ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that theory of print capitalism, politics and the public sphere that is more in tune with some empirical reality which calls postcolonial publicity. Populist mobilization in India provides an important perspective from which to think the role of a deeply embodied publicity in forming democratic politics. To the degree that politics can project compelling mass-mediated representation of 'the people', it produces a different form of collective self-abstraction from that of the unmarked citizen. A cursory examination of the history of newspaper circulation in India is enough to cast doubt on the teleology undergirding arguments prematurely heralding the death of print and the growing irrelevance of regional languages in a globalizing world dominated by the English language. The politics of 20th-century mass mobilization in India has proven to be an important vantage point from which to consider the production of publicity from the perspective of those that are not privileged enough to inhabit the disembodied voice of reason.
