Politics in Emotion: The Song of Telangana

The work focuses on a subaltern local sovereignty movement called "Telangana" in India. Over the last ten years, this movement has engaged in a massive political mobilization, including strikes, rallies, work stoppages, occupation of public spaces, electoral contests, 200 and more political suicides (including a number of public self-immolations) and media battles. But, interestingly enough, not withstanding a political mobilization that has brought day-to-day life to a halt on a number of occasions, it has remained largely invisible in international media and global politics. Its invisibility is all the more puzzling since it is occurring in and around a city (Hyderabad in South India) that has, in recent years, achieved prominence as a global city (hosting a number of multinational corporations and software powerhouses, including Google, Microsoft, Infosys etc). Fascinated by the social movement's international invisibility as well as the causes and conditions of its eruption around a city/region that has become a showcase of new capitalist development, Muppidi seeks to unpack this issue, showing that this invisibility is not just intrinsically puzzling, but also represents the operation of power on a global scale. Investigating the conditions of invisibility in this instance can therefore tell us something important about the way global power works to produce visibility and invisibility in the 21st century world.