“We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of feelings…our best friends have been killed in concentration camps, and that means the rupture of our private lives.” — Arendt, We Refugees (1943). What of oneself is lost—dispossessed—when one is possessed, owned and...

Mutant’s first episode was an archaeology of democratic anger, and as we publish our 13th, almost midway through the Roman alphabet, we return to our beginnings; to a concept that silently saturates our political condition, bubbling corrosively in the shadow of that which it is too often conflated with, even though they belong to two fundamentally different orders.  Resentment. Silence clouds our understanding of resentment no more and no less than it defines it. Because silence is endemic to...

Few words in our political lexicon are as fragile and as paradoxical as hope. Is hope a privilege of the smug? Or is it the helpless, last resort of the inconsolable? Whatever we might think of it, hope is easy to dismiss and yet impossible to fully leave. In fact, hope acquires its greatest gravity, or what B R Ambedkar might call its greatest force, precisely when the circumstances for its existence seem bleakest.  This paradox reveals a fundamental truth about the human condition: that...

What does it mean to be human? This is a question at once timeless, yet often posited as an abstraction: as though being human and living as humans in the world can be disentangled from each other. But man's humanity is not something that exists in isolation from other species, from other human beings. “In that sense, the idea of the human rests fundamentally on the belief that to be human is to both be political and social,” says Aishwary Kumar. “If you were to be marooned in the middle of...

Nothing frames our thinking at Mutant — the very name we have given this dictionary of concepts — more fundamentally than the human drive for purity. After all, by its very constitution, the figure of the mutant — the bearer of our mutations, our mixing, our transgressions, our struggle with finitude — is an antidote to the violence unleashed by political and moral purists. As we begin a decisive year for democracy worldwide, Mutant turns to this pernicious antithesis of our democratic faith:...

“There is nothing mere about symbols”, says the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. And “there is nothing mere about the struggle for architecture, about the strife over monuments. They are arenas of war over memory itself,” says Aishwary Kumar, as we undertake an unflinching examination of the event that marked the beginning of an irreversible torsion in the world’s largest democracy: the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, India, on December 6, 1992. It was not just a matter of a medieval relic...

Not only does violence have the capacity to become normative, we also seem to wholly lose our capacity for moral judgement in its wake. So that the moment it appears in front of us, violence immediately destroys all social and political alternatives, as if it were the only choice available to exercise, an inevitable path waiting to be taken.This is why we fail to ever judge violence; we judge only its perpetrator. We fail to call out militarized rage; we choose instead to mourn its victims...

Talking of violence in a time of war can distort rather than clarify our comprehension of it.On the one hand are the visible and implacable barbarisms of modern conflict waged on land and air, through bombings and blockades, mobilising soldier and satellite to deliver sometimes precise cruelty, sometimes indiscriminate brutality.On the other is violence’s vaporous history: cloaked in invisibility and silence, embedded in the law in the guise of order, intricately threaded through those civic...

If there are twin pylons on which our democratic deformities today seem to stand, they are identity and indifference. Democracies wage war in the name of the former, but for all the rhetoric surrounding “culture wars”, they do so rarely ever in plain sight. Rather, an uncontrolled war rages on today in silence: by making majoritarian identities disappear into the structure of the ‘normative’ and by rallying masses and movements behind a sanctioned regime of pervasive indifference. An...

At the heart of the modern democratic contract is the principle — and the faith — that the majority will decide for everyone.  But it is in fact this majority — neither simply a numerical preponderance, nor an ideology — that constitutes the greatest risk of democracy in our time; a moral swerve that is not simply mappable to a caste or economic structure. Rather, it is a complex combination of motivations and desires tethered equally to old conformisms and emerging markets that believes — if...

How do ordinary citizens become the foot soldiers, the automatons, the purveyors of evil? How does barbaric cruelty become a civic norm? In her controversial classic Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt gives us a way to understand this pervasive degeneration of our time. She calls it the banality of evil. And it is this banality given democratic license; this turning of neglect into a legitimate doctrine of governance; this virtuosity of brutalism without bloodshed, that Aishwary Kumar...

"Annihilation is refusal of the world as it is. Annihilation is destruction of the world as it is. Annihilation is an act of faith. Annihilation, above all, is a refusal of our will to forget. Annihilation, to use B R Ambedkar's word, is "responsibility" to the world as it is." Aishwary Kumar and Payal Puri examine one of the most morally sophisticated and philosophically complex visions of democracy ever conceived.

It is today impossible to understand the fragility and violence of democracy’s global life without grappling with the appearance of an unprecedented political form on our horizon. It is a form of politics that marks a catastrophic, cruel perversion — a stolid mutation — in the very structure of our democratic faith. Aishwary Kumar calls this new form, poised at the intersection between constitution and cruelty, neodemocracy. Mutant is the recuperation of those words and concepts that we now...