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Dr Brahma Prakash is a writer, cultural theorist and Assistant Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. He is the author of Cultural Labour: Conceptualizing the 'Folk Performance' in India (Oxford University Press, 2019) and Body on the Barricades: Life, Art and Resistance in Contemporary India (LeftWord, 2023). He specializes in 'folk' and regional theatre performance traditions from North and Eastern India.

For Issue #78 of The Internationalist, Dr Prakash sits down with editor and documentary studies scholar, Arundhati Chauhan to discuss his book, Body on the Barricades. In this discussion he looks at the book’s genesis in response to India's shrinking freedoms amidst the pandemic, navigating themes of curtailment, resistance, and artistic expression in challenging times.

Arundhati Chauhan: Hello Dr Prakash, thank you for joining me.

Brahma Prakash: Thanks for inviting me.

AC: What inspired you to write Body on the Barricades? Where did the idea come from? 

BP: To tell you the truth, this book was not planned. It happened in the heat of the moment when India witnessed a curtailment of fundamental rights and freedom. The COVID-19 pandemic further aggravated the situation. So, it was not inspiration, but anger, frustration and instigation that made me want to write this book. Amidst rising curtailment in 2018, I started writing popular columns on art and culture.  I found solace in these columns, as I was able to express my anger and frustration to a larger audience. However, given their short format, I could not fully explore the themes that I wanted to. So, those fragmented pieces came together to form this book. While it can be seen as a book of essays, it can also be read as a book on curtailment and resistance in contemporary India.  

I also come from a background of political activism and street theatre. At a point in time, these came to a standstill because of several reasons. I was feeling confined in my body and space. I was feeling a sense of loss. So I wrote the book like a street play, attempting to create an active dialogue with the readers. 

I also see this book as an exploration of my writing. I did my education in Hindi-medium schools and so I never had the confidence to write in English. As you must have realised, I write in the mode of "I" and "You"— in the voice of first person, second person and third person. This mode of writing made me realise that words can have so much creative and disruptive potential.

Still, I don't understand grammar. I write from body and rhythm. The body on the barricades was a test case for me. Many publishers refused to publish the book because they felt the text was volatile, unusual and too critical of the current political regime.  Thankfully, LeftWord Books published the book, showing me that publishing is an act of political courage.

AC: What is the book about? If you can be more specific. 

BP: Body on the Barricades is about the curtailment of life, art, and freedom in contemporary India. It is about a situation that stands at the edge. One stands at the margin. Like a guidebook, it walks with you and tries to show you how politics and aesthetics are coming to a corporeal level, entering our psyche, playing out on our bodies and minds everyday. The body comes to the centre in extreme crisis. We start thinking from the barricades in a situation of extreme vulnerability. We also enter the state of non possumus: We can’t return. We can’t yield any more. It is the limit of concession after one can’t surrender. And one has to necessarily resist. 

The book is about thinking about life and freedom from the points of confinement. It is about the act of breathing from the point of breathlessness. It is about the ultimate resolution of the body to cross the barbed wires. As the authoritarian regime pushes its boundaries and curtails our life and freedom, we have no option but to walk. The situation gives birth to a new politics, a new resistance, a new resolution, a new realization. Breathing — a natural and unconscious act — becomes a conscious act. What was physiological becomes political. The right to breathe becomes a new assertion, the name of a bare minimum that one asks for. More than the question of liberal freedom, the book talks about the necessity of resistance (breathing) when it comes to the point of suffocation. 

Overall, Body on the Barricades is about authoritarianism, its culture of curtailment, and the struggle against it. It is about the body resisting the barricades, breaking the barricades, crossing the barricades; in the absence of space, the body appears on the barricades; or the body turns into a barricade and creates space for love, life and freedom. 

AC: Why Body? Why Barricades? Why does the book try to centre the body in the larger discourse of curtailment? Can you please talk more about the provocative title? 

BP: I think in the case of extreme colonization of life, the body takes centre stage. It opens up its unknown capacity. In such a situation, we start thinking from body and limbs. The book explores how the body reacts when it is placed at the barricades and when it faces extreme curtailment. How does the body carry itself in a specific social and cultural context to make the meaning of life and resistance? How the body faces a breaking point but it also tries to rise. 

The initial title was When We Can’t Breathe: Curtailment of Life and Freedom in Contemporary India. Then, I realised that I was not only talking about curtailment but also about hope and resistance. Therefore, the current title brings the dynamics and dialectic of body and barricades. I write in the book: 

'In the situation of extreme barricading, one has no option but to resist. Against the barricading, movement is the utopia that gives us hope. But against the rampant movement and performance of capital, it is the barricade and the pause that create resistance.' 

Body on the Barricades indicates the extreme situation, yet it also indicates the last resort from where we can retreat to life. To resist, we need to have hope; to transform, we need to have hope. As a scholar, an activist, a writer, and a critic, I think we need to keep reinventing hopes in difficult times. We can only count on our radical hopes.  

AC: Speaking of form, I was also very interested in how the essays are structured in the book. They don't follow a clear timeline that you might expect in a book about politics, but they all come together as a cultural critique of the state versus the dissenting body. So, in that sense, you're also responding to the contemporary condition. Would you like to talk specifically about the structure of the book?  

BP: The book connects eight different themes through eight different events that unfolded from 2020 onwards. It covers breathlessness; demagoguery/curtailment of words; the curtailment of minority rights; migrant exodus; the incarceration of artists and intellectuals; the farmers' protests; the Una strike; and mourning. 

The first chapter, ‘When We Can’t Breathe’, discusses the situation of breathlessness, which is a profoundly physiological and political situation. It discusses the situation’s vulnerability and its immense mobilizing capacities in which every limb tries to act in defence of life. At that moment, what matters is not the lockdown but the deadlock — the impasse that irritates and motivates us to participate in action. 

The second chapter, ‘Words and Demagogues’ discusses the curtailment of words by the culture of demagoguery. It argues that the curtailment of the word and the lynching of an individual are not separate acts. It shows how demagogues command through monologues and seize the very healing capacity of words. 

Continuing the debate on the curtailment of words, the third chapter, ‘Muslim Hating in the Bone of the Nation’ discusses how the new regime of control curbs minorities’ lives and rights. Through my own family’s stories and anecdotes, I tell the story of ghettoization and how hatred enters the bone. The fourth essay looks at migrant labourers and their plight in light of the curtailment of bodies and movements, especially during the lockdown in India. Migrant labourers neither belong to the villages nor the cities. They are called pardesi (outsiders) at home and outside. They are constantly on the move. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the authorities expected them to stay in one place or move in an assembly line. But, drifting from the designated routes, they undertook a journey that showed both the vulnerability and potentiality of their movements.

The fifth chapter discusses the curbing of dissenting voices by the authorities and the tenuous relationship between art and the state. The chapter shows how the attack on poets and artists is an attack on indispensable human capacities. It is an assault on the bodies of sensibilities, the fundamental ideas of freedom, their rhythm, and words. It is an attack on the chord that echoes the unstuck word. 

In the sixth chapter, I move to the curbing of protests with a focus on the farmers’ protests in Delhi and its enduring spirit that led to the authoritarian regime’s surrender. We learn a lesson that curtailment, unless opposed, never stops. It goes on to take over everything, from mourning to death. What happens when the right to protest is criminalized, when surveillance becomes the primary engagement of sovereign power? The media carries the same campaign with fear and hatred, with persistent demonization, with the harvest of shame. 

Carrying the indomitable spirit of the farmers’ protest, the next chapter discusses the unique gestures of protest that fall outside the accepted notion of protest, that is, nonviolent permissible protest within the limit or protest that happens within the space of appearances. In a biopolitical regime, choreopolice — a movement decided by the police — becomes the norm. Policing becomes the norm of protest itself (protest within 100 meters). The Dalit community’s outburst during the Una protests went beyond the choreopoliced limit. It produced new gestures of politics itself.

The final essay discusses the banning of mourning and grieving in relation to the Hathras rape case in Uttar Pradesh. One can understand a situation where authorities fear protests and subversion. They are afraid of questions and criticisms. They are terrified of truth and dialogue. Why are they afraid of mourning and grieving? What do they find alarming in a wailing sound? What do they find dangerous in the last ritual? This essay connects us to mourning and its curtailment by an authoritarian regime in an oppressive social structure. 

At the site of mourning and vulnerability, the Epilogue shows the possibilities of resistance and the fundamentals of life and art that cannot be curtailed under any circumstances. 

AC: The book ends with a chapter on death, and then the Epilogue talks about the trap of pessimism. You reiterate that even as regimes rise and create conditions for their own demise, the artists, the narrative and the theatre itself lives on. How would you characterize the future like this to look like?

BP: There was a criticism about the book that it presents too much optimism. I do not deny this criticism. However, I will not agree with the allegation of it being too much; yes it tries to create hope. If you are a social scientist, if you come from an empirical mode of reading things, then I don’t disagree with you — in that mode yes, we are in a difficult situation. We are facing a real crisis. If the Modi government comes to power again this year, then the situation may get worse.  But I am not writing from a position of social scientist. I have written this book as a poet, artist and writer. We do not have the privilege to not have hope. As a poet, as an artist, as a writer — what else I can do? It is our responsibility to create hope, heal the wounds, and save the words so we can carry on our struggle. I don't think without hope and utopia we can work or we can generate or mobilize our future. But it is not about false hope, it is more about affirmation of life and struggle.

I'm not the first person who's writing in this way. I would not be the last person either.  In these times of hopelessness, artists necessarily need to generate life, create alternatives and excavate hope.  And this is precisely what the book is trying to do, finding hope in all extreme positions, in the situation of breathlessness, in the exodus of migrant labourers, in the curtailment of protest and strike and finally in the case of mourning and death. Even on the deathbeds, we need to reclaim the life and dignity of death. Regarding your question about how would I see the future: the future remains ideal for me. I still hope for the ideal future. 

AC: In a discussion about your book, Nivedita Menon mentioned that the book itself can be considered a performance, which I agree with. Would you like to expand on the performativity of/within your writing? 

BP: You are quite right. Though there is not one specific mode of writing, I use theatre as a topography to write this book. Performative becomes a mode of writing and engagement. It is about the performativity of the body in the situation of extreme barricading. The writing itself creates a performative mode in which I keep shifting my positions. The book is also about bodies in motion. I see it as writing like a street play. The writing is passionate and confrontational but also full of empathy, personal narratives and the larger humanitarian concerns. 

AC: So, what are you working on next?

BP: For some time, I have been working on the question of cultural justice. I have also been working on a project on the Ramayana and have been trying to understand Hindutva ideology through images and objects.

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