The Hunger of the Republic: Our Present in Retrospect

The Hunger of the Republic: Our Present in Retrospect (Volume 1 in the India Since the 90s series) is a text and visual assemblage. Across the 1990s and early 2000s, key concepts of democracy – of welfare and justice, of people and citizen-subjects – got mutated into unrecognizable avatars. It was a change being recorded in real time by artists, academics and diverse cultural producers. Brought together and viewed in hindsight, their work appears unexpectedly prescient. Documentary and art images, maps and letters combine with essays on politics, economics, cultural studies and aesthetics to produce a retrospective account for how our present came to be.