Festival Infrastructure, Neighbourhood Clubs and the Affective Governance: The Politics of Spectacle and Urban Transformation in Contemporary Kolkata

Abstract

Festival infrastructure in urban settings, especially in places like Kolkata, operates at the intersection of religious, secular, and cultural domains. Neighbourhood clubs, or para clubs, play a pivotal role in this dynamic, acting as both organizers and mediators of these multifaceted infrastructures. This paper examines the role of the city of contemporary Kolkata’s expansive and year-round festival economy which I call “festival infrastructure” that sustains political patronage, social organisation, and urban governance and broadly how such processes alter the pattern of populist politics and urban transformation in the postcolonial South Asian context. It highlights a shift in governance away from traditional welfare delivery to perception management and aestheticized civic interventions. In Kolkata, the year-round cycle of religious, cultural, and patriotic festivals—has become the primary medium for political parties to assert dominance, claim public space, and orchestrate affective mobilization especially since the end of a three-decade communist rule in 2011 and with the advent of the current political regime. Organized largely by neighbourhood clubs functioning as nodal hubs and political conduits of clientelistic networks, these festivals blur the boundaries between the religious and the secular, between state-led governance and informal political mobilisation. This paper explores how the infrastructural investments into festivals—stages, signage, tableaux, and decorations—reshape urban spaces, transforming localities into sites of spectacle and political visibility. In this mode of governance, festival infrastructures become key instruments for controlling public affect, saturating the city with spaces of cultural congregation while redirecting political activity into seemingly depoliticized arenas of festivity and celebration. Situating this within broader discussions on postcolonial urbanism and the moral geographies of religious infrastructure, this paper interrogates how Kolkata’s festival economy exemplifies new forms of governance, where state incapacity is offset not by institutional reform but through a sustained politics of spectacle and sentiment.