This paper provides a critical appraisal of the civil society versus political society formulation of Partha Chatterjee that has influenced recent sociological analyses (Baviskar and Sundar 2008, Das 2011 and Nielsen 2018) about modes of contentious subaltern politics in the developing world. Using ethnographic vignettes, I herein argue that subaltern actors, in their engagement with the state, have been found to use an array of methods that belong to both civil society (CS) and political society (PS). I add to this critique by looking into another aspect, viz., the question of context or the spatial dimension. My argument here is that the spatial/ territorial underpinnings of subaltern politics further problematise the presumed trade-off between neo-liberal, material aspirations and affective/ cultural moorings of subaltern groups and hence there is a need to develop more productively relational understandings of citizenship like topological citizenship, which accommodates spatiotemporal changes in modes of political engagement.
I call these tactics deployed by subaltern community leaders among valmikis as ‘fluid brokerage’ which has two key facets. Firstly subaltern agency, herein, has emerged as a differentiated entity with a heterogenous composition (i.e., which involves a melange of civil society actors like traditional chiefs or pradhans, youth leaders, neighbourhood association representatives etc.) Secondly, with the onset of regimes of populism and middle class aspirations amongst subalterns, subaltern agency has shaped up as per temporal demands (i.e., the affiliation community leaders have with political parties at the Ward/ State/ Central level) and spatial materiality (i.e., the type of neighbourhood in which the Valmikis’ reside – legal colony, unauthorised colony, resettlement colony, urban village). Finally, in so doing, this essay iterates the salience of brokerage as a new praxis of negotiation with the State in both South Asian (Bjorkman 2015) and non-South Asian (Koster & van Leynseele 2018, James 2011) contexts.
