'To read Spectacle State is to understand that hateful displays of public jubilation under authoritarian states (the music, the flags, the guns, the chants, the swords) are less an unsightly by-product of failing democracy and more a reconfigured relationship between a people's aesthetic and a people's hate. "It possesses your bodies before it possesses your mind ..." Brahma Prakash writes. It is not often scholarly work that is symphonic. Prakash is a virtuoso of modern Indian cultural politics and nobody else could have so thoroughly and urgently dissected hate aesthetics, tracing the unconscious somatic attraction that leads a moving, leaping shame-riddled body to join a mob outside a mosque in contemporary India.'
-Zara Chowdhary, PEN America finalist and winner of the Shakti Bhatt Memorial Prize for The Lucky Ones: A Memoir
In today's India, political power does not merely
govern as an invisible force-it marches, roars,
dances and displays itself in colour, sound and
action, as spectacle. From the beating of drums
and the blare of loudspeakers to the rise of symbols
such as the bulldozer and intimidating stickers
and statues, depictions of political might surround
us-bold, sensorial and all-pervasive.
In Spectacle State, Brahma Prakash looks beyond
leaders, ideology and speeches, towards everyday
life, objects and culture in India-religious processions,
street performances, monuments, music and festivals.
For it is in these charged liminal spaces that violence
appears in the garb of celebration, hate as preservation
of self-identity and devotion as display.
Thought-provoking and seminal, this book traces
how fear, pride, victimhood, anger and piety are
produced and circulated in today's India as spectacle.
It asks how Hindutva is changing our day-to-day
expressions and relationships beyond ideology.
