The Second Wave: Reflections on The Pandemic Through Photography, Performance and Public Culture by Rustom Bharucha (review)

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• The Second Wave: Reflections on The Pandemic Through Photography, Performance and Public Culture by Rustom Bharucha
• Amanda Culp

THE SECOND WAVE: REFLECTIONS ON THE PANDEMIC THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHY, PERFORMANCE AND PUBLIC CULTURE. By Rustom Bharucha. Kolkata: Seagull Books, 2022; pp. 230.

Rustom Bharucha begins The Second Wave, his insightful and broad “reflections on the pandemic through photography, performance and public culture,” with an acknowledgment of his position in the thick of things: “in medias res” (ix). Written [End Page 247] from Bharucha’s apartment in Kolkata during the catastrophic second wave of the pandemic that tore through India in the spring of 2021, the book contends with the question: how can we write about, reflect on, or make art about an experience as all encompassing—and world-altering—as the COVID-19 pandemic when we are still so fully immersed in its aftershocks? Bharucha’s interest in the middle—in beginning from the space in between—performs a kind of temporal alchemy: reading these essays feels like both an imprint of a particular moment in time and a moment extended. For here I am writing this review nearly three years later, and the world still feels very much in the middle of this crisis, perhaps just further along. We are still suspended between the world before the pandemic and the world that will follow it—on the threshold between an ending and a new beginning.

The Second Wave makes more connections than it does explicit arguments. The book is divided into three essays—“Photography in the Pandemic,” “No Time to Mourn,” and “Endings/Beginnings”—and while each has a distinct focus, the real success of the volume is in its fluidity. In the preface, Bharucha offers instruction as to how best to encounter the work: “Instead of spelling out here how I shift gears from one context to another, I would prefer that you share some of the surprise that I felt on discovering these connections as they came to life in the narrative” (xvii). In the spirit of that directive, I can speak to my own discoveries, which I imagine upon a second reading would shift from another point of relation to the last four years. On this read, what really captured my attention was how The Second Wave expresses liminality, in both the content that it documents and the manner in which that content is communicated. It is betwixt and between genres, somewhere between theory, memoir, and journalistic documentation; disciplines, moving effortlessly through case studies drawn from mythology, visual arts, performing arts, and literature; continents, insisting that a global pandemic be theorized, documented, and responded to from global vantages; and temporalities, a condition that, as I’ve suggested above, will only be enriched the longer it remains in publication.

One of the volume’s greatest assets is the variety of case studies and interlocutors through which Bharucha guides the reader. Those familiar with Bharucha’s earlier writings will find in The Second Wave echoes of other projects: his work with the dancer Chandralekha; his conversations with Komal Kothari, which informed Rajasthan: An Oral History; his study of Tagore’s adoration of Japan in Another Asia; and his decades-long relationship with theatre artist and social activist Maya Krishna Rao. These returns to previous subject matter demonstrate the ways in which a career’s worth of accumulated knowledge can be reoriented by the dramatic upheavals of history. But the work is also incredibly contemporary, situating these previous projects among works from the last four years. In “Photography and the Pandemic,” for example, Bharucha reads a series of photographs taken by Bandeep Singh, who documented migrant laborers’ treacherous journeys home during the lockdowns, in conversation with Soumyabrata Choudhury’s Now It’s Come to Distances (2020).

The Second Wave is also rich with scholarship, mythology, and art from outside a Euro-US base, which is an enormous contribution to theatre and performance studies. The standards of the field are here: Agamben, Barthes, Benjamin, Butler, Derrida, Phelan, Schechner, Sontag. However, Bharucha puts them into conversation with a rich cast of thinkers and artists working in and hailing from South Asia, including Dipesh Chakrabarty, Mahasweta Devi, Usha Ganguly, Arjun Ghosh, Sundar...