The language of the crowd: public congregation in Urban India

Abstract

This essay details the fascination, apprehension, and ambivalence associated with mass crowds and public congregation in urban north India. Most studies of the crowd adopt a classed bourgeois or state planner’s perspective. As a result, the crowd is conceptually held at arm’s length, its complexities flattened as it is viewed from the outside. In studies of India, the popular and subaltern, made interchangeable with the crowd, is often viewed via prevailing concerns. This essay adopts another approach: it considers the internal, organic language used for crowds in urban north India. Drawing on an ethnography of male sociality in Old Delhi, it examines khalbali, which may refer both to undesirable crowd panics and excessive collective pleasure; dhakka mukki, for being hurtled helter-skelter in the metropolis, pushing and shoving onto the bus or Metro; and bheed, for congested crowds that nevertheless retain their allure. These terms inform a gendered and classed vocabulary of public sociality; mainly men partake of crowds that unfold in popular, plebeian areas of the city. This essay considers these grounded terms vis-à-vis the prevailing social science understanding of the crowd.