Cultural Studies

ISSN: 0950-2386 (Print) 1466-4348 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcus20

Cruel Pessimism and Waiting for Belonging:

Towards a Global Political Economy of Affect
Dia Da Costa
To cite this article: Dia Da Costa (2016) Cruel Pessimism and Waiting for Belonging:
Towards a Global Political Economy of Affect, Cultural Studies, 30:1, 1-23, DOI:
10.1080/09502386.2014.899607
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2014.899607

Published online: 25 Mar 2014.

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Dia Da Costa
CRUEL PESSIMISM AND WAITING FOR
BELONGING: TOWARDS A GLOBAL

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POLITICAL ECONOMY OF AFFECT

Recent theorizations of affect have focused largely on Western historical, political and
aesthetic contexts to distinguish between affect and emotion. Notably, these interventions offer new imaginaries to reinvigorate analysis of politics in the face of
shrinking possibilities. However, much of this literature views affect as autonomous from
emotion, while overlooking the political history of development and the differentiated
relation to affect under colonial capitalism in other historical contexts. This paper
studies subaltern engagement in activist performance in India to address these issues. It
thinks through Lauren Berlants account of the aesthetic genre and affective structure of
cruel optimism, and her focus on historical contexts where people have recently lost the
vision of a good life. By contrast, focusing on the historical present of those born into a
pervasive and intractable sense of marginality and insecurity, I ask: what is the
subjects relation to affect and activism in contexts where the loss of vision of a good life
is not new under neoliberalism, but rather, reworks long-standing violence and
inclusion/exclusion of colonial capitalism and nation-state histories. I argue that it is
useful to understand Berlants materialist context for affect theory in light of uneven
global histories of colonialism, development and neoliberalism. The affective experience
of time is different across different spaces. As such, this paper contributes a global
materialist context for affect theory, by focusing on activist theatre by a tribe called
Chhara, designated born criminals by British colonial law a status legally
denotified in 1952, but that is practically still effective in postcolonial India.
Competing affective structures sentimental optimism, cruel pessimism, betrayal and
ordinary regard shape and are shaped by Chhara negotiations with branded
criminality. Ultimately, for the postcolonial subject, surviving in the neoliberal present
involves vacillating among competing affective structures, only some of which generate
sustained political critique.
Keywords Cruel optimism; cruel pessimism; India; Chhara activist
performance; political history of development; Lauren Berlant

Cultural Studies, 2016

Vol. 30, No. 1, 123, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2014.899607
2014 Taylor & Francis

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Introduction
In recent years, a number of scholars have written about affect and affective labour
in order to renew desires for imaginaries of political action and citizenship in times
of shrinking possibilities. In particular, Lauren Berlants Cruel Optimism (2011),
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negris Commonwealth (2009), Jacques Rancieres The
Emancipated Spectator (2009) and Ash Amin and Nigel Thrifts The Arts of the Political
(2013) have attended to the senses as a form of making sense of the world that
precede language, representation and discourse. Together, these scholars have
offered a way to think about struggle and citizenship beyond the misplaced
certainties of vanguard politics and pedagogical citizenship, while also unsettling
theories that confidently map needs and interests onto identity, ideology and social
action. Although attention to affect involves an attempt to understand knowledge
and politics by refusing the distinction between emotion and reason (Thrift 2004),
these recent theorizations tend to focus on Western aesthetic, political and historical
contexts. This focus results in overlooking the powerful history of development and
the differentiated relation to affect under colonial capitalism in other historical
contexts. Moreover, while these scholars theoretically reimagine practices for a
new politics, many of them tend not to engage in grounded analysis of their
examples. Thus, we are often left with theoretically poignant glimpses of new
political imaginaries that remain somewhat untainted by the messy reality of
activism or sustained analysis of its actual limits (Massumi 2002). With regard to
the latter point, Berlants writings are a useful exception because her analytical
attention inhabits and lingers on in the messy immediacy of the historical present as
a way to give her examples skin, bones and political traction.
This paper addresses these dimensions in theories of affect and affective
labour by drawing on Lauren Berlants tremendously valuable account of the
historical present as marked by the aesthetic genre and affective structure of
cruel optimism to explore subaltern engagement in activist theatre in India.
Berlant discusses cruel optimism as the affect of neoliberalism among those who
expected normal protections of the good life and have presently come to lose
the vision of a good life. In historical contexts where people have recently lost
such a vision, they are thrust into a life of indirection making the sensual archive
of the immediate present vital for understanding social life and emergent
change. By contrast, my focus is on the historical present of those born into a
pervasive and intractable sense of marginality, insecurity and exclusion, as well
as the activism spawned in this kind of context. This paper asks: what is the
subjects relation to affect and activism in contexts where neoliberalisms
ordinary violence is not new, but rather, reworks the ordinary and longstanding violence and inclusion/exclusion of colonial capitalism and nation-state
histories. This paper is an attempt to consider what Berlant calls a materialist
context for affect theory (2011, p. 14) in light of the uneven global histories of
colonialism, development and neoliberalism.

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In order to contribute a global materialist context for affect theory, I focus

on activist theatre by a tribe called Chhara who were designated born
criminals by British colonial law a status legally denotified in 1952, but that is
practically still effective in postcolonial India. At present, approximately 60
million people in India belong to the administrative designation of denotified
tribes (DNT). In Chharanagar (or Chhara town), a neighbourhood within a
city called Ahmedabad, Chhara are reputed for livelihoods in thievery and
liquor production in the legally dry Indian province of Gujarat. Between the
hangover of colonial labels and current livelihood practices, Chhara are
considered guilty until proven innocent, they lack productive resources, are
denied jobs or training in new skills, and lack formal documentation for their
residences.
In recent accounts of a Chhara group called Budhan Theatre, they have been
constructed as generating pedagogical spaces of compassion and critical
optimism that performatively reconstructs a stigmatized criminal community
into a creative community, thereby garnering national and international
recognition as well as job opportunities (Schwarz 2010, Talukdar and Friedman
2011, Da Costa 2010, 2012, Johnston 2012). While there are sound reasons for
such an optimistic account, in this paper, I identify the articulation of several,
crucial and often competing affective structures sentimental optimism, cruel
pessimism, betrayal and ordinary regard that shape and are shaped by Chhara
negotiations within the social history of their branded criminality.
The first, sentimental optimism inheres in the promise of creativity as a
mode of generating employment and rejuvenating growth an optimism
institutionalized by international and national development policy and creative
economy discourse. The second affective structure is what I call cruel pessimism
which is in a mutually constitutive relationship with the first. Cruel pessimism is
familiar to subjects of what Homi Bhabha (1994) has called colonial mimicry
and that I think extends to development mimicry. A third affective structure is
betrayal, which then gets mobilized in a permanent performance of stigma
relating ongoing experiences and discoveries of collective suffering and
exclusion among formerly criminal tribes. The fourth affective structure may
be thought of as a combined result of the above namely longing for ordinary
regard, arguably generated within this activist theatre group.
The Budhan Theatre play, Stories, Mine and Yours (SMY) combines actor/
activist biographies with social and organizational history (2011). The four
sections of this paper draw on this play to simultaneously describe the contours
and formation of the four affective structures while building upon Berlants
analysis of cruel optimism. Together, these sections argue that, for the Chhara
subject born into pervasive conditions of marginality and exclusion, genres of
surviving and acting in the neoliberal present often entails vacillating among
competing affective structures, only some of which generate sustained political
critique.

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The theorizations of affect to which I am drawn are recent refractions of

Raymond Williams concept of the structure of feeling by which he captured
peoples sense of an emerging present and the fact that the senses are often the
first register of change, at the very edge of semantic availability (Williams
1977, p. 134). In her book Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant speaks of affect as
shared, not solitary (2011, p. 15). Affect signals a common historical
experience sensed but not spoken (p. 65) when a historical moment appears as
a visceral moment (p. 16). Affect is also often contrasted with the realm of
emotion which Berlant among others views at the level of peoples subjective
experiences. While affect and emotion are related, affect, unlike emotion, for
Berlant, cannot be understood solely in terms of a symptom of ideology, mode
of production and emotional manipulation. Here, I take Berlant to mean by
ideology, a set of practices that manipulate subjects and their emotions as ways
of reproducing the conditions and structures of production. By contrast to
subjects emotion, affect is apparent to the body in ways apart from signifying
form and structure. Affect is intelligence that inheres in what is sensed, but has
not been signified in knowable forms and determinate structural positions.
Affect is a space of feeling things out (p. 62).
This space of feelings things out, I believe, is germane to the vital energy
and the social power of activist performance and creative work. This description
of affects distinction from emotion is also one of the key contributions of affect
theory. However, it is important for me to reiterate that I see affect and
emotion, affect and ideology as conceptually and processually interrelated
where they feed each other. Lawrence Grossberg notes that emotion is the
articulation of affect and ideology. Emotion is the ideological attempt to make
sense of some affective productions (Grossberg 2010, p. 316). Here,
articulation (which signifies distinct realms of life which need to be understood
in relation to each other) is as significant as the attempt (which signifies affect
as a site that possibly or virtually exceeds the grasp of ideology, but cannot be
presumed to actually do so in any given empirical reality; 2010, p. 315). This
way of theorizing affect does not insist on affect and emotion as mutually
autonomous spheres of life. As Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg notes,
affect and cognition are never fully separable (Seigworth and Gregg 2010,
p. 3). Arguably, they appear to be distinct categories of experience to theorists
seeking spaces of autonomous knowledge or hopeful political openings (i.e.
potential not yet sullied by subjectivity, structure, ideology, maybe even
performance and performativity). Understanding the relationship between
affect and emotion in this way does not obviate the possibility of thinking about
affect in terms of those moments, processes and things that move us in ways
that we are yet to (re)cognize.
In this regard, although Berlant is building on Brian Massumis theorization,
I sense some divergences. For Massumi, affect is unknowable because we only
study affects afterlife. As he puts it, affect is not entirely containable in

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knowledge, but is analyzable in effect, as effect (1995, p. 107). The autonomy

of affect for Massumi inheres in its intensity as a felt state. He explains this
through the claim that the the skin is faster than the word in terms of
cognition, whereas words come later and tend to numb the intensity of what is
felt on the skin (p. 86). For Massumi, affect points to a state of suspense,
potentially of disruption (1995). As a felt state, it is neither passive since it
resonates and moves us, but nor is it active, in that it is not yet activity
because the motion is not of the kind that can be directed (Massumi 1995).
Nonetheless, Massumi admits that this affective intensity can and is mobilized
in other contexts (1995). While acknowledging this, he is quick to retain the
autonomy of affect by suggesting that to the extent that affect is mobilized
towards other functions, it is not in resonance with intensity. It resonates
to the exact degree to which it is in excess of any narrative or functional line
(pp. 8687). Thus, while language and resonance interact, they follow two
entirely different rules of formation (Massumi 1995). The power of affect, for
Massumi, is its autonomous formation from that which constitutes narrative,
function and mobilization.
But, why, I want to ask, this investment in placing affective formations and
forces out of the loop, so to speak? I am referring here to Massumis inference
that whereas affective resonance is unknowable, the mobilization of affect is
knowable. What makes affective resonance resonate? Can we know that affect
when mobilized as narrative, does not resonate as felt intensity? Ultimately, it is
the attachments generated through visceral experiences that interest me, which
also concerns Berlant. As Lawrence Grossberg puts it, it is the popular which
organizes the lived-ness of life (2010, p. 328). That is, following Raymond
Williams in thinking about life as material relationships and structures of
feeling, Grossberg is interested in asking what are the machinic apparatuses or
regimes of discourses that are constituting the ways in which we live our lives?
(pp. 313314). In other words, while recognizing the difference between say
affect and discourse, or ideology, Grossberg insists that we must then map
their actual and virtual articulations (2010). Distinguishing his analysis from
Althusser and Stuart Halls he says, you could have ideological interpellations
but people do or do not invest in them. The meaning-structure has to
somehow be affectively charged for it to constitute your experience (2010).
Apart from what Grossberg emphasizes in the original (i.e. investing or not
in an attachment), the point for me, is also how something becomes your
experience. In other words, when we identify a feeling, an experience, a look, a
genre as affective, for whom is it a space of feeling things out, for whom is it
sensed but not spoken, for whom does a given popular organize and affectively
charge meanings and structures of life? In other words, for whom is any given
affect an emergent and visceral experience and for whom an entrenched
reality? The affective experience of time is different across different spaces.
A global political economy of affect cannot avoid these issues of uneven affects,

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divisions of affective labour and considerations of who comes to belong to any

given popular, in any given context. In highlighting the four affective
structures at work in the Chhara case, my goal is to ethnographically juxtapose
the encounter between what is sensed with what is known (Berlant 2011,
p. 53) in order to unsettle the idea of cruel optimism as the driving aesthetic
genre of the neoliberal present, and consider other articulations of popular
investment and affectively charged meanings that organize the structures of
contemporary Chhara lives. This essay suggests the importance of attending to
the uneven geographies of what feels virtually (im)possible and to whom.

Sentimental optimism
In the Budhan Theatre play, SMY, five Budhan Theatre members play
themselves as they provide a biographical, organizational and social history
accounting for the birth of their theatre group and their membership in it
(2011). In some ways, it is a classic tale of the disenfranchised finding livelihood
and liberation through theatre and creative work. The arc of the biography of
one of the five Budhan actors traced through the play begins when Ankurs
father is fired from a job in a private factory. This moment in Ankurs narrative
corresponds to a time when owing to a shift from composite mills to smaller
powerloom factories, the textile mills of Ahmedabad faced a crisis and the city
lost its reputation as the Manchester of the East (Breman 2004). Around
250,000 people, or 37% of Ahmedabads population, were directly and
indirectly employed by the textile mills in early 1980s (Shani 2005, p. 878). By
1985, 53 mills were closed.
Ankurs unemployed father rapidly spends household savings, searches for
new employment and finds only precarious short-term employment. The peak
of household poverty is tellingly portrayed in the story of a supportive aunt who
begged daily to provide for her son. On occasion, Ankur would receive
something from her even two rupees (US$ 0.04 cents). For a household that
didnt even have money to make vegetables, the pittance bought some red
chilli which I dissolved in water and we all made a meal of it (Budhan Theatre
2011, p. 3). Respite came in the form of an award-winning activist writer
Mahasweta Devi who came to Chharanagar (Chhara town) in 1998.1 Ankur was
a young boy. He was incredulous that someone might want to open a library in
his neighbourhood and entirely sceptical that one could earn Rs. 50 (approx.
$1) a day if you worked there. In a pair of torn shorts and running shoeless on
the hot tarmac, Ankur went to the library inauguration in lure of food they
were even providing food to attendees (p. 6). At the event, Ankur was struck
with fear by the verisimilitude of a performance in which a woman was
desperately claiming her husbands innocence and protesting police brutality. In
his words, a new hunger was born whose name was theatre I had not
heard the word theatre in my life before (p. 7). Entranced by it, the word

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theatre made my hair stand on end (p. 11). But he could not afford the
Rs. 20 (35 cents) library membership to be able to do theatre there. The word
20 rupees made my standing hair sit down again (p. 11).
Ankurs affective attraction to theatre is not explained. We do not know
why it turns him on, but it does. Retrospectively reasoned in the narrative, if he
had the money to pay for library membership where he could learn about the
promise of theatre, then his attraction for it could turn into attachment.
A chance encounter with a 20-rupee note on the school playground buys this
child attachment to theatre because he learns to see it as a bearer of better
things. Theatre takes him beyond the walls of his stigmatized neighbourhood
into the rich cultural city where he met the theatre stalwarts Mallika Sarabhai
and Archan Trivedi.2 Participation in a theatre project at Sarabhais Darpana
Academy earned him two thousand rupees (approximately US$36). Brother,
I am that young child who had two rupees [US$ 0.04 cents] worth red chillies
and dissolved it in water to make a family meal of it. I suddenly got two
thousand rupees (p. 18). This reminder of two rupees as largesse is crucial in
establishing the arc of sentimental optimism in Ankurs story. It takes us from
his hunger and scorched feet to a new hunger for activist theatre to theatre as a
source of his first income.
Ankur is affectively drawn to theatre, lack of money hinders his access to it,
but money also contributes to making theatre an attachment when theatre itself
becomes a source of money. Yet, theatre, not money, is the saviour in this
narrative. Money is far from incidental as attachment, but it appears as
incidental transformative agent in the narrative. The Rs 20 he found in the
playground to facilitate Budhan membership happened by chance. Arguably, the
affective power of sentimental optimism rests on seeing money as a matter of
chance rather than pivotal force of change.
Ankurs hunger and affective investment in theatre must be placed in the
context of the increasing institutional construction of creative economy as
the space and source of social change. On 18 February 2006, the popular
Indian national daily The Times of India published a newspaper article in
which Richard Florida sold his well-known theories to an Indian public. He
called upon Indians to catch up to the new economy with his rallying cry
Lets get creative (Florida 2006). Although India has creativity in her
DNA, Florida argues that she is unable to rise in the global creative
economy because she fails to harness this creative potential. Floridas ideas
have long since been music to urban planners in the deindustrializing North.
Within the last five years, Florida has also become instrumental in casting
the creative worker as an attractive policy figure in global development
thinking. In part based on Floridas conception that everyone has creativity,
United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) began to issue
reports on the creative economy, most recently seeing creativity as a

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feasible development option in the aftermath of a financial crisis during

which trade in cultural products was unfazed (UNCTAD 2010).
Working variously at levels of global discourse, regional modernities and
body politics, creative economy institutionalizes a civil and sentimental
optimism that celebrates everyones creativity as potential under contemporary
capitalism. The affective appeal of creative economy discourse is precisely that it
claims to bypass regional histories of inequality and discrimination by harnessing
the creative potential of the poor as a means of replacing the congestion and
devaluation of working-class neighbourhoods with creative clusters. In
Ahmedabad, sentimental capitalism is evident in initiatives to preserve urban
heritage, revitalize urban infrastructure and even memorialize the genocidal
violence against its Muslims in 2002.3 Histories of conflict are aestheticized,
devalued spaces get a fresh coat of paint, they are revisited and revalued. Since
1996, the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) has memorialized
disappearing ways of life through walks, auto-rickshaw tours, childrens books
and street theatre (AMC, AUDA and CEPT 2006, p. 87). While displacing
working-class populations of their residences and livelihoods on the Sabarmati
riverfront, the AMC has announced a cluster of eight museums on the
riverfront on themes ranging from Air and Space to Gujarats Tribals, Textile
and Design (Unnithan 2013).
In a policy context that revalues real estate by creative productions of
heritage as rationale for displacement and currency of development, there is
no more appealing story than Ankurs hunger for food morphing into a hunger
for theatre which delivers him from hunger for food. So little monetary
investment necessary, no accountability demanded for histories of colonial,
capitalist, and statist violence, no need to combat hunger itself, just
empowering stories of terrible lives changed by the power of theatre. My
point is that the affective appeal of Ankurs hunger for theatre is fed by an
uneven global creative economy that displaces hunger not by feeding the hungry
but by empowering the hungry with new hungers the hunger to act, to
create, to commodify everyday life (Everyday Life Inc.), ones memories, to
be an activist for social change. These new hungers may only provide precarious
satiation and certainly no structural change of hunger itself. But these facts are
easily hidden in Ankurs rags to cultural riches story.
This is a sentimental capitalism which relies on an emotional regard for the
poor and hungry a regard that does not confront inequality itself, preferring
instead to trade in the sentiment that even the poor deserve the opportunity for
pleasure, leisure, creativity and, who knows, creativity may be so
empowering that the poor generate an income and survive, not to mention
make plays about their triumph against all odds. But this is not the only relevant
affective structure for Ankurs story or for Budhan theatre more generally.

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Cruel pessimism
In contrast to an affective structure of sentimental optimism institutionally
active through the creative economy, in critical scholarship today, neither art
nor politics seems able to liberate our sense of ordinary and extraordinary
possibility from capture by the historical processes of contemporary capitalism
(Yudice 2003, Ranciere 2009).4 As noted earlier, Lauren Berlants writings are
a potent example of this critical literature. Berlant shows that, in the historical
present, our very senses speak of pervasive relations of cruel optimism that
amount to desiring objects that are actually obstacles to our flourishing (2011,
p. 1). She has in mind attachments to objects as varied as food, love, a fantasy of
the good life or a political project (2011). With a particular focus on the
cluster of promises (p. 24) that constitutes the good life, Berlant relentlessly
reveals how very cruel and exhausting optimistic attachment to promises such
as upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and lively,
durable intimacy can be under neoliberal conditions (p. 3).5
In order to provide a materialist context for affect theory (p. 14), she
investigates the senses as the first historical and collective register of adjusting to
a loss of confidence about how to live on when an expected life is no longer
available in neoliberal times which produce a widespread loss of vision of the good
life (p. 16). Berlant wants to note what is collective, historical, shared, the
structure of relationality (p. 13) in what she senses is a pervasive shapelessness
(p. 8) and indirection (p. 25) within the impasse of the neoliberal present for
those who expected the benefits and protections of the good life. Berlants bold
and refreshing perspective on trauma as ordinary suggests that life in the impasse
involves the exhausting work of treading water, not drowning (p. 10).
We might experience disappointments (the realm of emotions), but powerful
atmospheric structures (the realm of affect) compel our sensual attachment to
sites and sources of disappointment. Yet, the disappointment, she insists, ought
not to be read as a symptom of error, a perversion, damage, or a dark truth:
optimism is, instead, a scene of negotiated sustenance that makes life bearable
(p. 14). Optimistic attachments keep us going despite disappointments.
Following this, Ankurs attachment to theatre as a new hunger is not a symptom
of error. In fact, his sentimental optimism about satiating his new hunger makes
life bearable, and as such, constitutes cruel optimism (2011).
But, seen differently, it is equally true that Ankur was not born into
affective structures of expecting the protections and benefits of the good life in
the first place, despite his attachment to such ideals? What about those born
into unwelcoming worlds and unreliable environments? (Berlant 2011, p. 20).
What characterizes the sensual present for those in an impasse that spans
centuries, not just the neoliberal decades? What of those who have been placed
in what Dipesh Chakrabarty has called the waiting room of history by those
who see colonialism as the advent of modernity in colonized spaces? (2000,

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p. 8). Against this logic, Chakrabarty asks why after more than 200 years since
the advent of British rule have Indians not yet become modern. How long does
it take for an Indian to become modern? (2002, p. 28). The affective structure
for post/colonial subjects is not just characterized by indirection, shapelessness
and disappointment. Just barely treading water is not new. It is historically
continuous with what Homi Bhabha has called colonial mimicry. Colonial
mimicry involves the colonizer wanting the colonized to be almost the same as
the colonizer, but not quite, which means that mimicry makes an ambivalent
demand for exact impersonation while constantly producing a difference
between the colonizer and colonized (Bhabha 1994, pp. 8592).
Colonial criminality is a case in point. While criminality in England was
understood as the disorderly outcome of industrial capitalism, in the colony, the
explanation for criminality was hereditary as well as social (Yang 1985,
Radhakrishna 2001, Schwarz 2010). Those branded criminal in India were
remarkably varied in livelihoods, customs and characteristics as peasants,
traders, village watchmen, palanquin bearers, mercenaries, performers,
acrobats and more. Victorian and Brahmanical ethics combined to view the
unsettled as worthy of discipline, punishment and eventually rehabilitation. As
such, since the mid-nineteenth century, the colonial construction of criminal
tribes involved chasing various evasive targets that promised to simultaneously
secure survival and rehabilitate the vagrant, nomad and criminal. The
wanderers went from controlling trade of goods to buying and selling goods
at East India Company prices, to then foregoing trading altogether, to being
disciplined by police and headman surveillance, cultivating under forced
conditions for landlords, paying taxes to colonial authorities, cultivating with
the promise of legal claims on land too poor in quality for productive yields,
working in industrial labour camps, being separated from families, and being
forced to send children to school. Considering this historical legacy, we might
ask, paraphrasing Dipesh Chakrabarty, how long does it take for a criminal to
become rehabilitated? (cf. Chakrabarty 2002, p. 28). How does it feel to be
constantly on the verge of overcoming criminality and in that moment sensing
the horizon of rehabilitation walking away from you? How does the ordinariness
of this reality affect a persons sense of the future, or time itself? Does life that
goes nowhere but moves us nonetheless to continue to long for the receding
horizon (cruel optimism), is that life, still life? How long do we live a still life
before we scavenge for different terms of longing, belonging and living?
For Indians, living in the impasse of the postcolonial present overlays
colonial mimicry with a development mimicry in which the ordinary here and
now is saturated by an aspiration to belong elsewhere, to become developed by
pursuing epistemologically and materially evasive targets from basic needs to
good governance, human rights, empowerment and creative economy
depending on the normative fashions of development funding priorities and
truth regimes. Becoming development subjects involve being in tune with the

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fact that catching up to shifting targets is constantly deferred, often impossible

and yet compulsory. As such, we have to consider the possibility that people do
not always attach themselves to the good life with optimism. Perhaps, the
affective structure within the post/colonial impasse involves an intense
pessimism, a cruel pessimism of compulsive aspirations towards an ever evasive
elsewhere.
Berlant draws on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick when she says that the exhausting
repetition of the politically depressed position that seeks repair of what may be
constitutively broken can eventually split the activity of optimism from
expectation and demand (2011, p. 227). In other words, the cruel optimism
with which we continue to repair our attachment to fantasies eventually makes
optimism itself a source of survival, utterly dissociated from expectations of
actual gain. Berlant calls the intense pursuit of the good life and being stuck in
survival time the bad life (p. 169). And yet, she argues treading water is an
affective structure of disappointment and protectiveness about the fantasy of
the good life (p. 188). Berlant thus grinds down optimism under neoliberalism
to an affective experience that marks life itself, survival itself. There is a
revealing sense of time in her analysis insofar as repeated disappointed results in
eventually causing such a split between optimism and expectation. Considering
colonial and development mimicry, how long after such an eventual split can
people wait for belonging before the lack of expectations and actual gains
humiliates, even batters, sensual intelligence towards other modes of belonging?
At least in the Indian context (perhaps in the developed north too?),
disappointment might be considered a middle-class and middle-caste affect.
Craig Jeffreys (2010) fascinating study Timepass, or seemingly aimless passing
time in north India provides a vivid case in point. Jeffrey shows that the
decimation of state support for agriculture in neoliberal India leads a particular
set of rural middle-caste (Jat), middle-class men to accumulate educational
degrees in the hope of replacing agrarian futures with government desk jobs.
But since government jobs were also slashed, the historical present is marked by
tremendous feelings of temporal anxiety, failure and disillusionment among
these young men with many degrees and no job or marriage in which to see
received notions of masculinity, career and adulthood bear fruit. But, as Jeffrey
shows, Jat men are able to turn their years and practices of waiting and other
seemingly unproductive activities into accumulated networks, influence, and
ultimately, concrete monetary gain thereby securing their caste and class
privilege. Unlike this story about Jat middle-classes waiting and indeed making
the most of waiting, what about those, like Ankur, who can barely fathom that
life might bring an opportunity to earn $1 a day, let alone harbouring such an
expectation? Ankurs affective experience is far removed from expecting the
protections of the good life.
Unlike Berlants aesthetic and social contexts, within the one that I am
exploring, at the very outset there was little stability to the normative

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aspirational conventions that constitute the good life within the long dure of
the post/colonial impasse. Moreover, for the most marginalized citizens among
colonized and development subjects, investment in attachment to normative
ideals and expectations of fruition have not been conjoined for a long time prior
to the neoliberal present. Rather than a viscerally sensed emergent reality, cruel
pessimism points to things that postcolonial subjects have long since negotiated.
After all, rather than a blinkered pursuit of good reform for rehabilitation into
good citizens, many Chhara turned towards thievery and liquor production as
modes of livelihood and belonging.

Betrayal
The Chharas have an aching sense of betrayal by the nation. Not just exploitation
and domination under colonial capitalism, Chhara knowledge is crucially a
consequence of their historic betrayal within the nation. Within the affective
structure of cruel pessimism, something like cultural activism rings of true
possibility. As another actor/character in the Budhan Theatre play, SMY puts it:
Alok: From Gandhi to Gandhi,6 whoever has come to Chharanagar, they
have come with their self-interest. But I couldnt detect such self-interest
in these artists who talk about art, such as Sawmya Joshi, Mahasweta Devi,
Devy Sir. These art lovers dont seem to have self-interest. And if their
self-interest has to do with art, then that is good for the health of a society.
These artists helped us confront history, that bitter settlement history.
(Budhan Theatre 2011, p. 9)7
Like Ankurs story, it is possible to situate Aloks attachment to art and art lovers
within the affective structure of creative economys sentimental optimism. But
this is a partial explanation because scholars are not the only ones who understand
that art and creativity appear to be economically disinterested concerns.
Alok may or may not be oblivious to the material relations of the creative
economy, but it is instructive that he is thoroughly aware of the pervasiveness
of self-interest in ordinary and extraordinary history. In fact, contradicting
dominant nationalist norms, he dares to call Gandhi self-interested a man who
is a global and regional symbol of selfless and non-violent sacrifice. Nor is Alok
saying that art is the exception to the rule of self-interested action. He says that
he detected no self-interest in the artists who crossed the spatial boundaries of
stigma in his city to come to Chharanagar where even rickshaw-wallas hesitate to
come (p. 4).8 Rather, as he sees it, self-interest driven by this kind of art (the
kind that helps people confront their history) is good for the health of a society.
It is notable that Alok sees the two Gandhis as self-interested. This
epistemological distance from Gandhi is likely enabled by Chharas profound
sense of betrayal by the nation. As noted earlier, in 1952, criminal tribes were

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freed from settlements and relabelled denotified tribals and Vimukta Jatis
(liberated communities). However, a number of DNT communities found their
names back on the newly minted Habitual Offenders Act of 1952 which allowed
the police to interrogate and arrest any DNT without a warrant. Betrayal is not
just a traumatic event in Chhara pasts or ushered by a traumatic realization
about the past in the present. It is manifest in an ongoing adjudication,
adaptation, and improvisation (Berlant 2011, p. 54). From brutally enforced
false confessions to reproducing illegal Chhara livelihoods through routine
bribes to bolster police incomes, the police betray the postcolonial category of
denotified criminality.
Ordinary citizens also betray Chhara denotification when they deny the
latter jobs because they automatically assume Chhara criminality and consider
them unworthy of entry into homes. In a survey of 50 non-Chhara households
in the vicinity of Chharanagar, only 5 households did not have any regular
contact with Chhara people at stores, as tenants and so forth. Of the remaining
who have regular if not daily contact with Chhara, a sizeable 20% would not
allow a Chhara to enter their homes for any purpose (despite other forms of
regular contact). Their rationale for this was as varied as Chhara criminality
because of their [Chhara] business, because they cant be trusted, because
Chhara entry would affect the atmosphere at home, because they themselves
want to live far from Chharanagar and because Chhara are the worst of our
community.
Add to these particularities of Chhara experience the normalized threat of
displacement in various parts of eastern Ahmedabads devalued industrial
spaces, including the Chharanagar vicinity. With few legal papers to prove
ownership, Chhara do not have housing security for the land that the Congress
party granted them in 1952. Intensifying Chhara insecurity today, the AMC is
dominated not by Congress but the right-wing Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP). Should they lie in wait for betrayal to come again, this time
in the form of displacement? Notably, there is an increase in BJP votes in
Chharanagar, a historically Congress pocket. Strikingly, Chhara were among
those recruited to participate in the BJP government-sponsored anti-Muslim
pogrom in 2002 (Chaturvedi 2011).
While some Chhara gravitate towards violence and voting BJP, others
interrupt BJP and capital by turning to social work, activism and acting. Alok
articulates Chhara betrayal within the history of nation and names activist
theatre as the encounter through which he was able to centre himself. He says:
Before 1998 it was not necessary for me to think about society (community)
because at that time I had much to think about. Fathers illness, debt, the
circus of earning daily meals (roti-roji kamaane ka chakkar9) I was caught up
(uljha) in all these things. But when I juxtaposed Budhan Sabars
circumstances with a fresh look at my own, I found the knots in me untied
(suljha hua). (Budhan Theatre 2011, pp. 910)10

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The ordinary circus of survival (like that of chasing shifting targets) is at once
disorienting, time-consuming and invites a cynical pessimism (survival is a
circus). By contrast, exposure to Budhan Sabars iconic experience of police
brutality (a person of another denotified tribe in another part of India) through
activism and activist theatre centres Alok. Unlike the failed promises of freedom
and equality for the Chhara within the history of nation, activism to construct
another imagined community by raising Chhara and DNT awareness about
bitter histories of settlement seems like an achievable target.
Unlike the cruel optimism of sentimental capitalism which does little to
engender critical awareness, Chhara activist theatre has represented the cruel
pessimism engendered by bitter histories of violence, betrayal and suffering. My
point is that performing betrayal mobilizes the disorienting Chhara affective
present to help settle Aloks spirit. For Berlant, scavenging for survival
provides the kind of loose solidarity towards a better good life that refuses
attempts to belong to the normative political and its conventional collateral
damage (Berlant 2011, pp. 262263). But for the Chhara, unlike the unsettling,
disorienting and grinding circus of ordinary survival which has its own
conventional collateral damage, performing their legacy of suffering and ongoing
experiences of stigma seems to settle a sense of belonging, for a moment. It
unties the knots of cruel attachments to ordinary survival and evasive elsewhere.
Thus, the affective structure of cruel pessimism and betrayal produces a
permanent performance of stigma. This involves Chhara recounting, discussing,
politicizing and mobilizing ongoing experiences and discoveries of collective
suffering and exclusion by any DNT tribes. Budhan performances highlight the
political economic compulsions and resilient discrimination that leads to
criminal occupations (thievery and liquor production) while drawing attention
to the ways in which the branded criminality of bearing DNT names and
identities produces discrimination. Betrayal drives the strategy of performance.
For example, Budhan, the play that made Ankurs hair stand on end, is about an
innocent toy-maker forced to confess to crimes he did not commit and killed in
police custody for refusing to do so.
Mobilizing historical betrayal as a resource (Yudice 2003), Chhara have
sought to gain recognition from the state, attempting to become as legible as
possible within state census-making so that they can avail of benefits granted to
the political identities therein. As such, a recent decision to give DNT special
attention in the current socio-economic census on caste and recent Planning
Commission commitment to consult with DNTs to devise suitable development
programmes was considered an important victory of DNT activism (Government of India 2011, pp. 104105). While the idea of seeking legibility by the
state might grate against Berlants conviction about refusing normative political
belonging, it makes compensations, relief and all kinds of other economic
opportunities from the state possible for the Chhara and other DNT. Moreover,
betrayal is not just a resource for these kinds of gains. Regularly performing

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betrayal as ordinary reminds Chhara audiences of the many scales at which

Chhara inclusion remains profoundly limited. In fact, they also perform betrayal
as internal to show that Chhara community is itself another evasive target.
Thus, Budhan Theatre attempts to address gender inequality and prejudice
against Muslims within the Chhara community as a counter-force to right-wing
presence and influence in Chharanagar. Sensual intelligence encounters a
reflexive one to mobilize a counter-hegemonic ideological practice in a context
of increasingly normalized bigotry against Muslim citizens. These activist
performances contribute to interrupting the strident BJP strategy of dispossessing Muslim land, housing and businesses accomplished by consolidating Hindu
domination among historically marginalized populations. In short, betrayal is
mobilised as a resource to avail of state resources, but this does not only
amount to an uncritical belonging to normative politics.

Longing for ordinary regard

Finally, Chhara experience a sense of ordinary regard in and through the work
of activist theatre and this makes activist theatre a space of intense longing for
Budhan theatre members. Throughout SMY, we get brief glimpses into the
ordinary regard that Chhara seek. Perhaps ordinary regard is what the space and
work of activist theatre can provide. One of the actors/characters in the play,
Jayendra whose father was a free-lancer thief (Budhan Theatre 2011, p. 8),
recounts part of his life, for example:
Father continued to drink, continued to gamble, continued to engage in
thievery. In the midst of this, he also continued to educate me and my
siblings. And he continued to encourage us towards Budhan theatres
work. I didnt know what my father wanted me to be. But I certainly knew
that he had a hunger for self-respect. And that this hunger was satiated by
the praise I received for my acting. And nothing made him happier than
when someone from another community would come and stay a few days
in our house. (pp. 1415)
In an interview, J. (Jayendras father) told me that his father starting stealing
when he had to leave work at the Anil Starch mill. J. learned thieving practices
from his father. Although J. also tried to earn a living from driving autorickshaws and working as an out-of-town chauffer for some years, he could not
make ends meet. He and his wife tried to produce liquor as a solution. But as he
explained, there is not much money in liquor production, especially in homebrew. In his words:
for foreign liquor (English daru) you have to have money because during
raids, the police will demand at least Rs.10,000. But with home-brew they

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let you go for Rs.500, or Rs.200. With home-brew you earn about Rs.100
a day. You cant live on that. Your life is also cut in half because it is very
hard work. Very hard work. You work in high temperatures. It is very bad
for health. (Interview, 26 June 2009)

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For all these reasons, J. focused his attention on thievery and said Thieving is
good (Interview, 26 June 2009). It is good because it affords a different
future for his children:
Once one of my children gets set up, I will stop this. I want to start a travel
agency. Thats when I will feel good. I dont want my children to get into
crime. Any kind of crime, whether it is liquor or thieving. I have seen how
the police treat me. They beat me because they caught me stealing. They
tied my hands at the back and they hung me from the ceiling in the lockup. I love that Jayendra does theatre. He will meet good people, he will
learn good things, and then he is bound to become good. (Interview,
26 June 2009)
In an interview with another Budhan Theatre member the importance of raising
good children deserving of praise was reinforced. Kalpana Gagdekar argued that
more and more Chhara children were joining the library and engaging in
Budhan theatre activities because apart from educational benefits, parents
enjoyed hearing praise about their children. Simple acts of praise for children
are denied to most Chhara families because they are assumed to be children of
criminals, if not criminal children.
Kalpana, the only female actor/character in SMY focuses her biographical
narrative on her attachment to acting:
we forgot our grief to continue theatre when my father-in-law was
thrown in jail and when the household was struggling (Budhan Theatre
2011, p. 13). Through it all, we just kept doing theatre. Theatre, theatre,
theatre. (2011)
While Kalpanas in-laws and husband gave her initial support for acting, her inlaws began to object when her son was older and Kalpana had to leave him
behind to continue theatre. Yet, she continued to do theatre and she did not
begrudge the familial objections. Why wouldnt they object? I continued to do
theatre when Tarun was an infant, I continued when my father was in jail, and
I continued when Kranti was an infant (p. 14). She performed right through
her second pregnancy, placing every norm of good woman/mother second to
her work of activist theatre. She herself questions this I was perturbed at the
end of the performance. I asked myself, why am I so crazy that I have paid no
heed to the fact that I am heavily pregnant. But I had no answers for my
questions (pp. 2021). Her affective longing to return to the work of theatre

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perhaps has something to do with the fact that her performances were always
appreciated. At her first audition, they clapped so hard that it brought tears to
my eyes (pp. 78).
A final poignant example is captured in the documentary, Please dont beat
me, sir (Talukdar and Friedman 2011). Budhan Theatre performed a play at the
Police Academy in Baroda providing a counter-narrative to the standard colonial
syllabus that still sees DNTs as born criminals. Considering police control
over Chhara life, livelihood and death, Budhan Theatre Director, Dakxin
Bajrange asserted to his audience, This is a historic day for us. At the end of
the play, the police commissioner Keshav Kumar spoke to the police trainees
and said:
Having watched this play, I humbly request that we take an oath: That
when we encounter a Chhara whether to arrest them or interrogate them,
such scenes [pointing to the stage] should not occur. I want you to raise
your hands and swear.
Scenes from the film show an enthusiastic audience raising both arms up in
the air.
Dakxin told me that police trainees came to speak to the actors with tears
in their eyes, to hold hands and hug Chhara actors. While norms of
untouchability in the caste system are well known, it is less known that the
Chhara also primarily experience the touch of the powerful when it is violent.
A collective of women activists called Sangtin Writers in rural Uttar Pradesh
have shown in their book Playing with Fire how tremendously difficult work it is
to unlearn and live beyond the norms of untouchability even momentarily, even
among fellow activists and even after years of critical thinking (Sangtin Writers
and Nagar 2006). Although the police commissioner reinforces arrest or
interrogation as two possible modes of interacting with Chhara, it is important
to take note of this historic day. Taking the Chhara cue, my point is that the
ephemerality of a non-violent non-Chhara touch is not lost on the Chhara. The
affective resonance of that moment is inscribed in the body, memory and
mobilization, alerting Chhara senses to the power of what is virtually possible.
Rather than place such affective experiences out of the loop so to speak,
however fleeting, these moments have to be recognized as significant outcomes
of activist performance that counter the political economic, ideological and
affective structures that reinforce betrayal, death and disregard.

Conclusion
In this paper I have highlighted multiple, overlapping, even competing affective
structures that mark the historical present for Chhara citizens and their activism
to expand our sense of the range of affective structures that constitute the

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historical present. Ordinary regard goes well beyond recognition and political
restitution from the state or accepting the benefits of sentimental capitalism.
Affect theorists looking for a new mode of political belonging may find this
vacillation between seeking the state and capital and seeking a new ordinary,
politically contradictory, temporally impossible and effectively schizophrenic.
But a global political economy of affect needs to grapple with the uneven effects
of colonial, capitalist and national histories on investment in popular modes of
belonging.
As Sanjay Srivastava says of the relationship of the poor to the Indian state,
while the state (compared to the market) is:
a far more constant spectre in their lives, making appearances in different
aspects: as provider of cheap food and other goods, erratic legal succour,
education, medical aid, residential spaces, and arbitrary policing it is
their strategies for dealing with the state that are boundless. (Srivastava
2012, p. 83)
If seeking legibility through DNT activism is one Chhara strategy, activist
theatre is another. Drawing on Michael Taussigs work, Srivastava notes that
the poors scepticism and belief [in the state] actively cannibalize each other in
a tragedy of unrequited love (Srivastava 2012).
Chhara attachment frequently vacillates between being seen as a good
citizen and scavenging for new modes of livelihood and belonging. Members of
Budhan theatre often speak of their audience as the state. The voiceover
preamble of SMY refers to the audience as their court, their jury:
This court [the audience, the public] wishes to know who exactly are these
theatre-types [nautanki-baaj]? What is the story of their lives? How do they
survive? How do they perform? What do they do? What kind of change do
they want? Most importantly, what do you know about their lives? Do they
deserve to be known as good citizens of this nation? This court demands
you to break your silence and tell us about these theatre artists.(Budhan
Theatre 2011, p. 2)
In a way, this play is a response to a pervasive suspicion about Budhan Theatre
among Chharas and the constant traffic of a transnational crew of academics
(like myself), documentary film-makers, activists, artists and development
practitioners in Chharanagar. Budhan theatre has generated endless speculation
about what is in it for Chhara. What really explains the new hunger for
theatre? How can activist theatre generate such buzz, attention and
resources? This play is one response to such questions, for which Chharas
are as much their audience, their court, their state as the broader community
and state that betrays them and yet inspires belief in its court and

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constitution. Thus, alongside mobilizing betrayal as a resource to claim state

resources, this articulation of betrayal as pervasive, ordinary, even internal
simultaneously generates a politics that imagines seeking a place beyond
normative sites. The concluding voiceover of the play addressing the audience
(court) says:
One of your [court/audience/Chhara self] questions was what has theatre
given them [Budhan theatre members]? What theatre has given them is
something that perhaps even the Indian Constitution cannot give and that is
the right to live with dignity. (p. 23)
The Constitution cannot constitute a life with dignity. While seeking legibility
into state categories and recognition as good citizens, they distance national
belonging from dignity. Chhara members of Budhan theatre seem to see
through the tragedy of unrequited love, they appear to be cognizant of cruel
optimism the limits of attaching to the fantasy of state protection, national
belonging and sentimental optimism. Possibly, colonial mimicry and the
waiting room of history transform the newly emergent and disorienting affect
of cruel optimism into the vacillating but relatively critical distance of cruel
pessimism where those who continue to wait for belonging, keep belonging
itself at a distance. I hope I have shown that such vacillation and yet critical
distance of cruel pessimism is constituted, at once, by betrayals, by nation and
community, as well as by forms of virtual belonging in organizational spaces
that attempt to make fleeting experiences of ordinary regard linger on the skin
and in the gut (Amin and Thrift 2013, p. xiv) through affectively charged
activism that to some Chhara feels like a worthwhile investment of time and
person. While such spaces of ordinary regard can quickly turn into sites of cruel
optimism, for the moment, about such spaces, those who have been waiting far
too long for a sense of belonging seem to be saying that all we have is the
present.

Acknowledgements
First, I thank Chhara activists in Budhan Theatre for their generosity and wisdom. I am
particularly grateful to Dakxin Bajrange, Chetna Rathod, Virendra Garange, Vaishakh
Rathod, Mustaqali Shaikh, Jayendra Rathod for their invaluable contribution to the
research process. I am also grateful for funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council which enabled me to conduct this research. Finally, I owe thanks to
friends and colleagues who offered crucial inspiration and critical feedback along the
way: Jeffrey Barbeau, Susan Cahill, Alexandre Da Costa, Erin Morton, Richa Nagar,
Vinay Gidwani, Craig Jeffrey, Samantha King, Eleanor Macdonald, Mary Louise
Adams, and Susanne Soederberg.

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Notes
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Mahasweta Devis writing has brought relentless attention to the conditions

of the most disenfranchised populations in India.
The Sarabhai family of Ahmedabad owes its wealth to the textile industry.
This notable family, to which Mallika Sarabhai (classical dancer, actor,
activist, and founder of the Darpana Academy) belongs, has played a
historical role in founding educational and philanthropic institutions in
Ahmedabad.
A recent exhibition entitled Cotton Exchange brought together artists and
artisans from Gujarat and the UK, elided histories of colonialism and
exploitation to represent the shared heritage of Manchester and Ahmedabad
within the abandoned precincts of the old Rajnagar textile mill (Da Costa
forthcoming). From a resistant political imaginary, local social justice
organizations such as Jan Vikas have attempted harness art and creativity as
instrumental means to revitalize a divided city, as the recently inaugurated
Conflictorium located in the incendiary Mirzapur neighbourhood reveals.
For example, George Yudice (2003) argues in The Expediency of Culture that
culture itself has no meaning left other than resource under neoliberal
capitalism. In a similar vein, in The Emancipated Spectator, Jacques Ranciere
(2009) critiques the dichotomies of seeing versus acting in theatrical
performance for being captive to the condescending politics of liberating the
oppressed of the kind forwarded through Paulo Freire, Bertolt Brecht and
Augusto Boal to name a few. Emancipate the spectator, he argues, by
refusing the inequality of knowledge implied in posing seeing versus acting in
the relation of the actor to the spectator. Redistribute to seeing the same
regard as is given to acting and we might close the epistemological distance
with which we begin when we separate visionary teacher from ignoramus to
be taught. These are significant interventions that help deconstruct the
sentimental affective structure and the unstated politics of intellectual
superiority embedded in social change levers such as creativity, community,
pedagogy or activism.
Rather than joining the scholarly chorus that views the neoliberal crisis as an
extraordinary historical conjuncture, Berlant compellingly argues that crisis
is not exceptional to history or consciousness but a process embedded in the
ordinary that unfolds in stories about navigating whats overwhelming
(p. 10).
The first Gandhi refers to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi or Mahatma
Gandhi, who is considered the father of the Indian nation. The second Gandhi
refers to Indira Gandhi who was the first female prime minister of India and
daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India.
That bitter settlement history to which Alok refers is about born criminals
placed in colonial labour camps for work, disciplining and rehabilitation.

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10

Rickshaw-wallahs (rickshaw drivers) are a ubiquitous and relatively cheap

part of the transportation system in most urban areas.
The word chakkar also means circle, indicating running in endless circles in
pursuit of survival.
Thanks to Nosheen Ali for an expansive translation of the term suljha hua
which refers to a person who is stable, sure of themselves, calm, settled in
spirit, centred in herself, whose knots have been untied, someone
comfortable in his or her skin, and in tune with themselves.

Notes on Contributor
Dia Da Costa is Associate Professor in the Department of Global Development
Studies, Queens University, Canada. She develops her research and teaching at
the intersection of global political economy and cultural studies. She is the
author of Development Dramas: Reimagining Rural Political Action in Eastern India
(2010) and editor of the book Scripting Power: Jana Sanskriti On and Offstage
(2010). She has articles in Third World Quarterly, Globalizations, Signs: Journal of
Women and Culture, Contributions to Indian Sociology and Journal of Peasant Studies.
She is currently working on a second book tentatively entitled A Hunger called
Theatre: Cultural Activism in an Age of Everyday Life Inc.

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