Introduction

Abstract

The above-quoted passage highlights a precarious relationship between infrastructure and bodies, embedded within the capitalist framework of neoliberalism. This introduction, along with other essays in Representations of Precarity in South Asian Literature, focuses on how precarity is the everyday experience of South Asia, driven and structured by forces of neoliberalism. Since neoliberalism is primarily based on the idea of transaction, what one can do—the unlimited capacity of workers—and not interaction, therefore, its transactional nature makes it aggressively to the extent that lives are categorised into liveable and non-liveable categories. The representations of precarity in this book make us look at the capitalist social relations that have emerged in South Asia post-1990s. Anxiety, job insecurity, zero-hours employment, environmental degradation, state violence, poor healthcare system, long working hours (aided and abetted by the surveillance cultures), bioeconomies, and fragmented families are the characteristics of the neoliberal age. Not negating the brighter side of neoliberalism, which lies in its ability to provide jobs and opportunities to “borrow from the future”, an ironical phrase used by Slavoj Žižek (2011, 997), its extractive practices, simultaneously, cancel out the future itself. “Precarity”, “precariousness” and “precariat” are terms used to refer to such uncertain futures in the wake of neoliberal capitalism. These generalised risks and increased vulnerabilities, which this book terms as “precarity” have become symptomatic of the neoliberal age, setting out to reflect on the inequalities which are deeply embedded in our social system, particularly in the South Asian region. Examining the post-1990 social transformations in the South Asian region, which are inevitably linked to draconian policies of neoliberalism, this book sets out to identify precarious conditions and their manifestations in the recent literature of the region.