‘To stop train pull chain’

Abstract

Many political practices in India are today regarded as disruptive, extralegal, violent or otherwise detrimental to India’s democratic record, yet at the same time they have functioned in the past and continue to function as widespread forms of political communication. This article argues that such practices—often associated with those in positions of structural marginalisation—are as deserving of analysis and understanding as forms and sites of communication more conventionally associated with the history of democracy, such as the coffee houses and forms of print media associated with the bourgeois public sphere in Europe or practices associated with elections. Using the very common practice of alarm chain pulling to stop a train for political purposes as a specific example, the article also argues that it is important to place contemporary forms of political practice into their longer historical genealogies in order to fully understand their significance within the history and practice of democracy in India today.