ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines what the figure of the crowd and the metro crowd in particular mean for modernity in India by bringing together the ladies’ coach crowd in the Delhi Metro with a violent mob that formed in the metro in 2014. It outlines the way protest crowds in Bangkok are both carefully planned by activists and also warily anticipated by authorities. The book also examines the deliberately spectacular praying sessions government leaders in Nigeria hold in stadiums. It argues that the leveled status of people in the choreographed crowd and the spontaneous crowd appears in stark contrast to the rigid hierarchy of the cliques and circles that people form elsewhere in the People’s Republic of China. Another way the contributors conceive of the ghostly crowds that follow, anticipate, or inspire actual crowds is in terms of images.
