There are four tea shops in Gandhamur, but the busiest by far is Sujit's. Sujit has been running the tea shop for over thirty years now, and his mother and father ran it together before him. Every morning at seven or so, he puts that day's newspaper on the table, lifts the big metal shutter facing the road, and men begin to trickle in. Older, retired men arrive first, a small cohort of regulars, the same every day. By eight, the middle-aged men begin to arrive—carpenters, laborers, and clerks mostly, with the occasional business owner or doctor. They come singly, not in pairs or threes, and take their seats on the benches that line either side of the long, narrow room. Dosa's are available, but most men take only tea, made the usual way with lots of milk and sugar, in the little glasses that one finds at every tea shop. Sometimes Sujit serves the tea himself, but usually there is someone to help him—a task exchanged for the morning's cup of tea.
The newspaper is divided into sections, which circulate around the room individually.
Newspaper reading is a dominant activity in the shop, but no one is in a hurry about it. There is no calling dibs, and men only rarely ask about the availability of a particular section. Those who read are generally content to read whatever is available, even if it is only the classifieds. The pace of conversation is similarly relaxed. A man might comment on the weather, an upcoming festival, or news of a lottery win in a nearby village. Usually, such conversation starters are taken up for a few turns at most, and that with the men seated beside the first speaker. Conversation that crosses the room to the other bench is rarer, sometimes only a few times per hour. But if a man comes to the tea shop looking for such conversation he will surely get it. And there are certain men who regularly do just that.
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Biju, the one member of the Action Council who regularly visits the tea shop, is this sort of man; he talks loudly and enjoys getting others talking loudly as well. When he is around, there will probably be some discussion of recent events in the conflict between the Action Council and the factory, or even debate about whether the factory should be closed. But when he is not there, these topics rarely come up. If there is an article about the factory in a newspaper, someone might point out that it is there, but most likely there will be no discussion of what the article says, how it represents the factory or the campaign, or what the implications might be for the ongoing conflict. No discussion, that is, of the sort that happens in the struggle tent. When I try to raise these topics in the shop, they receive only weak replies. When I asked about the best road to a nearby town, I heard about the history of road building over the last fifty years. But my best conversations about the factory were out on the front stoop, sharing a cigarette, or back in the kitchen with Sujit, not in the shop itself.
Sujit himself is a strong supporter of the campaign. He used to go down to the tent now and then, and he still donates money regularly. But he is not a man to talk loudly about it. One day, when I joined him in the kitchen, he explained to me that there are both campaign
supporters and opponents who come to his shop, so he does not talk about it much. In particular, two of the old men who come early every morning are factory retirees. When they are around, he does not talk about the factory. At first, I thought he was saying, as an auto rickshaw driver told me once, that it is better for businessmen to avoid getting involved in politics because one might lose clients. But he explained that this was not his reasoning at all.
"They all know what my politics are when it comes to the company," he said, laughing,
"It's just that I don't say anything. What's the point in saying anything against it? For me it's not so much about business. But why should I disturb them?"
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He turned back to the stove and flipped a few dosas.
"Did anything like that ever happen?" I asked.
"No, no, no...maybe because we do not really talk much about politics here."
This statement surprised me because Kerala is known for having active and abundant political discourse. As noted in Chapter 1, political scientists and development scholars have written about this, but it is also part of Malayalis' own self-imaginary. Some complain about it and others take it as a point of pride, but no one thinks of Kerala as a place where people do not participate in, let alone talk about, politics. But Sujit meant what he said in a different way.
"Let's say we four people are all LDF or all UDF," he said, referring to the two major party coalitions in Kerala, "Then we'll talk politics, but if someone from the other faction is there, then we won't talk...[when it's just us] we'll say that guy is with them, that guy's not correct, but when everybody is all together, we'll act like there's no problem at all."
Sujit flips a few more dosas, then adds, "Really that's not how it should be. People should just speak openly...hey?"
He shoots me a grin, then laughs. I laugh too and tell him I am not so sure.
"Couldn't there be problems if people speak openly?" I ask.
"The real gentleman is someone who speaks openly, right?" He says, still laughing, "I know that."
"But couldn't there be problems with that too?"
"They can do a lot of harm, the people who talk openly. Right? Nobody likes people who talk about things openly..."
His voice trailed off as he turned back to the stove.
***
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Sujit's account of why he does not speak openly (tur̤ annu par̤ayuka, a compound of the verbs "to open" (tur̤ akkuka) and "to say" (par̤ayuka)) about his support for the gelatin factory campaign resonates with the communicative anxieties at the heart of the public sphere concept.
This notion of speaking openly combines two senses found in Malayalam dictionaries; that of speaking frankly and that of speaking in the open. Sujit is not merely averse to saying what he really thinks. After all, the same views that he withheld when in the tea shop, he was now explaining to me in detail in the kitchen. Rather, Sujit did not wish to express himself frankly in certain communicative situations, which he elsewhere described as speaking “publicly"
(parasyamāyiṭṭ). We might say that he did not want to speak openly in the open.
Sujit was worried that he might lose business but, more fundamentally, he was simply worried about disturbing people. His relations to those who frequent his shop are complex and enduring; they are economic relations, but also neighborly relations, friendly relations, even kin relations. The factory retirees were his father's customers before they were his own. In this social context, openly disagreeing with someone is not just a matter of opposing one opinion to
another. It could have consequences for all of these other relationships.
The public sphere is meant to counter such anxieties; it is a social context in which opinions can be openly stated because they are not entangled with the relations of economic exchange, of kinship, or of state authority. In his analysis of the emergence of a public sphere in 18th-century Britain, for example, Habermas describes coffee shop conversations in which differences of social status were systematically disregarded, a practice meant to create a setting in which "the best argument could assert itself against that of social hierarchy" (J. Habermas, 1989, p. 36). Likewise, he argues that the circulation of opinions in literary journals effectively disconnected arguments from the social embeddedness of the persons who constructed and
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debated them (J. Habermas, 1989, p. 41). This logic of disentanglement and disinterestedness underwrites the capacity of the public sphere to engender rational debate; by separating relations between arguments from other social relations, the public sphere is imagined to free the force of reason from countervailing forces such as authority, sentiment, economic interest, or violence.
A key communicative principle underwriting the possibility of such disentangled discourse is the notion that in the public sphere, one addresses everyone. Habermas argues that the emerging public spheres of Britain, France, and Germany were characterized by the notion that everyone "had to be able to participate," even if low literacy rates made it obvious that everyone did not (J. Habermas, 1989, pp. 37, 38). Building on this account, Warner argues that public speech is in principle oriented to "indefinite strangers," regardless of whether the speaker actually knows her audience or not (Warner, 2002, p. 74). Participants in the public sphere take each other as strangers in this limited sense, addressing one another without regard to any social specificity—as if they could be heard by anyone. Such indeterminacy of address, as Cody notes, stands in for the notion that public speech is universal in concern (Cody, 2015). Insofar as participants in the public sphere are stripped of social specificity, their utterances are taken to be unencumbered by "private" interests associated with race, class, gender, or other dimensions of social position. For Habermas, this ideological framework affords the possibility of deliberation in the interest of all.
As illustrated by the old man who listened in on my research assistant Sunil's suspicions about the dead fish, talking in the road also has a certain indeterminacy of address. That road in particular, which runs past the struggle tent and the factory gates, is the main thoroughfare in Gandhamur—anyone might happen by. The same is true of the shops lining the road, which, like Sujit's tea shop, are generally constructed with three concrete walls and a large metal shutter
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spanning the width of the fourth, road-facing wall. Awnings stretch out over stacks of soda bottles or crates of vegetables, luring passersby into their shade. Just as the old man overheard Sunil, so we had overheard the debate in the provisions shop a few minutes before. As in the public sphere, there is a sense in which, in the road and its shops, one must speak as if one could be overheard by anyone.
However, the indeterminacy of speaking in roads and roadside shops has nothing to do with stranger relations. At least, not in Gandhamur. Though not a secluded village, Gandhamur is a small place, and not a place that many strangers have reason to go.34 But walking, cycling, or driving in the road, one might run into any of these known people—there lies the indeterminacy.
People are not stripped of their social specificity, but it becomes more difficult to address them in their specificity because other people are likely to overhear. As Sujit suggests in his anecdote about the LDF and UDF party members, such mixedness does prompt people to adjust their speech, but these adjustments do not include disregard for social position. On the contrary, Sujit describes people—including himself—avoiding controversial topics altogether in mixed
company.
Nonetheless, debate does occur. When the shopowner declared that there were no small fish floating to the surface, his customers challenged him. Biju, the outspoken campaign participant that frequented Sujit's tea shop, always found plenty of other patrons ready to take him on—his own uncle first among them. Indeed, in Gandhamur, these are arguably the spaces in which such debates are most likely to occur. The mixed sociality of these spaces makes such
34 Am important exception are the migrants who come from Tamil Nadu, Bihar, and other states to work in the village's two brickmaking factories. But the migrants are strangers of a very different sort than Warner and others associate with the public sphere. They do not speak Malayalam, and they generally keep to themselves. If it is true that the other residents of Gandhamur address migrants as strangers, what is truer is that they rarely address them at all.
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debate possible. But this same mixing of kin and customers, friends and foes, young and old, also makes openly disagreeing with others potentially risky.
The risk of voicing his opinions was not, according to Sujit, the risk of being found out.
In describing his aversion to "speaking openly" (tur̤ annu par̤ayuka), Sujit also employs the adverb "publicly" (parasyamāyiṭṭ), one antonym of which is "secretly" (rahasyamāyiṭṭ). And yet, he makes clear that his aversion to speaking publicly is not about keeping secrets. Sujit was certain that everyone already knew that he opposed the factory, even if he never voiced this opinion in their presence. Thus, his concern about disturbing the factory retirees was not a matter of whether or not they knew his opinion. Rather, it was a question of whether they heard his opinion from his own lips or, alternatively, via some other communicative channel.
Sujit's belief that everyone knew his views was consistent with the claims of many others in Gandhamur. Both supporters and opponents of the factory professed that they knew with certainty where everyone else stood with regard to the campaign to shut it down. In my own experience, people's knowledge of others' opinions (at least, as those opinions were expressed to me) was often less complete than they believed. Nonetheless, those who spoke to me "secretly"
often only shared what was widely known. Numerous times during my research, I was pulled aside by someone in the road and taken to their house, where this person regaled me with the
"real" story behind the factory and the campaign against it. In every instance, I later found out that this person's secret story was well known to the campaign participants, who offered their own counter-story when necessary, complete with details relevant to the trustworthiness of the storyteller. It would be too much to say that there were no secrets in Gandhamur. But there were definitely an abundance of public secrets.
Likewise, there were many who supported the factory but were not willing to be seen
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marching through the roads or sitting in the struggle tent. Chief among these were campaign supporters whose kin were employed in the factory. But this was not, generally, because they understood their views to be secret. Rather, it was a question of openly displaying those views in the road.
Even campaign participants, who did choose to voice their views in the open, often spoke of the challenges they faced in doing so. For example, Sunitha described how her family
members initially argued with her for getting involved with the campaign. Many of them also felt strongly about the pollution from the factory, but they did not think she should be marching in the street about it, particularly because a couple of her kin were factory employees. Likewise, Biju's outspokenness was, by his own account, a source of embarrassment to his family. Though his uncle Jacob laughed off his challenges, the two of them were not on good terms. Jacob knew there were others in the family who were in favor of the campaign, but none who confronted him so directly.
Ideologies in Gandhamur about speaking openly stand in stark contrast to the speech situation supposedly facilitated by the indeterminacy of the public sphere. The more a social setting is "open" to a wide variety of people, the less "openly" people talk. Thus, in the tea shop and the road, most people exercise great care in how they speak, often avoiding disagreement, let alone criticism of one another's views. At the same time, in the language ideology of Sujit and other Gandhamur residents, keeping quiet is not necessarily understood to be a barrier to the flow of information and opinions. Word gets around without getting out in the open. Thus, discussion in Sujit's tea shop is not a mere reversal of that in the coffee shops of Habermas.
The notion that reticence in public settings does not hinder the flow of information and opinions is underpinned, pragmatically, by the entanglement of social relations I described
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above. Multiple and various relations between people in Gandhamur facilitate many points of communicative contact, or channels, along which knowledge of others' activities and opinions can travel. Thus, although the gelatin factory itself was separated from the road on all sides by a high concrete wall, developments inside the factory were almost immediately known to
campaign participants. Despite their differences, those who supported the campaign openly were friends and kin with at least some workers. They were also linked to those inside the factory by the many who supported the campaign less openly. Thus, the dense web of relatedness in the village made the flow of information and opinions difficult to control, giving a sense that any communication held at least some indeterminacy of address.
In this limited sense, then, all communication in Gandhamur was partially "public." What was not said in the road could be expected, nonetheless, to make it way to a "general" audience anyway. Given this expectation of indeterminacy, the road and the tea shop stand out as marked instances of a general condition. A high degree of indeterminacy in all communication is presumed by the expectation that opinions will be known regardless of whether they are uttered in roads or tea shops. Nonetheless, in these settings the ideological presumption of indeterminacy is more salient. Sujit feels he can tell me his opinions frankly in the kitchen, but not in the tea shop, even though he knows that those opinions will make there way into the shop eventually—
and, indeed, he assumes they already have. But in the kitchen, his speech is nonetheless not in risk of causing disturbance.
To speak publicly (parasyamāyiṭṭ), then, is not so much a matter of indeterminate address as such, but rather a matter of which settings are ideologically marked as indeterminate. Without question, the selection of the road as a public space is afforded in part by a relatively high degree of possibility for words to travel in unanticipated ways. This is not only a matter of the actual
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mixing of people in the road, but also the possibility of remediation. Thus, what worried me about the man who overheard Sunil's comments was not that he was unknown to me, but rather that I could not be sure whether he would serve as a channel back to the campaign. Indeed, that he seemed to express some acquaintance with me made me suspect that I might have met him in
mixing of people in the road, but also the possibility of remediation. Thus, what worried me about the man who overheard Sunil's comments was not that he was unknown to me, but rather that I could not be sure whether he would serve as a channel back to the campaign. Indeed, that he seemed to express some acquaintance with me made me suspect that I might have met him in