Humour and the Performance of Power in South Asia: Anxiety, Laughter and Politics in Unstable Times edited by Perera, S. and Pathak, D. N., New Delhi: Routledge India, 2022; pp. xx + 264, 234x156mm, ISBN: 9781032229975, ₹3,495 (hardcover).
Humour plays a vital role in South Asian culture and postcolonial critique as it serves as a powerful tool to navigate political instability, express dissent, challenge authority, and reveal social anxieties. It enables marginalised voices to subvert dominant narratives, fosters resilience through satire and irony, and provides critical insights into the complexities of power, identity, and resistance in postcolonial societies. Humour, understood as a complex and multifaceted medium, brings to light the dynamics of power, resistance, and identity in a region shaped by colonial legacies and ongoing sociopolitical disruptions, as is explored in Performance of Power in South Asia: Anxiety, Laughter and Politics in Unstable Times, an edited volume by Dev Nath Pathak and Sasanka Perera.
This collection explores how humour acts as a powerful yet complex social force in times of political instability, rising authoritarianism, and deepening social inequality within South Asia. It examines humour across various forms—print, oral traditions, folk performance, and digital media—amid rapid digital transformation. By bridging the past and the present, the volume highlights how humour has evolved in contemporary South Asia, while also grounding it in the region’s colonial histories through a close analysis of laughter.
Inside the Pages
This edited volume comprises eight different chapters contributed by scholars from diverse disciplinary backgrounds and is organised thematically to explore humour’s deployment specifically as a tool that offers political critique, social commentary, and performative resistance. The essays together explore satire’s colonial genealogy along with vernacular adaptations of humoristic forms and dwell on the subversive potential in oral and folk humour. Contributions also explore digital satire which is a newer and developing type of satire that employs internet avenues such as memes, social media updates, videos, blogs, etc., to make politics, society, and culture the object of satire through parody, irony, and humour. Digital satire is distinguished from its pre-digital equivalent in that it is participatory, immediate, and open to a wider audience. As the editors’ note states, “This thematics diversity is quite an asset for the reason that it shows humour’s capacity to traverse social strata and media forms…it provides a means of expressing resistance across both traditional and digital public spheres.” (p. 23)
Anatomy of the Text
Divyendu Jha’s chapter on colonial cartoons and vernacular satire is a standout for its meticulous archival research and has subtle theoretical engagement with satire being a colonial instrument while also including an indigenous response. He also illuminates the hybrid character of humour during the colonial era. He does this through tracing how the vernacular satirical periodicals that emerged were modeled after Punch, the popular British satirical weekly. These works thus simultaneously reflected colonial power via their imitation of English periodicals. At the same time, in the vernacular versions, colonial rulers along with Indian elites complicit in governance were critiqued in an attempt to destabilise colonial power.
Jha uses humour to problematise the “coloniser and colonised” binary by presenting satire as a dialogic discourse negotiated in power relations. Satire’s ambivalence improves with historical context because it can be both oppressive and emancipatory. While Jha’s archival methodology provides a richly descriptive account of vernacular satire in colonial India, the scope of available sources necessarily limits the chapter’s engagement with the audience’s reception of these periodicals. As such, the chapter effectively foregrounds production and circulation even if the dialogic dimension of humour remains constrained by methodological limits.
In a complementary vein, Dev Nath Pathak’s chapter titled “Khattar Kaka’s subversive Hinduism” focuses on literary satire through an insightful reading of Khattar Kaka, illustrating how humour functions as “soft resistance” in conservative societies. Secured socialism with religious norms are questioned in Pathak’s essay via literary humour’s subtle yet powerful role. Through a focused study into Khattar Kaka’s satirical writings, Pathak argues that humour offers a culturally sensitive mode of ideological critique, provoking reflection and debate while navigating social taboos. This chapter is particularly important for its exploration of the possibilities and limits of satire within conservative societies, highlighting how overt criticism can provoke censorship or even violence. It draws the readers’ attention to these constraints through an analysis of Khattar Kakak Tarang, a satirical work by Hari Mohan Jha, in which the character Khattar Kaka uses sharp wit and irony to critique social orthodoxy and political hypocrisy in postcolonial India.
Pathak’s approach leverages laughter quite effectively for weakening dogma without alienating audiences as it displays humour’s potential for “soft resistance”. Although the chapter draws on Bakhtinian ideas of the carnivalesque to explore the subversive power of humour, its analysis would be more compelling if this theoretical framework were more consistently and systematically applied, particularly in relation to other South Asian satirical voices that similarly challenge dominant structures.
Prithiraj Borah’s chapter speaks about folkloric narratives and humour as resistance, it offers a powerful contribution by an ethnography of oral humour among Assam’s tea garden labourers. This work challenges and revises dominant narratives about subversive satire by showing that humour is not always purely rebellious or oppositional; instead, it can be complex, layered, and sometimes complicit with power structures, depending on its context and audience. His study about Assam’s tea garden labourers reveals that oral humour acts as a mode of covert resistance against systemic exploitation and social marginalisation. Borah foregrounds communal storytelling, jokes and performative laughter to show how humour ‘veils agency and solidarity tactically within’ entertainment.
The work expands humour studies’ scope for inclusion of collective, unrepresented practices in negotiating power at the grassroots. While Borah’s ethnographic approach offers valuable insight into humour as a form of everyday resistance among marginalised communities, the absence of a comparative analysis with other South Asian contexts limits the broader applicability of her findings. Interestingly, James Scott’s Weapons of the Weak makes a parallel argument in the context of Malay peasants resisting the pressures of the Green Revolution, suggesting that these small acts of subversion through humour and satire may indeed follow transregional patterns worth further exploration.
The chapter by Sasanka Perera titled “Humour, criticality and the performance of anonymous power” shifts the focus to digital satire, particularly the Sinhala meme culture, examining how political dissent is voiced anonymously and creatively through internet humour. This offers an astute analysis about social media’s affordances and constraints as a platform for political satire. Memes that mobilise shared feelings operate as a quick, common, often nameless form of critique, allowing suppressed voices to dodge usual censorship as his debate shows. The shaping of contemporary digital expression is influenced by historical legacies as is shown by the chapter’s theoretical grounding in the studies of post-colonial media. Perera argues quite convincingly that memes evolve in form, yet retain their function as tools for social commentary and dissent that continue South Asia’s satirical traditions.
This chapter can be enriched by including commentary on how language barriers, digital divides, and algorithmic moderation shape the circulation of memes and influence the reach of political messages. The chapter would benefit from a clearer engagement with existing scholarship that examines digital satire across South Asia in other linguistic and national contexts—such as Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, or Urdu meme cultures. While comparative ethnographic or media analysis may be beyond the chapter’s scope, referencing such literature could help situate the Sinhalese case within a broader regional discourse.
Contribution to Scholarship and Contemporary Significance
This edited volume by Dev Nath Pathak and Sasanka Perera has an interdisciplinary approach, and since the text is multi-modal, it provides for the reader a rich assortment of case studies. These case studies in turn work to challenge reductive understanding of laughter and satire that exists within South Asia. In the collection, a cohesive theoretical framework that could unify the diverse chapters is occasionally lacking. The book has such a concise format that certain themes receive only limited attention, but that is the limitation of an edited volume.
This book offers valuable insights into how humour acts as a site of political engagement and social critique. With authoritarian tendencies growing, social polarisation increasing, and surveillance heightening across South Asia, the volume’s focus on humour as a form of resistance and negotiation is particularly relevant. It allows scholars, activists, and cultural critics to analyse how laughter reflects and shapes power structures in unstable times.
The book explores humour not just as a mode of expression but as a complex cultural and political force and illuminates satire and laughter as social practices that reproduce, resist, and entertain power simultaneously. The volume invites readers to rethink humour’s critical importance—as a powerful medium societies use to grapple with anxiety, identity, and injustice—by tracing satire’s colonial roots and following its digital age evolution beyond mere amusement. This volume lets researchers open new avenues as it encourages people to reflect on humour’s vital role in South Asian socio-political life. With a balancing of empirical richness and theoretical understanding, the editors have made some praiseworthy choices ensuring that the volume appeals to scholars from disciplines across history, cultural studies, media studies, post colonial studies, subaltern studies and political theory.
References
Scott, J. C. (1985). Weapons of the weak: Everyday forms of peasant resistance. Yale University Press.
Dr. Preeti Sharma is an Assistant Professor at KCC Institute of Legal and Higher Education, Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India.
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