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excess are, without doubt, designed in part to maintain hierarchies of cul-
tural production and taste. In other words, it is clear that the fan-as-rowdy
is constructed in semantic and social opposition to the idea of the fan-as-
rasika—rowdy fans of the actor Vijaykanth as opposed to rasikas of Carnatic
23
musician M. S. Subbulakshmi, for instance. Where, then, do we position
film music fans like members of radio listener clubs (Srota sanghs) across
India who wrote hundreds of letters to Ameen Sayani, the anchor of Binaca
Geet Mala, the popular program on Radio Ceylon, and played a critical role
in the consolidation of playback singers and music directors’ aural stardom?
How do we account for a show like Lift Kara De, hosted by Karan Johar on
Sony Entertainment Television, which relies so centrally on fan participation
and labor? Finally, how do we understand the online life-worlds of fans in
diverse locations worldwide who come together as online and offline com-
munities on the basis of shared attachments to film culture? Moving past the
rowdy/rasika binary is crucial if we are to broaden the arena of inquiry to
include spaces such as the Rahman fan community.
Academic interest in “rowdy” fan associations has resulted in a roman-
ticization of fan associations as belonging to the realm of “political society,”
a term that Partha Chatterjee has proposed to conceptualize relationships
between individuals or groups that are outside the rule-bound and legal
framework of bourgeois civil society and the state in postcolonial societies
such as India. Chatterjee writes:

Most of the inhabitants of India are only tenuously, and even then ambigu-
ously and contextually, rights-bearing citizens in the sense imagined by
the constitution. They are not, therefore, proper members of civil society
and are not regarded as such by the institutions of the state. But it is not
as though they are outside the reach of the state or even excluded from
the domain of politics. As populations within the territorial jurisdiction of
the state, they have to be both looked after and controlled by various gov-
ernmental agencies. These activities bring these populations into a certain
political relationship with the state. 24

Chatterjee argues that the “sites and activities characteristic of . . . political
society” have become particularly visible since the 1980s owing to changes in
the techniques of governance and a “widening of the arena of political mobi-
lization, prompted by electoral considerations and often only for electoral
25
ends.” This is shaped, he points out, not only by organized political par-
ties but also by “loose and often transient mobilizations, building on com-
munication structures that would not be ordinarily recognized as political.” 26