Literature covering activism from a politico-cultural perspective has often discussed “art as resistance” and “art in resistance,” but very rarely does the work position “resistance as an art” (Ettinger and Virtanen 2005). Brahma Prakash’s Body on the Barricades (2023) is one such work that metaphorically places resistance as an assertive art in a political backdrop where curtailment, oppression and marginalisation continue to exist in the most unapologetic forms. The book brings in the dimension of the 2020 pandemic and its aftermath where one saw the political and social oppression intensify everywhere, and only in this given backdrop, one cannot help but rethink how the present-day oppression conjured up over the years. The “body” is experiencing breathlessness, both from a physical as well as figurative point of view. There could be several creative ways to read the book, but two significant contentions come out fairly in the end—the assertion of identities against “curtailment”-producing artistic patterns and decoding the patterns and meanings of both, the oppressor and the oppressed, including artists.