Various scholars have commented on the intersecting impacts of political authoritarianism and neoliberal governmentality on the precarization of art, especially in the global south (see Duarte 2020 for a review). In North India, the erosion of government funding and increasing commercialization of acting, coupled with the institutionalization of extralegal Hindu Nationalist censorship regimes in public spaces, has exacerbated socio-economic precarity, especially for marginalized and minoritized artists. At the same time, the rise of digital technologies, media platforms, and urban growth has provided artists with new markets and avenues of expression.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with a small theatre group based in a Muslim neighborhood in Saharanpur, the paper explores how diverse sets of young people involved in theatre are negotiating cross-community friendships, mobilities, and practiced secularism in the context of Hindu nationalism and precarity. Using the idea of everyday prefiguration: alluding to the ways in which people embody "being the change" in the present as a means of enacting desired futures (see Dyson and Jeffrey 2018), I show how young people's acting and stagecraft function as prefigurative practices, creating spaces for uncomfortable conversations, political critiques, interreligious and intercaste friendships, and cultural pluralism.
Actors’ prefigurative practices not only enable generative social and political practices, but also contribute to their strategic negotiation of precarity. Through their everyday prefiguration, young actors strategize, dream, and hustle towards "making it" in Bollywood. Young people's prefigurative practices of secularism on the stage or "in the circuit", which may often involve being tolerant in the face of unequal power dynamics within the group, are therefore also oriented towards cultivating contacts, moral networks, and strategizing for personal futures.
