South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies

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Mazaa: Rethinking Fun, Pleasure and Play in South

Asia

Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria & Ulka Anjaria

To cite this article: Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria & Ulka Anjaria (2020): Mazaa: Rethinking
Fun, Pleasure and Play in South Asia, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, DOI:
10.1080/00856401.2020.1725718

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SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2020.1725718

ARTICLE

Mazaa: Rethinking Fun, Pleasure and Play in South Asia

Jonathan Shapiro Anjariaa and Ulka Anjariab
a
Department of Anthropology, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, USA; bDepartment of English,
Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, USA

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
The goal of this special section of South Asia is to generate new Embodiment; fun;
ways to describe and theorise mazaa, a Hindi-Urdu word that can futurity; performance;
mean fun, pleasure and play. Scholarly writing often treats fun pleasure; politics
and pleasure as either frivolous, and therefore irrelevant, or as
symbols of a more important social phenomenon. At times, this is
motivated by political critique; researchers often believe that
entertainment necessarily supports the status quo. At other times,
researchers avoid mazaa because we are sceptical of things that
have an embodied pull on us. Indeed, mazaa is sensuous; it draws
us in with its viscerality. Rather than see these qualities as
obstacles, we argue that mazaa’s embodied, unwieldly and seduc-
tive properties can generate new ways of knowing, analysing, crit-
iquing and writing. Contributors to this section write on a wide
range of topics—including, but not limited to, dance, fashion,
food and flirting. Together, the essays demonstrate a method-
ology for making mazaa an optic. This methodology includes
keeping mazaa centre stage, allowing oneself to be moved, main-
taining an open-ended reading practice that allows for indeter-
minacy, and writing with an abundance of detail. Dwelling in
mazaa does not mean ignoring inequalities, violence or power,
but finding new ways of writing about the forms of life that
thrive even in times of crisis. It also means illuminating how
pleasure can generate new communities and political possibilities
as well as new understandings of the role of the critic in
social analysis.

While researching the lives of day labourers in New Delhi for his book, A Free Man,
the journalist Aman Sethi meets Ashraf, a housepainter who enjoys drinking with his
friends and, because he works freelance, has the ability ‘to tell the maalik (boss) to fuck
off when [he] want[s] to’.1 Ashraf’s sense of freedom in not having steady employment
compels Sethi to think differently about the way journalists write people’s lives in
India. Throughout their time together, Ashraf stubbornly refuses to let Sethi turn
his life into an allegory for neo-liberal precarity. So, when Sethi urges Ashraf to
narrate the ‘basic facts’ of his life, Ashraf complains: ‘You take the mazaa (fun) out of

CONTACT Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria janjaria@brandeis.edu; Ulka Anjaria uanjaria@brandeis.edu

1. Aman Sethi, A Free Man (Noida: Random House, 2011), p. 19.

ß 2020 South Asian Studies Association of Australia

2 J. S. ANJARIA AND U. ANJARIA

every story’.2 As Sethi’s requests continue to prove futile, he realises that Ashraf’s
insistence on mazaa—the Hindi/Urdu word for fun or pleasure3—is not only a claim
to fun, but a resistance to being made representative of some larger story that, Sethi
admits, ‘for all purposes, I had already written’.4
We believe that for decades, scholars of South Asia5 have also been taking the mazaa
out of the story.6 The disjuncture between the daily lives of people in South Asia and
the prior frameworks the ethnographer, journalist or critic uses to document these lives
is the premise for this collection of essays. We seek to outline why mazaa matters, how
it offers a methodology and mode of analysis, and what new features of everyday life in
South Asia might be brought to light if we put mazaa back in the story.
We argue that thinking about, writing about and, indeed, dwelling in mazaa might
allow scholars to develop a different relationship with the texts and people we write
about while maintaining the impulse of progressive scholarship. We hope that thinking
with mazaa can inspire self-reflection on the work of scholarship, the stance of the
scholar and the questions we ask: what it means to be political, how we distinguish
between the ‘serious’ and the ‘frivolous’, where knowledge comes from, and the nature
of our connectedness to the people and texts we study.7 This might also mean rethink-
ing what it means to research in contexts of crisis—contexts in which people continue
to laugh during films, savour street food, be subsumed by a passage from a novel,
scream at the television while watching cricket, dance in front of the mirror and make
love. Currently, our methodologies and modes of critique often prevent us from writ-
ing about these aspects of our and others’ lives. As Nida Kirmani writes in her essay in
this special section, ‘Those studying poor, urban women in the Global South, are often
compelled to only ask particular questions and frame their research within certain lim-
ited categories. If one is writing about violence, how does one also write about all of
those moments when violence is not taking place? And if one is researching gender-
based oppression, then how does one include all of those moments when women are

2. Ibid., p. 75.
3. Mazaa is commonly defined as pleasure or enjoyment in Hindi and Urdu, from the Persian maza. See R.S.
McGregor (ed.), The Oxford Hindi–English Dictionary (Oxford/Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993). It has
equivalents in other South Asian languages, such as majaa in Gujarati and moja in Bangla. See Ananya
Jahanara Kabir’s essay in this volume for a fuller philology of the word. Ananya Jahanara Kabir, ‘The Fleeting
Taste of Mazaa: From Embodied Philology to an Alegropolitics for South Asia’, in South Asia: Journal of South
Asian Studies, Vol. 43, no. 2 (April 2020), DOI:10.1080/00856401.2020.1703486.
4. Sethi, A Free Man, p. 6; and Ulka Anjaria, Reading India Now: Contemporary Formations in Literature and Popular
Culture (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2019), pp. 73–4.
5. Although the majority of essays in this special section focuses on India, our argument applies to South Asia as
a whole. The emphasis on India was unintentionally influenced by our particular research expertise and the
dominance of India-related work within South Asian studies as a whole. We believe that there is much to say
about mazaa in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and Nepal, and we see this special section as a provo-
cation for more such studies across South Asia and beyond.
6. This is true in other fields as well. Writing on African studies scholarship, Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall
argue that the trend in social science is to see cities like Johannesburg ‘as nothing but the spatial embodiment
of unequal economic relations’ as opposed to seeing it as ‘a place of manifold rhythms, a world of sounds,
private freedom, pleasures, and sensations’, quoted in Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and
Urban Culture in Nigeria (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 251. See also Joel Robbins’ discussion of
the disciplinary trend to focus on the ‘suffering subject’ in anthropological writing. Joel Robbins, ‘Beyond the
Suffering Subject: Toward an Anthropology of the Good’, in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol.
19, no. 3 (2013), pp. 447–62.
7. Here we are influenced by Best and Marcus who write, in their influential discussion of surface reading, ‘We
want to ask what it might mean to stay close to our objects of study’. Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus,
‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’, in Representations, Vol. 108, no. 1 (Fall 2009), pp. 1–21 (p. 15).
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 3

neither being oppressed nor necessarily actively resisting power structures?’8 These
questions can be extended to many other texts and contexts in which we find ourselves
compelled to ask certain questions, focus on particular themes and emphasise particu-
lar narratives at the expense of others.
We need a richer vocabulary than we currently have for writing about the worlds of
pleasure around us. Thinking with mazaa helps us write in new ways about how enjoy-
ment is expressed, felt, imagined, spoken about and experimented with. Mazaa also
allows us to highlight new worlds, social configurations and political possibilities that
are emergent, whose outcomes we cannot yet know. At times, mazaa can challenge the
status quo, but at other times, its implications remain latent, unknown or indetermin-
ate. Being open to mazaa means being open to a politics whose direction is neither
inevitable nor foreseeable. It means being open to the ways in which the sensuous and
the pleasurable appear in our lives, not just to reflect or challenge the status quo, but to
generate worlds as well.

The problem with pleasure

Play, fun and pleasure are typically treated in one of two ways in South Asian studies:
either they are ignored or they are seen as symbols of something more important. In
the first instance, mazaa is assumed to be frivolous or irrelevant. So researchers take
on projects that seem, at first glance, to have gravity, depth and immediate political
purpose rather than those that seem to take them away from the serious political prob-
lems of our time. In the second instance, mazaa is written about but in such a way that
makes it a window onto something more serious. In these cases, mazaa can be a mech-
anism for political engagement, a symbol of domination, a fleeting resistance to social
inequalities or a bearer of cultural difference.
The difficulty of taking mazaa on its own terms is that doing so contradicts schol-
arly norms. Mazaa is sensual, affective, visceral. It asks us to feel and to be drawn in.
Mazaa ‘resists all analysis, all logical interpretation’.9 As Ananya Jahanara Kabir writes
in her essay here, ‘Mazaa’s collective appeal is to the closer senses, most importantly
taste, but also taste’s handmaiden, touch’.10 By contrast, academic writing implicitly
idealises a ‘detachment from the body’.11 Mazaa is also unwieldy, uncertain and open-
ended, whereas scholarship’s emphasis on abstraction, big narratives and extractable
meaning, even when motivated by a politically progressive agenda, leads to a certain
inevitability, so that we tend to know the answers to the questions we ask even before
we ask them.
We argue that the problems mazaa poses to academic writing—its embodied qual-
ity, its pull, its sensuousness and its unwieldiness—are generative of new

8. Nida Kirmani, ‘Can Fun Be Feminist? Gender, Space and Mobility in Lyari, Karachi’, in South Asia: Journal of
South Asian Studies, Vol. 43, no. 2 (April 2020), DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2020.1716533.
9. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: The Study of the Play-Element in Culture (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949),
p. 3.
10. Kabir, ‘The Fleeting Taste of Mazaa’.
11. Susan Brownell, Training the Body for China: Sports in the Moral Order of the People’s Republic (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 7–8. See also Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Program for a Sociology of Sport’, in
Sociology of Sport Journal, Vol. 5, no. 2 (1988), pp. 153–61.
4 J. S. ANJARIA AND U. ANJARIA

epistemological possibilities. For some contributors, this means emphasising the nov-
elty of cultures of joy that have been overlooked by scholars; for others, it means dwell-
ing in the sensory experiences of food, urban public spaces, clothing or dance. Across
these essays, authors not only write about practices, activities, objects and cultures of
joy and pleasure that have previously been considered unworthy of attention, but also
present mazaa as a way of understanding, a mode of theoretical engagement, of seeing
the world anew.
Dwelling in mazaa thus goes against the grain of scholarly trends in South Asian
studies, which, since the 1980s, have been inclined toward revealing the workings of
power.12 This type of analysis is common, in part because of the influence of post-
colonial theory, Marxism and Subaltern Studies on the field, which have helped us
identify forms of domination, hegemony or ideology in everyday practices, images and
texts. However, when instances of pleasurable cultural life or cultural production are
always considered in relation to power, it leads to a certain predictability in analysis.
Sports events and realist novels are interpreted as vehicles for nationalism, television
serials as a conduit for Hindutva politics, Hindi cinema as patriarchal, new media as
corporatised, popular fiction as neo-liberal, food and fashion innovation as elitist, fan-
dom as a form of political mobilisation, and so on. At moments, any of these might
subvert or exceed power. However, they are assumed to fall in line with dominant ideo-
logical trends in the final analysis. In all these interpretations, ordinary joys are under-
stood for their relation to power rather than in the language we use to relish them.
Moreover, activities that fall outside the categories of work, family or politics are seen
as significant only insofar as they shed light on some other, more sociologically signifi-
cant, phenomenon. Or, as Huizinga said critically of his contemporaries in the 1930s,
‘they all start from the assumption that play must serve something which is not play’.13
This is an approach that assumes, in the end, that the true cultural meaning and sig-
nificance of practices of fun are not found in the visceral moment of enjoyment, but in
some other domain—a domain that, often, the person having fun herself is not aware
of, and so it is up to the scholar to identify.
This reluctance to take mazaa on its own terms in South Asian studies corresponds
with commonly accepted ideas surrounding the goal of critical scholarship across the
humanities and social sciences today, which Rita Felski describes as the imperative to
‘expose hidden meanings invisible to all others’,14 a practice that has become synonym-
ous with progressive or politically-motivated scholarship. The impulse to reveal texts’
hidden exclusions was an important development of the 1980s and 1990s, and helped
decolonise the US academy, revealing neutral-sounding domains like literature and art
to have underlying ideological implications. However, this methodology has now
become so commonplace that it is used equally to expose texts of empire as it is for
texts and practices of the formerly colonised world. It is quite different to point out the

12. In addition, the scepticism towards pleasure in South Asian studies seems derived from critiques of a ‘tyranny’
of happiness propagated by a consumerist mass media in Europe and North America. See William Mazzarella,
The Mana of Mass Society (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2017), p. 135. However, it is clear that
happiness, pleasure and fun have a very different cultural valence in South Asia; the nationalist ethos in India
has been largely about self-sacrifice for the nation rather than consumerist happiness.
13. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, p. 2, italics in original.
14. Rita Felski, ‘Response’, in PMLA, Vol. 132, no. 2 (2017), pp. 384–91 (p. 386).
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 5

imperial undertones of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park in the 1980s15 than to reveal the
nationalist project of Shah Rukh Khan films in the 2010s. The first critique addresses a
scholarly public that had imagined itself to be above the political, whereas the other
implicates a largely non-English-speaking Indian public that finds joy in these films,
already suspect for their supposed irrationality, in chauvinistic politics. While the for-
mer unsettles entrenched ideas of the canon and reveals the spectre of empire that
haunts the whole enterprise of British fiction, the latter puts a wedge between the acad-
emy and the millions of people—the ‘subaltern’—whom that approach was initially
aimed at defending. When insistently repeated in a range of domains—film, music,
sports, literature, food, and so on—it generates in scholars an affect of deep critical
scepticism towards the world around us:16 of people’s emotions, of the ways in which
they display their passion, and of what and how they love. It also conjures a strange
binary between a pre-critical public easily swayed by hidden ideological messages17 and
academics who are not.
This sensibility is evident across scholarly disciplines. The very act of analysis
requires that what brings joy or draws us into an event must be pushed aside. For
instance, academic presentations on Bollywood often see scholars assuring the audience
that they are not unthinking fans by peppering their talks with jokes or ridicule about
conventions of the genre. There is a long history to this stance. In anthropologist
McKim Marriott’s classic article on Holi, he writes that, after getting high on bhang
during his first Holi in India, he makes sure not to get intoxicated in subsequent years
in order to better analyse the festival.18 These examples suggest that loving or being
overcome by a text, substance or activity means not being critical enough, and being
critical seems to require not being swayed by it.
Despite the shift away from positivism in the humanities and humanistic social sci-
ences, the main affect of scholarly critique continues to be dispassion. Like the whiskey
appraiser who spits so that she does not get drunk (Ray, this special section),19 or the
censor who watches films for erotic content without getting aroused,20 critics evaluate
things that sway people without themselves being swayed. There are important excep-
tions, especially in fields such as performance studies, which value scholar-
practitioners. However, quite often, for researchers who believe that being critical
means to ‘expose’21 and reveal, and that meaning can only be found in a space apart
from the moment of consumption, viewership or action, to evaluate means maintaining
a distance from the thing being observed. Seen in this way, the practice of exposing the
‘real’ meaning of pleasure or fun is no longer such a radical act but suggests elitism.

15. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993); and Ulka Anjaria, Reading India Now, p. 21.
16. Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 4.
17. Ibid., p. 1.
18. McKim Marriott, ‘Feast of Love’ in Krishna: Myths, Rites, and Attitudes (Honolulu, HI: East-West Center Press,
1966), pp. 200–12, 229–31.
19. Krishnendu Ray, ‘Vernacular Taste and Urban Transformation: Towards an Analytics of Fun and a New Kind of
Critique’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 43, no. 2 (April 2020), DOI: 10.1080/
00856401.2020.1716501.
20. ‘By what logic can the censors claim to be both representative of the people at large—a “cross-section” of soci-
ety … and immune to the same images that would damage the people they apparently represent?’ William
Mazzarella, Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013),
p. 79.
21. Felski, The Limits of Critique, p. 1.
6 J. S. ANJARIA AND U. ANJARIA

It creates distance between the critic and the world that, ironically, replicates the power
dynamic we so often seek to challenge.

A mazedaar methodology
But what if the role of the critic were not merely to expose what everyone else misses
but to give space to what brings pleasure? This would mean seeing mazaa not just as
promoting individualism or complacency, but as a means of reimagining the self and
of world-building. It would illuminate new understandings of post-colonial art, built
environments, food, sexuality and cultural practice, at times showing how these worlds
have political implications but also trying to understand them even when they do not.
‘Mazaa encodes a sensuous dip into embodied fun and pleasure’, writes Ananya
Jahanara Kabir in this issue. Mazaa is not just pleasure out in the world, but it captivates,
entertains and draws us in. This is why our contributors write about pleasure not just as
something happening to other people, but as potentially enveloping ourselves. For
instance, Krishnendu Ray argues that studying the politics of street vendors cannot be
separated from the enjoyment of street food, and Ananya Jahanara Kabir shows how the
physical experience of an art installation can generate theoretical insight. In his essay on
Bangalore nightlife, Kareem Khubchandani describes participating in the pleasures, pas-
sions and anxieties of his field site.22 Inhabiting a world of dance teaches him how obser-
vation and analysis are bodily practices which disrupt the myth of critical distance.
Openness to the passions swirling around us challenges the unspoken stance of the
scholar-as-appraiser. For instance, while the dispassionate film studies scholar might
show how fan communities are ways to mobilise lower-class men as potential vote-
banks, mazaa suggests that love of a film star might offer people a way to experiment
with who they are in the world, with multiple possible selves, something that we, too,
might do, thus bridging the distance between the critic and the fan.23 From this per-
spective, the tease of a movie trailer, the thrill of a first-day-first-show screening and
the anticipation of the moment the star comes onto the screen for the first time might
be seen as critical insights into the power of cinema, not distractions from a more ana-
lytical project. In this example, mazaa does not preclude analysis because it arouses joy
or passion, it simply asks us to make these emotions a part of our analysis.24

22. Kareem Khubchandani, ‘Dance Floor Divas: Fieldwork, Fabulating and Fathoming in Queer Bangalore’, in South
Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 43, no. 2 (April 2020), DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2020.1704362.
23. An event at the Godrej India Culture Lab in Mumbai held in September 2019 discussed the possible
collectivities formed by fandom; however, there was one session that made visible the divide between the fan
and the critic. Members of a local Rajinikanth fan club were invited to a screening of the film For the Love of a
Man (dir. Rinku Kalsy, 2015) and a lecture by a noted scholar of fandom. The fans whistled and cheered
whenever Rajinikanth appeared on screen, their love and energy disrupting the otherwise dispassionate
atmosphere of the screening. Afterwards, the scholar began his lecture by noting that he was not used to
speaking to an audience of actual fans, and the lecture proceeded to analyse fandom as a distant sociological
phenomenon separate from the very fans in the room.
24. The writings of Paromita Vohra are an example of the way criticism can refuse the distinction between fan and
critic. See, for example, Paromita Vohra, ‘The Final Word on Why Women Love Fawad Khan’, Scroll.in (16 Mar.
2016) [https://scroll.in/reel/805186/the-final-word-on-why-women-love-fawad-khan, accessed 21 Oct. 2019); and
Paromita Vohra, ‘Tracking SRK’s Film Journey Is to Map the Growth of the Indian Middle Class’, in The Indian
Express (24 July 2016) [https://indianexpress.com/article/entertainment/bollywood/shah-rukh-khan-on-svreen-
journey-2932000/, accessed 21 Oct. 2019). For an analysis of Vohra’s writings on film, see Ulka Anjaria, Reading
India Now, pp. 202–7.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 7

The stance of the dispassionate critic also encourages definitive analysis, seeing the
meaning of texts or practices as something fixed in relation to stable ideological or pol-
itical positions. But mazaa as a reading practice is open-ended, allowing for cultural
products to hold meaning in open, undetermined and surprising ways.25 Thus we
understand that texts and practices might hold different meanings for different people
and that their ‘resonances’26 might change over time. Indeed, the reinterpretation and
circulation of texts can lead to meanings unspecified by the original author or creator
and disconnected from the ideological contexts in which they were produced.27 As
Kareem Khubchandani shows in this issue, the circulation of film songs allows for new
meanings to be attached to them, in this case queer meanings and the promise of
seduction and sex that exceed the heteronormative and prudish plot lines from which
they may have emerged. Many studies of Bollywood’s queerness have similarly focused
on how moments of seduction, touch, embrace and even a heady look can transform,
through repetition and circulation, Bollywood dance moves that originally reinforced
heteronormativity into celebrations of queer desire.28 In Arti Sandhu’s essay, she simi-
larly shows how high-end fashion originally made for saas-bahu serials circulates
beyond the domain of the elite, even shaping the urban landscape as it appears in
street-side displays.29 Reading for and with pleasure might illuminate moments that
contradict what something might originally have symbolised or represented. It might
also contribute to the formation of new and even unexpected collectivities that cross
conventional lines of distinction. As Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria shows in his essay, the
momentary mutual recognition between recreational and utility cyclists that occurs on
Mumbai’s streets challenges the scholarly narrative that today’s urban middle class only
wants to retreat from the city’s messy and eclectic public spaces.30 Such collectivities
might turn into political formations, or they might be ephemeral. Developing mazaa as
a theoretical tool means being open to the unexpected and surprising meanings of
films, texts and social encounters as they circulate and interact with new phenomena
and new bodies.
In addition to methodological and analytic openness, mazaa might also require new
kinds of writing. The dispassionate stance emphasises analytic sharpness and sees
description as self-indulgent, or as a distraction from the scholar’s ethical imperative,
which is to make pointed critique. However, we argue that dwelling in mazaa requires

25. Lawrence Cohen’s article on political cartoon pornography is an instance of this kind of reading practice that
embraces the multiple ways in which people respond to images. Rather than taking this cultural product ‘on its
own hegemonic terms’, Cohen highlights the contradictions and momentary incoherence of responses to the
cartoons, showing the possibilities in this excess. Lawrence Cohen, ‘Holi in Banaras and the Mahaland of
Modernity’, in Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, Vol. 2, no. 4 (1995), pp. 399–424 (p. 418).
26. Mazzarella, The Mana of Mass Society, p. 128. We thank the anonymous reviewer of a separate article in this
special section for alerting us to this connection.
27. Ibid., p. 133.
28. Gayatri Gopinath, ‘Queering Bollywood: Alternative Sexualities in Popular Indian Cinema’, in Journal of
Homosexuality, Vol. 39, nos. 3–4 (2000), pp. 283–97; and Rajinder Dudrah, ‘Queer as Desis: Secret Politics of
Gender and Sexuality in Bollywood Films in Diasporic Urban Ethnoscapes’, in Sangita Gopal and Sujata Moorti
(eds), Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008),
pp. 288–307.
29. Arti Sandhu, ‘The Guilty Pleasures of Saas-Bahu Style’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 43, no.
2 (April 2020), DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2020.1718888.
30. Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria, ‘Surface Pleasures: Bicycling and the Limits of Infrastructural Thinking’, in South Asia:
Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 43, no. 2 (April 2020), DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2020.1703324.
8 J. S. ANJARIA AND U. ANJARIA

dwelling in the details. Description keeps us open to the possibilities of meaning in

unexpected places; it holds off the scholar’s desire to sum up, reduce and synthe-
sise31—academic practices which unintentionally foreclose the irreducibility of experi-
ence, subsuming it instead to a theoretical frame likely established in advance.
Description means spending time describing the sensory and mazaa-inducing aspects
of cultural forms, conveying the complex tastes of street food, the sexual frisson of the
nightclub, the minute bodily movements of a dance step, the quiet of an afternoon
stroll. As James McHugh writes in his piece on the pleasures of alcohol in medieval
India, ‘The process of fermenting starches and sugars into alcohol produces all manner
of new flavours, and liquor was celebrated as both delicious and fragrant, quite unlike
anything else’.32 Descriptions like these allow the reader to dwell in sensuous experi-
ence. They allow us to understand, as Brian Horton conveys, the pleasure of looking at,
touching, wearing and playing with a newly-discovered bag of clothes so that details
like the twinkle of sequins, the unique flow and feel of fabrics, the way glitter reflects
the light and the ‘sheerness’ of the stitching allow us to access the pleasure that his
interlocutors felt as they sorted through the clothes.33 There is mazaa in reading the
details themselves, but also, they implicate us in the sensory world he is describing.
At the same time, description does not mean a refusal of the political. Horton’s dis-
carded clothes became ‘part of the potential for socially-discarded people to tell their
own stories and write their own histories’. In Natasha Bissonauth’s essay in this issue,
the absurd mazaa of the lotah exhibit offers an affirming articulation of South Asian
diasporic subjectivity against feelings of inherited shame.34 Moreover, describing and
presenting sensory experiences on their own terms opens the possibility that the reader
too might participate in the pleasures of a text or activity. This in turn offers new possi-
bilities for convivialities and alliances across divides. As Kareem Khubchandani com-
mented at our original conference in March 2018: ‘Description is what matters to get
at fun. The seemingly frivolous details’ are important for ‘building an ethics’ and for
forming new ‘relations between people’. And lastly, description can broaden our audi-
ence; rather than speaking to a small number of experts familiar with the vocabulary of
ideological critique, we can think of ways of sharing our experiences, involving others
in the pleasurable worlds we have access to, and thus making our work more
public-facing.
Indeed, allowing space for the experience and expression of pleasure has the poten-
tial to expand the space of the political beyond those who explicitly think of themselves
as activists or critics. As Shilpa Phadke writes in her paper, many women are turned
off by the sidelining of fun in feminist projects.35 But by rethinking the pleasurable act

31. Anthropologist Kathleen Stewart encourages researchers to counter the ‘urge to classify, code, contextualize’
and avoid the requirement ‘to get the gist, to gather objects of analysis into an order of things’ by
emphasising description and detail. Kathleen Stewart, A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an
‘Other’ America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 26.
32. James McHugh, ‘Varieties of Drunk Experience in Early Medieval South Asia’, in South Asia: Journal of South
Asian Studies, Vol. 43, no. 2 (April 2020), DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2020.1718385.
33. Brian A. Horton, ‘Fashioning Fabulation: Dress, Gesture, and the Queer Aesthetics of Mumbai Pride’, in South
Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 43, no. 2 (April 2020), DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2020.1716288.
34. Natasha Bissonauth, ‘The Dissent of Play: Lotahs in the Museum’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies,
Vol. 43, no. 2 (April 2020), DOI:10.1080/00856401.2020.1720070.
35. Shilpa Phadke, ‘Defending Frivolous Fun: Feminist Acts of Claiming Public Spaces in South Asia’, in South Asia:
Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 43, no. 2 (April 2020), DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2020.1703245.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 9

of loitering as making a claim on public space that is mostly seen as a male

domain, she argues that mundane actions—and especially those that seem to have
no political purpose beyond being enjoyable—might also be part of a broadened
notion of feminism. The fact that Why Loiter?36 and related articles have spawned
numerous groups around India and Pakistan encouraging women to loiter in pub-
lic, sit at a chai stall or relax in a park suggests that such a mazaa-filled feminism
can indeed have wide impact. In the Indian web project Agents of Ishq as well,
which was founded by feminist filmmaker, writer and critic Paromita Vohra, we
see a similar attention to pleasure as a feminist epistemology.37 The website’s
motto, ‘We Give Sex a Good Name’, writes itself explicitly against what they con-
sider a risk-averse feminism in which sex is something from which women must
be guarded. The site’s use of bright, vibrant colours, its stunning design, its over-
all sex- and pleasure-positivity, and its mix of educational content with erotica,
stories of sexual awakening with testimonies of fear, marginalisation and self-
doubt, refuse the divide between the serious and the fun to chart a new pathway
for a broad and inclusive Indian feminism based in desire and joy.38
Thus, thinking with mazaa does not mean denying the gravity of the big political,
economic, social and environmental problems that exist today, but rather claiming that
part of the work of politics is also to understand the experiences of pleasure and joy
that continue to enrich the daily lives of people. There is not one single kind of analysis
that can help us overcome the problems of our time and, we believe, truly progressive
scholarship requires a constant reappraisal of and a willingness to accept challenges to
the way we approach research and analysis and the way we do our work. This is espe-
cially the case when pleasure has the potential to generate new alliances, new modes of
being in the world, and to dismantle the elitism that underlies the distance between
critics and the people we study.

Rethinking fun, pleasure and play in South Asia

This special section of South Asia is an attempt to begin to generate a vocabulary to
talk about, describe and theorise different kinds of mazaa in South Asia. We, like the
papers’ authors, seek to remain aware of our frightening political moment and mazaa’s
possibly subversive potentiality without reducing it to either of those things. Seeing fun
as an optic allows new worlds, experiences and sensibilities to come to light and dis-
abuses the scholar of her distance and joylessness. What are the forms of pleasure and
fun that exist in South Asia; how can we, as scholars, understand them; and what
would our writing look like if we read with what filmmaker Paromita Vohra calls

36. Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan and Shilpa Ranade, Why Loiter? Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets (New Delhi:
Penguin, 2011).
37. Agents of Ishq [http://agentsofishq.com/, accessed 20 Jan. 2020].
38. Both Agents of Ishq and the authors of Why Loiter? are aware of the at times potentially dangerous sides of
pleasure—for instance, the criticism that loitering opens up a space where women can be taunted and
exposed—but it is precisely that line between pleasure and danger that gives loitering and sex positivity their
radical edge. For both groups, the pleasures of sex always come with a potential for violence, but protecting
women from sex for fear of exposing them to risk ironically replicates the paternalism of the patriarchal state.
10 J. S. ANJARIA AND U. ANJARIA

‘a loving eye’?39 How would this change what we as critics imagine ourselves to do and
how we understand our relationship to the worlds we study?
The scholars included here come at these questions from different disciplines and
intellectual perspectives. But across the papers we see some commonalities that give us
a rich vocabulary to begin to theorise fun, pleasure and play in India and Pakistan. The
contributions are deliberately 6,000 words rather than the standard 9,000 words of
journal articles; the focus is not only on original research but also on different ways of
getting at the question of mazaa: new openings, new paths and research possibilities
for this largely untrodden and untheorised topic.
Correspondingly, we have structured the articles in such a way that they build on
each other and provoke and raise interesting correspondences across disciplines.
Ananya Jahanara Kabir begins by outlining some of the longer histories and associa-
tions of mazaa through an ‘embodied philology’ that offers a vernacular rejoinder to
the mandated joylessness of the national project. Kareem Khubchandani dwells in the
intimacy and sensual encounters of a Bangalore nightclub to offer a new possibility for
fieldwork as embodied practice. Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria, Shilpa Phadke, Brian
Horton and Krishnendu Ray all show how pleasure, far from being individualised and
anti-political, actually offers a new embodied epistemology that imagines new political
formations in cities. Nida Kirmani takes up this point as well, noting how fun often
gets subsumed into more important political and social problems and calling on the
social scientist to engage in thoughtful reflexivity about the potential joylessness in
social analysis. Natasha Bissounath looks at the mazaa in a bathroom museum exhibit;
James McHugh reads several texts from late medieval India to show how the pleasures
of alcohol and intoxication were described and connected to other bodily and spiritual
pleasures; and Arti Sandhu illuminates the pleasures of circulating fashion trends
through various media and on street corners to offer new modes of subjectivity for
women from a range of class positions. Across the essays, certain commonalities
emerge: the importance of thick description, dwelling in sensual pleasure, playful writ-
ing styles, an awareness of the distance/proximity of the critic, the possibility for new
collectivities, a respect and even love for the informant, an openness to political resist-
ance where it can be discerned but also an understanding that new and as-yet
unformed political possibilities might be lying just round the bend.
Clearly the contemporary political landscapes in South Asia and the United States
impart a sense of political urgency to academic work, so that interest in anything other
than the problems of our time might seem to support the chauvinist and increasingly
myopic status quo. But, as Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan writes, political crisis can actually
be an opportunity for critically-minded scholars to rethink our collective endeavour.40
Dwelling in mazaa and taking pleasure seriously is not a call to replace the study of
inequalities and violence with the study of fun, but to allow space for all the forms of
life and politics that animate the worlds in which we live. They offer the potential to be
surprised41 by what we find rather than only re-cover old ground. Mazaa has the

39. ‘March on Women: In Conversation with Columnist Paromita Vohra, Activist Trupti Desai’, YouTube, 12 Mar.
2016 [https://www.news18.com/videos/india/watch-march-on-women-1215306.html, accessed 21 Oct. 2019].
40. Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, ‘“It’s All Very Suggestive, but It Isn’t Scholarship”’, in Saikat Majumdar and Aarthi
Vadde (eds), The Critic as Amateur (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), p. 79.
41. Felski, The Limits of Critique, pp. 167, 189.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 11

potential to stop us short, to cause us to reflect on our own political and scholarly prac-
tices, and to consider whether a singular preoccupation with power and hegemony is
actually doing the political work we want it to be doing.

Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the original participants of the conference, ‘Mazaa: Theorizing Fun,
Pleasure, and Play in India’, which we organised at Brandeis University on 23 March 2018.
The conference was supported by the Brandeis India Initiative, the Program in South Asian
Studies, the Department of English, the Mandel Center for the Humanities, and the Office of
the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Brandeis. We would also like to thank Kama Maclean and
Vivien Seyler at South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies for their continued support for this
special section.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).