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Analyzing the relationship between collective action and civility within the world’s largest democracy, this essay argues that, rather than being a precondition for democratic participation or a quality of individual comportment or manners, civility can be analyzed as an effect of political recognition and of the existence of a responsive structure of authority. Using ethnographic examples of recent collective assemblies held in southern India, the essay demonstrates the limits of both deliberative democracy approaches (Dryzek, Habermas, Rawls, Benhabib, Cohen, Farrelly) and agonistic pluralist models (Mouffe, Connolly, Honig, Arendt) for understanding democracy. If individual speech action is understood to run the gamut from polite and constructive participation in deliberation to antagonistic incivility, collective action is framed by both models as inherently oppositional and adversarial, rejecting or resisting authority and protesting against it, running a narrower gamut from agonistic intervention, which frames others as adversaries, to antagonistic refusals that frame others as enemies (Mouffe). There appears no space within either deliberative or agonistic frameworks for approaching collective action as non-adversarial participation in the public sphere on par with individual participatory contributions to deliberation. The ethnographic examples presented in this essay illustrate examples of collective action as efforts to “hail the state” and be included in its decision-making processes. These examples demonstrate that collective action can function as amplification of earlier communicative efforts that have gone unheard or been silenced. Illustrating the failure of both models to capture the larger processes that result in collective action, I conclude by presenting an analytic approach from the perspective of a former British colony that offers deeper understandings of collective forms of action as they relate to civility not only in India, but elsewhere as well.

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