The Politics of Lament

Building on an analysis of Gandhari’s lament in the Indian epic, the Mahabharta, this article brings into view those who lament – their bodies, socio-political locations and the political landscapes in which they perform. It argues that reading Gandhari’s lament as a performance allows us to read politics otherwise – at the inter/national and individual levels through paying attention to civilisational tropes and epistemic hierarchies reflecting inequalities of the global order, social and political cleavages based on class, gender and race/caste, as well as resistance to these through the form of lament as cursing. Expanding this reading to the cultural economy of lament also allows us to make visible the social reproduction of communities and the costs of labour of those who perform lament. This reading of lament takes Butler’s argument in new directions: it is the dialectics of grievability and public performance of grieving that together with a cultural economy of lament that makes for the politics of ‘livable life and grieveable death’.