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WhatsApp and digital private spaces are transforming the quality of lived democracy in India today. Bringing together STS, geographies of democracy, digital and political anthropology, and feminist approaches to the home, this paper makes visible how the Silicon Valley imaginary of the “digital living room” is domesticated in India. Drawing on digital ethnographic research in urban north India we show how WhatsApp is being used by the Hindu right to digitise new party‐political intimacies. This has implications for how people at the margins of Hindu nationalist politics dwell in the “digital living room”. Framed as a home like space, we problematise Facebook’s “spatiotechnical” utopia by making visible how kinship and (domestic) politics are newly entangled in digital private spaces. Finally, we document how WhatsApp is deployed as a technology of discipline to determine modes of appropriate sociality and reconfigure spaces of digital‐physical inclusion/exclusion in the making of India’s “ethnic democracy”.

Anthropologists have posited that citizenship takes on multiple meanings and forms based on citizens’ everyday engagements with state and non-state actors. This article examines forms of citizenship that materialize vis-à-vis the state. In particular, it deals with new imaginaries of citizenship that emerge through interactions between state actors and poor women in counterinsurgency settings. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the erstwhile Maoist zones of eastern India, I show that, despite knowing the violent face of the state, poor women nevertheless rely on the developmental face of the state to hope for social transformation and imagine better lives and livelihoods. I argue that in doing so they engender an idea of hopeful citizenship.

A large number of tribal, peasant and urban middle class women participated in the Naxalite movement of the 1960s and 1970s in postcolonial India. However, the academic historiography of the movement for the longest time, maintained a silence on these women participants as well as gender issues (

This introduction to the special issue lays out the importance of studying women’s collectives in South Asia. We argue in this issue that it is particularly important to examine collectives in this moment because transformations in South Asian women’s lives are increasingly described in individual terms in state policy and international development discourses. The emphasis on individual empowerment alone, however, effaces the subtle negotiations that women carry out with state actors, development workers, families, the market and their communities through collectives. The articles in the special issue examine how women’s participation in collectives and collective spaces enables them to imagine transformations in their lives. We also discuss the limitations of collectives-led transformation.

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