Re-writing the bleeding body of a sacred polity: the notion of the abject in Delhi’s 2020 anti-CAA protest art images

This article addresses the ways in which multiple dynamisms associated with the notion of the abject permeated protest art against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) that was signed into law by the Indian Parliament in early December 2019. It analyzes visual findings I documented from 11 protest sites that operated in the Indian capital from December 2019 to late March 2020. My analysis offers political interpretations of Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject (1982) in anti-CAA protest art images. To do so, I combine methodologies from modern Indian studies, subaltern studies, art history and cultural studies. The concept of the abject underpins India as a threatened corporeality in two main ways. The first is the politically dominant discourse of Hindu nationalism that culminated in the CAA/NRC/NPR legislation which views the Muslim minority in India as the nation's abject. The second, stressed in this article, reverses this balance of power in protest artworks depicting the post-CAA Indian nation-body as bleeding and dismembered. These images challenged the dominant Hindu-nationalist view of the Indian polity as sacrosanct, immaculate body, transubstantiated the divinized into various manifestations of the abject and pointed at the CAA/NRC/NPR legislation – and not at Indian Muslims – as the perpetrator.