Scholarship on Indian indenture has seen several historiographical turns over the years – from the overarching migration histories of the 1950s and the administrative histories of the 1960s and 1970s to the colony-focused histories that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s. The end of the century saw an increasing focus on migrants’ experience of recruitment, passage and plantation, and the publication of Hugh Tinker's A New System of Slavery encouraged reflection on the vestiges of slavery while also prompting works that emphasised the autonomous agency of labourers in shaping their own economic futures.1 The last two decades have seen an exciting shift in the field, as scholars are rejecting plantation colonies as the natural boundaries for framing indenture research and moving outside the ‘indenture bubble’ to draw links with other labour systems and wider imperial processes. Historians are increasingly framing indenture within the overseas movements of convicts, labourers, lascars and servants, interrogating the implications of indenture research on understandings of colonial power and labour rights, and exploring the interplay of race and the body in the Indian indenture trade.2 Increasingly, works have foregrounded connections between plantation colonies and explored spaces beyond the sugar colonies.3 Yet others have flipped the narrative of indentured migrants as producers to explore their role as consumers, discussing how sale, taxation and consumption (of opium and cannabis, for instance) were ways of maintaining control over indentured Indians.4 Indeed, the future of indenture research seems to be moving towards bringing indenture out of the slavery–indenture dichotomy and out of siloed colony-focused studies.

On September 18–19, 1982, the Dalit Panther Iyakkam (DPI; Dalit Panther Movement) convened its inaugural symposium in Madurai. In preparation, DPI chairman A. Malaichamy, a spindly twenty-eight-year-old law student, publicized the meeting among Dalit public sector employees, educators, lawyers, students, and activists, addressing them as “the spark that will ignite tomorrow's fire.” On a printed invitation circulated ahead of the symposium, he bemoaned that despite thirty-five years of independence, Dalit socio-economic development remained stagnant and the community languished as an exploited “toiling class.” Pledging that Dalits would no longer be offered up as a “ritual sacrifice” to the economy, he characterized their plight as a betrayal of India's democracy and disparaged politicians for capitalizing on their misery for electoral gains. In particular, Malaichamy charged the state government with undermining Dalit development by seeking to fob off their community with piecemeal concessions instead of enforcing existing laws and upholding their democratic rights. He declared: “Rather than providing a means for us to live in this country, they are offering us percentage-wise quotas. Our rights are being refused in the name of concessions. This is detrimental to our economic condition.” Although Malaichamy described the DPI as a “revolutionary organization,” he promised to act “on a legal basis” to pressure state authorities to enforce existing laws and fulfill their commitments to Dalit citizens.

This vignette from the archives of DPI politics contrasts with conventional accounts of lower caste assertion, which frequently depict collective forms of protest that, by design, generate a visible, and often disruptive, public presence.

Prologue

The ever-present sights and melodious sounds of popular Bombay cinema were the mass culture of my childhood. I took for granted its use of Indo- Islamic architecture as an aesthetic backdrop for romance. In these films, the architectural monument was beautiful and ordered, just as the British colonial authorities had desired and as the postcolonial Indian nation has perpetuated. The ordered monument made Bollywood love possible, much like the picturesque landscaping around the Qutb mosque complex made elite and middle-class picnicking on its lawns an enjoyable leisure activity.

Just as there existed an ordered way to display and experience the Indo-Islamic monument in physical reality, so too did an ordered mode of representing it in film gradually emerge. What, then, might we term as “resistance” to this order of filmic beauty? In examining representations of Indo-Islamic monuments in postcards in Chapter 3, we found that unruliness and disorder came from outside in the form of anxiety-ridden tourist experiences that failed to align with postcard imagery. Conversely, in the context of film, I argue that both order and disorder come from the same source: that is, from the film itself. In this chapter, I discuss two patriotic films of the 1950s: Jagriti (Awakening, 1955, director Satyen Bose) from India,

and Bedari (Awakening, 1957, director Rafiq Rizvi), a Pakistani remake of Jagriti. In particular, I explore the consequences of the fact that both films highlight the importance of historic monuments to national identity while also absenting the Indo-Islamic monument from the visual, aural, and scriptural narratives or making those monuments unspeakable and unanchored from national iconography.

Just prior to the 2014 general election, I interviewed VCK Deputy General Secretary J. Gowtham Sannah in a shared law office at Madras High Court. Casually perched on a rolling chair behind a cluttered desk, his silhouette was set against a towering bookshelf featuring an archive of legal volumes intermixed with the conspicuous thick blue tomes of B. R. Ambedkar's collected life works. I posed what I had intended to be a straightforward question about his party's present challenges and its prospects for continued growth. I asked Sannah to discuss the difficulties of merging the VCK, which is often described in popular media as a “Dalit party,” with the “political mainstream” as a “common party.” Sannah's posture immediately stiffened as he shot a wry glance in my direction. Muttering under his breath, he was visibly cross at my choice of the terms “common” and “mainstream,” both of which are often used by political commentators and VCK organizers alike.

Following a protracted silence, Sannah rattled off a barrage of questions. Referring to parties that are widely reputed to draw support from and cater to the interests of particular caste constituencies, he inquired: “Is the Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK) a common party? And, moreover, tell me, do you think the Marumaralarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (MDMK) is a common party? What about the Desiya Murpokku Dravida Kazhagam (DMDK)? Was the Dravidian movement a common movement?” “Of course not!” he underscored, “they were established on the foundations of specific groups pursuing a greater share of resources. But these parties feel that they alone—as caste Hindus—can raise their voice in the name of what is ‘common’.”

On the morning of November 4, 2013, a puttering auto-rickshaw dropped me off at the Liberation Panthers's headquarters nestled in a former elementary school building in Velachery, south Chennai. On my arrival, a handful of party cadre accustomed to my presence welcomed me with a cup of hot tea. We retrieved several chairs from a former classroom and spoke informally as I waited to interview Thirumavalavan, whom they called talaivar (the leader). As the hours passed, a crowd of visitors swelled around us on the shaded, open-air veranda, each awaiting their turn for a meeting with the party president. At the time, Thirumavalavan was the acting MP from Chidambaram, yet Dalits traveled from across the state to see him because he was widely regarded as a surrogate representative for all Dalits. Some visitors came to appeal for his intervention in personal matters. Others came to request a signed document on his parliamentary letterhead that directed a government bureaucrat to remedy a grievance. While most visitors arrived with specific requests, a handful came bearing ornate marriage invitations, hopeful to confirm his attendance and schedule the ceremony accordingly. No appointment was necessary, only patience.

After attending to a flurry of requests, Thirumavalavan emerged from his office and gestured for me to accompany his entourage as they set off for their afternoon meetings. Taking his cue, I squeezed into an overflowing SUV. Thirumavalavan sat in the front passenger seat while his secretaries positioned themselves at my sides and additional cadre piled into the back. Seemingly without pause, his assistants vetted incoming calls throughout the trip, carefully noting the caller's name and nature of inquiry before deciding whether to pass the phone to their talaivar.

In 2015, nearly a full year ahead of the state assembly polls, the VCK co-founded the Makkal Nala Kūttani (PWF; People's Welfare Front), a motley alliance of the communist parties (CPI[M] and CPI) and the Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (MDMK; Renaissance Dravidian Progressive Federation) led by ex-DMK firebrand Vaiko. From the start, the PWF billed itself as “a policy-based alternative” to Dravidian coalitions. Moreover, PWF leaders critiqued the conventional model of coalition politics in Tamil Nadu, where Dravidian parties formed coalitions with allied parties to face the polls and then proceeded to keep their allies at arm's length once the next administration was formed. In an evident departure, the PWF demanded pre-poll guarantees for a share (pangu) of political power as a precondition for its support. Censuring the uninterrupted reign of Dravidian parties in the state, VCK organizers panned Dravidian rule as oru katci ātchi, or single-party rule, which they alleged amounted to edēccādikāram (despotism). In contrast, the PWF advanced a pioneering demand for “coalition government.” Touting a broad-based platform of popular issues, PWF leaders traversed the state and conducted public rallies that addressed the rights of unorganized workers, regularization of labor contracts in the public sector, and a wide breadth of other topics including education, police reform, healthcare, and environmental conservation. As the polls drew near, VCK leaders reverted to an old playbook and ramped up a caustic critique of their Dravidian rivals.

Initially, the DMK and the AIADMK were largely unphased, auguring that these “opportunists” would almost certainly “disintegrate” before the next election, chalking up the coalition to a publicity stunt before the polls. They predicted that its leaders would invariably come groveling back seeking an alliance with a Dravidian patron in the coming months. Then, as elections drew near, the PWF released a “Common Minimum Program”—a shared political agenda that represented a consensus among its members and would act as a policy blueprint for coalition governance. According to preliminary media reports, the public response was initially positive and, as 2015 rounded into 2016, prominent outlets aired footage of massive PWF rallies across the state.

Prologue: Fatehpur Sikri, January 2007

For a moment, let us leave Delhi and travel a few hours east to the sixteenth-century fort-palace Fatehpur Sikri, where I encountered a young postcard seller in January 2007 who disrupted my leisurely experience and scholarly analysis of the monument. It is winter and I am with a group of graduate school friends on a trip to Fatehpur Sikri and Agra—two popular tourist destinations and the erstwhile capitals of the Mughal empire under Akbar (r. 1542–1605). Both cities have been made famous by the quintessential Mughal red sandstone and white marble architecture. As art historians, we photographed the architecture with our lenses focused on capturing the buildings’ style and shied away from locating ourselves as posed tourists in the photos. In doing so, we disassociated our presence from the commercial act of tourism, using people in our images only to show scale. Feeling smug in our knowledge of the site, we also refused to hire a guide. However, despite our efforts to escape the trappings of touristic activity, the accoutrements of tourism enveloped us from time to time. As we emerged from the Buland Darwaza (Lofty Doorway), a grand and imposing entrance to the Fatehpur- Sikri fort-palace, several souvenir sellers surrounded our group of nine. The most persistent of the lot, a young boy selling postcards, got into an argument with one member of our group. My friend, speaking for the rest of us, kept refusing the advances of the postcard seller, telling him that he should spend his time studying instead of wasting it selling postcards.

Prologue

On a sweltering, sunny, late April morning in 2018, I found myself outside the now erstwhile Swatantrata Sangram Sanghrahalaya (Freedom Struggle Museum), a 1990s museum housed in a nineteenth-century British barrack within the seventeenth-century Mughal Lal Qila (also known as the Red Fort). I was there to seek permission from the ASI—whose offices used to be housed to one side of this museum—to photograph the colonial and postcolonial on-site museums within the fort. To my dismay, scaffolding enveloped the building in question, the museum displays I had visited earlier had been dismantled, and the ASI office was nowhere in sight. While I was able to locate the office in a space behind this structure, I wondered what would happen to the chapter I was writing, which analyzed the on-site museums at the Lal Qila.

In conversing with an official, I learnt about the impending reorganization of the museums, which included the Swatantrata Sangram Sanghrahalaya and the Swatantrata Senani Smarak (Freedom Fighters’ Memorial), which were housed in British barracks and jails within the fort; the Delhi Museum of Archaeology housed inside the Mumtaz Mahal; and the Indian War Memorial Museum, located inside the Naqqar Khana. At the behest of the Indian government's Ministry of Culture, under whose authority the ASI functions, the four museums were now to be housed in one building to create a more cohesive narrative—one more consistently centered on anti-colonial struggles and the formation and consequent “unity” of the Indian nation. More revealing, however, was this official's annoyance at the numerous visitors, belonging mainly to the lower classes, who created “nuisance” inside the museums.

The British Empire was, in many ways, contingent on trade and commerce. British merchants helped expand the empire into newer territories, while planters consolidated imperial hold over these newly acquired territories through settlement and commodity production. They played a particularly important role in procuring, employing and legalising the indenture trade. The continuation of indentureship for about a century, and the resumption of indentured emigration in 1842 after its brief suspension in 1839, was a direct consequence of relentless pressure from merchants and planters. Any understanding of the indenture debates, then, is incomplete without a thorough discussion of merchant and planter arguments in defence of indenture. Although there has been substantive work on the West India lobby and planter arguments in the context of slavery, pro-indenture arguments have remained peripheral to the histories of Indian indenture, and indeed to the histories of the British Empire.1 Most works on indenture debates focus on anti-indenture protest – a narrative that under-represents the voices of merchants and planters who decried prohibition and used their significant political and commercial influence to shape post-slavery labour regulations.

By situating merchant arguments in Calcutta within a global network of pro-indenture letters, petitions, publications and reports, this chapter inserts merchant and planter voices into the narrative. Abolition had created labour crises in plantocracies that ranged from permanent decline of the sugar industry in Jamaica, to decline and slow recovery in British Guiana, to fast and successful recovery in Mauritius. With the increasing strength of anti-slavery and anti-indenture lobbies, planters and merchants not only had to prove the need for an alternative source of labour but also demonstrate that Indian labourers were the most well suited for this post-slavery regime.

Prologue

Growing up in colonial bungalows with manicured lawns speckled with flowers and wide driveways amid Assam's verdant tea estates—a landscape that could easily have been mistaken for frames from a Merchant–Ivory film or passages from a Jane Austen novel—I luxuriated in the sensory pleasures of the natural world. My childhood spaces were peaceful and beautiful, where I could imagine adventures while remaining oblivious to the exploitation that had enabled their creation: the forced planting of tea by the British (a crop they privileged over any other) and the immense violence against indigenous communities that led to the making and functioning of tea plantations. Indeed, the tea plantations were tamed and romanticized in language by using the phrase tea gardens. When I left these scenic environs for the urban milieu of Delhi in the 1980s to meet extended family, I was ensconced once again within the green lawns, trees, and meandering roads—this time those of the Qutb mosque complex where my grandfather loved to take our family for picnics to enjoy the warm winter sun. Amidst the mosque's columns, I did not think it curious that a group of historical Islamic structures, built in the late twelfth to fourteenth centuries by the Afghan rulers of north India, should be surrounded by a quintessentially English picturesque landscape consisting of undulating green lawns, trimmed by neat hedges, a circular driveway, and trees strategically placed to frame the Qutb mosque complex. I did not give much thought to this landscape's provenance; at six years old and as a young adult, I simply delighted in it, blissfully enveloped in the enticingly pretty scenery, which took me back to my tea garden home.

In this chapter, I will present the results of the qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) and then interpret them to describe the configurations that constitute populism in India. I will then provide the results of the tests for necessary and sufficient conditions and discuss the parameters of fit in terms of consistency and coverage. Finally, I will cover the various solution terms that indicate the pathways to populism.

The Sets of Data

Table 5.1 presents the data, that is, the sets of data, comprising 37 cases along five conditions and a populist outcome. Describing the worksheet as comprising sets of data instead of a dataset seems more accurate because each of the columns in the sheet is a set and its members are points of data (as fuzzy scores or as percentage scores) along the rows as constituent parts of the unit of analysis. The unit of analysis is an instance of a party candidate contesting elections at the state or at the national level. The cases have been purposively selected by reviewing the scholarship that explicitly indicates that the cases can be identified as instances of populism. And the conditions described earlier—electoral invocation to their people (P), antagonistic boundary setting (B), populist political leadership (L), populist attitude (A), and anxiety about the future (F)—are some of the commonly accepted attributes in the comparative scholarship on populism. In set theoretic terms, we will explore if P, B, L, A, and F are the conditions that constitute the membership of the populist outcome Y.