Broken bodies, spectral persons, fake truths. Precarious lives in globalized India through the prism of Uday Prakash’s short stories

Judith Butler stated that “there are ways of distributing vulnerability, differential forms of allocation that make some populations more subject to arbitrary violence than others,” asking “what form political reflection and deliberation ought to take if we take injurability and aggression as two points of departure for political life” (Butler 2004, xii). With much political fervor, Hindi writer Uday Prakash investigates the fundamental dependency on anonymous others that involves everybody’s life in the gritty, rapidly urbanizing India, where the price of human life is inhumanly low. He draws his narratives from the marginalized lives that India's economic liberalization has pushed even further to the margins, and from the insecurity of lower middle classes, whose dependency on both private and governmental rich and corrupt powers is unavoidable. He talks of ‘a different kind of globalisation, one so stealthy and so secret that not a single sociologist in the whole wide world knows a thing about it’ (Prakash 2012, 11). In this paper I will discuss how Uday Prakash represents the experiences of vulnerability and loss and the individual struggles for survival against a backdrop of societal corruption. Introducing precarity as a condition where the individuals feel that there are others out there on whom their life depends – people they do not know and may never know, – the writer takes the reader to the bowels of globalization from below while representing at the same time globalization from above. I will focus on narrative strategies and stylistic tools utilized by Uday Prakash in order to convey the sense of precarity, such as metafictional narrative techniques that blur the boundaries between ‘real’ and fictional life narratives, or the notion of postrealism and metamodernism.