It is ingrained in us that gossip is shameful, and making judgements is not a virtue. However, more than three decades of social science research and ethnographic studies indicate that these ‘vices’ might actually be the most important political and social weapons common people have. Nothing demonstrates this better than South Asia, where common gossip about corrupt politicians has always done what the system itself could not.

Evening talk in Alipur

Akhil Gupta, in his influential article titled “Blurred Boundaries” (1995), recounts how in Alipur (a North Indian village), all the talk in the evenings revolved around corruption (bhrashtaachaar)- whose money bought whose favours, what was the current market value of electricity connections, who got transferred, and who provided favours without asking for money. This is gossip by any standard, i.e., judgmental talk about someone who is not there at the scene.

Gupta’s insight was to take this talk seriously. Villagers do not come across “the state” as a whole; they come across it in bits and pieces. For instance, the patwari keeping land records, the village development officer, the police station. According to Gupta, it is precisely through gossip, rumour and judgment of such figures that the image of the state emerges. In talking about corruption, people talk about the accountability of government officials whose actions deprive people of their right to certain things. Rumours, in contrast to newspapers, radio and TV, are uncontrollable from the standpoint of their origin. Hence, an extremely effective medium for contesting official versions. The political theory of common people, according to Gupta, is gossip which the polite society ridicules.

At stake was the issue of survival for Sripal, a labourer belonging to a lower caste from Alipur. He was deprived of housing scheme material through corrupt practices of the officials, and used the knowledge acquired in common talks to use one arm of the state against another. Farmers belonging to Bharatiya Kisan Union used rumours and grievances about bribe-taking engineers to organise a joint struggle against them. Gossip here was not a form of moral breakdown but the only means of holding accountable those above the farmers in social hierarchy.

What the wider social science says

Gupta writes within a long intellectual tradition. In 1963, Max Gluckman argued that gossip served the purpose of upholding social norms, while Robert Paine responded that gossip is nothing but a self-serving attempt of the gossipers to establish information control. The ensuing discussion about gossip sustained itself over the years in anthropology. James Scott, in his work Weapons of the Weak (1985), placed gossip and slander among the everyday forms of rebellion; at the same time, Alipur’s observations have proven Scott’s argument almost verbatim. South Asian historians have made a similar case; Subaltern Studies scholars like Shahid Amin and Ranajit Guha have shown that rumour was an instrument of rebellion in colonial India and was the communicative structure of rebellion. The latest work, Niko Besnier’s Gossip and the Everyday Production of Politics (2009), made the political function of gossip an ethnographic subject of research.

However, the behavioural sciences present a different approach. According to Robin Dunbar, language emerged as “vocal grooming” with roughly two-thirds of ordinary talk concerning absent third parties. Megan Robbins’s observations demonstrate that gossip is mostly about the exchange of neutral facts instead of insults, while experiments by Matthew Feinberg and Robb Willer show that “prosocial gossip” is aimed at warning others about bad behaviour. That was supposedly meant to protect groups from exploitation and sustain cooperation. Across these literatures, gossip functions as a reputation mechanism that operates without courts or anti-corruption mechanisms.

Similarly, judgment withstands a close examination as well. According to research findings in social cognition, people form judgments of other people in milliseconds in terms of both warmth and competence. People make judgments because it is necessary: to predict whom one can trust, be comfortable with and consider dangerous is essential for functioning in the social world. Being morally wrong is not to make a judgment but to do it wrongly, hastily and not charitably and critically. To condemn judgement outright is the same as condemning eating because some people overeat.

Why, then, the bad name?

First, since the price of gossip is paid by an individual personally while the benefit from gossiping is felt by the community as a whole, indirectly. The price is paid by a gossiper, while the community, safe from a corrupt official, does not feel what they managed to avoid. Second, malicious gossip and discriminatory judgment actually ruin reputations and enforce conformity. Just like how gossip in South Asian villages regulates gender and caste relations. Third, as several feminist scholars, including Patricia Meyer Spacks onwards pointed out, the term ‘gossip’ has always been used in relation to the information flow among women, which was often undervalued and considered to be chatter. Moreover, it was neglected even when they carried vital knowledge about safety and abusive men. The label itself has been a way of policing who may share information about whom.

Gupta’s approach takes a post-colonial view of this problem. According to Gupta, Western academia has universalised a particular duality between “state” and “civil society.” Thus, talk among villages that does not distinguish these two terms is perceived as disorderly and backward. But if government employees like Sharmaji (from Gupta’s article) and the patwari are conducting official activities at home, while surrounded by clients and social talk, the problem may very well be in analytical concepts rather than in the behaviour of villagers.

Reframing the question

The point is not to romanticise gossip or to excuse unfair judgment. Gossip and judgment: Are they good or bad? Such a question is misguided; neither gossip nor judgment is innately either good or bad. It is like fire and language, two other socially useful capacities that can be put to equally destructive purposes. Instead, more fruitful questions take up the concerns implicit in conversations held every evening by Alipur’s villagers: Is this information true? Is this information instructive or purely malicious? Is it using its power to scrutinise or punish the disadvantaged? Is this a judgment based on facts or fixed and unfounded?

For social scientists, then, the message should not only be ethical but methodological as well. In dismissing gossip as noise and judgments as biases, one misses where people actually theorise power, circulate information, and regulate norms outside the confines of institutions. If one does not want to study the construction of the Indian state in tea stalls and courtyards, one will miss it.

Social existence includes talking about and judging others; these are the ligaments that link communities together and, in much of South Asia, indeed, citizens together. We cannot pretend not to operate in a world of gossip and judgment, but must practise and analyse these activities with accuracy and a willingness to be corrected.

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Asmita Bharadwaj is a PhD scholar at the Centre for Political Studies (CPS), Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research focuses on astropolitics and the geopolitics of outer space, and she also writes on Indian politics, political culture, and Northeast India.