The Great Indian Hyperfascism: Art of Subjection and Survival Among One-Fifth of the World’s Population Sandip K. Luis Indian art since the anti-colonial era has developed without an avant-garde, and continues to remain so to this day. [1] A sustained form of collective militancy, whether cultural or political, has generally been discouraged within the Indian art world’s liberal and center-left constituency, as if testifying to a certain Gandhian ethic of non-violence (which, as a conjunctural rather than civilizational disposition, may appear not so much relapsing as status quoist upon closer examination). It is in this general cultural and political vacuum, not unique to the art world alone, that one may locate the gradual rise of Hindu militancy, which first came to serious notice with the assassination of M. K. Gandhi in 1948. Evolving from a scattered shadow state to a coordinated deep state, [2] and finally into a full-blown state power with the prime ministership of Narendra Modi in 2014, the so-called Sangh Parivar (a nebulous family of Hindu fundamentalist and militant organizations) has now pushed India into a state of “undeclared Emergency.” [3] Since India is the world’s most populated territory and a fragile Babel with almost two dozen officially recognized languages (while the unofficial estimate ranges between 100 and 1000), let’s call the present disjuncture, for the lack of a better term, “hyperfascist”—a fascism more fascist than the historical fascism originated in the interwar Italy. [4] Given the great diversity and geographic expanse of India, and the limited scope of this brief reportage, a discussion of how artists and cultural activists have been grappling with the historical disjuncture created by Modi’s prime ministership can be triangulated by examining the following three representative locations: (i) the National Capital Region of Delhi, currently controlled by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its “parental” organization, the extreme-right Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS); (ii) the state of Kerala, the last outpost of leftist governance in the country; and (iii) Kashmir, given the way the region has been turned into a vicious laboratory for testing the nation’s federalism and military jingoism. Whereas the first two offer a quasi-Lacanian schematization of the symbolic and the imaginary of the Indian contemporary respectively, the last provides an impossible access to the real of the region’s “fascistic” present. [5] Delhi: The National Capital, the Neoliberal Symbolic Over the past decade, the National Capital Region (NCR) has witnessed an unprecedented number of protest movements and violent crackdowns, owing to the city’s symbolic and strategic importance in the discourse of the nation. Noteworthy among Figure 4: Protest art-banners displayed at the partially demolished “caste wall” in Vadayampady, Kerala, 2018. Photo courtesy: Vibin George The Great Indian Hyperfascism: Art of Subjection and Survival Among One-Fifth of the World’s Population Sandip K. Luis