Figurations of precarity encompass multiple and conflicting registers of thought and feeling. Abjection, melancholia, resilience, or utopic lines of flight from the depredations of capitalism provide recognizable markers of the “age of precarity.” These conflicting figurations, however, carry shared pathologized mappings of precarity. Paradoxically, these mappings appear in the shifting terrain of reparative redress itself, in efforts to de-pathologize precarity. Converging on a disparate selection of cinematic images, art-work and literary texts on precarity in contemporary India, this paper explores the antinomies of a reparative aesthetics. I focus on Anamika Haksar’s Ghode ko Jalebi  Khilane Le Ja Riya Hoon, (Taking the Horse to Eat Jalebis),  Arundhati Roy’s Ministry of Utmost Happiness and ‘slum art’ produced in Dharavi, Mumbai, now in worldwide circulation, as recent attempts to de-pathologize precarity. A principal aim of this exercise is to tease out the challenge of untangling precarity’s imbrication as concept and form with modernity writ large.