The Theatre of Fury and Fame

In India today, the archetype of the angry young man has left the cinema and entered the streets. The figure once embodied by Amitabh Bachchan in the 1970s—an individual railing against injustice—has been transformed into a real-life agent of spectacle. Aspirational youth from small towns and peri-urban India¹ often translate frustration and humiliation into violent action, using defiance as a tool for recognition. What was once symbolic rebellion has become a practical strategy for social and political mobility.

Partha Chatterjee² and Sudipta Kaviraj³ have long noted that Indian democracy functions across two registers: the elite-controlled civil sphere and the political society of the marginalized, where rights are contested through disruption and confrontation. In this second sphere, youth quickly learn that visibility and aggression matter more than dialogue or policy. Thomas Blom Hansen⁴’s work on populist mobilization highlights how participation often requires public displays of force and spectacle. Violence, in this context, is not an aberration but a language of citizenship for those excluded from institutional channels.

The roots of this rage lie in structural inequality and the uneven promises of economic liberalisation. Christophe Jaffrelot⁵ emphasizes how reforms since the 1990s have expanded opportunity for some while leaving many behind. Job scarcity, entrenched caste hierarchies⁶, and bureaucratic corruption amplify frustration, producing a generation whose ambition exceeds the avenues available for realization. Their rebellion emerges not from ideology alone but from a deep disillusionment with a procedural democracy that routinely fails to deliver dignity or justice.

Political parties have long recognized the utility of this anger. Disruption, spectacle, and outrage mobilize far faster than reasoned debate or policy proposals. Arjun Appadurai’s⁷ concept of the “politics of visibility” explains how power increasingly resides in who is seen rather than who governs. Youth who act violently, whether in protests or viral videos, intuitively grasp that performance grants legitimacy. Their rebellion is strategic, instrumental, and highly visible—whether or not it achieves systemic change.

Cinema has cultivated these instincts for decades. From Company to Gangs of Wasseypur to Singham, the violent protagonist operates simultaneously as sinner and savior. Scholars such as Rachel Dwyer and Ravi Vasudevan ⁸have argued that Indian cinema’s recurring “aesthetic of anger” mirrors postcolonial conditions, positioning moral authority in the individual rather than the institution. This cinematic grammar has migrated into politics: defiance, charisma, and spectacle now substitute for competence, negotiation, or policy-making.

Yet the rebel’s rise is rarely emancipatory. Pierre Bourdieu’s⁹ theory of symbolic capital shows how acts of defiance, once recognized, are quickly absorbed into existing power structures. Youth who gain visibility through violence often become dependent instruments of the very system they initially opposed. Their rebellion is contained, codified, and reoriented to serve party or state objectives. What begins as disruption is normalized into routine political management.

Ashis Nandy¹⁰ has described Indian politics as a moral psychology of the wounded, where acts of aggression reflect existential struggle as much as ideology. For many young men in small towns or semi-urban spaces, politics offers the only stage on which one can assert agency. The act of raising a slogan, wielding a stick, or going viral momentarily restores selfhood in a society that systematically denies it.

Social media has intensified this performance. Zeynep Tufekci’s¹¹ research on networked protest demonstrates how digital platforms prioritize visibility over deliberation. Online, outrage travels faster than reason. Youth activism, trolling, orchestrated hate campaigns, and performative indignation mirror street-level politics: both are techniques to claim space and attention in systems that marginalize them. The digital theatre extends the same logic of spectacle into the virtual realm, where every act of fury is a form of recognition and validation.

The political class has perfected the management of this energy. Youth wings¹², student organizations, and local party cadres channel discontent into safe, predictable forms of aggression. Each generation of youth finds itself drawn into a familiar cycle of mobilization, performance, and co-optation. The state condemns violence rhetorically but relies on it practically as a controlled pressure-release. Achille Mbembe’s¹³ concept of necropolitics clarifies this logic: power is exercised through life and death, making expendable the bodies of those whose anger sustains political theatre.

Beneath the spectacle lies a persistent irony. The youth, often idealistic yet constrained by structural inequities, believe they disrupt the system even as they reproduce it. Each protest, viral video, or street clash reinforces the illusion of participatory democracy, while substantive deliberation and reform remain scarce. The politics of outrage has become both a medium and a message: rebellion, like visibility, is performative, instrumental, and ultimately co-opted.

The tragedy of India’s radical youth politics is not just moral but aesthetic. Violence is stylized, ritualized, and consumable. The rebel is celebrated, feared, and finally subordinated to structures of power. What began as a challenge to authority becomes a spectacle that reinforces it, recycled endlessly for the next election, the next camera, the next ephemeral moment of recognition.

Conclusion

Youth engagement in violent politics in India reflects systemic conditions rather than isolated aberrations. As Chatterjee and Kaviraj show, democracy relies on both its institutions and its margins. Hansen illustrates how aggression is normalized as political currency, while Jaffrelot traces the consequences of unequal economic restructuring. Appadurai’s framework clarifies the centrality of visibility, and Bourdieu shows how symbolic recognition is quickly transformed into dependency. Nandy explains the psychological and moral stakes of these performances, while Tufekci and Mbembe illuminate the ways digital and state apparatuses channel and manage youth anger.

The result is a theatre of power where rebellion produces recognition but rarely emancipation. India’s youth are both actors and instruments, admired for their energy but constrained by the very structures their rage sustains. Politics becomes a performance, and the stage absorbs the performer, leaving little room for genuine transformation.

1. Semi-urban India — refers to small towns and peri-urban spaces that are neither fully rural nor metropolitan, where aspirations for mobility collide with entrenched social hierarchies and limited opportunity. ↩︎
2. Partha Chatterjee — a leading Indian political theorist and historian, best known for developing the concept of political society in The Politics of the Governed (2004). He describes it as a domain where marginalized groups in postcolonial democracies negotiate rights not through formal institutions but through informal, often disruptive means of collective action. ↩︎
3. Sudipta Kaviraj — a major scholar of Indian political thought and intellectual history, whose writings such as The Enchantment of Democracy and India (2011) explore how democracy and modernity acquire distinct meanings in societies shaped by inequality and colonial legacies. ↩︎
4. Thomas Blom Hansen — a Danish anthropologist whose influential works, including The Saffron Wave (1999) and Wages of Violence (2001), analyze Hindu nationalism, populism, and the performative nature of public violence in Indian democracy. He highlights how emotional and theatrical forms of politics mobilize mass consent and produce legitimacy. ↩︎
5. Christophe Jaffrelot — a French political scientist specializing in South Asia. His works, such as India’s Silent Revolution (2003) and Modi’s India (2021), examine how economic liberalization, caste politics, and Hindu nationalism have intersected to deepen social inequality and reshape the structure of power in contemporary India. ↩︎
6. Caste hierarchies — a foundational structure of Indian society that continues to shape inequality and access to resources despite the legal abolition of caste-based discrimination. ↩︎
7. Arjun Appadurai — an Indian anthropologist known for his studies on globalization, aspiration, and urban inequality. In Modernity at Large (1996) and Fear of Small Numbers (2006), he explores how visibility, imagination, and representation become crucial for marginalized groups to assert political agency in conditions of insecurity. ↩︎
8. Rachel Dwyer and Ravi Vasudevan — scholars of Indian cinema who have examined how Hindi films shape moral and political imagination. Dwyer (SOAS, University of London) and Vasudevan (Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi) show how popular cinema constructs the “angry hero” as a figure of justice who operates outside formal legality, mirroring broader societal anxieties about authority and corruption. ↩︎
9. Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) — a French sociologist whose concept of symbolic capital describes the forms of prestige, honor, and recognition that translate into social power even without direct economic or political resources (Distinction, 1984). ↩︎
10. Ashis Nandy — an Indian political psychologist and public intellectual who interprets Indian politics through the intertwined lenses of trauma, colonialism, and identity. In works such as The Intimate Enemy (1983), he argues that political aggression in postcolonial societies often emerges from a “moral psychology of the wounded,” rooted in collective humiliation and loss. ↩︎
11. Zeynep Tufekci — a Turkish-American sociologist and techno-critic whose book Twitter and Tear Gas (2017) examines how digital networks enable rapid, large-scale mobilization (“networked protest”) yet often lack the organizational depth to sustain long-term political change, prioritizing visibility over deliberation. ↩︎
12. Youth wings — the student and young-adult branches of Indian political parties (e.g., the ABVP for the BJP, NSUI for the Congress). They function as recruitment networks and instruments of street-level mobilization, often participating in protests, rallies, and confrontations. ↩︎
13. Achille Mbembe — a Cameroonian philosopher who coined the concept of necropolitics (2003), describing the power of the state to decide who may live and who must die. His work shows how violence and disposability become instruments of governance in modern political systems. ↩︎