This essay offers a particular reading of postcolonial publics while attending specifically to the modern Marathi public in western India. Whereas modern publics are assumed to be animated by stranger-sociality, this essay argues that, on the contrary, it is a kind of fetishized performance of kin relations that we see in Marathi publics. What the author calls 'kin fetishism' makes for a qualitatively different kind of public arena, a difference accounted for by the fact that the postcolonial public is situated in a socio-economic reality that is distinct from that which underpins the much-theorized Western public. The essay explores how, in postcolonial publics, the dichotomy of 'outside' to 'inside' troubles the dichotomy between public and private, and suggests that such jostling is symbolically resolved in cultural forms in Marathi public spaces.
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