Railway Stations as Sites of Emerging Political Identity in India, 19th-20th Centuries

FAIN: FA-54215-08

Lisa Mitchell
University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA 19104-6205)

Railway stations have played a crucial role in modern India in fostering collective actions and expressions of affect never before recognized. My NEH-supported project will result in a book-length analysis of the ways in which the public spaces associated with railway stations have facilitated new forms of social interaction, political mobilization, and democratic practice since their establishment in India a century and a half ago. Bringing together theoretical approaches to the study of public space and the built environment, ethnographic approaches to the mapping of discursive and communicative networks, and historical approaches to the understanding of affective experience, this book will be of interest to historians, anthropologists, area studies specialists, and those with an interest in public space, genealogies of democracy, and the role played by affect within collective mobilization and identification.