At a time when populism is gaining currency as a global buzzword, contemporary theories tend to focus on charismatic leaders and institutional breakdown, but leave a more fundamental question unanswered: how are the conditions for populist politics produced in the first place? My book project addresses this question based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the rapidly transforming city of Hyderabad, India, where populism is normal rather than exceptional. Instead of treating populism as a top-down imposition, I argue that everyday populism is a multi-scalar process through which ordinary struggles over property and environment are converted into political value for competing political projects. My account spans the micro-scale of people’s everyday political engagements in struggles over land and water, the meso-scale where reactive governance actively produces and manages political instability, and the macro-scale where political value is absorbed into spectacular populist campaigns through disruptive media ecologies. Across these scales, I theorize populism as a product of the material conditions of urban governance and media circulation.
Journal Articles
Jonnalagadda, Indivar. 2025. “Reactive Regulation: Rethinking Urban Growth and Governance through Property Relations,” Cultural Anthropology 40 (2): 192-220. [Link]
Vidyapogu, Pullanna, and Indivar Jonnalagadda. 2025. "From Contested Commons to Ornamental Ecologies: Environmental casteism and the blocked dialectic of urban lakes in Hyderabad," Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Online First. [Link]
Jonnalagadda, Indivar, and Thomas Cowan. 2024. “City Drafting: Property-making and Bureaucratic Urbanism in South Asia.” City 28 (1-2): 7-23. [Link]
Vidyapogu, Pullanna, and Indivar Jonnalagadda. 2023. “Cultural Ecologies of Urban Lakes: The Bathukamma Festival, Caste Associations, and Resource Claims in Hyderabad,” Economic & Political Weekly, Review of Urban Affairs, 58 (8) : 57-61. [Link]
Jonnalagadda, Indivar. 2022. “Of Political Entrepreneurs: Assembling Community and Social Capital in Hyderabad’s Informal Settlements.” Urban Studies, 59 (4): 717–33. [Link]
Jonnalagadda, Indivar, Ryan Stock, and Karan Misquitta. 2021. “Titling as a Contested Process: Conditional Land Rights and Subaltern Citizenship in South India.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 45 (3): 458–76. [Link]
Jonnalagadda, Indivar. 2018. “Citizenship as a Communicative Effect.” Signs and Society 6 (3): 531–57. [Link]
Maringanti, Anant, and Indivar Jonnalagadda. 2015. “Rent Gap, Fluid Infrastructure and Population Excess in a Gentrifying Neighbourhood.” City 19 (2–3): 365–74. [Link]
Online Publications
Jonnalagadda, Indivar and Pullanna Vidyapogu. "How India's Lake Policies are Getting it Wrong," The India Forum, April 15, 2026. [Link]