Podcast: The Crowd Never Left the Scene… – Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury on Crowd Politics in Bangladesh

In this conversation for CEU Democracy Institute’s journal Review of Democracy with our Global Forum editor Anubha Anushree, Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury – author of the recent book Paradoxes of the Popular: Crowd Politics in Bangladesh (Stanford UP, 2019) – discusses the various layers of democracy in Bangladesh. Analyzing the differences between the English word “crowd” and the Bengali term “jonata,” Professor Chowdhury deliberates upon the recent events in Bangladesh through the lens of the country’s long history of popular dissent and street mobilization. She describes how the Western category of “the people” fails to capture the tenuous, fleeting, and ephemeral materiality of the crowd in the context of Bangladesh and beyond.

Glossary of key terms

Jonata: People

Chattro: Student

Jonogona: Population

Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury is a political anthropologist. She is an associate professor of anthropology at Amherst College in Massachusetts, USA. Her research and writing focus on the affective and aesthetic dimensions of postcolonial democracies, especially in the context of popular sovereignty and political communication. Her first book, Paradoxes of the Popular: Crowd Politics in Bangladesh (2019) is an ethnography of the crowd. She is currently writing a book that explores the social and political life of the longest river bridge in Bangladesh in order to understand how mega-infrastructure a strategy through which authoritarian regimes is increasingly seek populist legitimacy. Her other works in progress include a special volume on women populist leaders in South Asia which aims to advance the debates around contemporary populism beyond masculinist charisma. In fall 2024, she is a visiting fellow at the Kellogg Institute of International Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

The conversation was conducted by Anubha Anushree. Lilit Hakobyan edited the recording.