ABSTRACT
This essay examines the way extractions of human blood – for medical donations, portrait paintings, and petitions – have come to form a significant means of political communication (particularly as a means of political protest) throughout India, focusing in particular on a case study from the south of a karate teacher and artist who, through painting multiple portraits of the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister with his blood, sought land for his karate school. The second half of the essay explores wider features of India’s ‘sanguinary politics’, focusing in particular on ways in which publicly witnessed deployments of political activists’ own blood once seemed to promise both intensification and purification of mass political idioms. It also considers how and why this promise has largely remained unfulfilled.
