Book Review: Hailing the State

Hailing the State: Indian Democracy Between Elections, by Lisa Mitchell (2023). Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.

Anthropologists have, for some time, been studying how people seek to resist, avoid, and speak truth to state powers, not least through the discipline’s penchant for stateless societies. Many of these anthropological studies—especially those of Pierre Clastres, David Graeber, and James C. Scott, among others—have variously theorized how societies and populations resist and reject the incursions of states. While such theories have undoubtedly been productive, these works tend to position states as necessarily interested in incorporating people into their political structures. In her new book Hailing the State, Lisa Mitchell turns the table on such assumptions and draws our attention to the political practices of those seeking to combat a state’s overall indifference towards its citizens.

French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser explained how people become subjected to state power by way of interpellation or “hailing”; in his famous illustration, this is acted out when a police officer, representing the state, hails someone who then responds as if the officer were ipso facto an authority of the law. Through such acts of hailing, as Althusser argues, ideologies surrounding the state come into existence, and individuals are in turn transformed into subjects of said state. Mitchell’s book is premised on the reverse of Althusser’s celebrated theorization; as she asks, what if state authorities “misrecognize, ignore, or refuse to recognize [their] potential subjects” (p. 10; italics in original)? And what do subjects do in response to these predicaments of indifference?

Taking the case of Telangana, a state in southern India, and using as an example the Telangana movement—which secured a separate statehood for those areas dominated by speakers of the Telangana dialect of Telegu—Mitchell offers fresh insights about democracy in South Asia through the lens of collective action and political communication. In so doing, she advances the scholarship on political practices and genealogies of engagement with the state.

In the Introduction, Mitchell sets the tone for the conceptual interventions that her book makes. Key to this is seeing public assemblies not just as a “protest against, opposition or resistance to, or rejection of authority,” but rather as “desires to contribute to or participate in policy making, or as appeals to elected officials or policy makers and efforts to hold officials accountable to their promises and to equitable implementation of existing legal and constitutional provisions” (p. 13). According to Mitchell, authorities in Telangana believe collective action to be a means of delegitimizing the state; such projections, she argues, are a ploy of officials to undermine and refuse recognition for those excluded from positions of power in society. In response, people at the margins resort to collective action and claims for recognition when they are not being taken seriously as individuals. By pursuing this argument, Mitchell destabilizes the long-held liberal distinction between individual rights and collective goals in society.  

The book is divided into two parts. The first part (Chapters 1 to 4) discusses the notion of audience and describes the ways in which political action is sought and secured by non-elite Indians. The second part (Chapters 5 to 7) traces the efforts of the state to ban such actions. Accordingly, she also shows how the legal distinction between criminal and political acts collapses when citizens try to “hail” the state (à la Althusser). In Chapter 1, Mitchell explains how dharna, popularly thought to mean “protest” in India, can be better understood as “demonstration, sit-in, or assembly” (p. 45). She historicizes this concept to show how the technique evolved as a method of political communication. During the eighteenth century, dharna was practiced by individuals as a strategy to amplify their communication; it was a recourse for exerting pressure on debtors, or against their family members, or business associates—such as when a petitioner’s initial attempt to get the attention of their partner went unheard. Dharna, thus, made “injustice (or perceived injustice) more visible” (p. 58). By the early nineteenth century, the tactic became increasingly collective in nature and was directed toward the British East India Company. It was also instrumental during the Indian independence movement against British imperial rule. Yet, in the postcolonial period, state officials deem strategies like dharna, which continues to be practiced by disenfranchised populations, to be outmoded and unsuitable for a “modern” India. In this vein, state governments have introduced regulations on dharna—including the requirement for permission as well as for detailed information on the size and duration of assemblies. Especially in urban centers, authorities go as far to designate sites—usually those out of public view—for such assemblies to occur.

In Chapter 2, Mitchell furthers her thesis by decentering the extant loci of political communication in India. Rather than being preoccupied with the ways in which subalterns fail to communicate, Mitchell argues that people in power often simply refuse to listen to voices from the margins. “[T]hroughout Indian history,” she writes, “there has been a direct relationship between the refusal on the part of officials to entertain petitioners and the subsequent emergence of collective action” (p. 73). Seen this way, the concept of audience is reversed; instead of performing to an audience, everyday Indians stage themselves and perform in order to secure their intended audience—the authorities.

In Chapter 3, Mitchell argues that “civility,” as is so often invoked by ruling elites, is not a precondition for deliberative democracy. Instead, as she shows, civility is a privilege only enjoyed by those in power. The disenfranchised must organize themselves and raise their voices when attempts to communicate are mocked or dismissed. The state, in contrast, regards such collective assertion as “uncivil,” or even as “hooliganism” (p. 118). Using a comparative historiographic method, Chapter 4 extends the discussion of the previous chapter to historicize instances of collective action in India and Britain. Mitchell challenges theories that trace the origin of general strikes to industrial England by citing various examples of “revolt,” “tumultuous assemblies,” and “insurrections” that took place both before and during the colonial period in India (p. 133). She proceeds to argue that “state-directed collective actions were expanding in India at a time when collective actions in Europe were still being used primarily to enforce local social norms” (p. 141).

In the book’s remaining chapters (Chapters 5 to 7), Mitchell builds on her previous methodological interventions to demonstrate that the legal boundaries between political and criminal acts in India are often blurred. These categories are therefore used cynically by the authorities to manage, limit, and impede political communication and recognition. Such ambiguity in legal categories has frequently led state officials to perpetuate colonial forms of repression by curtailing dissent, preventing collective assemblies, and labeling certain gatherings as antithetical to democracy. Tellingly, the techniques and infrastructure for political mobilizations—particularly roads and railways—are strategically significant both for state building and for use by marginalized populations seeking recognition and accountability.

Mitchell clarifies that not all collectives that amplify their voices to “hail” the state receive recognition. Yet, collective actions that do succeed in hailing the state—achieving what Mitchell calls their “political arrival”—oftentimes manage to stretch legal categories to accommodate their right to political communication. In Chapter 7, she cites the instance of Dalit annual pilgrimages to Deekshabhoomi in Maharashtra state—a sacred monument where reformer B. R. Ambedkar (1891-1956) and his followers converted to Buddhism—to which pilgrims take the train en masse without tickets. While it is unlawful to travel without a valid ticket, railway authorities regard such acts as political; as opposed to penalizing the pilgrims, authorities respond by “adding additional bogies or even entire trains to accommodate the large number of people travelling without tickets” (p. 198; italics in the original).  

Michell concludes Hailing the State by highlighting the continued importance of collective assemblies and public performances in contemporary Indian democracy. Even amid a changing national mediascape, and especially during periods in between elections, assemblies and collective action are the primary mechanisms through which people at the margins can gain visibility, make their voices heard, and keep the state accountable. She laments, however, that such opportunities are now fewer with the rise of authoritarian forms of politics and a concomitant proclivity for using legal strictures to control public spaces.

In sum, Michell’s book is historically rich, ethnographically grounded, and theoretically innovative. Her intervention is at once timely and cautionary for Indian democracy, as it highlights and situates the stakes of political recognizability for marginalized populations. Readers interested in political anthropology and history and subaltern and South Asian studies will no doubt find this book insightful.

Author Biography

Roderick Wijunamai is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. His research focuses on the recent introduction of oil palm in India’s Northeast.