Starving Bodies, Disappearing Flesh: Hunger Strikes as a Mode of Political Resistance in Colonial and Postcolonial India

What is the place of hunger strikes in crisscrossed transimperial histories of the British empire? How were hunger and self-decimation used as a strategy of protest against the excess of British disciplinary regimens spatialised as they were in colonial prisons? Did the legacy of Gandhian fasts as a channel for practising penance/purification and the hunger strikes of political prisoners from the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army (HSRA) leave an imprint on the post-colonial imaginaries of legitimate protest tactics?

How do these spectacular fasts, the most recent of Irom Sharmila, continue to inflect the form of everyday micro-politics in contemporary India and beyond? To address these various interlinked questions, this project seeks to interrogate the site of colonised bodies of the hunger strikers as a reimagined site of transnational insurgency and follow the trail as it leads us up to the present.

The primary interest of this study is an inquiry into the practice of hunger strikes (or political fasts, or fast-unto-death) as a mode of political resistance. As a form of protest, it has been embraced by several individuals and groups implicated in asymmetrical power relations to disrupt the 'legitimacy of their opponents'. The most recent occurrence of weaponising bodies for making political claims happened in detention centres housing refugees and migrants seeking asylum in more stable democracies.

In these instances, the body was brutalised as an act of resistance not merely through hunger strikes but also other self-laceration techniques of lip sewing and self-immolation (Bargu, 2017). The commonplace-ness of hunger strikes in India, and even global cultural settings, makes it a compelling case for further research. This project will look at four sets of activists and actors who have deployed 'hunger' as a subversive strategy in colonial and postcolonial India.

The first set of activists under study will be Bhagat Singh and his associates, who engaged in hunger strikes to push forth the rights of political prisoners and contend against the 'rule of colonial difference' that marked their prison experience. Second figure, and one whose name is commonly identified with political fasts, is Gandhi. However, my intention is to decenter Gandhian satyagraha by bringing in visual and textual representations of other anti-colonial resisters using hunger in protest.

The third instance under focus will be of two Sikh leaders of the Punjabi Suba fame, Tara Singh and Fateh Singh, involved with 'fasting unto death' in the early 1960s. Most Sikh self-representations begin with a narration of past persecutions, where the 'body of a martyr' is a permanent motif in discourses on identity. The emaciated bodies of Tara Singh and Fateh Singh, circulating new transcriptions about Otherness and community, were folded into this trope of martyrdom.

Even more intriguing was the conscious intention of these protesters to disassociate themselves from Gandhian notions of fasting. The last political fast under consideration will be of Irom Sharmila, also known as the 'iron lady' of Manipur, against the 'draconian AFSPA (Armed Forces Special Powers Act) law' operational at the margins of the Indian state.

She began her death fast after the Malom massacre when ten civilians were gunned down by the Armed forces near a bus stop. In Indian nationalist politics, normative ideas of self-sacrifice signify, encode and evoke specific forms of cultural performance for the masculine and female body. In the case of Irom Sharmila, her depiction as an embodiment of devi (semi-goddess) by the spectators altered her body's situatedness to mean something non-temporal and ahistorical, in turn eclipsing the polysemous political meanings otherwise available to such corporeal resistance.