Who participates in collective actions and how they articulate and evaluate their participation? Is participation a stable and static category of analysis? How does one account for plural, contradictory and ambiguous narratives of participation? Using the ethnographic material collected through interviews conducted with ‘participants’ of a movement against extraction in Odisha in eastern India as a prompt, I ask if one can apply the existing social movement theory that was developed in particular specific contexts in the North universally to struggles in the South. I show that existing social movement theory engenders an analysis that is only partially useful as it provides a static analysis and does not account for shifts, movements and mutations in participation in contexts of southern social movements that are constantly evolving. In order to make sense of the ebbs and flows and how the participants evaluate their participation, I look at another Northern scholar, Antonio Gramsci to develop insights into how to research participation and conceptualise it in order to fully capture the dynamics of social movement participation.