Lumpen

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Moscow, 1937), p. 38 [https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/.../pdf/18th-Brumaire.pdf, accessed Sept. 2015].

2. DCS-Digital Corpus of Sanskrit, ‘lampaṭa’, [http://kjc-sv013.kjc.uni-heidelberg.de/dcs/index.php?contents=lemma&IDWord=80930, accessed July 2016].

3. Sanskrit scholar Jesse Ross Knutson explains this comparative value neutrality through a range of examples from Sanskrit literature. In the Rājataraṅgiṇī, a Kashmiri queen may be described as lampaṭa due to her indiscriminate choice of sexual partners—expressing rabid desire—while in another context, a bird could be lampaṭa for the fruit of a tree (also expressive of desire and predilection, but not particularly sexual or reprobate). Personal communication, 26 July 2016.

4. Shiv Kumar, ‘Appeal to Join Rally with Maruti Workers in Manesar’, Sanhati (1 Sept. 2011) [http://sanhati.com/articles/4069/#sthash.oWv29HBM.dpuf, accessed Feb. 2015].

5. Sumanta Banerjee, ‘Anti-Worker Offensive in Haryana’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 13, no. 11 (18 Mar. 1978), p. 514; italics added.

6. I owe the Ezekiel reference to Meera Ashar. She pointed out that ‘students who were part of protests against the Emergency have also often been referred to as lumpen or goonda’.

7. While there is no federal legislation, most of the states seem to have a version of this legislation: Kerala Antisocial Activities Prevention Act; Karnataka Prevention of Dangerous Activities of Bootleggers, Drug-Offenders, Gamblers, Goondas, Immoral Traffic Offenders and Slum-Grabbers Act (Act 12 of 1985); Uttar Pradesh Gender Niyantran Adhiniyam; Rajasthan Control of Goonda Act, and so on; italics added.

8. Vivek Dhareshwar and R. Srivatsan, ‘Rowdy-Sheeters: An Essay on Subalternity and Politics’, in Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakravarty (eds), Subaltern Studies, Vol. 9 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 201–31.

9. ‘We read, for example, that the police have “rounded up” hundreds of rowdy-sheeters in anticipation of “communal tension” in the old city. The police of course “know” them, “recognize” them; after all, they have fixed the referent of the category in the first place. How do the police “know” the rowdy-sheeter, what “sociology” of class and gender, what “anthropology” of caste and tribe, determine their notion of crime and criminality, and enable them to empirically fix the referent, making it a natural/social category of civil society? This “official” knowledge about the “rowdy-sheeter” and its reproduction by the newspapers determines the degree-zero of the category, its “ground”, as it were’. Ibid.

10. ‘The Tiny [car] will make the streets of Kolkata look more modern…compared to the historic and lumpen Ambys that are seen everywhere!’ Amby is the Ambassador make of car, still used for state-licensed cabs in Kolkata. It used to be the sarkari or official car for all government offices, being the only car to be exclusively manufactured by an Indian company, Hindustan Motors.

11. Hirani is the successful filmmaker, Rajkumar Hirani, known for his loving satire on the endemic corruption that runs through every level of Indian society, via his trademark Munnabhai films. A Hindutva blogger calls him ‘lumpen’ in the context of the appeal to ban his 2014 film, PK, seen as bringing the Hindu faith into disrepute. The epithet ‘lumpen’ is somewhat displaced, simultaneously meant to comment on the filmmaker's penchant for ‘lumpen’ protagonists with a golden heart.

12. This concept is drawn from Andre Gunder Frank's Lumpenbourgeoisie and Lumpen Development: Dependency, Class, and Politics in Latin America (Kharagpur: Monthly Review Press, 2004). It is characterised by import substitution, and the promotion of consumer-idle industrial installations such as the automobile industry, all of which stagger rather than stimulate growth.

13. Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! (dir. Dibakar Banerjee, 2009).

14. ‘“It's not dacoity, it's just bribery”…. “Bribery, theft, dacoity—now they've all become the same. It's communism”…. They both laughed’. Shrilal Shukla ( Gillian Wright, trans.), Rag Darbari (Delhi: Penguin India, 1992), p. 10.