Musings of a Split Subject: A review of Brahma Prakash, Body on the Barricades: Life, Art and Resistance in Contemporary India

Sandip K. Luis (bio)

Prakash, Brahma. Body on the Barricades: Life, Art and Resistance in Contemporary India. Leftword Books, 2023.

Body on the Barricades: Life, Art and Resistance in Contemporary India (2023), by theater and performance studies scholar Brahma Prakash, came to its readers already winning blurb praises for being “an insightful, and unusual guidebook” (Arundhati Roy), a “work of passion,” and an invitation “to get enraged” (Santhosh Dass). It was presented as a “lyrical and searing … witness to the darkest, but also the most inspiring moments in the history of India” (Nivedita Menon). The numerous reviews of the book, which entered its third edition just a few months after release, were similarly laudatory. Prakash’s extraordinary intellectual feat was received, to quote a reviewer, as a “literary haven, where philosophy and poetry intertwine, where the written word carries us on wings of thought” (Rani).

It is worth emphasizing, however, that this “literary haven,” when originally conceived and taken up by the author, was anything but a place of intellectual retreat. Many of the book’s chapters were written and published during the COVID-19 pandemic in the middle of the lockdown. As Prakash himself admits, quoting an anonymous reader’s observation, “The book is written in a way as though the writer is gasping” (Prakash, “Conversations”). This unique feature, the practice of “visceral thinking” as Prakash puts it (Body 33), makes the book’s overall contents, “the work” in other words, radically unworked—an “inoperative” text so to speak. Its carnal thoughts are expressed in a poetic style that is inevitably broken and elliptical, at times caught inside the infinity mirror of language. Demonstrating Alain Badiou’s axiom of “democratic materialism” that “there are only bodies and languages” (Logics 1), and being deliberately devoid of prescriptions let alone “ideas,” Body on the Barricades is anything but a “guidebook,” contrary to Roy’s estimation.

Yet, there is a guiding motto in Prakash’s elegant and persuasive prose, silently undercutting the overarching and gloomy theme of curtailment experienced under a myriad of repressive conditions. That motto, which I express as a Beckettian dictum (Badiou, Logics 89), is simply to “Go on!”, to continue fighting every form of cordon sanitaire. Anchored on this single maxim, which is the point de capiton of an otherwise nebulous text, Prakash undertakes a daunting project that is at once poetic and philosophical. To fully appreciate the author’s efforts, one needs to start from the very tensions and contradictions to which Prakash subjects himself for the reasons specific to his writing.¹

The Poetic Prose and Its Split Subject

Despite Prakash’s claim of following the “methodology of heart,” a methodology of non-method in other words, it is possible to place Body on the Barricades in the line of the disciplinary innovation of lyrical sociology (Abbott). Against the teleological narrativity of historical disciplines and positivistic descriptivism of conventional sociology, advocates of the lyrical turn in the social sciences endorse the writer’s reflective, sympathetic, and affectively intense engagement in the here and now of the subject. For all its lyricism, however, Body on Barricades complicates the methodological assumptions underpinning the lyrical turn, not just because of its excessive resort to poetic metaphors and philosophical contemplations but also due to an ironic desire for the narrative that it often expresses. This commitment, torn between the lyric and narrative—or the epic to be precise—produces an intriguing split subject in the text. One may outline Prakash’s necessarily unstructured and stylistically fragmented writing through the following questions: Who is the subject of the book’s poetic prose? Is it a body politic of the common masses that surpasses every logic of confinement in the most epic sense? Or, is it the author himself, a confessional subject expressing his feelings in the lyric mode and seeking, as we will see below, an intimate friendship with the reader? Or, should it be assumed, following the Lacanians, that the actual subject is located nowhere other than this split—between the epic and the lyric, the radical exteriority of the masses and the contemplative interiority of the individual?²

The major historical episodes that inspire many of the observations in Body on the Barricades are the Black Lives Matter movement following the custodial killing of George Floyd (Chapter 1), the mass exodus of migrant workers from Indian cities triggered by COVID-19 restrictions (Chapter 4), the farmers’ protest against the extractive agricultural policies of the Indian government (Chapter 6), and the widely discussed Shaheen Bagh protests led by Muslim women against the discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act passed by the parliament of India (though this is not a main topic in the book)—all happening amidst the pandemic and a ruthless lockdown. Reflecting on them and inspired by Bertolt Brecht, Prakash writes, “I believe epic tragedies and violence have to have an epic writing response; they cannot be captured merely by stating facts and information” (21). This is where the author forges a mimetic relationship with the other (the masses), hoping to constitute the epic subject called “the people” by transcending not just a barricaded society but also the limits of lyrical interiority. For instance, in Chapter 6, “March of the Mustard,” romantic and contemplative motifs of nature, a conventional theme of lyrical poetry, are fused with a description of the “heroic” agency of the Indian farmers (142–43). But the chapter also highlights their inability to produce a narrative (let alone being the heroes of the narrative as we shall see in a while): “You won on the ground but lacked the narrative. … And a successful protest failed in the narrative” (148).

This sense of ultimate failure and loss leads Prakash to the seventh and eighth chapters, “A Siege Against the Siege” and “A Show for the Dead.” Whereas the former, dedicated to the 2016 Una protests against mob lynching and manual scavenging,³ is on a spontaneous gesture and interruptive moment of refusal, “a bare minimum protest … that is not marked by movements but by pauses and breaks” (157, 164), the latter is “about owning death” (199). In this final chapter, addressing a few extreme yet increasingly normal instances, such as the government’s confidential and forced cremation of a Dalit rape victim in the village of Hathras and the open graves in India-occupied-Kashmir, Prakash puts forward his final and perhaps most forceful observation. A disrupted ritual of mourning is not just an occasion for melancholic withdrawal but also a Brechtian instance of the “alienation effect” (Verfremdungseffekt) in which the subject is provided with a unique opportunity to see and seize the necropolitics of power.

The “body on the barricades,” in its ultimate sense, is also a body politic constituted by an ethic of maitri, “the feeling of fellowship” (29). Prakash book, setting out its investigations with an interior monologue from the late Hindi modernist poet Muktibodh’s In the Dark (44–45), is an invitation to create an epic narrative—however tragic or extrapolated it may be in its direction—out of a lyrical subject’s intimate world of love and fellowship. Similar to Muktibodh’s long narrative poem that at times approaches the prosaic, Prakash’s writing attempts to situate itself between genres, suspending conventional literary taxonomies.

Nevertheless, the subject of Prakash’s poetic prose remains split, divided between the irreconcilable differences internal to its composition. What makes Prakash’s meditations truthful to their historical context yet unable to be fully committed to the truth of historical events, is that methodologically and stylistically it is not the epic figuration of the people but the affective interiority of the lyrical subject itself from which the writing ultimately derives its strength. Responding to an interviewer’s question about the parallels between Prakash’s prose and “the lyrical essays propounded by the writers like Maggie Nelson, Claudia Rankine, and others,” he says:

Sharing a similar social background, I read myself between these lines. Yet, there is a pressing need to address the paradoxical place of the lyric in the prose of the contemporary everyday. Even Theodor Adorno, perhaps the foremost advocate of the lyric in the age of late capitalism, famously admitted its “barbaric” incongruity following the genocidal violence of the Second World War and the penetration of the cultural industry into every aspect of individual life (358). It is the experience of this impossibility (of writing lyric poetry) that, ironically, became the last justification for making the same possible today. An assumption of the lyrical self as the centre or the origin of the writing, even if it is cast in the mould of an identity (be it minoritarian or majoritarian), still needs to justify itself by “going out of the self.” What is commendable about Prakash’s intervention is that such an “outside” is sought not so much in any postmodern politics of difference or the social history of identity as in a profoundly anachronistic category of the epic that late modern writers and theorists including Adorno rarely address. What is latent in Adorno’s theory of the lyric, “the collective undercurrent” as he calls it, takes an explicit figuration in Prakash (66). Against Adorno’s left-liberal melancholia and the criticism of the “naivety” of the epic, be it classical, modern, or Brechtian, (49), Prakash ponders the possibility of an epic plot to affirm and narrativize the new figure of our historical present: the people or the collective.

However, in a candid and self-reflective move, Prakash also admits the stakes and contradictions involved in his daunting project of writing the epic from a lyrical point of view. No matter how epic and heroic the composition of the multitude is, the confusion around its amorphous character, sliding between the extremes of being a murderous mob and a noble expression of shared humanity and fellowship, is repeatedly expressed following the global populist wave in the past decade. Though Body on the Barricades does not squarely address this crucial question of political theory other than remaining troubled by it, the real tension in its prose comes from a different source: the social location of the author’s lyrical subjectivity, the actual place from which he speaks. Prakash’s anecdotes begin with an honest admission of the hypocrisy and paranoia of a middle-class individual to whom many readers, including this reviewer, would immediately relate: “I felt exposed. Good that he [Kishor, a sanitation worker who decided to get married amidst the pandemic] did not say, ‘Sir, your mask is falling down'” (14). Later in Chapter 3, the most moving and personal section of the book, Prakash not only recounts his family’s difficult relationship with Muslims in a communally polarized Bihari village, but also confesses his own susceptibility to the surrounding culture of hatred: “I could have been part of a lynch mob like many others if I would not have been sensitized against hate” (80). Admissions such as this should send shivers down the reader’s spine. Hasn’t this self-exposure, the truth about one’s untruthfulness, seriously compromised the reliability of the contract/maitri that the writer sought to establish with his readers?

The Poet-Ruler, Obscure Events

Prakash engages with the problem of poetic demagoguery, especially with respect to the appropriation of the sixteenth-century anti-caste poet-saint Kabir by the present Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is not only a fascist but also a mediocre poet, following the lead of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the first prime minister from the same political party). As Chapter 2 only flags this question towards the end, it receives more dedicated attention in Chapter 5, “The Trial of Art.” Acknowledging that being a poet (or artist) alone is not sufficient—since we also have “darbari (state patronized) poets, poet bureaucrats, and poet corporates, the poet who participated in the riots, and the poet who became the prime minister” (124)—Prakash invites the reader to the most self-reflective chapter of the book. This is where the writer of poetic prose reflects on the very status and meaning of his vocation at a time of increasing censorship and the instrumentalization of language for state propaganda. Finally, the chapter is also the erratic point where the overall arguments of Body on the Barricades, premised on the “power of words [and images],” ironically appear to be the most vulnerable, not just because of the topic of artists and intellectuals put behind bars, but also because of the fundamental bad faith Prakash continues to hold regarding the role of art and literature. Prakash, following in the footsteps of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, writes: “A state is ‘conservative by its very nature as a State’… [A]rt is revolutionary by its very nature as art. … The poet and the state are in a ceaseless fight [since] the relationship between art and the state is a case of ontological antagonism” (130; my emphasis). In Ngũgĩ emphatic opposition between the two takes the following form: “Absolute art is for the celebration of absolute motion, which is life: the absolute state is for the absolute cessation of motion, which is death” (14). The importance of this statement for a book about the necropolitics of confinement is perfectly understandable.

Such assumptions about the ontological distinctiveness of art and the state, or of authorial creativity and authoritarian repression, conceal their secret isomorphism. Since a detailed elucidation of this problem exceeds the scope of this review, let me highlight an aspect that Prakash also evokes in the beginning of his meditations but chooses to leave behind. It is the damning figure of the poet-ruler (parallels to which Ngũgĩ finds in Sédar Senghor and Agostinho Neto). Prakash finds a genealogical origin of this figure in a redundant, and now historically obsolete, strain of anti-Platonism.⁴ Based on Ngũgĩ’s criticism of Plato’s notion of the “philosopher king,” Prakash argues that “poets cannot accept the power of morality and the certainty of truth.” “While the state wants to define everything,” he writes, “for poets and artists, nothing is fixed. It is not surprising that Plato wanted to banish poets from the Republic” (129). Prakash castigates the dictator for his preference for monologue over dialogue (a jibe in Chapter 2 at Modi who is known for evading unscripted interviews). However, it is precisely on the same ground that Plato the poet-ruler argues for the banishment of poets on the charge of their evasion of dialectics and dianoia (discursivity). What makes writing the lyric barbaric during authoritarianism is not so much its resignation to individual interiority as the authoritarian core of the poet’s authorial imagination. At first reading, Prakash’s lyric subject, with all its vulnerability and subjection to the contradictory pulls of class politics and genre classifications, appears to be anything but authoritarian. Owing to the paradoxical authority of the petty bourgeois author as well as his poetic prose, the subject exists only to the extent of erasing itself. However, by privileging the event of language and its poetic constitution, is not the author falling prey to what Badiou has called the descent “into the night of non-exposition” (Logics 59)—an obscuration of the actual political events to which Body on the Barricades seeks to remain faithful? An adventure of thought moving from spectacular protest movements (Chapter 6) to their bare minimum in strike (Chapter 7) and finally regressing to a melancholic resignation to and lyrical immersion in the emptiness of being and the obscurity of death (Chapter 8), still parallels and even overlaps with the state’s negative portrayal (Darstellung) of the political event as nothing. The real wager of an authentic political subject, on the other hand, is to resist every attempt at reducing the event into a mere void in the order of being. The subject achieves this not by picturing the event as a place “to own death,” to quote the author, but by militantly affirming the same as the irradiating provenance of the eternal—”a glorious thing made up of stardust” in Rohith Vemula’s moving words (Doshi), or “becoming the Immortal that [man] is” as Badiou puts it (Ethics 76).⁵

A Comic Desire for the Epic?

“They protested. They were emboldened. They thought that they would emerge as heroes… They remembered the slogan but forgot the song that the revolution will not be televised.”

—Prakash (Bodies 147)

In literary history, the world of immortals is the epic. However, in contemporary cynical reason, the epic, even when it is tragic, is seen as nothing but a farce. We have seen the split subjectivity in Brahma Prakash’s poetic prose, which develops from lyric poetry’s ambivalent desire for epic narrative. I doubt that the force of writing that Prakash finds in lyrical interiority is adequate for this daunting task. Even if we assume, contrary to Prakash, that such a force should rather come from a drive towards the immortal and the singular deeds that bestow the epic protagonists their enduring glory, we should also reckon with the fact that the real antagonist that the writer confronts is the absolute sovereignty of the comic. Let me explain.

For all its anti-authoritarianism, Body on the Barricades refrains from laughing at authority, especially in the first person. Despite the two instances where Prakash cites the irony of the National Investigative Agency of India’s painstaking translation of the satiric songs about the Prime Minister in their charge sheet (118) and the biting sense of humor of the Una protesters in asking the cow-worshipers to do the last rites for their dead “mothers” (179), or the one or two occasions of the author’s self-ridicule (14, 165), the book’s overall tone is sad and somber. In fact, it ends with an enigmatic Epilogue by alluding to the retirement of the comic mode from history. Referring to the late modernist playwright Habib Tanvir’s preference for Greek comedies and his statement, “I want a dictator, so I can continue with my theatre,” Prakash considers what happens to theatre, especially comic theatre, under the real conditions of dictatorship (203): “With his cigar, the narrator [Tanvir] makes an exit, smiling and cracking jokes about the authority” (203). The octogenarian’s exit is provoked by the crisis of comedy as a particular genre, as it now needs to compete with a reality which is thoroughly comic—a state of affairs that is ironic, cynical, and absurdist to its core. In the resultant vacuum left by the withdrawal of the comic playwright, the lyric subject (the author) enters the stage of history, singing his longing for the epic. It is quite easy and tempting to interrupt this new entrant with a burst of contagious laughter, by joining the retired narrator (Tanvir) who is now part of the audience. However, Prakash is singularly positioned to complete the act for an important reason.

Adorno seems to recognize and appreciate the lyric’s ability to redeem the premodern genre of epic, or at least the folk song (Volkslied), during late capitalism. It needs to be noted that Prakash’s previous publication, Cultural Labour: Conceptualising the Folk Performance in India (2019), was primarily on folk traditions and subaltern epics, references to which appear at crucial points of Body on the Barricades (for instance the Bihari love epic Reshma-Chuharmal at the end of the Epilogue). If his lyrical regression is indeed an attempt to rediscover and reintroduce the epic to break down the barriers of stagnated history, then what we are witnessing here is nothing less than a true event in thinking. Just as a body on the barricade could also be a crouching body gathering itself before hurling forth, lyricality could be a muscular contraction of thinking before lunging into the future.

Sandip K. Luis is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History & Art Appreciation at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. He teaches critical theory and historiography, focusing on modernism and global contemporary art. Luis received a Ph.D. in Visual Studies from the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and has taught at Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University, Delhi, and the University of Kerala. His areas of research and publication include the theories of the avant-garde, biennials, and historiography of contemporary art.

Footnotes

1. For a short yet illuminative take on Prakash’s paradoxical vision, see Sawhney.

2. For the purposes of this review, I largely follow the definition of the genre provided by Jonathan Culler: “If narrative is about what happens next, lyric is about what happens now—in the reader’s engagement with each line” (202). Hegel’s Romanticist theorization of lyric as subjective and epic as objective (or communal), mediated through Adorno’s redefinition of the same, is also crucial to the observations shared here.

3. The Una strike and the related mass movements took place in Gujarat, the home state of the Indian Prime Minister. The strike was a militant response of Dalits (untouchable castes) to the widely mediatized incident of publicly flogging seven members of a Dalit family doing sanitation work by Hindu “cow protection groups.”

4. For a criticism of contemporary anti-Plantonism, see Badiou, “Plato.”

5. Vemula was a Dalit research scholar at the University of Hyderabad and a leading member of Ambedkar Students’ Association in India. Following the repeated persecution and caste discrimination that he faced from the university administration and the Ministry of Education, Vemula took his life in 2016, at the age of 26. Described as an “institutional murder,” the incident triggered widespread protests across India.

Works Cited

• Abbott, Andrew. “Against Narrative: A Preface to Lyrical Sociology.” Sociological Theory, vol. 25, no. 1., 2007, pp. 67-99.
• Adorno, Theodor W. Notes to Literature. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann, translated by Shierry Weber Nicholson, Columbia UP, 1992.
• Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Translated by Peter Hallward, Verso 2001.
• –––. Logics of Worlds: Being and Event 2. Translated by Alberto Toscano, Continuum, 2009.
• –––. “Plato, Our Dear Plato!” Angelaki, vol. 11, no. 3, 2006, pp. 39-41
• Culler, Jonathan. “Why Lyric?” PMLA, vol. 123, no. 1, 2008, pp. 201-206.
• Doshi, Vidhi. “India’s caste system: ‘They are Trying to Erase Dalit History. This is a Martyrdom, a Sacrifice.'” The Guardian, 24 Jan. 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/24/student-suicide-untouchables-stuggle-for-justice-india.
• Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams: Toward a Critical Theory of the Arts and the State in Africa. Oxford UP, 1998.
• Prakash, Brahma. “Conversations: Body on the Barricades is a Book of Hope Amidst Curtailment of Rights and Freedom.” Interview by K. Kalyani, Indian Cultural Forum, 2 Sept. 2023, https://indianculturalforum.in/2023/09/02/body-on-the-barricades-is-a-book-of-hope-amidst-curtailment-of-rights-and-freedom/.
• Rani, Chanda. “Book Review, Body on the Barricades: Life, Art and Resistance in Contemporary India by Brahma Prakash.” Feminism in India, 19 June 2023, https://feminisminindia.com/2023/06/19/book-review-body-on-the-barricades-life-art-and-resistance-in-contemporary-india-by-brahma-prakash/.
• Sawhney, Simona. “Caste and the Resistance of Theatre.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 58, no. 48, 2 Dec. 2023, p. 34, https://www.epw.in/journal/2023/48/book-reviews/caste-and-resistance-theatre.html.