"Fight the Filth"

Aesthetics of the Citizen in Mumbai, India

Abstract

This paper examines how civil society is enacted in India through a study of a citizen's movement initiated by a tabloid: the Mumbai clean-up campaign called "Fight the Filth." It focuses on the narrowly defined terms of "citizen" and "civil society" used by Indian English speakers and analyses the aesthetics of civil society, by which the campaign attempts to give form to the uncertain concepts.