How Hindutva shapes feeling and culture — a study of political power not as ideology but as spectacle, from one of India's leading cultural theorists.
In today's India, power does not merely govern. It marches, blares, dances and displays itself in colour, sound and action. From the beat of the drum and the glare of the loudspeaker to the rise of the bulldozer and the spread of the angry Hanuman, politics surrounds us — intense, sensorial, immediate.
In Spectacle State, Brahma Prakash looks past speeches and slogans, moving instead through vivid scenes of everyday life to show how emotion itself has been claimed. It is in this charged space, he argues, that violence can appear in the garb of celebration, hatred as the preservation of identity, and devotion as display.
Travelling between village processions, street performances, monuments, music and festivals, the book traces how fear, pride, anger and piety are produced and circulated through the most innocuous of things. It closes on a question: what happens when power and politics batter the thin walls between culture and religion to produce a new language for a whole country?
Praise
“A rare and much-needed account.” — Pankaj Mishra
“Prakash is a virtuoso of modern Indian cultural politics.” — Zara Chowdhary, author of The Lucky Ones
About the author
Brahma Prakash is a cultural theorist, essayist and public intellectual based in Delhi. He teaches theatre and performance studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, and is the author of Cultural Labour: Conceptualizing the 'Folk Performance' in India (2019) and Body on the Barricades (2023), which was shortlisted for the David Bradby Award. He has been a visiting fellow at Cambridge and Heidelberg, and his writing appears in Outlook India, Scroll, Al Jazeera and DW News.
Perfect for readers of
Pankaj Mishra, Christophe Jaffrelot, Arundhati Roy's non-fiction, and readers of cultural theory and contemporary Indian politics.
