Beyond Partition: Gender, Violence, and Representation in Postcolonial India 9780252038853, 9780252080395, 9780252096815, 2014009851
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Beyond Partition
Copyright © 2014. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.
Gender, Violence, and Representation in Postcolonial India
Deepti Misri Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
Copyright © 2014. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.
Beyond Partition
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
Dissident Feminisms
Copyright © 2014. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.
Piya Chatterjee, Editor
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
Beyond Partition Gender, Violence, and Representation in Postcolonial India
Copyright © 2014. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.
Deepti Misri
University of Illinois Press Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
Copyright © 2014. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.
© 2014 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America 1 2 3 4 5 c p 5 4 3 2 1 ∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper. Chapter 2 is revised from “The Violence of Memory: Re-narrating Partition Violence in Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers,” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 11, no. 1 (2011): 1–25. Chapter 4 is revised from “‘Are you a man?’: Performing Naked Protest in India,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 36, no. 3 (Spring 2011), 603–25. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Misri, Deepti Beyond partition : gender, violence, and representation in postcolonial India / Deepti Misri. pages cm. — (Dissident feminists) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-252-03885-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-252-08039-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-252-09681-5 (e-book) 1. Violence—India—History. 2. Women—Violence against—India— History. 3. Violence in literature. 4. Violence in art. 5. India—Social conditions—1947- 6. India—History—1947– I. Title. hn690.z9v5526 2014 305.48'420954—dc23 2014009851
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
Copyright © 2014. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.
For Santosh Misri and R. L. Misri For everything
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
Copyright © 2014. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved. Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
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Introduction 1
1. Anatomy of a Riot: Vulnerable Male Bodies in Manto and Other Fictions 25
2. The Violence of Memory: Women’s Re-narrations of the Partition 55
3. Atrocious Encounters: Caste Violence and State Violence 87
4. “Are You a Man?”: Performing Naked Protest in India 113
5. “This Is Not a Performance!”: Public Mourning and Visual Spectacle in Kashmir 133
Epilogue: The Violence of the Oppressed 161 Notes 169 Bibliography 185 Index 195
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
Copyright © 2014. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved. Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
Copyright © 2014. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved.
Acknowledgments
My earliest debts are still owed to mentors and friends at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Into this book I have carried so much of what I learned from Ania Loomba, Jed Esty, Antoinette Burton, and Simona Sawhney. Their example continues to inspire me. In Champaign-Urbana I was also sustained by amazing conversation, fabulous food, and all-around good cheer with Tulsi Dharmarajan, Indranil Dutta, Somnath Baidya Roy, Celiany Rivera Velazquez, and Michael Koliska. To Praseeda Gopinath I owe many years (and counting) of long telephone calls and incisive commentary. I do not know how to convey my debts, personal and intellectual, to Himika Bhattacharya. Over the last few years Parama Roy, Suvir Kaul, Shefali Chandra, Ananya Jahanara Kabir, and Sujata Moorti have also been generous and astute readers of much of this work—the most heartfelt thanks to them. Portions of chapters 2 and 4 have appeared in the journals Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, respectively. I am thankful to the anonymous reviewers at these journals for their detailed feedback, which improved these segments immeasurably. The work of three wonderful artists appears in this book: Altaf Qadri, Malik Sajad, and Unnamati Syama Sundar. I thank them for sharing their work so unreservedly, and for the critical vision of India I found in their art. In Boulder, where I joined the University of Colorado, I walked into a community of supportive friends and colleagues who were put hard to work by this book from the moment it arrived on campus. Robert Buffington did just about everything a senior colleague can do to support the endeavors of
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
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x
Acknowledgments
a junior colleague. I am also grateful to my colleagues Scarlet Bowen, Emmanuel David, Lorraine Bayard DeVolo, Michaele Ferguson, Nan Goodman, Kira Hall, Janet Jacobs, Alison Jaggar, Najeeb Jan, Celeste Montoya, and Katie Oliviero for offering valuable feedback on much of this work. This book was also partially supported by the Center for the Humanities and Arts, as well as the Dean’s Fund for Excellence at the University of Colorado. And by the excellent baristas at the Innisfree Poetry Bookstore and Café and other Boulder coffee joints. Alicia Roxanne Forde came along at a time when this book and I were at daggers drawn and effected a truce while weathering not a few cuts—all with her usual incredible grace. From her I try to learn how to meld critique with compassion. Beverly Weber and Danika Medak Salzman I thank for working and playing with me through many months. Were it not for long dinners cooked, eaten, and enjoyed with Janice Ho, Ramesh Mallipeddi, and Haytham Bahoora, I would probably have finished this book much sooner. Thanks to the example of Laura Brueck, friend, scholar, and chef extraordinaire, I did not fall too far behind! But seriously, being surrounded by dazzling minds who are also beloved friends is certainly one way to write a book. Grateful thanks to all of you, many of whom have given me valuable comments on this work. At the University of Illinois Press, I thank Piya Chatterjee and Larin McLaughlin for coming up with the remarkable vision of the Dissident Feminisms series—I knew right away that it was the right home for this book. Thank you both for supporting this work through every step. Every first author should be so lucky as to have Dawn Durante’s assistance, which has been well beyond the call of duty. Julie Gay’s fine eye has saved me from many an error in these pages. My exceedingly able teaching assistant Angela Rovak held it together for me at an intensely busy time, as did our wonderful administrative staff in Women and Gender Studies: Alicia Turchette and Valerie Bhat, thank you. In Srinagar, the Kitroos provided warmth, home, hospitality, and perspective. Deep gratitude to them and also to Parveena Ahangar, Parvaiz Bukhari, Dilnaz Boga, Angana Chatterji, Inderpal Grewal, and Khurram Parvaiz for connections, keen conversations, and the gift of their time during my work on chapter 5. My parents in their usual way made everything easy for me, traveling with me and translating for me, as I complained about all the arrangements. My cousins, aunts, and uncles in Bombay have for more than a decade provided home, heart, food, and even money. My uncle Mohan Motto needs special thanks for swooping in fortuitously from Bombay one wintry day, if
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
Acknowledgments xi
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only to hand me the inconveniently large sum of cash that I needed, since every ATM in Delhi had spat out my card. Amit Erandole, Rashmi Deshpande, Sachin Agarwal, Rujuta Modi, Rashmee Bhatia-Gajra, Parul Bharadwaj, Mubin Pagarkar, and Paromita Vohra make every trip home a homecoming. Meenal Jethi, Alok Gahrotra, Richa Gupta, and Arunesh Roy have provided all kinds of home through the years. My brother Kuldeep Misri and sister-in-law Chetna Bail provided loving refuge in Chicago and California. To my puppies Kavin and Anaya for their laughter and naughtiness: this book looks toward a world you might help make. My grandfather, B. N. Misri, shared with me a love of language that perhaps surfaces here in unexpected ways. Finally, thanks to my beloved parents, Santosh Misri and Ratan Lal Misri, for standing behind absolutely everything I do with an unreasonable pride. It would be futile to try and catalogue their contributions to this work and my life in the space of these acknowledgments. To them with the greatest love I dedicate this book.
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
Copyright © 2014. University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved. Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
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Introduction
Shortly following the brutal gang rape of a young woman in New Delhi in the early days of 2013, Mohan Rao Bhagwat, the chief of the Hindu nationalist organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, noted, “Such crimes hardly take place in ‘Bharat,’ but they occur frequently in ‘India.’” He clarified: “You go to villages and forests of the country and there will be no such incidents of gang-rape or sex crimes. They are prevalent in some urban belts. Besides new legislation, Indian ethos and attitude towards women should be revisited in the context of ancient Indian values” (“Rapes Happen in India”). Riding on a spate of similar victim-blaming utterances by various political actors in India, Bhagwat’s statement was widely derided in the liberal English press as well as in several Hindi newspapers in India, for its victim-blaming stance as well as its absurd disavowal of the ground realities of violence against women in rural India. But it did index the continuing hold of one particular “idea of India” in the Indian public domain, and the centrality of both women and violence in the perpetual crafting of this idea.1 In Bhagwat’s Hindutva-inspired formulation, the English-language signifier “India” referred to a liberalized India that had lost touch with “ancient Indian values” presumably preserved in the untainted rural hinterland, where women behave in accordance with such values and hence are safe from violence.2 Implicitly, it positioned the victim, who had been returning from a movie theater with a male friend, as the quintessential “new Indian woman,” a figure that has performed contrary kinds of representational work on the postliberalization landscape. As Rupal Oza writes, this figure is typically “associated, on the one hand, with deteriorating Indian culture attributed to satellite television, and on the other, [with] the emergence of a more complex representation of women iconic of liberalized India” (22). Indeed, Bhagwat’s
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
2
Introduction
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idealization of India’s villages ran against another idea of India espoused by many urban, middle-class Indian subjects, wherein it is rural India that represents the violent patriarchal backwaters, while India “shines” in the cosmopolitan and relatively evolved space of the urban city. Inderpal Grewal identifies this as typical of “a modernity that wishes to expel patriarchy to rural areas” (12). Even in New Delhi, notorious for the daily harassment and violence faced by women in public, gendered violence is frequently attributed to Bihari migrants and the Haryanvi Jat nouveau riche, who are held responsible for the rough edge and misogynist bent of the city. In this cosmopolitan imagining, “India Shining” is certainly better than “Bharat.”3 Then there was the India as seen “under Western eyes,” where “Indian women” as a whole appeared as undifferentiated victims of “Indian men” as a whole. In early January 2013, the American feminist Ms. magazine ran a blog post provocatively titled “Being Female in India: A Hate Story.” The post featured nuggets of plainspeak such as “India hates women. That is the ugly, unvarnished truth,” and “This is no imposition of foreign rule. We can’t blame our old bugbear, the British Raj. This is pukka, indigenous, Made With Pride in India stuff.” The writer, in her indictment of “India” as a whole, also made specific mention of the brutal sexual violation of the tribal woman Soni Sori in police custody and the public’s lack of concern in that case. Yet these sweeping condemnations situated the post as of a piece with a widespread denunciation of India by many writers in the Western media, including some Indian writers. Responding to a similar statement (“India has a woman problem”) in the U.S. magazine Foreign Policy by the writer Rashmee Roshan Lall, Amith Gupta asked in the e-zine Jadaliyya: [W]hich “India” is Lall blaming? Does it include the India of the All India Democratic Women’s Association, which has actively fought sexism from the local to national levels for over thirty years and claims millions of members? Does it include the “India” of the protesters, who are actively fighting and risking death from Kashmir to Delhi to challenge the police and demand justice? Does it include the “India” of the victim herself? Does it include the “India” of all of those who are disgusted by this horrible crime? Because that “India” does not seem to have a “woman” problem—it seems to have a “government” problem.
Gupta noted the erasure of progressive Indian voices from such analyses and pointed out that such utterances are symptomatic of a desire to “save brown women from brown men.”4 They work, often unwittingly, in the service of a Western imperialist account of the world that erases the violence prevalent within and exported by the so-called First World and establishes the civilizational superiority of the latter. As striking as the reductive representations of “India” in the Western media, however, were
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
Introduction 3
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a good number of editorials that argued, à la Chandra Mohanty and Uma Narayan, “Sexual violence is not a cultural phenomenon in India—it is endemic everywhere,” and “The Delhi rape is being used to demonise Indian men.”5 These editorials provided heartening evidence that the injunctions of transnational feminist activism and theorizing have not gone entirely unnoticed but had, in fact, found an audience among self-conscious opinion makers in the West. Yet, as I read and shared some of this counterdiscourse widely, I was struck by the very different preoccupations around the signifier “India” among transnational feminists located in the West, compared with feminists of all stripes in India. For many feminists within India, for example, the generic denunciation of India as violent and barbaric in the transnational sphere was hardly an issue, given the contentious status of “India” as a violent and highly militarized regional power that profited from national and international hesitation to decry the crimes of the postcolonial nation-state. Dalit, Manipuri, and Kashmiri feminists pointed out in chorus that the routine and equally brutal rapes of Dalit, bahujan, Adivasi, Northeastern, and Muslim women across India had never elicited the kind of mass protests provoked by the rape of one woman in a middle-class locality in urban New Delhi. A cartoon by Unnamati Syama Sundar accompanying one such post on the Dalit feminist blog Savari visually expressed Dalit women’s frequently troubled relationship with the India left unperturbed by this other history of rape.6 On the left of the image stands a tightly packed assembly of women, extending into the horizon. They stand
“Stop Atrocities.” Illustration by Unnamati Syama Sundar.
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
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4
Introduction
under a banner that says in Hindi: “Dalit Mahilaon par atyachaar band karo” (“Stop atrocities against Dalit women”). Protest signs in both English and Hindi repeat and repeat: “Stop Atrocity.” One sign bears the Hindi words “Chalo Dilli,” echoing the slogan popularized by the anticolonial Indian leader Subhash Chandra Bose, and implicitly positioning India’s capital New Delhi as a continuing seat of imperial power. Hovering over this assembled crowd at some distance to the right is a map of India, populated with a number of heads. Pointing fingers at the protesters, the latter opine: “They want quota in women’s reservation bill”; “It’s a Dalit issue”; “some NGO funded”; and “some Dalit politics”—judgments typifying the upper-caste Hindu middle class’s attitude toward Dalit organizing as a greedy, self-interested, “special interest” politics with no bearing on the political geo-body they themselves occupy. The visual contrast between the thickly drawn mass of protesters on the left and the sparsely drawn, Englishspeaking occupants of the map pointedly spatializes the deeply alienated affective relationship between Dalits and “India.” On this map of India, an elite minority of occupants take up all available space, while the crowd of Dalit women in the image are tellingly located outside the map. The multi-sited responses around the Delhi protests exemplified the different ways in which the signifier “India” attains meaning in relation to notions about gendered violence and their relationship to the nation-state. “India” is at once a beleaguered postcolonial nation, an oppressive regional power, and an emerging global economy. “India” is the nation-state and its people, democracy and its tyrannical other, the “biggest democracy in the world” and the “worst country in which to be a woman” of the world’s twenty largest economies (K. Baldwin). How do we make sense of this political entity and the long history of violence that has marked it since its very beginnings? This book considers how the meaning of this floating signifier, “India,” is secured and unsecured time and again through violence.
The Violence of “India” Beyond Partition traces a cultural history of violence associated with widely divergent ideas of India after 1947—an India post–British Raj, post-Partition, post-Independence, postcolonial, an India for which 1947 marked the birth of a political entity around which much blood has been spilled, continues to be spilled. Communal violence, ethnonationalist insurgencies, terrorism, and counterinsurgent state violence have marked and marred the postcolonial Indian nation-state since its very inception, frequently intersecting with prevailing forms of gendered violence within communities. These forms of
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
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Introduction 5 violence have frequently indexed a serious disjoint between communally and regionally specific ideas of nationhood on the one hand, and the politically bounded, militarily enforced entity known as “India” on the other. Consider, for instance, that in many parts of the country, “India” is widely perceived by residents as a colonizing entity rather than a hospitable home. In a 2010 essay titled “Walking with the Comrades,” Arundhati Roy sharply indexed the affective alienation from the nation-state in the tribal-populated forests of central India, when she wrote that the district of Dantewada is “a border town smack in the heart of India.” That alienation was both mirrored and entrenched by the officials of the state, the police who had dubbed Maoist-controlled territory “Pakistan.” It is significant that an area within India’s borders is conceived of and cast by the state under the name of its putatively most adversarial other. Roy’s description calls attention to the affective diaspora and internal borderlands created within the nation-state by the Indian state’s structural violence in the region, where it has displaced large numbers of Adivasi people to clear land for multinational mining corporations. The alienation is entrenched in language not only in the forests of central India, where the Maoists avowedly seek to overthrow the Indian state, but also in Northeast India and the Kashmir valley, where such estrangement runs so deep that travel into the Indian mainland is often spoken of as “going to India.” The panicked exodus in 2012 of thousands of Northeastern migrants from India’s metropolitan cities despite the state’s assurances of protection revealed once more the affective rift between Northeasterners and the Indian state.7 Speaking the language of “unity” and “communal harmony,” Prime Minister Manmohan Singh appealed to Northeasterners, saying, “[O]ur people are one, and we will do everything to provide peace and security to all the people of northeast in whichever part of the country they are living” (Bajaj). But as the anthropologist Dolly Kikon wrote then, the exodus revealed the people’s jadedness with citizenship ideals as well as a deep distrust in the state to secure their protection. Moreover, she noted the acute irony of Northeasterners’ impulse to return for safety to the Northeast, for the “home” they were returning to was in a region “poisoned with extra constitutional laws like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (1958) that has spawned a cosmology that thrives on the by-product of violence, bloodshed and disorder” (Kikon). As Papori Bora argues, “The category ‘Indian citizen’ is a constitutive one with a normative ideal; and when the Northeastern tribes are compared to this normative ideal, they emerge as immigrants” (346).8 For too many of its citizens, then, India has been an unhomely home, if a home at all. From the official perspective of the state, however, India is not only the proper home of these recalcitrant citizen-subjects, it is also a
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
6
Introduction
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geopolitical entity whose borders, in the interest of national security, may not be compromised, regardless of the popular sentiment in these states. The fallout of these divergent ideas of India has been a history of armed insurrection with varying degrees and phases of popular support in Kashmir, the Northeast, and the tribal regions of Central India in the postcolonial decades. This has been met with the most brutal counterinsurgent violence by the Indian state (the world’s largest arms importer), which continues even after popular support for militancy has receded in recent years. In the course of these postcolonial decades, the state has routinely deployed militarized violence, extrajudicial killings, rape, and sexualized torture against both men and women in these disaffected regions. Much less visible but equally potent is the submerged violence of state-sponsored “humanitarianism.” In a fascinating ethnography of the state’s “healing touch” policy in postwar Kargil, Mona Bhan demonstrates how such policies, couched in the soothing rhetorics of compassion, healing, and “heart warfare,” served to claim for India the civic loyalties of dissatisfied Kargilis perceived as potentially subversive, while cultivating economic and social dependencies that entrenched the presence of the military in this region. At the same time, the violence brought about by diverging notions of India may not be reducible to the standoff between the state and its internal and external others. It encompasses too the forms of violence internal to families and communities, often precipitated by or comprehended via notions of India or Indianness. This book is concerned with these forms of violence as well.
“Beyond Partition” Beyond Partition spans the decades between India’s concurrent independence and partition in 1947 and the postcolonial present in which the Indian state finds itself in a position that political scientist Sanjib Baruah describes as “India against itself.”9 I begin with 1947 because the events around that year inaugurated new ways of communal and national being in India, as well as new forms of violence that have endured into the present. In addition to marking the end of British rule in the Indian subcontinent, 1947 heralded the beginning of a history of politicized animosity: between the two new nations of India and Pakistan; between the majority Hindu community and India’s many religious minorities; between the Indian state and its subnational fragments, most notably in the northern state of Kashmir and the region known within India as the “Northeast”; and between India’s upper-caste, burgeoning middle class and those poor Adivasi (indigenous) and Dalit10 populations who have often paid the price of development as India has come to claim its
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
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Introduction 7 place in the global economy. It is hardly a stretch to say that the history of postcolonial India has been a history of violence. And so this exploration is bookended on one side by the inaugural violence of nation formation in the name of the new nation-state, and on the other side by the violence deployed by the state to sustain its own political integrity. It begins with the violence of Partition and branches out into analyses of gender, violence, and community beyond the moment and modes of Partition violence. It also moves beyond the Hindu-Muslim binary, on which analysis of violence in India is most often focused, to include a substantial accounting for India’s other minority subjects: Sikhs, Adivasis, Dalits, and racialized others in Northeast India. Beyond Partition turns to the domain of cultural representation in order to explore the imbrication of the violence of “India” with the gendered ideologies that infuse formations of community, nation, and state in India. In the chapters that follow, I assemble an archive of representations that interrogate the gendered scripts underwriting some stock forms of violence associated with differing ideas of India—violence between and within religious and ethnic communities and families, and between subaltern minorities and the Indian state. These forms range from male circumcision, deturbanning, and violent religious conversion, to rape, reproductive violence, family violence, caste atrocities and police “encounters,” and insurgency and counterinsurgency violence. I consider how the representations examined here, in exploring these violent scenes, performatively reconstruct dominant, state-defined, and majoritarian ideas of India. I begin with India’s Partition, which brought with it a founding moment of cataclysmic violence in the new nation-state. The Partition of India was based on an infamous “two-nation theory,” which proposed that Hindus and Muslims, fundamentally different in every regard, were two separate nations and should therefore inhabit different states. The line of Partition itself was rather hastily drawn by the British and announced very late—one day after India’s Independence and two days after the Independence of Pakistan—so that there was much uncertainty about which border towns or villages would fall into which of the two countries. In the confusion that preceded and followed the impending partition, the displaced border communities of Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs fought and killed each other in mass riots. Historians now estimate that between 12 million and 17 million people were displaced from their homes, about a million people died, and more than seventy-five thousand women were abducted.11 As so many scholars of Partition history and its cultural aftermath have pointed out, memories of Partition continue to inform newer waves and forms of violence in the subcontinent and therefore deserve close and continued scrutiny. Urvashi Butalia observes, for example, that in the anti-Sikh
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
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8
Introduction
riots of 1984, the Bhagalpur riots of 1989, and the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1991, “Partition stories and memories were used selectively by the aggressors: militant Hindus were mobilized using the one-sided argument that Muslims had killed Hindus at Partition, they had raped Hindu women, and so they must in turn be killed, and their women subjected to rape” (6). Suvir Kaul, Kavita Daiya, Jisha Menon, and Priya Kumar all attend to Partition as an originary trauma in national memory, excavating its lasting impact on the postcolonial life of the nation-state and exploring in particular how the violence of Partition left its mark on Indian literary and cultural production. However, equally urgent today are other histories, forms, and enactments of violence that may be shaped not only by Partition and the communal sentiment that is its legacy but also by other aspects such as caste and class structures, gender asymmetries, globalization and development foisted upon the poor, and pervasive militarization among state and nonstate actors. Accordingly, though this work strikes its roots in writing about Partition, including the fiction of Saadat Hasan Manto and Shauna Singh Baldwin, it branches out into analyses of gendered and sexualized violence beyond the moment and modes of Partition violence. Thus, I also examine the representation of caste violence and police brutality in the literary fiction of Arundhati Roy and Mahasweta Devi, as well as the framing of anti-Adivasi violence in a set of recent atrocity photographs. I consider the use of nakedness as a mode of state violence but also as a powerful mode of protest in literary, theatrical, and performative representations by women in India. Finally, I look at how the violence of enforced disappearances is made visible in the act of public mourning by Kashmiri mothers in protest and is magnified in the visual art created by their supporters. Although this book is deeply invested in the possibilities offered by literary fiction and “high art” to narrativize the violence of the nation-state, in chapters 4 and 5 I attempt to deprivilege text and center the public performances of often unlettered women whose political dissent is expressed not in writing but in creative visual and performative gestures. Here I join Rosemary Marangoly George in asking: “Is literature the most representative form in every cultural context?” As George points out, although postcolonial feminist theory’s focus on literary texts has been enormously generative in questioning colonial discourse and constructing a minor canon of literary texts, the attention paid to this form of cultural production over others undeniably risks reproducing “divisions and inequalities on the home ground” (224). This is particularly true of work on India, where the low rate of literacy makes the reading of fiction a particularly elite activity. As will be evident from the inventory above, this book, in bringing together literary, histo-
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Introduction 9 riographic, visual, and performance texts, mines the vast gamut of cultural representations through which ideas about India and ideas about violence are constituted. Undergirding this archive is the conviction that the cultural study of violence demands an archive that extends beyond verbal texts and requires an interdisciplinary approach. In expanding its archive beyond the literary to the visual and the performative, this work also hopes to forge what Chandra Mohanty calls a “noncolonizing feminist solidarity across borders” with vulnerable subjects across the gender spectrum, including men (Alexander and Mohanty, 503).
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Violence and Representation Running through this book is the notion that violence “on the streets,” as it were, is of a piece with the shifting ways in which something called “violence” is conceptualized and represented within culture. For instance, during the bloody Partition of India in 1947, the killing of women by their own families in the name of honor could occur only because of an existing narrative of “honor” and “sacrifice” which legitimated and even glorified such killings. An analogous narrative had justified the practice of sati in nineteenth-century India and indeed continues to do so today. Only since feminist activists, artists, and scholars began to concertedly interrupt this account has there been some acknowledgment in the long-silent public sphere that sati and the Partition killings were neither “suicide” nor “sacrifice” nor “martyrdom,” but indeed “violence.” The implications of this cognitive shift on the prevalence of the actual practice of such killings may not be underestimated, for arguably one of the major conditions of possibility for such a practice was the disappearance of its violence through these other representational categories. Thus I proceed with the understanding that “violence” must be understood not merely as a phenomenal event that occurs out of time and place but also as a historically and socially specific process that moves in the realm of discourse and helps construct it. Arguing that every writing (or representation) of violence is also a “reading” (or interpretation) of violence, this book privileges representations of violence that exhort us to read the representational content of violence itself. For example, when the elderly thespian Sabitri Heisnam appears naked on the Manipuri stage in the role of a woman who insists on remaining naked after being raped by Indian army personnel, it would be a mistake to see the play as a mere “portrayal” of custodial rape and one woman’s resistance to it. What the play dramatizes are the representational structures and theatrical conventions constituting custodial rape as a form of violence. Sabitri’s naked
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10
Introduction
body invokes for Manipuri playgoers the relations of looking that constitute the very real violence to which her own performance responds: the routine rape of women in Manipur, frequently “staged” by Indian army personnel for a captive “audience” of male relatives who are forced to watch while unable to act. The performance reveals the theatricality and representational nature of violence itself. This brief analysis elucidates my approach throughout this book: the domain of representation does not simply follow violence but determines its very contours, shaping ruptured flesh with the force of meaning. I address violence as performative, heeding Anupama Rao’s caution against “[attributing] to violence a purely instrumental or utilitarian function” and acknowledging that “violence continues regardless of efficacy because it is also pedagogical instruction in a symbolic order obscured by modern state forms and discourses” (2009, 240). I therefore concur with Allen Feldman that all too frequently, and particularly with stock forms of violence such as rape, naked parade, and genital violence, “the wrack and ruin of dead, wounded, maimed bodies and buildings is already a representational configuration, a created or artificed scene that is prepared in advance for an ex post facto second representation by the media and various apologetics or condemnations” (1997, 36). The texts I collect here are in Feldman’s sense a “second representation” of the violence they explore. Throughout this work I attend to the “literariness”—that quality of language, structure, and form that estranges the familiar—of both literary and nonliterary representations in my corpus. I elucidate the creative narrative, visual, and performative strategies by which they refigure, and thereby interrogate, symbolic forms of violence. What ideological discourses do these representations uncover? And how are these violent forms being contested in the realm of language and representation in India? Furthermore, my readings explore the relation between the form of violence and the form of its representation at particular historical moments. Why was the literary sketch Manto’s preferred form for his writings in the immediate aftermath of the Partition? Why did Manipuri women choose nakedness as a mode of protest against the sexual violence of the state? How does the monthly appearance of Kashmiri women and men in a public park in Srinagar constitute our understanding of the enforced disappearance as a form of systemic state violence? These questions about the forms of creative representation to figure violence often lead us back to uncovering the ways in which violence itself is a representation. Mindful of the ever-contingent definitions of violence, I imagine this study as part of a wider feminist undertaking to critically examine how violence is
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Introduction 11 imaged, narrativized, and conceptualized in the many discourses—governmental, legal, institutional, academic, journalistic, familial—that permeate and shape public consciousness in the Indian subcontinent and its diasporic extensions. As a key site where such discourses often intersect, cultural representations may serve as points of transmission or containment of their positions on violence. In contrast to the regressive perspectives frequently shored up in communalist discourses in the Indian subcontinent, I align the present project and its archive of representations with an ongoing feminist endeavor to replace a hegemonic patriarchal discourse on violence with a feminist commonsense on violence. In approaching gendered violence through its representation in the cultural domain, and in the use of literary and other cultural representations as an important archive, this study draws upon feminist arguments, particularly within women’s oral history, about the evidential validity of “subjective” resources such as memory, testimony, and literary and cultural narratives (see Antoinette Burton’s Dwelling in the Archive, for instance). In my specific attention to the form of violence and its representation, I follow the prompt of feminist and subaltern historiographers to attend to the particularities of violence rather than the broad generalities of cause-and-effect that frequently inform analytical approaches. The virtue of this methodological shift is that it has offered access to the experiences of women and other marginal players who have been written out of traditional nationalist and state histories; it also offers richer insights into the cultural, historical, and ideological specificities of violence and social relations in general. As Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid have argued in their influential volume Recasting Women: “A feminist historiography rethinks historiography as a whole and discards the idea of women as something to be framed by a context, in order to be able to think of gender difference as both structuring and structured by the wide set of social relations” (2). The same of course may be said for feminist cultural criticism. This book, then, is not explicitly “about” women; it is about the set of social relations through which something called “violence” is constituted and effected, and it presumes that this set of social realities cannot but be gendered. Not all the representations examined in this book are self-consciously feminist, although they may be amenable to a strategic feminist reading. I frequently emphasize the gendered locations of the authors I discuss—not under the assumption that women will inevitably produce more sensitive critiques of gendered violence, but in order to foreground the different locations and investments of male and female authors, and also to warn against taking women’s accounts as feminist accounts. Thus, for instance, my reading of Krishna Mehta’s memoir, Kashmir 1947, acknowledges the value of this
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12
Introduction
“woman’s account” of gendered violence, while also drawing out the problematic Hindu and nationalist affiliations of the author. I show how these affiliations are not merely incidental to Mehta’s gendered witnessing of the suicides of women faced by enemy others; they fundamentally shape her interpretation in ways that make hers not just a woman’s account but a Hindu woman’s account, an account by an incipient Indian national subject whose intersectional formation as an “Indian woman” depends on the repudiation of “Pakistan.” This is a positioning that sometimes entails the cancellation of similar violence experienced by Muslim women, as well as a silence around Sikh women’s experiences, belying a frequent subsuming in popular memory of the Sikh experience (gendered or otherwise) into the Hindu experience of Partition. Beyond Partition explores primarily violence against women but also highlights the gendered dimensions of violence against men in the work of Saadat Hasan Manto and Arundhati Roy, showing the ways in which male bodies too are rendered vulnerable to symbolic forms of violence. Attention to the specific vulnerability of male bodies troubles the naturalized association between victimhood and femininity, while also reminding us that women’s bodies are not the only sites of symbolization in culture. As Kavita Daiya argues, “a new look at the narration of violence against men in the postcolonial Indian public sphere reveals that masculinity and men [and not women alone] as gendered subjects can also become critical sites for the symbolization of nationality and belonging” (41). This growing critical interest in masculinity and male bodies is in line with the renewed emphasis in recent feminist work on gender as a relational category. While the relational nature of gender has been a commonplace of feminist thought, feminist scholarship frequently elides “gender” with “woman,” leaving in place the assumption that men are somehow outside the realm of gender relations. Against this approach, this book is committed to examining the specific experiences of women as well as to a more overarching deconstruction of gender. Part of the work here is to make visible certain forms of violence against men as gendered. The violence of deturbanning or cutting the hair of Sikh men, for example, is not typically understood in this way, but by tracing the theological significance of uncut hair or of the turban as ritual markers for the male “amritdhari” Sikh body, it becomes possible to reveal these forms as moments of gendered violence and of a violent regendering of Sikh men and masculinity.
“Third World Violence” The forms of violence examined here cannot be adequately understood outside the specificities of social, political, aesthetic, and overall cultural contexts:
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Introduction 13 modes of historical consciousness, structures of identity and community, embodied practices, affective currents, and aesthetic repertoires that give meaning to violence are all germane to the discussion. In underlining the specificity of such violence, however, I have no desire to reproduce the easy pathologization of violence in Third World societies as seen, for instance, in Western media coverage of the 2013 Delhi rape case. Recounting an experience with a student whose paper identified Sri Lanka as quintessentially, endemically, “almost [instinctually]” violent, the anthropologist Valentine Daniel remarks: “Germany had already been forgotten; that the history of Europe—more than any other part of the world—is a history of belligerence was also forgotten; white South Africa was not mentioned. Bosnia was yet to come” (7–8). As pertinent here is Daniel’s cautionary note against areaspecific pathologizations of violence. In the moving introduction to his book Charred Lullabies, Daniel explains:
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I have called this an anthropography of violence rather than an ethnography of violence because to have called it the latter would have been to parochialize violence, to attribute and limit violence to a particular people and place. Granted, the events described and discussed in the body of this work pertain to a particular people: Sri Lankans, Sinhalas and Tamils. But to see the ultimate significant effects of this work as ethnographic would exculpate other peoples in other places whose participation in collective violence is of the same sort; even more dangerously, it could tranquilize those of us who live self-congratulatory lives in times and countries apparently free of the kind of violence that has seized Sri Lanka recently, could lull us into believing that we or our country or our people were above such brutalities. (7)
Alongside Daniel’s warning it is also worth noting a necessary distinction made by Catherine Besteman, who writes, “Analyzing the cultural dimensions of political violence is a very different thing from suggesting that culture motivates violence, that particular cultures are more prone to violence, or that cultural differences produce violence.” Rather, it may be useful to consider how “instrumental motivations for political violence can become culturally elaborated; in some cases to the extent that a culture of violence among perpetrators gradually evolves” (7). Writing about Islamophobic media representations of domestic violence in Muslim communities in the United States, Zareena Grewal similarly cautions against deculturalized explanations that resist exploring the relationship between violence and culture for fear of racist co-optation. Grewal writes, “Culture alone does not cause violence; however, the effects of violence are always cultural, as are the conditions that allow abuse to persist” (13). While the present study is not restricted to what is often called “political violence”—violence implemented for stated
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14
Introduction
political ends—a central intent of this work is certainly to acknowledge the political dimension of all violence. Inversely, complementing Besteman’s interest in the cultural dimensions of political violence, I wish to emphasize the irreducibly political dimensions of even the most “private” forms of violence, frequently understood as “cultural,” such as the violence of the family or community. The texts examined here stage “cultural elaborations” of violence in their representation of the forms of violence investigated in each of the following chapters. This book places considerable faith in the capacity of cultural narratives to perform the work of containing violence, just as such narratives can and do play a role in the transmission of violence. As an opening elucidation of my approach throughout this work, I turn now to two Partition texts that illustrate the particular contributions of cultural narratives in general and literary discourse in particular to non-elite memorializations of violence. I seek here also to illustrate how art can call fresh attention to routinized or otherwise invisible dimensions of violence.
The Small Voice of History
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“I want figures, only figures, nothing but figures. Why don’t you understand? You start narrating an endless tale of woe and suffering. I am not here to listen to the whole ‘Ramayana.’ Give me figures—how many dead, how many wounded, how much loss of property and goods. That is all.” —Statistics Babu in Bisham Sahni’s Tamas
So speaks the figure of the aptly named “Statistics Babu” in the 1973 Hindi novel Tamas (316–17). Statistics Babu is the government agent who travels from village to village documenting the violence that has occurred during the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan. Undeterred by his officious manner, the refugees who come to register their grievances insist on dinning into his ears the woeful tales that he does not wish to hear. This compulsive recounting of the experience of violence he cannot shut down despite losing his temper, brusquely cutting the tale short, and putting his finger to his lips. As he walks through the grounds of the Relief Office, Statistics Babu witnesses the traces of violence everywhere: a man wishing to locate the body of his wife in order to recover her jewelry, a grown man reduced by trauma to acting like a child, a Brahmin couple grieving the loss of their daughter yet reluctant to find her and take her back after her abduction—traces that exceed the quantitative cost of life and property that the babu has come to document. Occasionally moved by this misery, he does go beyond the call
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Introduction 15
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of his rigidly defined duties, helping refugees find their way back to their villages to look for lost ones. But at the end of the day, what finds its way into his register is strictly factual. The outpouring of survivors’ testimonies jostling against each other are neatly filtered out, for there is no column for them in Statistics Babu’s ledger. The episode speaks eloquently to the manner in which violence typically enters the official archive—the institutional memory of the state. Out of Statistics Babu’s records will arise the history of the new nation-state, which, while tallying casualties against its twin and rival Pakistan, would remain deaf to the suffering of its own citizens. Indeed, Statistics Babu stands in the novel as an exemplar of the state’s detached and fact-based approach to understanding violence, although sometimes even he is seduced by the survivor’s tale, for “the account would be so compelling that it would entice his mind and heart” (316–17). Consider the following conversation between the babu and a refugee who has just taken the seat vacated by another before him: The babu, without lifting his eyes from the register, went on asking questions and putting down answers: “Name?” “Harnam Singh.” “Father’s name?” “Sardar Gurdayal Singh.” “Village?” “Dhok Elahi Baksh.” “Tehsil?” “Nurpur.” “How many houses belonging to the Sikhs and Hindus?” “Only one house. That was ours.” The babu lifted his eyes. An elderly Sardar was answering his questions: “How have you come out alive?” “We had very good relations with Karim Khan. In the evening when . . .” The babu raised his forefinger, asking him to keep quiet.
The documentation of historical evidence calls for a suspension of sympathy. The staccato monotony of the babu’s questions is momentarily broken when he realizes with interest that Harnam Singh’s house was the sole Sikh house in his district. But the moment Harnam Singh begins to respond to his amazed question (“How have you come out alive?”), Statistics Babu recalls his duty and silences the former with raised forefinger, quickly relapsing into the official mode of the detached record keeper. Nevertheless, the break in the Babu’s routine—that moment when he lifts his eyes from the ledger and looks at Harnam Singh—exposes the avenue of humane inquiry that
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16
Introduction
was so firmly shut down during the process of documentation, which for survivors could only have exacerbated the trauma of the violence they had already experienced. In contrast, the novel itself incorporates the refugee’s interrupted narrative, marking off its own approach to violence from the numerical fixation of Statistics Babu. The scene depicts how the refugee’s narrative repeatedly attempts to insert itself into the official record only to be interrupted—the ellipses in speech (“In the evening when . . .”) signifying the gaps in the historical record on Partition, one which only fictional discourse of the time was able to register. If Tamas caricatures the practiced deafness of the statist/ical approach represented by the agent of the postcolonial state (aptly personified by the pencilpushing Statistics Babu), Abdullah Hussein’s The Weary Generations (1963) reveals a similar deafness to the trauma of survivors on the part of those who have collected the “evidence” of nationalist history. Hussein’s epic-scale novel bookends its overview of the subcontinent’s history with the violence of the “Mutiny” of 1857, at the beginning, and the violence of Partition, with which it concludes. In the novel, following the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919, two committees investigate the event.12 The Hunter Committee appointed by the British government, Hussein writes, “completely exonerated [Dyer], though as a token of conciliation he was transferred from his post.” The nationalist Congress party (of which the central characters Naim and Azra are members) also conducts an inquiry, producing an unofficial report that “was submitted but never considered with any degree of seriousness” (199). Hussein himself dedicates an entire chapter to the Congress committee’s inquiry visit and the testimony of one eyewitness in particular. While the unjustness of the colonialist Hunter committee is beyond question in the text, Hussein suggests that the sympathetic inquiry of the nationalist Congress committee is also flawed, in that it is clearly removed from the reality of those who had suffered the direct effects of the violence: “The inquiry committee had been talking to prominent social and political leaders, academics and lawyers in the city over the last few days and taking down their accounts” (189). In this list of social elites, an eyewitness is conspicuously absent. It is only on the last day, on their way back, that the committee encounters an old man who insists on giving an eyewitness account. Though finished with their inquiries, the committee indulges him, compelled as much by his appearance as “a four-legged primate” as by his enthusiasm to talk (189). The man begins with the words: “I am a fisherman”—a positioning that immediately sets him apart from the category of elites who have thus far been consulted by the Congress committee (190). Instead of describing the scene of the massacre, he goes on to provide an achronological, fragmented, and often rambling biographical account of his family’s struggle to make ends
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Introduction 17
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meet. After listening to a series of seemingly irrelevant details about the man’s life as the son of a fisherman from boyhood to maturity, Naim impatiently interrupts him: “Tell us what you saw here” (192). As the fisherman responds to this prompt, he begins to recall the “ghadar” (revolution) of the last century as well as the “red fever” or plague at the turn of the century, past scenes recalling extreme death and destruction and melding into his telling of the present massacre. Yet again, the committee returns him to the main question of “what happened.” The man’s remarkable account of the days preceding the massacre is worth quoting at length, for it illustrates the special language of testimony. Testimony, Shoshana Felman writes, is “composed of bits and pieces of a memory that has been overwhelmed by occurrences that have not settled into understanding or remembrance, acts that cannot be constructed as knowledge nor assimilated into full cognition, events in excess of our frames of reference” (Felman and Laub 5). Emphasizing testimony’s status as a speech act that showcases “language . . . in process and in trial,” Felman reminds us of its discursive and performative dimension (5). Hussein’s construction of the fisherman’s testimony offers a useful lesson in the reception and interpretation of testimony, alerting us to the literariness, rather than the literality, of testimonial discourse. The fisherman tells of the killings of several white men in the days before the massacre: “Nine men were killed that day, although I only saw seven with my own eyes. All the shops were shut quickly and not a single person was seen on the streets. Only ghosts lived in the town. But the ghosts were there all right, in the mohallas and the dead-end streets, coming out of their houses and standing in little groups. It was like a net for fishes that is snipped with scissors at one end and gathers up in bunches in many places. There was no talk, only whispers, like the wind. But it was a bad wind. I was afraid. In my hut at night I could not sleep. The weather was not cold but I started shivering. I made a wood fire and lay down beside it. Still the sleep was absent from my body. I did not do much business that day either, and the fishes in the bucket gave off a stench because they were rotting in the heat of the fire. Thinking that this might be the reason for my lack of sleep, I decided to do something about it. As I cannot bear to see cats and dogs dragging around the fishes that I have caught with my own hands, I preferred to throw the older ones in the fire. Now, children, if you have spent your life with fishes as I have, you would know that the smell of fish roasting in the fire is the biggest cause of hunger in the world. Great hunger was born in my belly, but from what I had seen during the day my throat has closed up. So there I sat looking at my fish slowly burning, making a crackling noise with their eyes open and mouths still smiling. I could not watch those
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18
Introduction
eyes and mouths go lifeless so I turned away and lay on the floor in my usual place away from the fire. After some time—” “Please, please,” several voices, somewhat annoyed, arose from the listeners, “enough about the fish. Tell us what happened after the killings. Please, it is getting dark.” “I am coming to that right now. The next day, I saw the white woman and what happened to her. . . .”
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In this account careful, seemingly accurate details (“Nine men were killed that day, although I only saw seven with my own eyes.”) slip into a surreal, personalized, and purely subjective telling of the man’s own response to the happenings of the day (“I could not watch those eyes and mouths go lifeless . . .”). The committee wants a chronological account focused on the massacre, but the testimony that emerges loops back and forth in time, peppered with personal details pertaining to the man’s business concerns—details that seem irrelevant to the expedient aims of the report the committee wishes to compile. For the fisherman, the murders of the white men and the mob’s rape of a white woman before the massacre means that the city becomes “like a graveyard” and the food shops are shut, so that the fisherman does brisk business. Three days later, he goes to the Bagh to sell the last of his fish. Here, he reports, a white officer suddenly appears, ordering the crowd to leave; the crowd begins to throw things at him, shouting political and religious slogans. None of these objects hit the man, but the white officer was getting visibly nervous, until the old man announces before lapsing into silence, “the moment of misfortune arrived.”
“What, the firing?” his listeners asked impatiently. “No, the fish.” “The fish? What fish?” “My fish. I was the unfortunate man. . . .”
If the fisherman is to be believed, he and his fish in fact played an instrumental role in sparking off the massacre. He explains: when the crowd exhausted its resources, people began to seize on his fishes and throw them toward the white officer. These too did not hit him but fell on the people in front: “Except one fish. The man on whom it landed picked it up and threw it. . . . That was it. The fish struck the officer squarely in the face. The force was such that it made him stagger backwards while slapping away the slippery animal. He regained his posture and raised his arm. That was the moment” (196). The soldiers emerge above the walls of the compound, and the massacre finally begins.
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Introduction 19 It is of course impossible to determine—partly due to the non-omniscient rendering of the conversation between the fisherman and his interrogators, almost exclusively through direct exchange between them—whether the reader should take this astonishing account of the events as exaggeration, make-believe, or simply a reflection of the generic inexactitude of memory. But importantly, the scene suggests that the significance of testimony lies not in the realm of fact but rather in the meaning assigned by the teller to the events being recounted. The scene compels an interpretation of the fisherman’s tale—of his clearly subjective construal of a historical event that had grand political ramifications for colonialists and anticolonialists alike, and of his assignation to these events of a meaning that is entirely personalized but not, for Hussein, any less important. Rather than the transparent account of “what happened,” which the Congress committee seeks, what is far more salient in the fisherman’s tale is a suppressed trauma and its action on narrative. Repeatedly, the committee ignores important cues in the man’s story, which the reader is exhorted to note. Outstanding among these is the fisherman’s dire need to talk about what he has seen and to break out of the deathly silence surrounding him (“It is many days since I talked to someone alive like you people. Everybody in this city is going around like they were dead” [191]; “Thank you for asking me, my children, my tongue was becoming like a dry fish from keeping quiet in this dumb people’s city” [192]). As his account proceeds, the testimony released by the presence of listeners becomes increasingly surreal. He narrates that the white woman was attacked by a mob of “fifteen or twenty men piled on top of her” who—impossibly—“stopped all at once” and stood up “one by one,” the fisherman recounts that the woman “sprang right up like a rubber doll and started running at full speed down the bazaar” (194). But this is interspersed with precise detail: “No, I forget, [her dress] didn’t tear, there were buttons which broke, flying all over the place” (194). Here the intermingling of realist detail and surreal narration indicates not only the desperate need of the testifier to be believed by his listeners but also his psychic struggle to cope with what he has witnessed. Rather than a realistic description of the violence, “which locates its content in a historical space and time,” we have in the fisherman’s account a description that Slavoj Žižek describes as the purview of art. This is “a description which creates, as a background of the phenomena it describes, an inexistent (virtual) space of its own, so that what appears in it is not an appearance sustained by the depth of reality behind it, but a decontextualised appearance, an appearance which fully coincides with real being.” It “evoke[s] the way this terror affects subjectivity” (6).
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
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20
Introduction
Crucially adding to the surreal quality of this recollection is the image of the fish that runs through every phase of the fisherman’s fragmented narrative, beginning with his introductory self-identification through his vocation (“I am a fisherman”), through his digressive biographical sketch (which the committee finally interrupts), and intruding most unexpectedly in his version of the events at Jallianwala Bagh, wherein his fish are absurdly held by him to be the main victims of the violent drama. Impatient with these digressions, the committee members return him insistently to the question of “what happened,” failing to realize that the crux of his testimony lies locked in that very leitmotif. What the committee sees as unproductively digressive in the account, the text pushes the reader to consider more closely: what accounts for this fishy obsession? The fish mark all the catalyzing influences and changes in the fisherman’s daily life. At the most obvious level, the centrality of the fish in the fisherman’s account bespeaks his economic anxieties—thus much of his story focuses on the “business” aspect of catching and selling fish, and on the disruption of the selling with the arrival of violence in the city. This economic situation has a direct bearing on his family life: when the catch was bad, his father would beat his mother and his mother would beat him. Furthermore, the fish mediate the fisherman’s traumatic recollection of the events, serving as a point of condensation for the displaced trauma of what he has witnessed. Throughout the man’s account, the people of the city are alternately imaged as corpses and as fish: “Everybody in this city is going around like they were dead”; “Only ghosts lived in the town. But the ghosts were there . . . coming out of their houses and standing in little groups. It was like a net for fishes that is snipped with scissors at one end and gathers up in bunches in many places”; “We were all packed against each other like fishes in the net as it is pulled up, and like fishes we were wriggling . . .” (191, 193, 196). Conversely, the fish are imaged anthropomorphically, “with their eyes open and their mouths still smiling” (193). The imagistic interchange between (dead) fish and (corpse-like) humans in the man’s account speaks to his inability to directly confront or access the memory of violence as he displaces his latent anxieties onto the fish, while also allowing him to process that memory, through language, after a long silence in “these dumb people’s city.” The image of the fish suggests that what is of significance in the fisherman’s testimony is not what he remembers about the violence but the manner and mode of his recollection of that traumatic event, which emerges in terms of quotidian, practical, and personalized concerns (hunger, money, rotting fish). What the fisherman remembers and recounts—his manner of telling,
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
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Introduction 21 his embedding of experience into imagery—is precisely what the Committee cannot hear and officially forgets. In Remembering Partition, historian Gyan Pandey notes “the contrast between the historical (‘national’) and the ‘local’ that we encounter in the histories of India produced by Indian historians and political analysts.” The local, Pandey writes, connotes both “the particular, concrete, detailed and small-scale” and “that which is not ‘mainstream’ or universal, or at one with the ‘trend of world history.’ It refers, in this [second] meaning, to aspects of our past, and present, that cannot—apparently—be narrativised. They have no beginning, middle and end. They are simply there—awaiting incorporation and transformation by the forces of history and progress” (119–20). In The Weary Generations, the fisherman’s story is one such “local” account (of which doubtless there were many others at the time), pushed into the zone of ahistoricity by the presumably more historically relevant accounts of the leaders already interviewed by the Congress committee. Of course, the novel reverses this approach: entirely sidestepping the accounts of those prominent figures, it rallies its artistic resources in order to foreground the “local account,” highlighting the Committee’s callousness in silencing it and demanding a careful readerly engagement with the testimony of the fisherman, which the text prompts its own audience to read as the committee refuses to do: as a text that will better (or perhaps only ever) yield to a thematic interpretation rather than to the chronological drive of orthodox history. Like that of many of their contemporaries, the writing of Sahni and Hussein exemplifies the work that literature can do to foreground the silenced local accounts elided in the fact-driven, archive-building procedures of state and nationalist history. Indeed, in this sense one might argue that literature was in many ways the prototype for subaltern and feminist scholarship, which has exhorted us to remember Partition by recording its violence—in counterpoint to state memory, which has focused on the political and economic fallout of Partition. The prolific fund of fictional writings and personal memoirs spawned by the devastating event of Partition inaugurated a long tradition of Partition literature in which is archived an alternative history of Partition, its violence, and of “India.” Engaging with this archive allows us to “step outside the history that nationalism gives to itself ” and to “understand nationalism [itself] as a historical reality” (Kaviraj, 167). But as much as bearing witness, denouncing the perpetrators of violence, or paving the way for understanding and peace, the literature of Partition mobilized its own symbolic resources in order to draw attention to the symbolic content of empirical violence as well as its passage into narrative and memory.
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
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22
Introduction
In the following chapters, I, too, will begin my inquiry into the violence of “India” with the powerful literature of Partition, a still-growing body of work that has extended beyond the moment of Partition and into the postindependent present of India and Pakistan. But alongside Sahni and Hussein’s imperative to bear witness to violence by incorporating what Ranajit Guha has called “the small voice of history,” I attend more specifically to the role of gender in violence and its representation.13 In chapter 1, “Anatomy of a Riot,” I scrutinize gendered violence against men, which, unlike other violations such as rape, abduction, and looting, has been largely forgotten in popular memorializations of Partition. I focus primarily on the Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto’s first and very original fictional response to the violence of Partition, Black Marginalia (1948), exploring the formal techniques by which he narrowly focuses the reader’s gaze on the forms of male-on-male violence and evidentiary procedures used by warring religious mobs in the Partition riot. But even as I elucidate Manto’s brilliant deconstruction of the logic of the communal riot, I question some aspects of his secular critique of such violence, particularly in the melodramatic tale “Mozail,” where the Sikh male figure’s investments in the markers of his faith are presented merely as dogmatic and superficial. To complicate this, I offer brief readings of two other fictional accounts that figure the violence of deturbanning quite differently— and in ways, I suggest, perhaps more productive for an accommodation of minority citizenship in “secular” India. Chapter 2, “The Violence of Memory,” moves ahead from Manto’s condensed vignettes to attend to the different imperatives and more expansive forms of the memoir and the novel, which memorialize the violence of Partition in different ways. The focus is on a set of women’s narrations that interrogate patriarchal memorializations of Partition, in order to exhume a widely disavowed form of violence against women: the preemptive killing of women by their own male family members in order to preserve community honor. I begin with Krishna Mehta’s recently republished memoir, Kashmir 1947, showing how a “woman’s account” of such violence does not serve automatically to interrogate patriarchal memorializations; yet a close reading may demonstrate the potential of such a text to destabilize the narrative of “death before dishonor.” I situate this text also within the context of the ongoing Indian occupation of Kashmir, marking how Mehta’s narration of these “honorable” suicides has been harnessed to anti-Muslim nationalist imagination in India. Against Mehta’s markedly Hindu and nationalist narrative, I examine the minority Sikh perspective of Sikh Canadian writer Shauna Singh Baldwin’s novel What the Body Remembers, showing how the novel layers male and female perspectives around the doubly dismembered
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
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Introduction 23 body of a woman first beheaded by her father-in-law and then cut up by the mob from which he had sought to “protect” her. Such analysis reveals how this dismembered body in the text figures an ideological continuity across competing communal patriarchies. Moving past Partition, chapter 3, “Atrocious Encounters,” considers two often-intersecting forms of violence peculiar to the postcolonial Indian state, with a specialized lexicon unique to these forms: the “caste atrocity” and the “encounter killing.” I consider some literary and visual representations of such atrocious encounters, beginning with Arundhati Roy’s novel The God of Small Things, where the Dalit man Velutha is lynched by the state police acting to preserve caste boundaries in Kerala of the 1960s: the novel’s nonlinear temporal architecture reorganizes the heteronormative, forward-looking telos of caste as a form of what Dana Luciano calls “chronobiopolitics,” namely “‘the sexual arrangement of the time of life’ of entire populations” (Freeman 3). The chapter also explores two recent “atrocity photographs” of beaten and killed Adivasi women, circulated in the mainstream press, asking how this genre of photography constitutes public understanding about the caste atrocity as a form of violence, but also considering how various framing narratives often expunge or mitigate the caste roots of these atrocities. Chapters 4 and 5 analyze resistant practices enacted by women calling the Indian state to account through performative tactics. Chapter 4, “Are You a Man?” considers the use of nakedness both as a form of violence inflicted by the state and as a form of resistance in women’s naked protests that expose the gendered logics of this violence by the state. Naked protest as deployed by a range of actors interrogate centrally the violence sanctioned by the Indian state’s discourses of “antinationalism” or sedition, which it uses today to quell any sign of dissent against “India.” I begin with Mahasweta’s short story “Draupadi,” wherein the raped female guerilla fighter, instead of trying to cover herself when given the chance, refuses to put her clothes on. The remainder of chapter 4 examines a range of naked performances by women, including a protest by a group of Manipuri women outside the Indian army’s Assam Rifles headquarters and a solo protest march by a Gujarati woman, Pooja Chauhan, who walked through the streets of Rajkot in semi-undress in order to protest domestic violence by her in-laws and the apathy of the police to her complaints. The analysis examines the implications of naked protest as an unmanning challenge that tauntingly punctures the triumphalist structure of rape-as-power by recoding rape as an act of cowardice—thereby hijacking the hermeneutics of rape, an offense that cites and draws its meaning from the cultural significance of women’s shame.
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
24
Introduction
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Chapter 5, ‘“This is Not a Performance!’” considers a set of visual representations deployed by and fanning out around the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP), the now iconic women-led organization that draws attention to the enforced disappearances of Muslim men, judged “anti-nationals” en masse by the Indian state. The APDP members utilize a performative repertoire in their public protests: monthly public meetings in which mothers mourn and sometimes weep as they sit with photographs of their disappeared sons; photographic collages of the disappeared; recognizable iconography “branding” the organization into the public eye through the use of badges, headscarves, and banners; and, not least, the insistence that “This is Not a Performance (tamasha)!” The chapter looks at some graphic, cinematic, and photographic practices that have accreted around the APDP’s protests, placing this range of countervisual practices against the scopic regime of the Indian state, composed of an overwhelming display of the state’s military might in what is today known as the most heavily militarized zone on earth. The epilogue considers the violence of the oppressed, exercised against the juggernaut of the state and its favored caste and class constituencies. Briefly exploring an active feminist debate over the ethical valence of violence “from below,” I suggest that we be prepared to consider if such violence places a productive pressure on contemporary imaginings of India. Implicitly and explicitly, this book concludes by searching for an idea of India that escapes the prevailing discourses of Brahminical, neoliberal, patriarchal nationalism ruling current articulations of that idea.
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
1 Anatomy of a Riot Vulnerable Male Bodies in Manto and Other Fictions
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When the neighbourhood was set on fire, everything burnt down with the exception of one shop and its sign. It said, “All building and construction materials sold here.” —Saadat Hasan Manto, “Daawat e amal” (Invitation to Action), Mottled Dawn
The two-line vignette above first appeared in 1948 in Black Marginalia (Siyah Haashiye), a slim volume of thirty-two literary sketches penned by the well-known Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto.1 Written even as the fires of Partition still burned, the sketches in Black Marginalia unwaveringly profiled the looting, arson, murder, religious defilement, and sexual violence that marked the violence of 1947, the double-edged moment of the Partition and Independence of India and Pakistan.2 In “Invitation to Action,” the lone shop and its inviting sign may be read as embodying the ironic promise of the new nation-state—the only standing structure in the midst of utter demolition, offering materials for reconstruction to absent buyers dispossessed of all the purchases they might once have had in the world. As such, the sign appears as a taunt, a bogus “invitation to action,” the wryly mocking title drawing from the reader the cheerless laugh that resounds throughout the collection, as sketch after sketch dramatizes the cosmic irony of a bloody Partition that had been proposed as a solution to communal tensions. In this chapter I want to consider the violence of the communal riot—that staple form of postcolonial violence so deeply imbricated with ideas of India— through an exploration of Manto’s post-Partition opus. I approach Manto’s Partition writings with a special focus on the sketches in Black Marginalia, which puzzlingly remain underexamined in critical scholarship on Manto despite being widely recognized as among the most scathing literary critiques
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
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26
chapter 1
of communal violence even to date.3 Given Manto’s stature as the “enfant terrible” of Urdu literature and the ideological work his fiction is so frequently made to perform in the contemporary secular critique of communal violence in India, it seems that any cultural exploration of communal violence in India must inevitably return to this fabled literary figure, whose acerbic persona and writings form the subject of countless news features, academic theses, theatrical adaptations, and translations in India today. Furthermore, in the vast archive of Partition writing, Manto’s fiction offers a rare representation of the riot that focuses on the male perpetrator, as well as an unusual fictional exploration of the gendered vulnerability of male bodies in the communal riot. I begin by reading Manto’s fiction for the brilliant insights it provides about the form and contradictions of communal violence, but I wish here to draw attention also to the limits of his critical vision, particularly the brand of secularism promoted in his fiction. I question in particular Manto’s dismissal of all investment in embodied religious markers and his singling out of the Sikh male figure as representative of what he saw as a puerile investment in embodied practices, such as the strict maintenance of uncut hair or the commitment to wearing the turban, sometimes at cost to one’s own life. In Manto’s defense it might be said that he was writing in a moment of transition where it was perhaps less clear what position the Sikh minority would eventually come to be assigned in a putatively secular postcolonial India (although Sikh leaders of the time fully anticipated this future). Regardless, contemporary readers of Manto must ask whether this is an attitude we can afford to inherit, particularly in the aftermath of the anti-Sikh violence of 1984. In that year, Hindu mobs, in violence orchestrated by political leaders following the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards, hunted down Sikh civilians and subjected Sikh men in particular to ritual forms of violence, central among which was the deturbanning and cutting of Sikh men’s hair before burning the victims to death or killing them in other ways. Toward the end of this chapter, I offer some post-1984 fictional accounts that provide more complex representations than Manto’s of the violence of “painless” practices such as the deturbanning and cutting of hair of Sikh men, either forced upon them as a gesture of “conversion” or undertaken by them in order to pass as non-Sikh. These latter fictions, I suggest, might provide a more productive path for an accommodation of minority citizenship in India. They also offer a way of reading Manto via a critical apparatus endorsed by Priyamvada Gopal, one “that evades both the celebratory and the condemnatory,” in line with Manto’s own wishes that he not be posthumously deified (Gopal 2005, 122).
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
Anatomy of a Riot
27
“A Story of Blood and Fire”
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I’m at a loss about what to do with Manto’s Siyah Haashiye: should I catalogue it as a work of literature or should I find an entirely new classification for it? Manto is very fond of things that create an uproar and awaken with a start even those who are fast asleep. . . . Usually this tactic pays off, and Manto has managed to receive a lot of applause, but the arrow has missed its mark this time. Siyah Haashiye is neither a masterpiece nor a timeless marvel, but it’s not garbage either. —Ismat Chughtai, “Communal Violence and Literature”
Black Marginalia was published in Pakistan in October 1948 after several months of creative inertia on the part of Manto following Partition, his dislocation from his beloved city of Bombay, and his move to Lahore.4 The volume, comprising his first effort at writing after his move to Pakistan, was not well received upon its publication: the critic Leslie Flemming writes that it went “virtually unnoticed,” but by Manto’s own account the collection suffered from too much unfavorable notice.5 By the time the volume appeared, Manto, while at the height of his career, had been at odds both with the British government, which had repeatedly charged him with obscenity, and with some members of the leftist Progressive Writers Association (PWA), a group of radical writers with whom Manto had broadly aligned himself despite his always-uneasy relationship with the Progressive movement.6 In an essay written in 1951, Manto complained to his readers of the harsh criticism Black Marginalia had received at the hands of some members of the PWA: “Believe me, it caused me great pain when some of my literary friends made cruel fun of my book, denouncing me as an irresponsible carrier of tales, a jokester, a nuisance, a cynic and a reactionary. One of them, a close friend, accused me of having robbed the dead of their possessions to build a collection” (qtd. in Hasan 1991, xii).7 Despite this uncharitable reception during its own time, the collection has since gained favor with publishers, readers, and critics—at least in piecemeal form, if not in its entirety. Widely excerpted, Manto’s Partition vignettes have recently become quite popular, appearing in multiple anthologies of Partition writing as well as in news magazines.8 The vignettes’ late popularity may be partly explained by the renewed interest in Partition writing, scholarship, and translation around the time of India’s and Pakistan’s fiftieth Independence Day celebrations in 1997. Manto’s centennial in 2012 also inspired another outpouring of reprints, public readings, and theatrical productions of his work, as well as a host of news stories on this beloved and controversial
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chapter 1
writer. As well, the vignettes’ appeal is possibly due to their brevity and apparent ease of reading: a selection of a few of these sketches coupled with some details from Manto’s brief, controversial, and tumultuous life usually makes for very readable copy. Whether the sketches themselves are as easily decipherable as they are readable is another matter altogether: their pithy form belies the heavy interpretive burden that Manto lays upon his reader, demanding a close reading to unravel their complexity. Notwithstanding the apparent resurgence and recirculation of Manto’s vignettes, Black Marginalia has received scant attention as a separate corpus within Manto criticism in English. Although the sketches are frequently discussed in critical analyses of Manto’s Partition writing in general, there exists little exhaustive analysis on the volume in its entirety.9 For instance, in his essay “Dance of Grotesque Masks,” Alok Bhalla groups Black Marginalia along with “Cold Meat” and “Open It” in Manto’s first set of stories about Partition, setting these “chronicles of the damned” apart from Manto’s post1951 Partition stories (175). While this is a plausible grouping, Bhalla does not attend to the differences that exist within this first group of writings as well: whereas Black Marginalia may well be examined among the rest of Manto’s powerful post-Partition oeuvre, the distinctive formal attributes of this collection set it apart from the rest of Manto’s short fiction before and after 1947 and thereby deserve separate critical scrutiny. Why did Manto find this fragmentary form to be a particularly apposite to depicting the violence of Partition? What was the social text that these Black Marginalia attempted to annotate? Are the vignettes best understood as documentary, denunciatory, or didactic pieces? It is generally suggested that Manto’s Black Marginalia and indeed much of his early Partition writing in general took a form appropriate to his first shocked reactions to the Partition.10 In many ways this fragmentary form speaks to the problem of representing violence in its immediate aftermath. The vignettes are often read as “first reaction” pieces, and it is argued that in his later Partition fiction, Manto turns to more conventional/coherent narrative forms to explore Partition. For instance, Leslie Flemming maps the shift in Manto’s post-Partition fiction in the following way: [I]n his first shocked reaction to the brutalities of the riots, the only way Manto could deal with such events was to divest them of all possible emotion and laugh at them as intellectual jokes. These anecdotes are clever and foreshadow later sarcasm, but they also show that Manto had yet to deal realistically with the human emotions and difficulties engendered by the upheaval of Partition. In later stories, which deal more concretely with Partition, he would show not only that he had no more need of this kind of verbal irony or punning, but
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Anatomy of a Riot
29
also that he could approach, sometimes with sarcasm, sometimes with anger, occasionally even with compassion, a more realistic description of Partition.” (74–75, emphasis added)
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Here, Flemming reads the anecdotal form and ironic content of the Marginalia as purely symptomatic of a need for emotional distance on the part of the author from the “reality” of Partition. It is certainly possible to understand the vignettes as being shaped to some extent by the trauma of Partition, but Flemming seems to read them as evincing a certain escapism: an inability to measure up to the task of realistic description (which she finds Manto was eventually able to achieve in his later fiction) and thereby from the reality of Partition itself. In my reading, however, the condensed vignettes represent some of Manto’s most well-crafted work, not mere reaction pieces. Rather than facilitating an escape from the reality of Partition, the brilliant irony of these sketches, combined with their sparse (or perhaps even anti-) narration, effects in fact a different mode of engagement with that reality on the part of the writer as well as the reader. It may be instructive to here turn to Manto’s own reasoning for writing the Black Marginalia. The vignette’s curtness of form seems to embody the urgency of its purpose in a moment directly following the brutal violence of Partition. Manto was not at this point interested in historical explanation, as was clear from his grouse that those seeking to explain Partition insisted on “looking for the truth” by peeling the onion of history: Some said if you were looking for the truth, you would have to go back to the ruins of the 1857 Mutiny. Others said, no, it all lay in the history of the East India Company. Some went back even further and advised you to analyze the Mughal Empire. Everybody wanted to drag you back into the past, while murderers and terrorists marched on unchallenged, writing in the process a story of blood and fire which had no parallel in history. (Qtd. in Hasan 1989, 6)
Rather than speculate, as did his contemporaries, on causes and historical antecedents, Manto would instead turn his attention to the “story of blood and fire” being written by “murderers and terrorists” at the heart of the communal riot. If violence was an unchallenged story of blood and fire, then he was going to retell that story in his fiction. He would do this not by telling another story but by providing his marginal annotations—readings, as it were—to that story of violence. These would be the plotless marginalia that would elude the narrative grasp of history and thereby deny to violence the sense-making structures of historical explanation. In other words, in rewriting the story of blood and fire, Manto sought to intervene in and reshape contemporary accounts of the Partition, attending to the immediate horror
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
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of the event and deflecting attention from the origins as well as the effects of violence by focusing squarely on the present. In doing so, Manto appears, in fact, to have somewhat anticipated historian Gyan Pandey’s problematization of the form typically taken by historical narratives of violence, and particularly of the consequences of narrativizing violence in the longue durée. In his essay “In Defense of the Fragment,” Pandey writes:
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[T]he grand narratives we produce—and must continue to produce—as historians, political scientists, sociologists, or whatever—tend to be about “context” alone, or at least primarily: the “larger forces” of history that assemble to produce violent conflicts. . . . One advantage, or . . . consequence, of such narrativizing is that we are able to escape the problem of representing pain. This is a sanitized history with which we are relatively comfortable. In it, violence, suffering, and many of the scars left by their history are suppressed. It seems to me imperative, however, that historians and social scientists pay closer attention to the moment of violence and try in some way to represent it in their writings. There are at least two reasons for this. First, the moment of violence, and suffering, tells us a great deal about our condition today. Secondly, the experience of violence is in crucial ways constitutive of our “traditions,” our sense of community, our communities, and our history. (41)11
The condensed form of Manto’s vignette embodies a similar preoccupation with the present rather than the historical trajectory of violence. But although Manto was interested in representing the moment of violence, he was not particularly interested in a restoration of pain, suffering, and trauma. In contrast to the writing of Manto’s literary peers around this time—and even distinct from some of his own writings, such as the story “Hatak” (Insult) or the well-known “Thanda Ghosht” (Cold Meat)—Black Marginalia is marked by a complete absence of sentiment or emotion. What we get instead is a series of “snapshots” of the Partition riot, ranging from two lines to two pages and offering glimpses onto the riot through various narrative perspectives: direct exchange between perpetrators, as in “Aaraam ki Zaroorat” (The Need for Rest) and “Halal Ya Jhatka” (Kosher or Not); or between perpetrators and victims (“Pathanistan,” “Hamesha ki Chutti” [Permanent Vacation]) via thirdperson narration (“Mazdoori” [Wages]); and in one instance in the form of a newspaper report ( “Saat-e-Shirin” [Sweet Moment]). Manto captures most effectively the excess that falls outside instrumentalist explanations that posit violence as a means to some stated end, connecting cause and consequence, means and ends. Opening directly onto the scene of violence, these vignettes bring the reader close to a decontextualized violence that always exceeds the frame of the sketch.
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The sketches abound with direct exchange between perpetrators such that the reader is often in a position akin to eavesdropping, positioned in a peculiar location of witness, precariously close to the role of voyeur, given the reader’s inability to stop the violence. As historians have frequently noted and as Manto probably knew, there were hardly any families at the time who were not implicated in some way in the violence of Partition, and at least some of his readers were likely to have been in intimate proximity with, if not directly involved in, scenarios similar to those depicted in the sketches. Taken abruptly onto the scene of violence, the reader is brought to an awareness of the final impossibility of any innocence at the scene of such devastation. This insistence on the proximity of violence was a familiar theme with Manto. In the memoiristic “Murli ki Dhun” (The Melody of Krishna’s Flute), where Manto makes painful note of murderous impulses between himself and his close friend, Hindi actor Shyam, Aamir Mufti reminds us that Manto “explodes the myth of neutrality of the secularist standpoint, in which the act of communal violence is displaced onto some other social actor, usually subaltern” (206). In “Saha’e,” a moody and touching tale that tells of the strained friendship between a group of young men as one of them is departing for Pakistan, Manto revisits this biographical moment in the sad tension between Juggal and Mumtaz after the former, hearing of an uncle’s death in communal violence, utters the words “I might kill you” (Manto, Black Margins 169). Though the tightly constructed sketches of Black Marginalia did not accommodate such affect, they share with Manto’s longer fictions the effect of implicating the viewer not only as a bystander/voyeur, but also as a virtual participant in the logic of the rioters. Lacking in these sketches is any trace of interiority, which might have drawn attention to the aspect of pain and suffering with which Manto’s literary peers, and later he himself, were fairly (and quite justly) preoccupied. As critics have often observed, the sketches are devoid of narrative development, in that there is no beginning, middle, or end in the conventional sense, no real plot. Instead, the lines erupt onto the page, always opening directly onto the scene of violence, doing away with any exploration of cause or effect, motivation or outcome. In “Kismat” (“Destiny”), for example: “What miserable luck! All that trouble and toil, what do I get? One lousy tin and that too with pork in it!” (Black Borders 19). Who is the speaker and why is he disappointed with the case of pork? The reader must draw on a knowledge of the shared presumptions of community in order to work out the full import of the sketch. The dissatisfaction with having looted a case of pork indicates that the speaker is a Muslim. The irony is both in the situation—the looter finds himself in possession of a stash of forbidden food—as well as his sense of being unjustly shortchanged by fate, given his own involvement in looting others.
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This extension of authority to the reader (who must “write in,” often through speculation, the larger narrative around this fragment) confers a narrative and interpretive agency that ensures an engaged reading, but it also has another, more uncomfortable implication. To be placed in the position of imagining the likely outcome of encounters between rioters and victims (as in “Khabardar” [Warning]), to be working out the reasoning behind the short utterances comprising sketches like “Luck” and “Time Out,” is to be caught in the logic of the rioters, to make sense of things as they do. In other words, rather than merely enabling distance or offering escape, the excision of emotion and the antinarrative form of the vignette enables Manto to foreground and call into question the shared forms of rationality underpinning the communal riot within which each vignette is set. Being drawn into an authorial position with regard to the happenings of the riot, the reader shares in the writer’s task and also in his ethical burden as he struggles with the implications of representing a world-changing violence: Is there a way to imagine this violence without slipping into voyeurism? How, in imagining violence, can one mediate between the possibility of a comfortable distance afforded by representation on the one hand, and pornographic involvement on the other? Thus confronted with the unavoidably dubious ethical implications of narrating violence, the reader moves between the uneasy positions of witness, spectator, and participant. In her remarkable study on slavery in nineteenth-century America, Scenes of Subjection, Saidiya Hartman offers a useful analysis of the political implications of representations that seek to create empathy with the victims of suffering. She takes the example of John Rankin, who in a letter to his brother emphasizes the horrors of slavery by vicariously imagining himself, his wife, and his children in the place of the slaves. Hartman acknowledges that such a fantasy seeks to eliminate the comfortable distance that inevitably characterizes the act of reading about violence and suffering, instead “facilitating an identification between those free and those enslaved” (18). Yet, she argues, this process of generating empathy necessarily works by displacing the enslaved black other and replacing it with the white self, denying all over again the possibility of black sentience: in fact “what comes to the fore [in this fantasy] is the difficulty and slipperiness of empathy” (18). Notwithstanding the understandable motives underpinning the empathetic urge in representation, and without pronouncing empathy as altogether disposable, Hartman compels us to “consider the precariousness of empathy and the thin line between witness and spectator” (19). Hartman makes a persuasive case about “the violence of identification” with those who suffer, but what of a representation that draws the reader into identification not with the victim but with the perpetrator of violence—as I have suggested is the case in Black Marginalia?
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As self-fashioned literary renegade, Manto often saw himself as forcing a confrontation between society and its rejects. In a piece titled “Manto’s Prayer,” he wrote of himself with characteristic grandiloquence: “He has nothing but contempt for modesty; he only has eyes for the naked and shameless. He hates sweetness, but would give his life to taste bitter fruit. He won’t even look at housewives, but is ecstatic in the company of whores. . . . Faces blackened by evil, he lovingly washes so that their features become visible” (Partition Sketches 111). It was this predilection for social outcastes perhaps that drew him to depict the subject of violence rather than its object. If, in his pre-Partition work, the “faces blackened by evil” were most often the affectionately (if condescendingly) drawn prostitutes who populated his stories, in Manto’s post-Partition oeuvre those faces often belong to the perpetrators of violence. (Although as Manto fully recognized, whereas the prostitutes were victims of patriarchy, the perpetrators of violence were its agents and demanded a very different, more complex treatment.) In the 1951 essay (discussed earlier) where Manto deliberates on his long disorientation and final return to creativity following the Partition, he attempts to shed some light on the intent and focus of Black Marginalia: For a long time I refused to accept the consequences of the revolution which was set off by the partition of the country. I still feel the same way; but I suppose, in the end, I came to accept this nightmarish reality without self-pity or despair. In the process, I tried to retrieve from this man-made sea of blood, pearls of a rare hue, by writing about the single-minded dedication with which men killed men, about the remorse felt by some of them, about the tears shed by murderers who could not understand why they still had some human feelings left. All this and more, I put in the book, Siyah Hashye. (Qtd. in Hasan, 1991, xii, emphasis added)12
Here, Manto seems to perceive his task as witnessing and working though the trauma of Partition. The metaphor of the pearl refers to those tight sketches yielded under the pressure of intense violence, as well as the promise (such as it was) of a precious reconciliation afforded by the possibility of remorse on the part of murderers. Equally noteworthy is the fact that the central protagonists of the Partition, are here identified as the “men [who] had killed men”; moreover the objects of violence are also identified as men, who are the primary victims of violence in Black Marginalia. Despite Manto’s claims in the above quotation, his fictional reflections about the remorse of killers and the “tears shed by murderers” are evident not in Siyah Hashye but in his later writings. Alok Bhalla finds that Manto’s first set of stories written immediately after Partition were used to “bear shocked
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witness to an obscene world wherein which people become, for no reason at all, predators or victims” (1996, 175). He suggests that it is only in the second set of stories written between 1951 and 1955 that Manto is somewhat able to historicize the violence that had occurred, effectively producing “demonic parodies” of the nationalist representations and showing that violence is not an aberration from but a symptom and continuation of the past (176). Manto’s movement between these phases is also marked by a shift in his choice of form: after Black Marginalia Manto seems to abandon the vignette altogether, turning back to the short story to deal with the violence of Partition. In that shift he was able not only to begin historicizing violence but also to represent a complex human subject of violence in a new light, one that begins to open up a space for the condemnation of violence (partly by acknowledging its traumatic effects) and finally a reconciliation between communities. Such a complex representation of the perpetrator’s resurgent humanity, as well as a reexamination of masculinity, becomes available only in later short stories like “Cold Meat” and “Sharifan,” which present us with not only the rage and brutality but also the trauma of the perpetrators, who are accordingly rehumanized, if also condemned. In “Cold Meat,” published in 1949, the virile protagonist Ishwar Singh is unable to “play his trump card” while making love to his lover Kulwant Kaur. This moment of sexual inadequacy is subsequently traced in the story to a moment of necrophilic rape, where Ishwar Singh, after having killed six men, abducts a beautiful girl while looting—only to find out, when he goes to “trump” her, that she is already dead. It is the trauma of this episode that replays itself in his failure to “trump” Kalwant Kaur. As Ishwar Singh comes into an awareness of his residual humanity, it is he who becomes the victim—first of an unmanning remorse, and then literally, as Kalwant Kaur stabs him with the same knife he had earlier used to kill six men. In “Sharifan,” the character Qasim’s surge of violence is prompted by his seeing the naked and brutalized corpse of his daughter Sharifan when he comes home.13 Rushing out of his home, he goes on to kill several Sikh and Hindu men before going on to reenact Sharifan’s sexual violation on the daughter of his Hindu neighbor, who comes home just as Qasim has raped and killed the man’s daughter. The story gives some indication of the violation of womenfolk as triggers for male violence, but it disallows a reading of the two fathers as innocent men spurred to senseless violence by trauma. It makes clear that both Qasim and his Hindu neighbor have been active in the riots prior to the discovery of their raped daughters: at the beginning of the story, Qasim comes home with a bullet in his thigh, and his neighbor too enters his house with a sword in hand. Any possible identification with the two fathers is thus
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mediated through a tension between sympathy and censure for these violent protagonists. Nevertheless, in these stories a glimpse of the perpetrator’s own trauma opens up a space, however fraught, for reconciliation. The sketches in Black Marginalia, however, offer nothing akin to the psychological depth of the stories examined above, which bring to life perpetrators like the stricken Ishwar Singh or the shocked and incensed Qasim. If those short stories are engaged in accounting for the “remaining humanity” of male perpetrators of violence, the clipped vignettes do not accommodate the affect required for such humanization—even if, as Gopal suggests, the sketches, by ironizing the perversion of human values in the riots “hint at some possibility of ethical reconstruction” out of those very values (2005, 122). Sketches like “Aaraam ki Zaroorat” (The Need for Rest), “Riyayat” (Lenience), and “Saat-e-Shirin” (Sweet Moment) all illustrate how complexities such as motivation, anger, or remorse are expunged from the frame of the vignette, which squarely frames brutality. Without attempting to recuperate some ideal of humanity, which might possibly begin to redeem perpetrators of violence, the sketches disrupt the many narratives: communal, secular, popular, and intellectual that seek to explain Partition violence. If Manto’s pieces had to work against historical explanations as well as the “stories” created by murderers, if they had to tell a different “truth” about Partition (of which Manto repeatedly cast himself as lone enlightened purveyor), then they had to be not just counternarratives but also antinarratives. Expressly denying readers the comfort of historical explanation, Manto infuses his fragmentary sketches with the jagged irony that had by this time already become his hallmark, insistently preserving the random, brutal, unaccountable, excessive, and eventually absurd nature of the violence he sketches. For instance, the sketch “Halal Ya Jhatka”14 shows the tenuous nature of communal bonds in a climate of violence that is carried out, ironically, in the name of consolidating intracommunal bonds. In this sketch, we hear two rioters chatting about the ritualistic form of killing during the riot. One confides: “I put the knife to his throat. I moved it slowly and I—koshered him (usko— halal kar diya)” “What have you done?” “Why?” “Why did you kill him kosher [halal]?” “Because it gives me pleasure to do it this way.” “Gives you pleasure indeed! You idiot, you should have chopped his neck off with one single blow. Like this.” And the halal killer was killed by jhatka. [Aur halal karney waaley ka jhatka ho gaya.] (2010, 507)
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As the axis of difference slides ever so easily, from religion to ritual, and the co-religionists become swiftly alienated from each other in this moment, violence breaks free of any putative rationale. The instrumental argument for violence that justifies communal violence in other sketches is quickly falsified—the sketch shows instead how the means of violence overwhelm any stated ends and become utterly gratuitous. What is brought once more to the fore is the unaccountable, excessive, and unpredictable dimension of violence. This recalls Hannah Arendt’s observation that “the very substance of violent action is ruled by the means-end category, whose chief characteristic, if applied to human affairs, has always been that the end is in danger of being overwhelmed by the means which it justifies and which are needed to reach it” (19). A similar disruption of communal narratives can be observed in Manto’s “morality vignettes.” Gopal reads “[e]ach irony-laden sketch in Black Marginalia . . . [as] a play on traditional values like ‘politeness,’ ‘propriety,’ ‘decency,’ ‘consideration,’ ‘equity,’ ‘fair trade’ and ‘neatness’” (2002, 264). In these sketches, the play on these values arises from a circular movement between the handy and seemingly instructive titles (“Humility,” “A Love for Cleanliness,” “Legitimate Use,” and so on) and the end-joke that gives the lie to those injunctions. “Qasr-e-nafsi” (Humility), for instance, opens onto rioters halting a train and systematically isolating for slaughter those from the “other community.” They then treat the remaining travelers to a feast of milk and fresh fruit. The last lines of the sketch put a point on the absurdity of the careful organization of riot (that form of violence widely constructed as spontaneous outburst) as well as the extreme disparity in treatment. Speaking the language of heartfelt hospitality, the mob leader apologizes to his coreligionists: “Dear Brothers and Sisters! We were informed about the arrival of the train at practically the eleventh hour. We regret that we have not been able to look after you as well as we would have wanted” (Black Borders 10). The absurd irony here lies also in the incongruity of the context in which such “humility” is manifested: the disconnect between the arrogance of methodical but casual murder and the humility of the apology in all its mundane detail. In “Safaaipasandi” (A Love of Cleanliness), the operation of that titular virtue is similarly compromised by its context, as one rioter stops his companion from slitting the throat of a “chicken” from the other religion: “No, no, not here. It will mess up the compartment; let’s take him outside” (Black Borders 41). The incongruous, macabre, and ironic joke that wraps up each vignette routinely returns the reader to titles like “Ta’awun” (Close Cooperation), “Munasib Karavaii” (Appropriate Action), and “Jaiz Istimaal” (Legitimate Use)—compelling the reader to consider if humanity has been corrupted in the riots, or whether human values are invariably in-
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Anatomy of a Riot
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voked only in the restricted context of one’s own community. The shrewdly punning titles emphasize not just the distortion of conventional morality but of the very language in which these moral ideas are encoded. The “human” values typically defined by signifiers like “propriety” or “cooperation” have come unmoored from their putatively universal context, have been set afloat amidst violence and have become qualified, narrowly applicable only to one’s own community. Thus, “neatness” may be conscientiously evoked in the middle of the messy affair of mass murder; just as in “Ulahana” (Reproach), the principles of fair trade may be cited by the rioter who, cheated of the opportunity for arson, complains, “Look here, what is this? You charged the full black-market rate for it and you have given me such lousy petrol that it hardly gutted even one shop” (Black Borders 17).
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The Violence of Metonymy I have already observed that Manto’s vignettes are concentrated upon a particular form of the sweeping violence of Partition: the communal riot.15 Writing about the form of the communal riot, the sociologist Veena Das notes that the “form pervades the content . . . rather than [being] a vehicle which, so to speak, contains the content.” The form of the riot, Das notes, is typically constituted by a “repertoire of symbolic actions” available to rioters (1990, 9). Feminist historiographers Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin catalogue the many forms of symbolic violence against women in this “repertoire” of Partition riots: “stripping; parading naked; mutilating and disfiguring; tattooing or branding the breasts and genitalia with triumphal slogans; amputating breasts; knifing open the womb; raping, of course; killing foetuses” (43). Relatively less has been said about symbolic violence against men in communal riots. But, as Kavita Daiya points out, it is also necessary to ask, “What happens to men’s roles, male bodies, and conceptions of masculinity in the discursive articulation of nationalism in the postcolonial public sphere? How are male bodies represented, deployed and refashioned in the creation and contestation of postcolonial nationalism?” (41). Manto’s sketches, which most frequently stage male-on-male violence (in addition to violence against women that he frequently thematized in his Partition writings), prove particularly helpful in approaching this set of questions. Manto prompts the reader to interrogate the meaning assigned to male (and, to some extent, female bodies) within the riot—meanings determined by the communal ideology that Black Marginalia excoriates. I now turn to a selection of sketches through which Manto stages and interrogates the logic of metonymy informing the selection of victims in the communal riot. This logic is embedded in the cultural practices of “telling,” by which the crowd discerns who is
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Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh (with all other religious identities subsumed into these three dominant, intelligible categories). Allen Feldman has noted how in Northern Ireland, the practice of “[t]elling constructs a conjuncture of clothing, linguistic dialect, facial appearance, corporal comportment, political religious insignia, generalized spatial movements, and inferred residential linkages”—all of which form an “iconography of the ethnic Other” that facilitates the selection of victims in an encounter (56–57). Communal riots in India work in much the same way, with the crucial difference being the crowd’s overreliance on embodied clues of religious identity and difference. Indeed, one particular feature about the communal riot is its obsessive reliance on the body as the determinate proof of religion. Whereas for women such “proof ” is more superficial, residing typically in sartorial markers such as clothing, sindoor, and the mangalsutra, for men it is made available directly on the body, which is heavily invested with religious significance. The physical fact of circumcision separates Muslims from both Hindus and Sikhs, while the strictures against the trimming of bodily and facial hair distinguishes Sikh men—most visibly by their long hair but also by other religious symbols worn on the body at all times. Thus male bodies, specifically the genitals, become the overdetermined proof of religious identity. These gendered bodies exist in metonymic relation to the communities to which they belong. Committed to dismantling this particular metonymic logic, in which bodily fragments such as genitals and hair are taken as indices of religious identity, Manto’s vignettes attack the logic of metonymy in general, asking the reader to rethink the complex relation between the part and the whole, which may not be merely indexical. The next section explores how Black Marginalia questions the master narratives of nation, community, and gender, which constitute the metonymic logic ruling the violence of Partition. What renders male and female bodies susceptible to gendered violence in the communal riot is the particular logic of metonymy informing the ideology of communal love and hate. The discourse of communalism organizes bodies through the logic of substitution, whereby individual bodies literally become communal bodies: stand-ins for other bodies that have acted in other times and places, and must be rewarded, punished, or disciplined as such. It is also a logic that is preoccupied with gendered bodies, which have always been central to the demographic anxieties and reproductive imperatives of communalism.16 Female bodies, as reproducers and boundaries of the community, become the repositories of community honor. Accordingly, sexual savagery before killing in communal riot is a paradigmatic manifestation of this logic.17
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Sketch after sketch in Marginalia document the pillage and looting that occurred during the rioting in 1947, questioning the putative ideological motives for this violence by suggesting that the logic of commerce triumphed over all other ideologies during the riots. While several sketches like “Wages,” “Close Cooperation,” and “Legitimate Use” depict the general looting that betrays greed rather than any kind of communal sentiment as the main motive for mob violence, two sketches in particular provide an interesting statement about how this climate of loot bears upon women as metonymic bearers of community honor. “Ghaate ka Sauda” (Losing Bargain) depicts the situation of a man who has been fooled into buying and then “using” a woman from his own community. Only the morning after does he think to ask the girl’s name, whereupon he realizes that he has been given a raw deal: upon hearing her name, “he ran to his friend and said, ‘That bastard has cheated us! He saddled us with a girl from our own faith. Come on, let’s go return her’” (Mantonaama 279).18 The sketch situates itself within the intersecting logics of commerce, communal hate, and patriarchy. There is nothing unusual about a man buying a girl as a usable commodity in the market, but in this context the pleasure of paid sex was supposed to be enhanced by the pleasure of having sex with an abducted woman from the other community. Honor is at the center of this transaction: in penetrating the girl, the buyer would deplete the honor and therefore the masculinity of the “other” community and enhance his own accordingly. In this, the buyer has assumed the seller to be colluding with him for a mutual profit (forty-two rupees for the seller, pleasure and honor for the buyer) on the same side of the religious divide. But when the buyer becomes aware of the religious identity between himself and the commodity he has purchased, the woman loses value: she is now fit neither for sexual use nor for reselling. Even if, as he wishes, the buyer gets his money back, it is still a losing transaction. Yet, Manto’s joke is that the buyer is quite willing to return the woman from his “own” community to the market rather than offer her any kind of protection. His outrage is not on behalf of one of his “own” women, the putative repository of his own communal honor, but for the fact that he has been duped by a man from the other community. What “Losing Bargain” brilliantly frames is the commercialization of honor, which becomes yet another commodity to be looted, bought, and sold, assuming of course that you deal with the right seller. This is the economy within which a man who purchases a woman for forty-two rupees can quote the principle of “fair trade,” and a man who participates in this warped commerce can demonstrate surprise and outrage at being cheated.
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While “Losing Bargain” shows us the conditions of violence that result in the commodification of women through forced prostitution, “Sadke Uske” (Glory Be) points toward a continuing commodification of women in the oldest profession in the world, no matter what the conditions. In this sketch the hollow core of community honor is indicated by the continuity of clientele for the courtesan who has crossed the border with her singing master. The idiosyncratic wry joke comes in his comment: “We had lost everything in the looting there, and arrived penniless here but the Good Lord has restored our riches in only a few days” (Black Borders 45). The riches are the wages of a continued double standard toward real women on both sides of the border, despite all the hysteria about the rape and abduction of one’s “own” women. What both of the above sketches show is the artificial installment of honor in a woman, who is herself merely an emblem; her own “honor” is of consequence only inasmuch as it has a bearing for the men who violently trade in it. What is the profit that accrues to the buyer when he purchases a woman from the “other” community? If honor truly resides in the inviolable bodies of the community’s “own” women, what explains the riches at the prostitute’s door? Is “honor” simply a learned justification for violence motivated by other kinds of greed? In his examination of the prostitute figure across Manto’s fiction, Mufti draws our attention to how this favored figure unsettles “the antinomies of national-bourgeois respectability” by which women are cast most frequently in the image of Mother. In “Sadke Uske,” as in other Manto fictions featuring prostitutes, this figure exposes “the claim of purity of the ‘national family,’ of the ‘chaste maternity’ of the nation” (200–201). Manto’s prostitutes, Mufti writes, “shatter the familial tableau of national culture and hint at possibilities of ‘love’ unimagined in the affective economy of nationalized culture” (200). If female bodies are falsely invested with the “proof ” of communal honor in an environment of communal violence, male bodies—in the logic of the riot—are presumed to carry the proof of religious identity. I now turn to a set of sketches in which Manto frames practices of “telling” male bodies in the riot, drawing attention to the evidentiary procedures of the mob in the riot.
The Male Body in the Riot A cluster of Manto’s sketches grapple with how violence acts on the relationship between the male body and the religious discourse that produces that body as a religionized body.19 Manto shows how slippery is that relationship in sketches like “Istikaal” (Firm Resolve), “Sorry,” “Islah” (Reform), “Khaad” (Fertilizer), and “Pathanistan,” all of which frame up-close and ironize the
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Anatomy of a Riot
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rigid investment in bodily markers of religion within the metonymic “common sense” of communalism. Each of these vignettes features a scenario wherein men are called upon to provide the proof of their religion. The need for proof is specific to the brutal practicalities of the communal riot, particularly to male bodies, which can and must provide the most immediate index of religion. The sketch “Islah” shows the mob’s singular focus on the body and the utter irrelevance of any specialized knowledge of religion:
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“What’s the proof?” “Proof—my name is Dharam Chand.” “That is no proof.” “Ask me anything from the four Vedas.” “We don’t know the Vedas. Give us proof.” “What?” “Loosen your pajamas.”20
The repeated chant for “proof ” in this exchange between the mob and Dharamchand is notable—all of the latter’s responses elicit that mantra until someone suggests the usual checking of the genitals.21 Dharamchand’s Hindu name and his knowledge of the scriptures cannot come to his aid if his genitals cannot tell the “truth” of his Hindu identity. “Islah” also suggests an internal difference within communities that might impede the determination of identity in the riot. The mob rejects his offer to demonstrate his knowledge of the Vedas, one of the source texts of Hinduism traditionally known only to high-caste Hindus. Dharamchand’s audience does not share in that knowledge and can only read the simple religious body, which, as Dharamchand finally proclaims, he has recently doctored to save his life from the “other” religious mob. Forced by the mob to reveal his genitals, Dharamchand confesses: “The area I was coming from was our enemies,’ so I was forced to do this, only to save my life. . . . This is the only mistake I’ve made. The rest of me is absolutely in order.” Once he reveals this small “mistake” however, “the mistake was blown off, and with it, Dharamchand.” The titular Urdu word islah, used to indicate the mob’s decisive action, bears connotations of reform or improvement, but also resonates with the usage islah banana, the male ritual of trimming the beard and here refers to the trimming of another sign of embodied masculinity. Since the penis can never be returned to wholeness, the only available “correction” lies in the elimination of both genitals and Dharamchand. Dharamchand, who knows that his genitals contradict his verbal claims, stalls with feigned innocence, offering his name and knowledge of the Vedas as “proof.” He appears to interpret as genuinely interrogatory a statement
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
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that is in the context clearly imperative: “What’s the proof?” He attempts to furnish alternate evidence of his religion. The predictable exchange that follows certainly dramatizes that the falsely pious mob’s singular focus on bodily evidence derives at least partly from a lack of any formalized knowledge of religion (“We don’t know the Vedas”). It also reveals a gap in terms of religious identification between apparent co-religionists—most significantly, this gap in knowledge raises the specter of caste difference among Hindus. Dharamchand’s later revelation pushes the reader into another disquieting realization: the changeability and thereby the utter instability of the body as an index of religious identity. The striking insight of “Islah” is its ability to reveal how communal violence effectively destabilizes exactly what it attempts most strenuously to fix: the self-evident relationship between the male body and religious identity. The sketch shows that, ironically, it is precisely the threat of violence that creates the need for a dexterous/traitorous body that can switch between religious appearances. It makes sense to read the vignette “Sorry” alongside “Correction,” not only for the contrasting titles but also for the centrality of genital “proof ” in both vignettes. The full text of “Sorry” is as follows: “The knife went cutting through the stomach up to just below the nose. The pajama cord was cut. Words of regret blurted out of the knife-wielder’s mouth: “Tsk tsk tsk tsk! Mishtake.”22 It is possible to read this as a sketch about a rioter who has “unwittingly murdered one of his own” (Menon 147). But I would read it instead as a sketch about the assumptions made by the rioter who now gazes upon the exposed genitals of the person he has just killed. For reasons unknown, the killer has been led to a “false” conclusion about the victim’s religious identity, which now stands revealed as identical with his own—so the killer assumes. Confronted with the genitals, the killer too readily sets aside whatever indicators (unspecified in the sketch) had led him to kill the other man in the first place. As Menon points out, the killer’s attitude exemplifies how the penis becomes “an exceedingly potent marker of religious difference during the Partition riots,” more so than sartorial practices, at least as far as Hindu-Muslim animosities were concerned (147). But we are not invited to share the killer’s interpretation, as a brief return to “Islah” will help demonstrate. Unlike the case in “Islah,” “Sorry” seems on first reading to imply that the victim’s genitals were, after all, “good proof ” of religion, and the murderer concludes that he has made a mistake. As far as the reader is concerned, however, those changeable bodies glimpsed earlier loom large still, and the mistake cannot be ascertained as such, especially since the reader is offered no insight into the events preceding the murder. In “Sorry,” despite the killer’s regretful reading of his victim’s body, can we be sure that the victim was really
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
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Anatomy of a Riot
43
a co-religionist of the killer and not someone like the unfortunate Dharamchand of “Islah,” who had claimed he was compelled to modify his genitals to save his life? In fact, casting back to “Islah,” can we be sure that it was not in fact Dharamchand’s words that were lying instead of his genitals—can we even be sure of his name, “Dharamchand”? In both sketches, all that is decisively clear is that there exists a dissonance between the bodily and non-bodily indexes of religion, which has led to the violent correction—or mistake? And considering the bewildering variety of situations that might have generated this dissonance, we can never be sure of the “true evidence” that would help us judge this violence. Manto’s sketches are about the impossibility of ascertaining religious identity through the telling practices utilized in the communal riot. There is simply no circumstance in Manto’s sketches—or in the communal riot—where genitals can ever provide “good proof ” of religious identity. Violence destroys the possibility of such proof. The changeability of the male religious body becomes particularly apparent in the Sikh male body, which is distinguished from Hindu and Muslim male bodies most prominently by unshorn hair, and from Muslim bodies by the uncircumcised penis.23 Whereas “telling” practices focus largely on the genitals in Hindu-Muslim riots, in Hindu-Sikh or Sikh-Muslim riots it is the long hair of Sikh men that bears the “proof ” of religious identity. The Sikh male body, because of the painless reversibility of its religious markers (compare this with Dharamchand’s bloody “mistake”), becomes Manto’s paradigmatic figure to reveal the fiction of body-as-proof, since it appears to carry the potential to slip most easily between Sikh and non-Sikh categories of appearance with the simple amendment of cutting hair. This seemingly painless changeability is hinted at in the sketch “Fertilizer,” where the speaker is unable to comprehend why his Sikh friend killed himself after having his hair shorn by rioters. The following is the full text of the sketch: When he committed suicide, a friend had the following observation to make: “He was such a fool! How many times did I tell him, ‘Look here, so what if they have chopped off your hair and shaved off your beard and whiskers? It’s not as if your faith is ruined beyond repair. . . . Massage your head and face with curd every day and with the blessings of the Great Guru, your hair will grow back within a year.’” (Black Borders 47)
Here, the irony is embedded in the casual simplicity of the home remedies offered to avoid what the speaker sees as a pointless death. But curd is not fertilizer; nor is hair crop, that it should grow back within a year. There is a suggestion here—especially when we bear in mind that the joke in these sketches is usually on the speaker—that the speaker gravely misses what is
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at stake in these embodied markers for the Sikh man who had preferred suicide to growing back his hair and beard with the prescribed regimen of faith. The speaker assumes that what is at stake is merely the appearance of the unmodified body required in Sikhism rather than the observation of the religious requirement. The flippant comment that constitutes the vignette presumes the ease as well as the reversibility of the bodily conversion to which suicide was preferred. “Firm Resolve” makes a similar point about the stubborn fixing of one’s own identity in a changeable body. The sketch frames the following determined refusal in a single line: “Never, never, never shall I agree to become a Sikh. I want my razor back” (Black Borders 46). Typically, the sketch requires us to ask questions that force us to confront the wider logic and discursive processes that frame this moment. The reader must ask: What is the speaker doing with a razor in public? Is this speaker, so determined to resist conversion, perhaps on a conversion mission himself? This sketch reveals the slippage between perpetrator and victim, as we realize that the speaker has in all likelihood himself been using his razor to “convert” others. Of course, the joke is also that the speaker presumes that all that is required to be converted to a Sikh is that he stop shaving, that the deprivation of his razor will result in his religious conversion. All of the above sketches suggest that, paradoxically, the relationship between the male body and religious identity is rendered increasingly tenuous by the violent drive to fix the male body as the absolute proof of religion. Manto raises the specter of the changeable male body in order to disentangle such a body from the religious discourse that brings it into being and naturalizes it as a self-evident religious body. Revealed in these sketches as apparent and changeable, the body is no more “real” proof than any other claim to religious authenticity, and in some instances, it is just as subject to passing between communal borders. This means that the body is always unreliable proof of the man. While this is true across religious communities, I have suggested above that it is the Sikh male body that most emblematizes the ease of passing in Manto’s fiction. While there is no doubting the somatic changeability of the Sikh male body, the sketch “Fertilizer” opens up an important question: What really is at stake for the Sikh male subject who prefers risking death to giving up the bodily markers of his faith? The putative overinvestment in embodied religious markers is satirized somewhat disproportionately via the Sikh male figure in the short story “Mozail” (in the collection Kingdom’s End and Other Stories), where the eponymous Jewish character Mozail pokes relentless fun at her admirer Tarlochan Singh’s religious observances, drawing on an enduring popular
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
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Anatomy of a Riot
45
discourse whereby Sikh sartorial practices are the object of derision across non-Sikh religious communities as well as among antireligious secularists. Mozail frequently teases Tarlochan about his unshorn hair, likens his untrimmed beard to a clothes brush or material for a woven handbag, and feminizes him by suggesting that if he were only to shave his beard and let down his hair, he would look like a beautiful woman. Manto holds up the capricious, sexually free, and nonpracticing Jewish woman Mozail as a cosmopolitan, even feminist foil to Tarlochan Singh’s antimodern attitude to his own faith and its embodied markers. Despite her on-and-off flirtation with Tarlochan (one of many admirers whom she entertains), Mozail voices an openly derisive antipathy of Sikhs: “‘You’re a Sikh,’ she would laugh, ‘and I hate Sikhs’” (40). Questioned by Tarlochan about her unconventional refusal to wear any underclothes, Mozail presents this choice as a rebuff to one of the five Ks of Sikhism, the kachha or clean underwear: “You’re a Sikh and I know you wear some ridiculous shorts under your trousers because that is the Sikh religious requirement, but I think it’s rubbish that religion should be kept tucked under one’s trousers” (41). Tarlochan Singh on the other hand is desperately in love with Mozail and wishes to marry her. She flippantly agrees, on condition that he get rid of his hair, but when after much agonizing he does as she requests, she disappears on the appointed wedding day with another lover, returning only after a spell of time. In the interim, Tarlochan falls in love with Kirpal Kaur, “a good, observing Sikh” for whom Tarlochan is growing his hair back. At the story’s beginning, Tarlochan is worrying about Kirpal Kaur, who lives with her family in a Bombay mohalla that is “predominantly and ferociously Muslim” even as news reports from the Punjab tell of ghastly anti-Sikh violence by Muslims. It is as he frets about this that he runs into Mozail, who, learning of the situation, proposes that they go over and get his “whatever Kaur from wherever she is” (43). When she suggests that Tarlochan take his turban off in order to pass as Muslim, he refuses, concerned that his strictly religious lover will see his shorn hair and judge him an improper Sikh. Mozail relents, blowing smoke from her cigarette in his face when he returns wearing his turban. In a moment of ironic foreshadowing, Tarlochan protests: “‘You’re the most terrible human being I’ve ever met in my life. . . . You know we Sikhs are not allowed to smoke’” (45). At the end of this mawkish tale, of course, it is the “terrible” Mozail who saves Kirpal Kaur’s life as well as Tarlochan’s at the expense of her own. Protecting Tarlochan on some pretext or other all the way to Kirpal Kaur’s home despite his visible turban, she strips first Kirpal Kaur of her clothes and then herself, offering her dress to Kirpal Kaur so that she can safely leave the area in Mozail’s dress with the crowd taking
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her for a Jew rather than a Sikh. Mozail herself rushes out stark naked to distract the crowd, storming up the stairs only to slip and come violently crashing down. As the crowd stares at her naked body, Tarlochan—at last and too late—finally undoes his turban to cover the exposed and injured Mozail. But as she takes her last breath, Mozail pushes aside the gesture of protection as well as the revered cloth: “Take away this rag of your religion. I don’t need it” (49).24 As the dying Mozail heroically clings to her hatred of religion, her pronouncements about the absurdity of Tarlochan’s religious investments throughout the story are borne out by the fact that her death is a result of Tarlochan’s dogged refusal to take off his turban when first asked. We might perhaps read in this ending a critique worth making, about the prioritization of one’s own religious or other investments over the lives of others, particularly women. However, Manto’s representation of the Sikh male investment in these markers as merely dogmatic tells us little about why such subjects maintain an investment in these markers at the expense often of their own lives as well as those of others. It tells us virtually nothing about such subjects as embodied political beings. It might be helpful here to turn our attention to Jasbir Puar’s reminder that we heed the “theological considerations of turbans, their significance, and affective realms of the divine, the spiritual, the ethereal that inhabit turbans and that turbans inhabit” (196). Manto’s stories give us little sense of such considerations. Against a dominant secularist view that the turban is merely an external modification on the pre-religiously marked body, Puar contends that a view of the turban as merely an external modification misses that the turban “theologically signifies not a modification to an otherwise pure, intact body, but is rather part of a body that is left unmodified” as per the tenets of Sikhism (196). The former view overstates the distinctions between organic and nonorganic entities, and it gravely underappreciates the extent to which turbans—or indeed all articles of habitual dress—become psychically and materially assimilated into the body itself, rather than being distinct from it. Puar explains this eloquently: “The fusion of hair, oil, dirt, sweat, cloth, skin, the organic melding into the nonorganic, renders a turban . . . as an otherwise foreign object acculturated into a body’s intimacies between organic and nonorganic matter, blurring the distinction between them, blurring insides and outsides, speaking to the fields of force—nonorganic entities having force—in relation to and melded into the organic, the body and turban folding in on themselves, quite literally, as folds press against other folds, folds of cloth and skin.” (195)
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
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Puar’s observations vis à vis the turban are somewhat reminiscent of Frantz Fanon’s suggestive observations about how the veil shapes the Algerian woman’s body inside and out. In Fanon’s analysis, the unveiling of that body, even when chosen by the woman herself, is experienced as a transformation not only of the body’s external accouterments but also of its very musculature. Fanon writes that the woman unveiled must quickly “invent new dimensions for her body, new means of muscular control” (1967, 59). Even if one is skeptical of the male psychoanalyst’s attempt to speak for the embodied experience of Algerian women, it is possible to accept Fanon’s larger point that the veil shapes the body, rather than merely taking its shape from the body or disguising it. So also with the turban, frequently described by Sikh wearers as part of the body. The above understandings of the body may be more useful in comprehending the trauma and violence attendant upon the process of deturbanning, even when done out of necessity to save one’s own life. Rather than a derisive dismissal of all affective investments in embodied religious markers, what is called for is perhaps a more sensitive assessment of what such practices mean to the subjects who engage in them. Here I am reminded of anthropologist Saba Mahmood’s suggestion that “in order for us to be able to judge, in a morally and politically informed way, even those practices we consider objectionable, it is important to take into consideration the desires, motivations, commitments, and aspirations of the people to whom these practices are important” (2001, 225, emphasis added). Mahmood compels us to rethink one kind of secular stance assumed by many progressive scholars and artists in India and within postcolonial studies, one that produces all signs of religious affiliation as automatically antimodern and retrograde. She insists that we “recognize the commitments, values, and modes of embodied existence that must be destroyed and remade in order for women [and surely men] to become the kinds of subjects [i.e., feminist, modern, secular] such stances presuppose” (224). In “Mozail,” Tarlochan’s impractical investment in the turban is represented simply as the sign of a retrograde and foolish investment in religious markers. But what do the practices of turbanning and maintaining unshorn hair represent for Sikh men? That is a question that may best be answered by ethnographic work beyond the scope of this book; here I will turn instead to another set of post-1984 fictions that implicitly avoid a simple representation of religious observance as dogma by registering the violence and trauma of the act of deturbanning, whether enforced by others or undertaken by oneself under duress. “Agli Subah” (The Morning After) by the Hindi short-story writer Mridula Garg suggests a rather different orientation toward turbanned Sikh masculinity
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than is found in Manto’s “Mozail.” A tense narrative about a Hindu woman’s attempts to protect a young Sikh boy from anti-Sikh Hindu rioters after the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984, Garg’s story registers the vulnerability of Sikh men in this historical moment, even as it relies upon an unsatisfying characterization of the recuperable “good Sikh” subject in order to do so. The story begins with the main character, Satto, hearing news of the assassination and the subsequent murder of Sikhs by her Sikh bodyguards. Even as Satto’s college-age son Ashok interrogates this metonymic logic presented by his neighbor’s son Manku (“That doesn’t mean the whole community murdered her” [165]), his Sikh college-friend Sarbjeet attempts to step out with Ashok and Satto’s younger son Ajay. Satto pushes Sarbjeet back inside the house, recalling the violence of 1947: “You boys don’t know this, but the same thing happened in 1947. Sarbjeet is in danger” (165). When Sarbjeet protests that he is known to everyone in the neighborhood, Satto responds knowingly: “That is the danger.” Recalling the betrayals of 1947, Satto reveals then that her father, also known to everyone in his neighborhood, had been killed in 1947 under similar circumstances. Garg’s story reproduces the familiar refrain in Sikh memory that 1984 was a surreal repetition of 1947. In figuring an ethical response from the majority Hindu community to the anti-Sikh violence of 1984, Garg’s short story reaches—not entirely successfully, as we shall see—for what Priya Kumar calls an “ethics of coexistence” in postindependence Indian literature and cinema, “an ethics that has arisen as a deeply felt imaginative response to particular historical moments marked by rising religious violence in the Indian subcontinent” (xv). Yet for Garg this is a vision of coexistence predicated on the unqualified loyalty of the Sikh subject to the Indian nation. The story draws on tropes of betrayal, suspicion, and reconciliation familiar from so many stories of Partition survivors. Thus the terrified Sarbjeet, locked in the storeroom, mistakenly fears that he has been trapped by “Satto auntie” under the guise of protection; later, when he realizes she is indeed his protector, he is speechless with gratitude. In the interim, however, his thoughts clarify that he is a loyal subject of the Indian nation, deserving of the reader’s empathy: “Is it his fault that Indira Gandhi was killed by her Sikh bodyguards? Why did they become traitors? They had taken an oath to save her life, they had eaten her salt to guard her, and they murdered her with their own hands! And an unarmed woman at that! . . . Our people may be hot-tempered, but they are not traitors” (170). Garg can only render the minority subject empathetic by making him believe, like Satto, that the killing of Indira Gandhi was an act of simple treachery. Absent in the story is any reference to an earlier history of hurt in the form
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
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Anatomy of a Riot
49
of Operation Bluestar, in which security forces under Indira Gandhi’s orders stormed the Golden Temple and damaged it grievously in an attempt to flush out Sikh separatists who had taken up residence there, killing hundreds of civilians in the process. Operation Bluestar persists today as a wound in the Sikh consciousness in India and in the Sikh diaspora. The erasure of this history is essential to Garg’s representation of the “good Sikh” worth saving, a figure that only consolidates the imagined other of the treacherous “bad Sikh” who is affectively alienated from the Indian nation. To this extent Garg’s ability to construct a viable ethics of coexistence on these terms of historical erasure remains doubtful. Toward its conclusion, however, the story does relay the event of deturbanning and cutting hair in a way that compels an acknowledgment of its violence, despite the fact that Sarbjeet’s hair has been shorn by Satto and her son in order to save his life. As the Hindu mob draws close, Satto and her younger son Ajay quickly shave and cut Sarbjeet’s hair, dispatching him to safety with Ajay on her son Ashok’s bike, having shaved him with Ashok’s razor and scissors and given him Ashok’s clothes (suggesting a symbolic adoption of him as her son even as Ashok himself becomes alienated from her by the end of the story). The remainder of the story is not about Sarbjeet but about the cut hair he leaves behind, a remnant of the body, which becomes a striking signifier toward the end of the text. Gathering up this hair, Satto is still contemplating what to do with it when the mob arrives. They perceive the “shaved Sardar” heading off on Ashok’s bike, but Satto holds up his cut tresses as evidence that he is in fact still in the house—evidence that is accepted as true only because it is presented by a Hindu woman. When the mob discovers she is lying, someone hits her on the head with an iron rod. Garg now presents us with an evocative image as Satto falls to the ground: “Sarbjeet’s hair was drenched in Satto’s blood” (174). On the verge of unconsciousness, the last thing Satto sees—a final betrayal—is her son Ashok at the edge of the crowd. The young Sikh boy’s shorn hair, drenched in the Hindu woman’s blood— we might seize upon this image from an otherwise less-than-satisfying literary vision of multireligious coexistence. What does this remarkable image signify? To begin with, the image materially links the violence of 1947 to that of 1984 through the injured body of Satto, the carrier of historical memory linking these two moments in the story. Satto’s blood is mobilized via this image as a signifier both of the painful memory of 1947 and of the violence experienced by Sarbjeet in the shearing of his hair. The image sutures a readily discernible violence (splitting the skull, spilling blood) with the seemingly painless violence of cutting hair, making visible the
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violence of the latter act through the spilling of the Hindu woman’s blood by her own co-religionists. Garg’s treatment of the Sikh male body certainly stands in sharp contrast to Manto’s secular disdain for its ritual markers in “Mozail.” Yet we are given very little of Sarbjeet’s own perspective on this experience of being scissored and shaved. “Stunned Sarbjeet was still standing with his hands raised,” Garg narrates, all the while that his Hindu saviors set about divesting his body of the telltale signs of his religious identity (172). For an exploration of the subjective experience of this violence from a Sikh male perspective, we might turn to the film Kaya Taran (Chrysalis) (2004), a low-budget, independent film directed by Sashi Kumar. While “The Morning After” connects the historical hurt and betrayals of 1947 to those of 1984, Kaya Taran attempts to connect the anti-Muslim pogrom of Gujarat 2002 with the anti-Sikh pogrom of 1984, exploring the afterlife of communal violence in postcolonial India. Kaya Taran is based on a short story by the Malayalam writer N. S. Madhavan titled “When Big Trees Fall,” a reference to Rajiv Gandhi’s infamous utterance about the Congress Party–sponsored anti-Sikh pogroms following his mother’s assassination: “When a mighty tree falls,” he is rumored to have said, “the earth is bound to shake.” The film narrates the story of Preet, a young journalist assigned to cover a story on the alleged “conversions” of Adivasis in Orissa to Christianity in the aftermath of the events of Gujarat. Upon his return to a nunnery in Meerut, Preet begins to recall his past, when, as a young child in 1984 (then named Jaggi), he and his mother had been forced to take shelter in this very same nunnery, pursued as they were by anti-Sikh Hindu mobs who had already killed his father and brother. When despite all efforts his mother is unable to leave Meerut for New Delhi25 with the visibly turbanned child without being intercepted by Hindu rioters, it becomes clear that Jaggi will have to be divested of all visible markers of his Sikh identity in order to escape Hindu mobs. The nuns thus decide first to cut his hair and then to smuggle him out in a coffin, with his mother dressed in a nun’s habit. The film itself has an undeniably amateurish feel, with performances ranging from unexceptional to poor, and with some lapses in continuity. Nevertheless, it is worth attending to, not only as a rare cinematic representation of the events of 1984 (making it an apt selection for at least two international Sikh film festivals) but also, in particular, for its exploration of the deturbanning and shearing of the hair of the Sikh male child as a deeply traumatic event. Like Garg’s “The Morning After,” with its image of cut hair drenched in blood, Kaya Taran too draws on a visual vocabulary of embodied pain to relay
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the violence and trauma of the act of cutting the hair of the Sikh male child. In the scene where Sister Agatha takes her scissors to Jaggi’s hair as he weeps copiously and begs them to leave his hair be, the child’s hair is held directly in front of the camera while Sister Agatha’s shaking hand advances toward it. The viewer is presented with the child’s hair as a live thing capable of feeling pain: Sister Agatha flinches visibly as she cuts his hair, her approach to this act a far cry from the cavalier attitude of the speaker in Manto’s “Fertilizer.” In both Garg’s story and Kumar’s film, dead hair is revivified via the signifiers of blood and pain as a live part of the Sikh male body so that its shearing signifies an embodied violence. It is in looking at these latter texts that we might fully understand the joke in Manto’s “Fertilizer,” where the speaker misses the fact that what may have prompted his friend’s suicide is not the irrecoverability of hair, or the loss of faith it signifies, but perhaps instead the embodied trauma of being divested of it. Among the more notable aspects of the film is its inclusion of a short performance choreographed by the iconoclastic dancer Chandralekha, who interprets through dance and movement the significance of the event of the cutting of Jaggi’s hair. Titled “Adoration of Hair” (according to the notes on the film’s website), Chandralekha’s composition provides an aesthetic language to mourn the loss of the child Jaggi’s hair as something worth mourning, while providing a space of healing for the adult Preet as he makes the transition to returbanning himself at the end of the film. The process of deturbanning and returbanning is represented in the performance and in the film as a death and rebirth of sorts. The coffin in which the child Jaggi is transported to safety itself symbolizes a kind of dying, adding affective depth to the earlier scene where the weeping child has his long hair cut off by the shaking hand of Sister Agatha. With Jaggi laid down in the coffin after his hair is shorn, the nuns in their habits close in around him, keeling over the coffin in an aspect of mourning that marks the loss they have brought upon the Sikh child. The film at this point cuts to the performance by the Chandralekha dance company. Once again we see a group of women, Chandralekha’s dancers, kneeling around a coffin in white costumes resembling the flowing habits of the nuns. At the center of this glass coffin is crouched an adult man who straightens up slowly, revealing his flowing hair and full beard. The performance, shot in the amniotic environs of the ocean shore, simulates a process of birthing. The coffin in which the child Jaggi was enclosed now becomes a womb that yields up the adult male who emerges from his crouched position, coaxed upward by the movements of the female dancers. As the man
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now stands up amid them, the women take off their “habits,” exposing their own hair. They run their fingers slowly and sensually through their own hair with one hand and through his with the other; he joins them in loosening his tresses. Finally, he bows his head: his long hair falls forward and is combed forward by the fingers of the women in a gesture that emulates the tying of the hair before the donning of the Sikh turban. Apart from the loving attention given to the hair of the adult Sikh male figure, what is perhaps most striking in this repertoire is its association in the performance with the long hair of the “nuns.” Rather than feminizing the Sikh male, the affinity set up here between the hair of the female figures and that of the male figure in the performance points to the non-normative gendering of both these kinds of subjects via the covering of hair—the nun’s habit preserving them from the sexualized gaze that often constitutes the category “woman” through her availability to a particular kind of desiring gaze; his long hair disqualifying him from the normative masculinity of the paradigmatic Indian national (Hindu male) subject. The performance also serves as a bridge to the film’s conclusion, where the adult Preet enters the newsroom for the first time in a red turban. Throughout the film Preet wears his long hair in a ponytail rather than a turban, since apart from a turban, long hair often appears in urban Indian spaces as a marker of cosmopolitan secular modernity rather than as a discomfiting communitarian affiliation at odds with the Hindu majority. Now, however, Preet smilingly compels his Hindutva-leaning colleagues to see the visible signs of his alterity. In this resolution Kaya Taran gestures toward “[a] living together of peace and accord that exceeds the compulsory tolerance of the juridical contract,” recognizing that this “can occur only when one opens one’s self and one’s home to the other . . . without subsuming the other into the self ” (Kumar xx). The final scene of the film harks back to its beginning, where Preet is sitting in a canteen with his Hindu colleagues shortly after the Gujarat pogrom of 2002. After listening to their anti-Muslim rhetoric, Preet decides to leave. Stepping outside, he runs into a Muslim colleague, Afsan, who remarks: “I can’t figure out which is more oppressive, the smoke or the conversation.” The exchange takes place in the corridor between two doors separating the canteen from the outside, an apt figuration of the liminal position occupied by minority subjects within India. Such an affective banishment of minorities from the mainstream idea of India need not be predicated on a forced expulsion, the film is careful to note. So when Preet leaves the table, his Hindu colleagues hasten to assure him: “Where are you going? We are not talking about you, of course.” The film rejects the terms
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of such a limited hospitality, predicated on a liberal notion of mere tolerance, on terms set by the majority community as host. Unlike Garg’s vision, in which the Sikh subject is figured literally as the guest of his Hindu host (Satto) on whose munificence his survival depends, Kaya Taran refuses the terms whereby the majority community merely withstands the minority. The film registers the alienation of Sikh subjects from the Indian nation following Operation Bluestar, in scenes where Jaggi and his mother both narrate that they did not celebrate Diwali that year, in mourning for the devastation of the Golden Temple. It was partly on pretext of this perceived betrayal that the Hindu mob (sponsored by local politicians, as the film also notes) attacked them. The terms of reconciliation are therefore forged on an acknowledgment rather than erasure of this affective estrangement on the part of Sikh citizensubjects. The possibility of multireligious coexistence too, is predicated not on an erasure of the signs of otherness but on its visibility in the form of the Sikh turban reappropriated by Preet at the end of the film.
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Conclusion Foregrounding the vulnerability of male bodies in the scenes of communal violence examined in this chapter undoubtedly brings with it the risk of “rephallicization and recentering within patriarchal nationalisms” of the vulnerable masculinities in question (Puar 182). It perhaps also risks obscuring power differentials between women and men that so often during the Partition and in subsequent moments of communal violence gave men across religious communities the power to decide the lives and deaths of women, as we will see in the next chapter. And yet I would argue that it is necessary and worthwhile to foreground such vulnerabilities—if only as a reminder that in the communal riot men become vulnerable by the same patriarchal rules that first appoint them as the privileged somatic bearers of religious identities, into which women enter merely by association. Male vulnerability is often the flip side of the power and privilege accorded to men in the scheme of patriarchal nationalism. Moreover, as Jisha Menon points out, the erstwhile silence on male vulnerability to violence in various sites of memory (artistic, academic, and popular) “serves to displace attention from the emasculated male body, thereby upholding it as virile and robust, ready to assume the tasks of nation-building” (147). Rather than preserve the machismo of the male body in this way, this chapter presumes there is something to be gained from the awareness that the condition of gendered vulnerability is one that men share with women
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and indeed with other gendered subjects. In chapters 3 and 5, I will return to the representation of male vulnerability via Arundhati Roy’s novel The God of Small Things and in antidisappearance activism in Kashmir to consider how such vulnerability is not always a function of power but often of severe disenfranchisement within the framework of the nation-state. Before that, however, let us go on to consider the ways in which the pressures of patriarchal nationalism in the moment of Partition at once shaped and erased from view the extraordinary violence against women by their own menfolk.
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2 The Violence of Memory Women’s Re-narrations of the Partition “I told you the truth,” I say yet again, “Memory’s truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else’s version more than his own.” —Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children
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Family Violence, Memory’s Truth It is now a commonplace that in 1947, as Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh mobs fought one another in the violence of India’s Partition, women became, in the way that is typical of war, primary symbolic and literal targets of communal violence. Feminist historians of the Partition have noted the staggering range of sexual brutalities that Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh women suffered at the hands of rioting mobs during this time: “stripping; parading naked; mutilating and disfiguring; tattooing or branding the breasts and genitalia with triumphal slogans; amputating breasts; knifing open the womb; raping, of course; killing foetuses” (Menon and Bhasin, 43). In addition to these, women were subjected to another prevalent form of violence that had long remained unacknowledged—although highly visible—in the powerful cultural memory of the Partition: the preemptive “sacrifice” of women by their families in order to save family and community honor. Menon and Bhasin note that “so powerful and general was the belief that safeguarding a woman’s honour is essential to upholding male and community honour that a whole new order of violence came into play, by men against their own kinswomen; and by women against their daughters or sisters and their own selves” (44, original emphasis). As survivors have so frequently testified, numbers of women (and often children) were “poisoned, strangled or burnt to death, put to the sword, drowned”; we also know that women frequently burned,
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shot, or strangulated themselves and their daughters; they ate opium and swallowed crushed glass (45). These are the dead with whom this chapter is concerned. Who speaks for these dead? How have their deaths been given meaning in the memorializing narratives of family, community, state, nation, and not least in the discourses of feminism? It is not that such women’s deaths were unknown or unremembered. Tales of women going to “honorable” deaths with stoic resolve have been only too pervasive in the South Asian cultural imaginary. Consider, for example, the deified practices of sati, self-immolation by widows upon the funeral pyres of their husbands, and jauhar, a form of mass suicide by immolation supposedly committed by Rajput women in medieval India in order to avoid capture and violation by enemy Muslim armies. The suicides of women during the Partition fit quite neatly within these heroic narratives of women’s self-sacrifice and could be memorialized accordingly. For instance, writing about an iconic scene in Govind Nihalani’s television series Tamas, in which a large number of Sikh women heroically stride to the communal well in order to commit mass suicide, Purnima Mankekar recounts that the scene had recalled jauhar for an upper-caste Hindu friend and doubtless for other Indian viewers as well (313).1 In Nihalani’s narration, which echoed the community narratives that had already emerged around such deaths, the brave Sikh women (so the story went) gave up their own lives proudly, willingly, rather than have their honor besmirched by mobs from the “other” community. This has been the stuff of what Rushdie calls “memory’s truth”—that selective, subjective mode of recollection that “creates its own reality” around events even as that reality remains unverifiable (211). What had been unacknowledged in such popular and often spectacular memorializations, then, was never the fact that women had died for the sake of family honor, but that such deaths constituted a violence. However, since the publication in 1998 of two landmark feminist oral histories, Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin’s Borders and Boundaries and Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence, this “memory’s truth” has come to be vigorously contested by feminist scholars, writers, and filmmakers, who have produced their own narratives to transform the ways in which these deaths have been popularly remembered (Rushdie 211). In arguments that echoed very closely the heated feminist debates over sati in the 1980s, yet which needed fresh enunciation in the context of sacrificial family violence during Partition, feminists have insisted that the “suicide” of large numbers of women for the sake of honor be reframed and named as “violence”—that too, violence perpetrated within families and communities rather than simply being brought upon them by hostile enemies. One of the ways in which they have been able to show this is by recourse to women’s accounts, which often
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resist the rhetorics of “martyrdom,” “bravery,” “duty,” or “sacrifice” found in men’s narrations of these women’s deaths. Women’s accounts have thus been undoubtedly crucial for a feminist rememorialization of the deaths of women for the sake of honor. This work exemplifies the value of women’s accounts even as it acknowledges the often sectarian and conservative discourses recirculated by women themselves. Indeed, we would be remiss to take for granted the category of “women” rather than examining the construction of women’s subjectivities through the categories of religion, class, and caste. Here I attempt to fracture the category of “women’s accounts” of Partition and make explicit the intersectionality of gendered subjectivity with communal belonging and citizenship. This would allow us to position these “women’s accounts” not only against “men’s accounts” but also against a supposedly secular yet implicitly Hinduized discourse of “India.” This chapter is concerned primarily with a series of representations in which feminist scholars and artists in South Asia have attempted to bring about this rhetorical shift in order to question the patriarchal remembering of such killings as “martyrdom,” “bravery,” “duty,” or “sacrifice” on the part of the women who died in these tragedies.2 The readings below explore how these representations exhume this long-disavowed intracommunity violence against women by interrogating the familial, community, and national narratives around such violence. At the same time, this chapter also considers the ways in which these representations fit into or complicate the shifting ideas of India underwriting Partition violence, as well as the memorialization of this violence in the postindependence period.3 If the ideas of India prevalent at Partition shaped the forms of violence unleashed during this time, the narrativization of these violent forms in official and popular memory—and indeed in artistic representation and feminist discourse—has also reciprocally shaped evolving ideas of India over the last several decades.
Kashmir 1947 There could scarcely be a better place to begin this examination than an early memoir of the events of 1947 in Kashmir by Krishna Mehta, the wife of a civil servant at Partition and later herself a nominee to the Lok Sabha as the first woman MP from Kashmir. Published originally in the late 1940s or early 1950s by the Indian government, Mehta’s memoir gives an account of the Pakistan-backed raiders’ attack in Muzaffarabad (now in Pakistan) in October 1947 and has come to be known for its evocative account of the experiences of “women” during this time. Mehta herself had moved to Muzaffarabad from Srinagar only a few months earlier with her husband Duni Chand Mehta, the newly appointed district commissioner of Muzaffarabad. With
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her husband murdered soon after the raiders’ attack, the memoir recounts her experience of being on the run to cross into the new India with six children in her charge. Mehta’s memoir merits our attention as a rare personalized account, by a woman, of the fallout of the Partition in Kashmir, a region that in Partition studies has been marginalized by the historical emphasis on Punjab and more recently Bengal, even as Kashmir remains solidly lodged in nationalist remembrance of 1947 in both India and Pakistan. In particular, the text carries a poignant, if sometimes sensational, eyewitness account of the suffering of women, including the suicides by drowning of women faced with the possibility of rape and conversion by the raiders. I begin with Mehta’s text in order to illustrate some of the dangers of simply adding accounts of “women’s experiences” of violence to the history of Partition without an adequate attention to the interpretive dimension of such experiences or to the ways in which “the evidence of experience . . . reproduces rather than contests given ideological systems” (Scott 1998, 400). I am equally interested in the trajectory and manner of this memoir’s recent reappearance in India. As Sara Ahmed argues, “To track what texts do, we need to follow them around. If texts circulate as documents or objects within public culture, then our task is to follow them, to see how they move as well as how they get stuck” (105). In this spirit, I wish to examine how and where this narrative of women’s “suicides” has moved in tandem with an evolving narrative of “India” to which Kashmir (the site of these tragedies in Mehta’s text) has always been central. Consider, then, how this text has circulated before returning to claim our attention in the past decade. Mehta’s memoir was published originally in Hindi by the Indian government’s Sasta Sahitya Mandal (Inexpensive Publications Body) as Kashmir per Hamla (Attack on Kashmir). Its original date of publication is difficult to trace, but the book was subsequently translated into English by an unknown translator and published as Chaos in Kashmir by the Calcutta-based Signet press in 1954. In 1966 it was republished under the title This Happened in Kashmir by the Indian government’s Publications Division. Excerpts of the book appeared in 2002 in Urvashi Butalia’s edited volume Speaking Peace: Women’s Voices from Kashmir. Finally, it was brought out in its entirety by Penguin India in 2005 as Kashmir 1947: A Survivor’s Story. These changing iterations speak to the varied narratives through which Mehta’s memoir has traveled over the decades. The text’s title has changed repeatedly, from the sensational, Indian state-allied rhetoric of “attack” (Kashmir per Hamla) on Kashmir declared in its Hindi title; to Signet Press’s barely less alarmist English title Chaos in Kashmir; to its state-sponsored republication under a title that proclaims a disinterested statement of facts, This Hap-
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pened in Kashmir. From here the memoir came to be excerpted in Butalia’s Speaking Peace, an anthology that, while including a range of perspectives on the history of Kashmir, bears a distinctly feminist critique of the Indian state’s militarized occupation of Kashmir. Finally, it was republished by Penguin India under a new title that underscores its status as an eyewitness narration (“A Survivor’s Story”). This text, in short, has evinced a remarkable political portability across nationalist and state agendas on the one hand, and feminist frameworks on the other. The memoir’s recent reappearance after a gap of more than three decades may be located at least partly by the renewed interest in Partition studies since 1997, when the fiftieth anniversary of Indian independence occasioned an energetic reflection on the legacy of 1947 in journalism, fiction, publishing, and cinema. This return to Partition, as Priya Kumar insists, “demands to be read in terms of the politics of the present” (90). The republication of Mehta’s memoir in the early twentieth century, first as excerpts in Butalia’s Speaking Peace and then in its 2005 Penguin avatar, must accordingly be considered in light of gathering national fears of another impending partition in Kashmir itself, where the popular demand for independence from India has been unrelenting since 1947.4 Mehta’s memoir receives a very different framing in both of these recent versions. While Butalia’s redaction of the memoir in Speaking Peace situates and perhaps appropriates the memoir to its critique of the Indian occupation of Kashmir, Penguin’s 2005 edition, as I will show, taps into a mainstream Indian sentiment that is often contiguous with the narratives of Hindu nationalism on “the Kashmir issue.” To track this text’s reemergence in terms of the “politics of the present” is to see how it has functioned as a site through which “Kashmir 1947” has been made significant for “India” today, through a particular memorialization of gendered violence (Kumar 90). In a perceptive review of the Penguin edition, Andrew Whitehead rightly takes Penguin India to task for the absence of any substantive notes or introduction explaining the original motivations, historical context, or conditions of publication of Mehta’s memoir. As he points out, it matters that the memoir first appeared as “an officially sanctioned account of the invasion by Pakistani tribesmen, and was regarded as worthy of republication in the aftermath of the 1965 war”—both India–Pakistan conflicts being fought over the disputed region of Kashmir (5). Indeed, the omission of contextualizing notes is of a piece with Penguin’s overall presentation of the book, which leaves it suggestively open to a well-worn narrative about Kashmir that is today widely prevalent among India’s Hindu middle class—the largest segment of the class of Indian buyers that Penguin courts with this edition. In this narrative, Kashmir is a state of spectacular beauty, ruined by Pakistanbacked Islamist militants with the support of Kashmir’s antinational Muslim
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majority. Kashmiri Muslim militants and citizens are together responsible for the tragic suffering of Kashmiri Pandits, the rapes of Pandit women, and finally the exodus of the Pandits from the Kashmir Valley. The beautiful valley belongs rightfully to India despite Pakistan’s claims on it. Or, as the simple Hindutva refrain encapsulates it all: “Kashmir hamara hai” (Kashmir is ours). India’s failure to honor the promised plebiscite, whereby Kashmiris would themselves be able to vote on whether to remain a part of India, is a bracketed detail. This chestnut is silently eloquent in the cover and back blurb of the Penguin edition. On the book’s sepia-toned cover is featured the familiar image of a shikara on the Dal lake at sunset, “a clichéd signifier of the Valley,” which never appears in the memoir itself (Kabir 59). The image activates the entrenched idea of the Kashmir Valley as a “territory of desire”—Ananya Jahanara Kabir’s phrase that describes quite exactly the discursive production of Kashmir in the Indian imagination as a site of national desire. Kabir shows how, since the 1860s, the camera’s gaze has produced the Kashmir Valley as a “fetish for the nation-state,” generating a national desire for the valley through colonial-era photography, Hindi cinema, and television (15). The stock image of the “shikara on the Dal lake” has been integral to this fetishizing visual scheme, which typically “foregrounds the Valley’s landscape, and, occasionally, the ruin in the landscape; [but] prefers to eliminate Kashmiri people, monuments in use, and homes” (17). The use of this image on the cover of the Penguin edition must therefore be read within this longer genealogy, within which the shikara image has come to function as a clichéd signifier not only for Kashmir but also for the national yearning it inspires.5 In this respect, the image taps into the “mimetic capital” that Kabir argues accrues around views of Kashmir from the nineteenth century onward.6 Mehta’s own narrative thus comes to the reader already embedded within this Indian national(ist) desire for Kashmir. The poignant narration of women’s suicides at the heart of Mehta’s book is thus harnessed to this ubiquitous nationalist narrative about Kashmir. While the dominant landscape image of the Kashmir Valley that Kabir describes is frequently devoid of Kashmiri people (except perhaps as silhouetted shikara boatsmen), the Penguin book cover superimposes on this backdrop the image of a beautiful woman in a sari, presumably representing the author, who bears a clearly Hindu name. She is the survivor of the travails described on the dramatic blurb on the back cover: The raiders who barged into Kashmir in October 1947 had more than territory on their minds. As they advanced, they left behind them a trail of dead, many of them women who killed themselves to protect their honour. Krishna Mehta’s
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husband was District Commissioner of Muzaffarabad, and he was away repelling the attack when the Marauders reached their home. Six children in tow, Krishna escaped to find safe shelter. Over the next few days and nights, hungry and thirsty, she and her family moved from one house to another, turned away from each by their hosts after a day or so for fear of the raiders. Finally the raiders caught up with them—and it was in captivity that Krishna realized the full horror of the situation. Yet, she never yielded. In the end, even her captors, pitiless thus far, were so moved by her spirit and dignity that they took it upon themselves to protect her, cutting across religious divides. Kashmir 1947 is a portrait of a woman fighting for survival in an extreme time. Set during the dark days in Kashmir when the state was under siege, it is a gripping account of courage and resilience, all the more fascinating and powerful because it is entirely true. (Emphases added.)
Reiterating a familiar narrative of sexual threat, Pakistani infiltration, and displacement of innocent Hindus from the legendarily beautiful valley, the blurb also makes handy use of the Hindu epic that has throughout postindependence history provided the ideal through which Hindu nationalists have sought to anchor the idea of India: the Ramayana.7 If there is any doubt that the above summary quietly but surely (even if perhaps unwittingly) casts Mehta’s story in the familiar mold of that epic, we might simply count up the embedded tropes of the absent husband, the arrival of marauders at the unguarded home, and the abduction of a woman who “never yielded,” who survived her ordeals with virtue intact.8 Through these elements, the book’s description draws in the Hindu Indian reader by joining itself to an enduring allegory of the Ramayana in Hindu political rhetoric around sexually endangered and abducted women. Its tropes resonate—because they have always been deployed—across the narratives of the Partition, the Pandit departures of the 1990s, and the Kargil war of 1999, a postindependence history that yokes the tragic history of violence in Kashmir to a benevolent and protective Indian state. Mehta’s memoir of Kashmir in 1947 is thus joined to an evolving idea of India—an idea to which the valley of Kashmir has been central from the very beginning, and continues to be so, as evinced by Hindu nationalist claims to bring India back to completeness (akhandata) by reintegrating Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, not to mention the Hindu middle class’s general support of the terrific military presence of India in Kashmir. The question then worth asking is whether the Hinduized narrative signaled through the book’s cover and blurb is one that is upheld by a reading of the text itself. And if so, what explains its selection for a feminist volume that critiques precisely this narrative about the history of Kashmir? Is it merely the fact of the author’s being a woman, or does this text also interrogate
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patriarchal community and state narratives about the “suicides” of women in general and the putative antinational character of Kashmiri and Indian Muslims in particular?
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Reading Partition Memoirs As a first-person recollection, by a woman, of gendered Partition violence, what can Mehta’s memoir tell us about the time it recollects? The recent reception of the text has predictably revolved around the question of what it can reveal about “how things were” in 1947 in Kashmir. Urvashi Butalia, in her introduction to the excerpts included in Speaking Peace, writes that the memoir provides “a valuable documentary account of the turbulence of those times,” that it “records not only the trials and travails of the hazardous journeys Krishna Mehta made, but also the courage and friendship—often from those designated as ‘enemies’—she met along the way” (1). If Butalia is willing to accept it as a documentary account, the late Pakistani critic and journalist Khalid Hasan responds with incredulity to Mehta’s account. In a review of the book on his website, Hasan points to several aspects of her story that he finds difficult to believe, while also objecting to Mehta’s stubborn dismissal of the violence that Muslims had experienced at the same time. Countering Mehta’s insistence on the singular victimhood of Hindus during this period, Hasan offers his own researched account, noting that about two hundred thousand Muslims of Jammu province were killed in 1947. Andrew Whitehead adds that Mehta’s account focuses singularly on Hindu casualties, although most accounts suggest that it was largely Sikhs who had died in the violence. Whitehead and Hasan both usefully remind us that there are other versions to the story Mehta tells, accounts that restore Muslim and Sikh victims of the violence in Kashmir and prevent us from forgetting that Mehta’s memoir represents a markedly Hindu woman’s perspective on the violence of the time. Justifiably dismayed by Mehta’s explicit denials of the violence experienced by Muslims (including Muslim women) in Jammu, Hasan concludes: “How I wish she had written a book that could have done justice to her experiences truthfully.” As I have argued in chapter 1, such documentary ascriptions to literary fiction and nonfiction of the Partition, while not unfounded, remain insufficient in accounting for what such sources may actually be able to tell us about the time. We might, however, accept Butalia’s imputation of documentary value in light of James Young’s reminder of the etymology of the term “document,” which “retains echoes of both its Latin origin documentum—a lesson—and
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its French root docere—to teach” (19). Thus the act of documenting constitutively entails a pedagogical aspect, so it must itself be understood as an act of interpretation rather than a simple cataloguing of “facts.” I would here invoke Joan Scott’s caution against the use of “experience” as unmediated “evidence.” In this I follow Butalia herself, who in The Other Side of Silence argues at length that if experience is evidence of anything at all, it is evidence of the subject’s interpretive apprehension of events, both as they unfolded and in retrospect. And so we might ask: If Mehta’s memoir is a “documentary account” of turbulent times, then what sort of document is it? What lessons are both learned and taught in its writing—about gender, about violence, about nation and its narration? The perils of considering experience as conduit to “reality” or “truth” have been noted by Joan Scott in her well-known essay “The Evidence of Experience.” Scott argues that “experience is a linguistic event” available only in narration and is in fact “contested, contextual and contingent.” The experience of “reality,” to which “evidence” supposedly leads us, is itself discursively constructed and thus always representational.9 In a similar vein, Homi Bhabha identifies the critic’s task as “show(ing) how historical understanding is transformed through the signifying process” (447). From memorial recollections, historians and literary critics alike must (and indeed can only) seek not a chronicle of events and experiences at a given moment in history but a tracing of the discursive logic ruling those happenings and the manner of their comprehension in multiple public and private discursive sites. In this respect, Antoinette Burton’s antiverification approach in her book Dwelling in the Archive is useful: sidestepping the bogus question of the reality or fictionality of women’s autobiographical and fictional writings, Burton attends to the tropes (specifically of home and domestic space) that repeatedly emerge in their writing. She mines those memory-tropes in the archive of women’s writing for the only kind of “evidence” they can possibly yield: “the full range of subjectivities . . . including those that [the archive] erases, suppresses, buries, denies” (17). Anticipating the objection that women’s writing belonged to the “private” domain of memory rather than the public arena of history, Burton counters: “The fiction that History continues to tell itself is that there ever was such a thing as the “private”—that quintessentially gendered domestic space-in-time—when in fact the discipline has been instrumental in reproducing the private as women’s domain.” This opens a space in history for all testimonial discourse otherwise thrown under the doubtful shadow of the “private”: the historical value of testimony lies in the fact of testimony, not only in the facts in testimony.
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Gothic, Melodrama, and Memoir Although Butalia finds that Mehta’s memoir is “written almost like a diary” that provides a record, it is with the instinct of a gothic novelist, not a diarist, that Mehta crafts her tale. The first chapter, “The Gathering Storm,” promptly introduces the reader to “the deep stirrings of the unhomely”—the defamiliarization of the familiar that characterizes the uncanny or unheimlich, in Freud’s articulation (Bhabha 445). The uncanny structures this opening chapter through an aura of foreboding, registering the author’s estrangement from her surroundings even before anything untoward has occurred. Mehta notes her immediate unease upon arriving in Muzaffarabad: “The place was not unfamiliar to me, but on this occasion I could somehow not enjoy being there. I was filled with a vague fear of my surroundings, though I did not quite know why, and felt like running away from the place” (2). Invoking a familiar gothic iconography of a darkening storm through the chapter’s title, Mehta steadily builds her narrative around seemingly supernatural intrusions into the space of her home in Muzaffarabad, a home in which she had never felt quite at home. Here is an unhomeliness that in Mehta’s description is marked by an estranging outside: charting the setting around their bungalow, Mehta describes the bungalows of her neighbors, a hospital, and a mosque, making particular note of “a Muslim shrine on the edge of a dense forest.” Of the barely used path leading from one side of their bungalow to this Muslim shrine, she writes, “Occasionally, a lonely dog walked up the path in search of prey, and one could hear the screech of vultures and owls” (2). It is this eerie path between the Mehtas’ bungalow and the Muslim shrine that becomes a marker of the unheimlich in Mehta’s remembrance and narration of this time. She notes that strange events continue to occur through the month: a servant drops a plate of offerings to the deity on Janmashtami, and Mehta immediately takes it as “a premonition of dark days ahead”; several snakes make appearances throughout the house, putting everyone on edge. “Death seemed to be coming at us from all directions,” Mehta writes (3). The premonitions, the ominous atmospherics, the iconography of stormy weather, the screeching of vultures and owls, the presence of snakes, all in and around the space of an unsettling house—these elements of narration combine the Hindu belief in premonitions and bad omens (apshagun) with some of the classic codes familiar from ghost stories and gothic fiction.10 I point to some of these stylistic features in order to acknowledge Mehta’s careful narrative construction of her memoir as a tale to be told rather than as a transparent documentary account. The use of gothic tropes here allows Mehta to convey an experience of unhomeliness, while also drawing the
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
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reader into an often-sensational narrative that promises and delivers on the usual elements of gothic, salient among which is the threat to a woman.11 And although these tropes drop away in the subsequent chapters, their presence in the opening chapter anticipates gothic’s “threat to woman” as one of the primary preoccupations of the memoir itself. Displaced from her home when the raiders attack, the remainder of Mehta’s memoir recounts her experience of the arduous journey to cross into India with her three daughters and a young niece, all between ages nine and fourteen, as well as her two sons, aged seven and twelve. Threaded through Mehta’s narration of this journey are several accounts of women’s violation during this time: Mehta recounts the abduction, rape, forced conversion and suicides of so many women, with an ever-present sense of the danger of any of these befalling Mehta and her young charges themselves. It is as she recounts the fear of these sexual dangers that Mehta begins to negotiate the patriarchal discourse of “death before dishonor” in a way that compels closer examination. When the time comes to flee the house that is surrounded by raiders, Mehta remembers to take only two things with her: a bed sheet, and a guptee (a sword stick) “so that if there was any danger of molestation, my children could kill themselves with it” (10). The sentiment is repeated like an anxious pledge every few pages, as if to offset the guilt of the survivor who lived to tell the tale: “I was willing to kill myself and the girls, if the worst happened”; “I told my sons, ‘ . . . if they are going to shoot you, die bravely. . . . And to Veena I said, ‘If it is too hard to face death, just remember how Indian women of old went to their death without flinching’” (28, 29). Once the raiders catch up with them, Mehta once again whispers to her daughters about what she had said before: “Don’t let them touch you, my daughters. Jump down the hill or throw yourself into the river if need be.” To this her daughter Veena, having “by now imbibed some nobility of desperation” (Mehta says this without irony but the statement exposes the pedagogical labor involved in propagating such “nobility” to which young women are not readily receptive) replies: ‘“Don’t worry, mother. You better look after my little brothers. We will see to it that we do not disgrace you’” (32). In schooling her young female charges in the ideology of death before dishonor, Mehta invokes the long traditions of sati and jauhar, in which “Indian women of old went to their death without flinching” (29). These invocations reveal how existing practices and the patriarchal narratives around them shaped the violent practices during the Partition as well. Although these repetitions seem to confirm Mehta’s investment in the ideology of death before dishonor, her firsthand observations about the women
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who actually died in this way betray a more complex interpretation at work in the literary witness left to us in her memoir. In the chapter titled “Mass Self-Immolation,” Mehta provides the most detailed description of the suicides she had witnessed:
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What I saw there I shall never forget. Before that I had only heard about the women who had jumped into the river; for the first time I saw the tragic spectacle of humanity surrendering life so willingly and for no great cause at that. Some women still stood on the edge of the bank with forlorn looks on their faces and a few others were knee-deep in the water. They threw their children first into the rushing river and seemed impervious to the shrieks and yells of their own infants. . . . The mothers looked on vacantly in front of them. Prolonged suffering had wiped out all colour and emotion from their faces. Then they jumped in themselves. Meanwhile, the children upon the bank . . . ran to their mothers’ sides and clasped them around the knees with a strength that comes only with despair. The raiders toiled hard not to let these women die. They cajoled and they threatened; they even drew their guns and shot at some of them who were beyond reach. But the desire for self-immolation was too great and they all went to their death with a seeming lack of pain, pity or feeling. (40)
From this account, despite Mehta’s reverence for the ideology of “death before dishonor,” it would be impossible to glean the valorized narrative of martyrdom that patriarchal testimonies about such women’s deaths have typically produced. Far from valiant subjects who choose death (and thus qualify for martyrdom), the suicidal women described by Mehta somewhat recall the figure of the Musselmann in Holocaust writings, the concentration camp inmate who had given up on life and become the walking dead.12 If we read past Mehta’s guiding interpretations of “humanity surrendering life so willingly” or the women’s “desire for self-immolation,” these captive women—“impervious to the shrieks and yells of their own infants,” “[looking] on vacantly in front of them,” their faces “wiped [of] all colour and emotion,” exhibiting “a seeming lack of pain, pity or feeling”—rather bring to mind Primo Levi’s description of the Musselmann. “Weeks and months before being snuffed out,” Levi writes, “they had already lost the ability to observe, to remember, to compare and express themselves” (Mehta 40; Levi qtd. in Agamben, 34). Incapable of testifying, the Musselmann was the impossible witness who was also, paradoxically, the only true witness, for no survivor can testify for the dead. As Giorgio Agamben notes: “The ‘true’ witnesses, the ‘complete witnesses,’ are those who did not bear witness and could not bear witness. They are those who ‘touched bottom’: the Muslims, the drowned. The survivors speak in their stead, by proxy, as pseudo-witnesses; they bear witness to a missing testimony” (34).13 We might understand Mehta as simi-
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larly bearing witness to a missing testimony: the account above testifies not only to what she saw but also to the incompleteness of her own witnessing, the lacuna at the heart of any testimony that can survive such an event. In other words, Mehta’s description obviates the ascriptions of such women’s martyrdom and bravery in male narrations—not by showing how the women were “forced” to kill themselves by the lustful raiders (although this is likely what Mehta believed) but by capturing the absence of these women, something akin to the evacuation of their subjecthood, in this moment of death. In sum, even as Mehta’s witnessing of this scene comes already embedded in existing patriarchal nationalist narratives about sati (heroic widows ascending the pyre with stoic resolve and without betraying pain), the “missing testimony” (Agamben 34) of the dead gapes through her own testimony in the form of the women’s bodily postures, which compel us to interpret this seeming painlessness as a function of a subjective absence rather than of a misattributed heroic agency. But even in Mehta’s own account, it is “prolonged suffering”—and not the goddess-like superagency typically attributed to the sati and also to the women who “sacrificed” their lives during Partition— that leads to these women’s suicides (40). (Of course, the reason here is that Mehta wishes to highlight the villainy of the Muslim raiders and produce these deaths as murder rather than suicide—but murder by the tribesmen, not by the strictures of communal honor.) It is true that women tell the story of these deaths quite differently than men do, but this way of narrating the other women’s deaths—as not heroic but desperate—also becomes necessary in order to explain the fact of Mehta’s own survival, or rather, of her refusal to commit suicide. Mehta describes how, shortly after arriving at the abovementioned scene of mass suicide, her twelve-year-old son implores her to kill herself as he himself prepares to drown in the river. Seeing her desist, he remonstrates: “You are a coward . . . You want to die a shameful death and you won’t lift your little finger to avert it. You needn’t fear death, Mother, only have something worthwhile to die for’” (41). Notwithstanding all her previously declared resolutions to die faced with the threat of violation or conversion, Mehta now refuses the option of suicide. She refuses not because there is any hope or possibility of escape on the horizon; by her own account, Mehta was one of only four women present who refused to kill themselves or their children, even as they clearly faced the same risk of violation as the women who did kill themselves. She refuses thus: “Don’t you think I could jump into the river if I wanted to? But do you forget your father? When Papa hears about it, he will be utterly miserable. I must know first what has befallen him. Then only I can know what to do” (42).14
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Mehta cannot, of course, frame her refusal to die as a “selfish” decision she took for the sake of her own life. Her refusal echoes the women in Menon and Bhasin’s oral history, who similarly justify their refusal to die by claiming that “someone had to stay back and cook for the men if they survived” (54). In Mehta’s writing, survival becomes a duty not to herself, nor even to her children, but to her husband. If Mehta’s urge for survival is at this point justified by her hope or faith that her husband is still alive, later it is his death that is summoned to justify her survival. Summoned by the Pakistani chief some time after she has learned of her husband’s death, Mehta, fearful of what the summons might mean, recounts making a (somewhat provisional) attempt to end her own life. She tightens around her neck “a piece of red string from her hair,” but only faints, to be revived soon after. She then resolves to face the situation: “I felt an urge to prove myself worthy of my husband. . . . I once claimed half boastfully and quite seriously before my husband, that if a woman was strong in her faith and her discipline, she would have a thousand men worshipping at her altar in sheer admiration. My husband had laughed off my claim. Here then was a chance to make it good and perhaps if I came out of it unscathed, I would not feel so guilty towards my husband” (54–55, emphasis added). Fashioning herself as a Hindu goddess, Mehta decides that her husband’s death can only gain meaning from her “unscathed” survival, and thus she must confront the dangers ahead. Here we witness an intriguing reworking of the Hindu patriarchal ideology of pativrata dharma, wherein the being of the Hindu wife is validated entirely through that of her husband, whom she should ideally predecease. If Mehta’s invocation of her husband to justify her continued existence seems to speak the ideology of pativrata, it also represents a subversion of this ideal through the parallel ideal of stri shakti, iconized by Hindu goddess figures that “contest or displace the more prevalent models of female meekness, subordination, and obedience (in the form and in the service of ‘pativrata’) derived from the mythological Sita-Savitri-Anasuya paradigm” (Rajan 1998, 35). Whereas at Partition the Hindu ideals of good womanhood and good wifehood were cited in prevailing discourse as the reason one should die for honor, here good wifehood is cited by Mehta as what compels her to preserve her own life: survival is ingeniously produced as a wifely duty. Unlike the other fictional representations examined in this chapter, this is not a text that self-consciously “interrogates” the violent ideology of deathbefore-dishonor. Rather, it represents a resourceful circumvention of this discourse, as the author seeks to explain her own survival of the gendered violence to which so many other women fell prey. The memoir displays at once Mehta’s stated investments in this deadly patriarchal discourse and
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the desire to evade its deadly grasp, as well as the difficulty of rejecting the imperative to die outside of the scripts of Hindu womanhood. In upholding an ideology from which she herself claims exemption by a series of discursive maneuvers, Mehta’s narrative testifies to what Veena Das calls “the hyphenated relation between legislation and transgression.” She writes, “It is not that first there is a law and then a transgression—first an individual who is completely defined by the norms and then one who transgresses” (Das 2007, 73). Mehta’s memoir demonstrates the fine discursive negotiations through which the “transgression” of patriarchal norms is staged alongside and even through an observance of them.
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What the Body Remembers Whereas Mehta notably elides the experiences of Sikh women in Kashmir during this time, the diasporic Sikh Canadian writer Shauna Singh Baldwin attends specifically to the Sikh experience of Partition, exploring the gendered dimension of this experience for both Sikh men and women. In distinction from popular and scholarly discourse on Partition, in which the violence suffered by Sikh women is often subsumed under accounts of violence against Hindu women, Baldwin’s novel What the Body Remembers situates the narratives of “martyrdom,” “suicide,” and “sacrifice” within a specifically Sikh history and hagiography. In the post–Operation Bluestar period and in the Sikh diasporic context of Baldwin’s writing, that Sikh history has come to be inextricably linked to a critique of the Indian nation-state. Baldwin’s memorialization of Partition from the vantage point of the 1990s through Sikh history requires us to account also for the ways in which that history has come be harnessed in the Sikh diasporic memory toward a critique of “India,” which is perceived as having betrayed Sikh subjects. Consider, for instance, the U.K.-based artists The Singh Twins’ miniature collage 1984, which utilizes the idiom of Sikh hagiography to portray the storming of the Golden Temple during Indira Gandhi’s Operation Bluestar. 1984 evinces how the image of Baba Deep Singh—resonant across Sikh history as a figure of sacrifice for the Sikh faith and put to ingenious patriotic use in anticolonial and nationalist bazaar prints15—comes in the Sikh diasporic imagination to be refigured as a martyrdom brought about by, not for, the Indian state. This gives us a very different cognitive map to grasp the lineage of such violence against Sikh women (but also men) and its experience, and it goes against the subsuming of Sikh women’s experiences within the rhetoric of jauhar and the elision of that experience by narrators like Mehta under the rubric of “self-immolation.” It also drives a wedge between the reverential memorialization of such deaths
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of “Hindu and Sikh women” and the project of Indian nationalism by delinking “Hindu and Sikh women,” even as Baldwin acknowledges the close correlation between Hinduism and Sikhism at the time. Here I explore the literary strategies through which Baldwin stages the violence of women’s “martyrdom” by their own families, as well as the rhetorical effacement of that violence by an ascription of “willingness” to the dead woman. Additionally, Baldwin’s text exhumes the material body of Kusum, refusing to let it be read as purely metaphoric in implication. And Baldwin selects for representation a scene of beheading rather than the iconic scene at the well in Nihalani’s Tamas and more recently in films like Sabiha Sumar’s Khamosh Pani and Meghna Gulzar’s Pooranmashi. While beheading perhaps lacks the aesthetic dimension of silent and rippling waters (which may explain why cinematic representation has gravitated toward the latter), Baldwin’s selection of this scene for fictionalization also necessarily recalls the centrality of beheading to Sikh hagiography, which in turn recalls the patriotic visual labors through which decapitated Sikh martyrs were incorporated and appropriated into the narrative of sacrifice for Indian nationalism. Baldwin shows how the act of beheading scripts the woman’s death as a sacralization—not after the fact but in the very act of violence. My analysis links this invocation of Sikh history by this secondgeneration diasporic Sikh writer to the later context of Sikh nationalism as one that marks an alienation from India.
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Violence, Memory, and Embodiment in What the Body Remembers Although Baldwin specifies a debt to Urvashi Butalia’s oral history in the acknowledgments of What the Body Remembers, it would be a mistake to take the novel as merely derivative in its exploration of gendered violence and memory. As I hope to show, literature’s very borrowings from historiography may best reveal the distinctive ways in which the former can elucidate and remake the memory of violence in the cultural domain. The narrative strategies by which What the Body Remembers dramatizes both the violence of women’s sacrificial deaths as well as its effacement are revealed through a particular focus on the body and its relationship to violence and representation. Worthy of consideration also are the narrative strategies of focalization by which the novel demonstrates how patriarchal narratives produce an optical blindness with regard to embodied violence against women, which the novel itself seeks to restore to view.
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Spanning nearly two decades leading up to the Partition, What the Body Remembers tells the story of Roop, the daughter of Bachan Singh, a man with some clout in the border village of Pari Darwaza in pre-Partition Punjab. Impressed from a young age with the inevitability of marriage and children, sixteen-year-old Roop accepts a proposal from the middle-aged landowner Sardarji, whose first wife Satya had borne no children. A rivalry between the two develops; the enraged older wife Satya commits suicide shortly before Partition, and shortly after her death, Roop and Sardarji, finding themselves standing suddenly in the newly drawn country of Pakistan, journey across the border to India to start life anew. Baldwin’s synoptic novel of almost five hundred pages offers a thick description of this border community, dwelling on the gendered processes of Sikh subjectification and particularly on the ways in which men and women are enjoined to “remember” community through both narrative and embodied acts. The final moments of violence in the novel are to be read within this pre-set framework, wherein Baldwin explores the many kinds of memory work that gendered bodies do for the communal body. If, as Ernst Renan famously wrote more than a century ago, “[f]orgetting, [and even] historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation,” it is conversely the case that nations are imagined by the creative and often inventive activity of collective remembering (11). Theorists of nationalism have frequently suggested that the reproduction of nations and other imagined communities is contingent on the performance of regular acts of memory that draw upon the community’s shared past to propel it into the future. Thus, Benedict Anderson writes that nations inevitably seem to “loom out of an immemorial past”; so crucial is that sense of “hoary antiquity” to the existence of nations, that history and tradition are often, as Eric Hobsbawm has observed, simply invented (Anderson 11; Hobsbawm and Ranger). In Homi Bhabha’s influential formulation, the nation is a discursive entity “narrated” into being in two simultaneous registers: the pedagogical and the performative, the former looking into the past and the latter looking toward the future, the two modes together constituting what Tom Nairn names the “the modern Janus” of the nation. While these theorists largely emphasized how the nation is produced and sustained through a series of iterated narrative practices, feminist scholars such as Anne McClintock, Gayatri Gopinath, and Kavita Daiya have drawn attention to material and embodied aspects of nation construction, underscoring the constitutive role of gendered bodies and specifically the heterosexual reproductive imperative that nations enforce in order to regenerate themselves. Bringing together these insights on nation,
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community, and gendered bodies, What the Body Remembers dramatizes the regenerative impulses of the community via twin themes of storytelling and sexual reproduction, two parallel modes of “remembering” through which the Sikh community in the novel perpetuates itself psychically and physically. Both modes of remembering, Baldwin suggests, are deeply gendered and embodied, and certainly the novel’s title speaks to its close exploration of gendered bodies as the material repositories as well as producers of communal memory. The novel consistently reflects upon the power of storytelling in the formation of Sikh subjectivity. Assimilating diverse and sometimes competing “stories” narrated by different characters, it cues the reader early on that, in fact, “stories are not told for the telling, but for the teaching,” drawing attention to its own pedagogical intent (46). Within the novel, the domain of storytelling is dominated by men: even when women tell the stories, it is men who control the narrative. Baldwin’s novel, however, seeks to intrude upon the masculine domain of storytelling by absorbing and retelling the stories told by men from within the feminist framework of its own fictional discourse. As it reflects upon the psychic effects of such storytelling in the life of the community, the novel also strains to establish that the stories exchanged between men and heard or passed on by women have decidedly corporeal effects for both. In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry observes that “what is ‘remembered’ in the body is well remembered” (109). Scarry attempts here to make visible “the political identity of the body,” which, she writes, “is usually learned unconsciously, effortlessly and very early” (109). The body’s political identity is not merely inscribed upon or imposed from without the body but must also be seen as arising from within the body, given the body’s “refusal . . . to disown its own early circumstances, its mute and often beautiful insistence on absorbing into its rhythms and postures the signs that it inhabits a particular space at a particular time” (109). A similar concept of bodily memory appears to be at work in What the Body Remembers, which suggests that memory comes to inhere (and not just adhere) not only in narrative but also in the very body of the listener. Thus the novel explores how “the political identity of the [Sikh] body” is produced and secured through a repertoire of stories—particularly through stories of embodied suffering, for the stories that stick in the body are stories about bodies. These range from Bachan Singh’s narration to his son Jeevan of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre with its martyred Sikh bodies, to the Sikh Aardas, featuring the “the forty Sikhs who stood by the Guru at his last battle against a Mughal tyrant; Sikhs cut limb from limb by Muslim tyrants; two sons of the tenth Guru bricked up alive in a wall for their refusal
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to convert to Islam; martyrs whose scalps were removed; men who were tied to wheels and their bodies broken to pieces; men and women who were cut by saws and flayed alive by Mughal emperors for their faith, but did not convert to Islam” (50). It is through such remembrance rituals and narrative practices that the memory of historical violence, and of other violated bodies, descends into the body of the listener and hardens into instinct. The novel illustrates effectively how the representational apparatus of Sikh communal culture produces a “martyrological consciousness” integral to the processes of Sikh male subjectification in a moment of violent political transition.16 Thus, later in the novel, Roop’s husband Sardarji is unreasonably apprehensive about Muslims because “Sardarji’s body remembers life-preserving fear, passed down centuries in lori rhymes his mother sang him, in paintings displayed in the Golden Temple Museum in Amritsar, in poem and in story” (339). The body itself, shaped as such within the archive of communal memory about other bodies, becomes the archive of such memories. If, in the novel, men remember through a regulated set of narratives, women literally re-member community through reproduction. At various points in What the Body Remembers, women are reminded that having babies is what women are for: this ideology is responsible for the death of Roop’s mother in childbirth as she tries to deliver yet another child; and it is what occasions the entry of the young and fertile Roop into the household of Sardarji; and it leads to the eventual ejection from the same household of Roop’s jealous co-wife Satya, whose barrenness only adds offence to her stubborn, quarrelsome, and already “unwomanly” disposition. If this cherished re-membering capacity of women’s bodies constrains them in everyday life, it renders them particularly vulnerable in times of communal strife. In the novel, the most tragic fallout of this imperative to reproduce becomes evident toward the conclusion in the horrifying fate that befalls the women of Pari Darwaza, who are sorted for various kinds of violence according to their reproductive potential. The key act of violence however, which unifies the novel’s thematic concerns and preoccupies most of its concluding chapters, is that which befalls Roop’s sister-in-law Kusum during the turmoil of Partition. Back in Pari Darwaza, Kusum is killed, her womb removed, and her body cut up in multiple acts of horrendous violation, with the dismembered fragments then reassembled. Explicitly recalling the novel’s title—What the Body Remembers—this dismembered, re-membered body compels a close reading in light of the novel’s preceding exploration of gendered, embodied remembering. Following the family’s exodus to India, Kusum’s husband, Jeevan, and her father-in-law, Bachan Singh, both of whom have seen Kusum’s body at different
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stages of dismemberment, give their separate accounts of Kusum’s death and mutilation to Roop, who is curious to learn what happened to the women of Pari Darwaza: Kusum, Roop’s paternal aunt Revati Bhua, and the family’s longserving maidservant, Gujri. I will focus on these testimony scenes in order to examine two related aspects of Baldwin’s complex construction of the events surrounding Kusum’s death. The first is the manner in which those events are narrativized in the testimonies of the two male family members. The second is the refracted image of Kusum’s mutilated body itself, emerging as it does in the text only through the layered perspectives of these male testifiers. These two aspects of the novel’s representation of violence together point toward the disfiguring violence of representation, through which violence against women seemed to disappear from view.
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“Listening in stereo”: Gender and Testimonial Discourse The testimony scenes in What the Body Remembers resonate heavily with the testimonial accounts of Partition survivors in Urvashi Butalia’s book The Other Side of Silence. These scenes also illustrate what feminist historiographers identify as a “gendered telling of violence,” which distinguishes men’s dominant narrations from those of women, in whose testimonies silences are often as or more telling than speech (Menon and Bhasin 54). The master narrative of such events within the family or community is constituted by men’s stories, which are typically “told in the heroic mode” and emphasize the valour of the dead woman through a strict disavowal of fear and pain (55). Women’s narrations, on the other hand, necessarily engage with the gendered realities of their lived experience—even though they might appear broadly to resemble the dominant narration of the men, they depart at significant points to challenge male narrations, if only implicitly. Ethnographers have found that it is often the silences of women (often signaling non-agreement for instance), rather than what is explicitly said, that draw the tangent from male narrations. This is why, as oral historians Kathryn Andersen and Dana C. Jack have said, “to hear women’s perspectives accurately, we have to learn to listen in stereo, receiving both the dominant and muted channels clearly and tuning into them carefully to understand the relationship between them” (qtd. in Butalia 2000, 280). Baldwin’s construction of the testimony scenes urges in the reader precisely such a practice of reception by giving textual form to the dominant and muted channels of narration around violence. The novel uses four devices to deconstruct the eyewitness narrations of men and to reveal them as “tellings”—self-interested creative narrations, even
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
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fictions, rather than objective chronicles of fact. One of the main techniques Baldwin uses to foreground the interpretive quality of the men’s own narrations is a complex manipulation of male and female perspectives in the testimony scenes, where the eyewitness narrations of the male testifiers are largely focalized through their female listener Roop. Whereas the narrative control in each of these scenes belongs to the men, it is nevertheless the perspective of their female listener that most often prevails in them. The second device consists of Baldwin’s insertion of italicized text to provide Roop’s alternate perspective, setting it in relief to the dominant male narrations of Jeevan and Roop’s father. Third, the testimonial narrations of the men are marked by internal inconsistencies that call into question their interpretive as well as their factual reliability. Fourth, Baldwin constructs a motif of ambivalent evidence across the two testimonies in order to challenge the neat projection of violence outside the familial, communal, and individual self in the men’s narrations. These devices effectively foreground the structure and significance of the telling itself, rather than allowing the reader’s attention to be monopolized by the events described therein. They puncture these male narratives in order to make space for the muted perspectives of women with regard to gendered violence within the family; and significantly, they caution the reader to approach the men’s accounts with the same skepticism that is manifest in Roop’s reception of them. If the men’s stories are representative of the dominant modes of telling through which the account of violence has come down through memory, Roop’s consciousness suggests a model of skeptical listening through which such tellings have been received by women and must be received by future listeners. In this way, Baldwin disrupts the tendency of the (largely male) eyewitness narration of such violence to be taken as the authoritative or “truthful” one, encouraging critical readings of the same and highlighting the interpretive dimension of the eyewitness account. Ultimately, the novel’s testimony scenes are set up not to reveal the extent of truth, lies, or misunderstanding in eyewitness accounts, but rather to reveal how such accounts often embody and provide the narrative optics through which violence can disappear—even as blood can be seen. The novel accordingly inculcates in the reader a doubting interpretive stance by foregrounding the relation between violence and representation. Jeevan—Kusum’s husband and Roop’s brother—narrates his story first, recounting his rescue mission to Pari Darwaza to bring the family out to safety. As Jeevan tells his story, the text frequently shifts perspectives between Jeevan and Roop, so that the reader alternates between “seeing” the events at Pari Darwaza as focalized through Jeevan and “hearing” Jeevan’s
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account from the perspective of Roop in the act of listening. The shifting perspective reveals a gap between the factual details of what Jeevan sees and his questionable interpretation of those details as he recounts them to Roop, whose act and modes of listening are foregrounded in the text. Jeevan reports that when he reached the house at Pari Darwaza, he found it unlocked and empty. In the kitchen, “pots rolled past dried pools of their contents, like the severed heads of martyrs”—the image already prefigured in the tales of Sikh martyrdom that Jeevan has grown up with, now foreshadowing his discovery of the fate of his wife Kusum (446). He goes into his dead mother’s room, lights a match, and sees “strange shapes backed up against the wall, [his mother’s] and Kusum’s dowry trunks thrown open, chunnis bordered with woven gold, lehengas, salwars, kameezes spilling over their sides, as if trying to flee” (446). He finds at his feet a “simple, white-clad mound” in the center of the room. Lifting the corner of the sheet he had found “a woman’s body lay beneath, each limb severed at the joint. This body was sliced into six parts, then arranged to look as if she were whole again” (446). The body, he had realized, was Kusum’s. The text switches to direct exchange as Jeevan observes: “[Kusum] looked accepting . . . Almost as if she had been dismembered by her own hand. But that, I told myself, is impossible. Can a woman ask for someone to do this to her? How can she actually desire it, move to her captor with a smile on her lips?” (447). He continues, describing Kusum’s body as he had found it, speculating on what had happened to her: Her hand was like this—unclenched. Her feet were like this—not poised to run. Her legs cut neatly at the thigh, why, they surely must have used a sword or more than one! Why were her legs not bloody? To cut a woman apart without first raping—a waste, surely. Rape is one man’s message to another: “I took your pawn. Your move.” (447, emphasis added)
Nevertheless, certain that there must be a message in this dismembered body, Jeevan had drawn back the sheet and deciphered it: Kusum’s womb had been ripped out and taken away. And Jeevan “reads” this message thus: “We take the womb so there can be no Sikhs from it, we take the womb, leave you its shell” (447). Resonant in Jeevan’s story are a number of elements that typify familial accounts regarding the violation of women in the family: the denial of rape within the family, the understanding of rape and reproductive violence as a communication between male members of the quom (community), and a reduction of the embodied nature of such violence to a merely semiotic act—that is, to a “message.” The most striking part of Jeevan’s telling is his
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
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outright rejection of the possibility that Kusum was raped before being dismembered, in clear contradiction to the physical evidence of her mutilated body. As Jeevan tells it, Kusum’s legs were “cut neatly at the thigh,” probably using more than one sword, and yet, impossibly, “not bloody”—which leads Jeevan to conclude that Kusum was not raped. Lest this factual inconsistency miss the reader, the text alerts us to the sheer implausibility of Jeevan’s understanding through the muted thoughts of Roop: “Even in death he can see Kusum only from the corners of his eyes,” Roop reflects. “For how can he know, how does he know, if she was raped or not, when he has heard the same stories I have heard?” (446, original emphasis). Instead Jeevan wishes to perceive Kusum as the agent of her own death, “as if she had been dismembered by her own hand” (447, emphasis added). Further, Jeevan’s own reckoning that the dismemberment was a “waste” if rape was not involved reveals his own clear understanding of what such an act would and should properly comprise in order to be effective: first rape, then mutilation. (Yet he denies, against all evidence, the possibility that such violence may have indeed befallen his “own” woman.) Underlying his statements is a sure understanding that rape is a violation between men, “one man’s message to another,” rather than an embodied violation against the woman in question. The certitude with which Jeevan looks for, finds, and “reads” the message in the mutilated body betrays his perfect acquiescence to the patriarchal terms on which such brutal violence against women acquires significance as a semiotic rather than an embodied act, such that it is the male recipients of the message who become the victims of the violent act, rather than the women whose bodies were made to bear the violent inscription. As Jeevan sees it, the primary offense of Kusum’s death lies not in the suffering that his wife must have endured, nor even in the violation of her bodily integrity after her death, but rather in the insult to Sikh masculinity that the violated body represents. Bachan Singh’s testimony (situated in the text immediately after Jeevan’s) gives a fuller account of the happenings at Pari Darwaza and the fate of Kusum, Revati Bhua, and Gujri. The details in Bachan Singh’s account provide a crucial corrective to Jeevan’s interpretation of the events, although underpinned by the same patriarchal understanding evident in Jeevan’s testimony—of woman as synonymous with communal borders, her significance contained in and by her womb. Bachan Singh tells Roop that when the mob had arrived at Pari Darwaza, he had thought quickly and decided that, of the women in the family, Kusum alone presented a real concern to him, being still in her reproductive years. Acting decisively, he had called to Kusum and told her how he must act upon the advice of the community leaders. To this, he says, Kusum consented
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
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readily, asking only that he take her to the front room so that her sons would not hear her cry out. Only at this point does the text reveal that Kusum was in fact killed by Bachan Singh himself as he brought down his kirpan on her bared neck—which, he says, Kusum willingly offered, for “always she made no trouble” (456). Faced with Bachan Singh’s palpable grief at the memory, Roop listens with sympathy but also with doubt. Her perspective once again prompts, as in the scene of Jeevan’s testimony, a critical scrutiny of Bachan Singh’s telling. As mentioned above, Baldwin frequently transcribes Roop’s muted moments of doubt into the text in italics, the oblique font neatly suggesting how women in the family must surely have looked aslant upon the ritualized narrations of the men, which disavowed the fear and pain of the murdered women and replaced them with the mantra of women’s valour. Standing in relief, the slanted italics serve to foreground the misgivings with which Roop greets the stories of Jeevan and her father, symbolically filling out the space in the historical record where women’s own narrations should be and suggesting that women’s historical silence may not be read as consent. When Bachan Singh recounts his decision to perform his “duty” to “sacrifice” Kusum, Roop reflects that “Revati Bhua was right—Papaji thinks that for good-good women, death should be preferable to dishonour”—suggesting of course that neither she nor Revati Bhua were in agreement with him on that matter (456). Even so, Roop knows that this is the telling that she herself will pass on to Jeevan as well as his sons, who will be told “that their mother went to her death just as she was offered it, baring her neck to Papaji’s kirpan, willingly, Papaji says, for the izzat of her quom” (456, emphasis added). But although it is clear that Roop explicitly, and apparently uncritically, recognizes her own role as the bearer of the men’s stories, nevertheless, in her brief qualifiers—“Papaji says”; and elsewhere, “Papaji thinks”—is embedded the wealth of doubt that signals Roop’s non-agreement with her father (456, original emphasis). It is through such quiet hesitations on the part of the female listener that the patriarchal investments driving the men’s narrations are laid bare in the novel. Roop not only finds circumspect her father’s stand that Kusum “willingly” bore her neck to the kirpan, but she also casts doubt on her father’s sanitized narration of the beheading itself. As Kusum prepared for her death, Bachan Singhs says, “she turned her back, so I should not see her face, took off her chunni to bare her neck before me. And then. . . .” Here he doubles over in grief and tears—a reminder of the affective complexities underlying male self-constructions of victimhood—but then resumes: “I raised my kirpan high above her head. Vaheguru did not stop it; it came down. Her lips still moved, as mine did, murmuring ‘Vaheguru, Vaheguru,’ as her head rolled
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from my stroke” (456). Now Roop’s muted question punctures the narrative: “One stroke? Just one stroke.” (456). Roop makes note of the dubious tidiness with which Bachan Singh seems to have succeeded in severing his own daughter-in-law’s head from her body. This scene magnifies and displaces a significant moment of doubt from a matching testimony in Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence, where the Partition survivor Bir Bahadur Singh gives an eyewitness account of his father’s beheading of his sister, Maan Kaur. As Baldwin acknowledges her debt to the testimonial archive collected by Butalia, a brief comparison here may illustrate how the novel reframes and “re-members” the representational strategies evident in Bir Bahadur Singh’s telling of his sister’s beheading. In his testimony to Butalia, Bir Bahadur Singh relates that after his father had killed two men outside the family at their own behest (to “save” them from conversion), his sister Maan Kaur presented herself for execution. He narrates: But when my father swung the kirpan (vaar kita) . . . perhaps some doubt or fear came into his mind, or perhaps the kirpan got stuck in her dupatta . . . no one can say . . . it was such a frightening, such a fearful scene. Then my sister, with her own hand she removed her plait and pulled it forward . . . and my father with his own hands moved her dupatta and then he swung the kirpan and her head and neck rolled off and fell . . . there . . . far away. I crept downstairs, weeping, sobbing and all the while I could hear the regular swing and hit of the kirpans . . . twenty five girls were killed, they were cut.17 (180; ellipses in original, emphasis added).
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Unsurprisingly, this traumatic scene comes up again later in Bir Bahadur Singh’s testimony, and he gives a second account: I had two sisters . . . The other one was the first to becomes a martyr, she did it with such courage. I have not seen anyone else with my own eyes. She sat just like this, on her haunches, and behind her stood my father, while I stood next to him. Father and daughter could not see each other. He was behind her. He sat. He did aardas with his kirpan out. And then, when he tried to kill her, something came in the way perhaps, or perhaps a father’s attachment came in the way. Then my sister . . . no word was exchanged. Just the language of the kirpan was enough for the father and daughter to understand each other. They both were sad that this vaar, this hit went waste. Then my sister caught hold of her plait and moved it aside, and my father hit like this, and her head fell . . . (191–92; ellipses in original, emphasis added).
Here, arguably, is the raw material for the fictional scene in What the Body Remembers, wherein the “compliant” Kusum takes off her chunni to bare her neck before Bachan Singh’s kirpan. In Bir Bahadur Singh’s testimony,
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
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whether the first attempt by his father to kill Maan Kaur failed because of the father’s uncertainty or because of a practical detail, indeed no one can say. Bir Bahadur Singh moves past this moment of uncertainty by assigning agency for the violent act equally to Maan Kaur and to his father—she moves the plait “with her own hand”; he moves the dupatta “with his own hands”—this resonates with the moment in the novel where Jeevan suggests that Kusum appeared to have been dismembered “by her own hand” (Butalia 180, Baldwin 447). In his second account, the lack of speech in this terrifying moment is produced as a sign of mutual understanding: “Just the language of the kirpan was enough for the father and daughter to understand each other” (Butalia 192). Despite these denials, Bir Bahadur Singh’s testimony nevertheless evokes the sheer messiness of killing one’s own kin, not to mention that of dismembering a human body—“something [comes] in the way,” perhaps, the kirpan stuck in the dupatta, perhaps a father’s attachment. In the novel, this doubt is smoothed over in Bachan Singh’s neat narration but is displaced onto the female listener. Read against Bir Bahadur Singh’s testimony, the fictional Bachan Singh’s testimony reflects the creative, suppressive, and imaginative work narratives must perform over time in order to arrive at the beautiful myths through which the women’s deaths are given meaning. Where Bir Bahadur Singh uses the language of attack (vaar kita) to describe his father’s beheading of Maan Kaur, in Bachan Singh’s telling he “raises his kirpan”; unlike the “doubt or fear” that impeded the swing of the former’s kirpan, in Bachan Singh’s narration the task was completed smoothly by divine sanction: “Vaheguru did not stop it; it came down” (Baldwin 456). There is grief after, but no hesitation or regret. If on the one hand Baldwin’s rendition of this moment loses the male self-doubt that attended to the practice of killing, on the other hand it captures precisely the erasures required by the patriarchal “fictioning” of such violence as it is passed on to women and through them down the generations. Bachan Singh’s smooth narrative is, however, ruffled in the text by Roop’s suggestive remark: “One stroke? Just one stroke.” Once we pick up on the strain of doubt articulated by Roop, it becomes possible to see several other questionable turns in the heroic narratives set up by Jeevan and Bachan Singh. For instance, when Bachan Singh tells Roop that at the moment of the beheading, Kusum had turned her face from him, he assumes Kusum did this “so [he] should not see her face,” allowing him to carry out his “duty” without being troubled by the sight of her expression. But might we not more credibly infer that the reason Kusum turned from him was so that she should not see his face as she goes to her slaughter at his hands! Bachan Singh’s failure of imagination on this count is of a piece with his, and Jeevan’s, perception of themselves as the main victims of Kusum’s
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death, the father producing himself as a victim of his own obligations, and the son, of the “other” community’s machinations. This is why Bachan Singh can freely speak of his own grief, of his “tears mingling with [Kusum’s] blood,” but never do we hear any mention of her tears, nor any speculation about her grief over a life foreshortened for someone else’s honor; we hear only of her unquestioning valor as she went to her death. Similarly, when Bachan Singh tells Roop what became of his sister Revati Bhua, he holds that she had turned herself over to the mob in the courtyard with “head held high,” heroically offering to eat beef and become a Muslim. This mention of beef jars with Bachan Singh’s own earlier observation that “Revati Bhua almost fainted . . . at the word beef ” when she had heard the mob’s demand that the family come out and convert to Islam (Baldwin 457). Now Bachan Singh maintains that he “didn’t even realize” when Revati Bhua had left his side and walked down from the terrace to the courtyard until he saw her talking to the rioters. If Roop is instantly incredulous at the thought that Revati Bhua, who “never felt an emotion or took any action unless pre-approved by Papaji,” should be so fearless, she is also acutely aware that “Papaji is the teller of Revati Bhua’s tale and he tells it as he wishes it repeated” (458). Roop herself suspects that Revati Bhua might have been under pressure, for despite her father’s assertion of Revati Bhua’s heroism, Roop reflects that “[Papaji] tells her sacrifice as if it is only what he expected of her—that she owed him no less for all the years of hospitality” (458, emphasis in original). And finally, in the case of Gujri, the old maidservant who had come into the household with Roop’s mother and has been there since, Bachan Singh maintains that she had stopped on the way to India, claiming fatigue and refusing to budge, so that he was unable to coax her to move on. Roop’s question, “How could you leave her?” of course goes unasked, yet it lingers in the text as a reminder of the desertion that Bachan Singh is himself unable, and unwilling, to acknowledge (460). In Bachan Singh’s inventory of the Pari Darwaza women who voluntarily, even insistently, give up their own lives, safety, and freedom for the sake of others, what becomes amply evident is the dispensability of the women from whom such sacrifice was clearly expected. Bachan Singh does make it safely to India with his young male charges, Jeevan’s sons, seemingly the only ones among the family at Pari Darwaza who at no point presented to Bachan Singh with an inconvenience warranting their “sacrifice” by murder or abandonment.18 The novel further underscores Bachan Singh’s implication in the violence done to Kusum’s body by way of the repeated motif of indeterminable evidence that surfaces in his testimony, comprising a series of clues that point ambivalently toward Bachan Singh’s beheading as well as the mob’s dismemberment
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of Kusum. After Kusum’s beheading, as her blood “arced, spouted, gushed everywhere,” Bachan Singh relates that he had opened the wedding trunks in the room and pulled out clothes, presumably to stem the flow of Kusum’s blood (456). Finally, he had shrouded Kusum with a sheet that he had found in the wedding trunk and then had run up to the terrace—moments before the Muslim mob battered the door in and crowded into the courtyard of the house. The wedding trunks and the sheet used by Bachan Singh are of course among the same items that Jeevan had observed upon his visit to the deserted house at Pari Darwaza. Their reappearance in Bachan Singh’s testimony is significant not only for their ostensible addition of detail to the question of “what happened” at Pari Darwaza, but more so for the symbolic function they perform in the text. In Jeevan’s narration these objects had numbered among the many signs of disorder he noticed in the unlocked house. Thus, the hastily emptied kitchen with its rolling pots and pans, the open dowry trunks, the gaping hole in the brick wall where his father had kept his money, the missing water bottles of his children from their customary place in the kitchen, and, of course, the dismembered body of Kusum covered with the white sheet—these half-clues had all contributed to Jeevan’s conclusion that it was either the Muslim mob or else his Hindu uncle Shyam Chacha who had killed and mutilated Kusum and ransacked the house. However, by the end of Bachan Singh’s narration it is clear that several of these clues point not to (or not only to) the “other” community but to (or equally to) Bachan Singh himself. Thus, it was not the mob who had killed Kusum; it was Bachan Singh. And while the rampaging rioters had looted Bachan Singh’s savings, it was not they who had upturned the wedding trunks but Bachan Singh himself, as he tried to staunch the flow of Kusum’s blood. Moreover, the rioters’ cutting up of Kusum was only the latter of two consecutive rounds of dismemberment enacted upon her body—the first being performed by Bachan Singh himself, whose act of beheading his beloved daughter-in-law in fact provided the template for the dismembering violence of the mob. Finally, the white sheet used by the mob to cover Kusum after their dismemberment of her was the same shroud left behind by Bachan Singh after the beheading. Running across the two men’s testimonies, these ambivalent evidentiary signs of violence—the upturned wedding trunks, the body of Kusum “sliced into six parts,” the white shroud—all explicitly connect the differently motivated actions of Bachan Singh with those of Kusum’s latter violators (446). I have suggested that as the focalizing consciousness in the testimony scenes, Roop models an attitude of skeptical listening to the gendered tellings of men with regard to violence against their own kinswomen. In question-
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
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ing (and inviting the reader to question) Bachan Singh’s account of the lost women of Pari Darwaza, the figure of Roop restores to the narration the violence that had previously been expunged by Bachan Singh’s repeated assertions of the women’s willingness and his own helplessness in their fate. But most crucially perhaps, Roop directs the reader’s attention back to the body of Kusum as it appears and disappears in the narrations of the men. At the end of his telling, Jeevan, still unaware of Bachan Singh’s version of events, requests that Roop not repeat his account to their father: “Let him remember Pari Darwaza the way it was as long as he can” (451). However silently she accepts this charge, Roop realizes that she must not forget. “I must remember Kusum’s body,” Roop decides, and the narrative voice confirms: “Roop will remember Kusum’s body, re-membered” (451). But what does this woman’s dismembered, disemboweled, re-patched body remember?
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What the Body Remembers In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry observes that one of the many representational paths by which the practice of injuring (which she insists is the central purpose of war rather than its “by-product”) disappears from view is through “redescription.” According to Scarry, “Redescription may . . . be understood as only a more active form of omission: rather than leaving out the fact of bodily damage, that fact is itself included and actively cancelled out as it is introduced into the spoken sentence or begins to be recorded on a written page” (69). In What the Body Remembers, this kind of redescription is plainly evident in the testimonies of Jeevan and Bachan Singh, wherein the violated body of Kusum is meticulously registered, its injuries clearly documented and yet undermined or “cancelled out” by the men’s insistence on treating this body primarily as a missive between communities. Thus Jeevan can detail the injuries on Kusum’s body while parsing them only for the “message,” and Bachan Singh can describe the blood arcing out of Kusum’s beheaded body while still representing it as necessary. The embodied reality of the injury itself disappears at the very moment of its invocation in narrative. In the text, this narrative trait is figured as men’s ability to look at women “from the corner of each eye,” without seeing them (Baldwin 43). Like Scarry, Baldwin too wishes to reverse the nullifying effect of such redescriptions, by foregrounding the injured body at the site of violence via Roop’s injunction to “remember Kusum’s body, re-membered” (Baldwin 451). Yet the text seems to acknowledge the impossibility of restoring this body to view in any unmediated way: this perhaps explains why the text disallows the reader from ever “looking” directly upon the injured body. Kusum’s mutilated
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corpse becomes visible to the reader only at a remove, filtered through the perspectives of Jeevan and Bachan Singh. Mediated through the questionable narrations of the two men, this mutilated body in fact appears once more as an image, somewhat fuzzy, and not entirely distinct in its contours. This refracted image of the dead woman’s re-membered body figures most evocatively the manner in which patriarchal narratives about such killings have tended to vaporize the materiality of the murdered women’s bodies into pure image. It dramatizes what theater scholar Diana Taylor (drawing on the Argentine psychoanalyst Juan Carlos Kusnetzoff) calls “percepticide”—the rhetorical disappearing act by which “violence against women disappears and reappears as pure metaphor” (10).19 If the men in the family look at the body without seeing, the text challenges the reader to see without looking: that is, to perceive the materiality of the body’s injuries without needing to linger voyeuristically over its graphic form. The image of Kusum’s dismembered, re-membered body itself appears in the text as a palimpsest projected by male perspectives and produced by two intersecting vectors of violence, within and between family and community. Its “re-membering” after dissection allegorizes the author’s exhortation to remember this body differently, as well as the convergence between the two kinds of dismembering violence suffered by Kusum. The patched-up body co-implicates Bachan Singh and the mob in her mutilation. Put back together, Kusum’s severed head now merges as one of the six dismembered parts so that to Jeevan they appear as the evidence of one and the same act of violence. The concentration of both kinds of violence onto the same symbolic site (Kusum’s body) compellingly figures what Menon and Bhasin describe as “a continuum of violence that had death at the hands of one’s own kinsmen at one end, and rape and brutalisation by men of the other community at the other” (57; original emphasis). In the novel, this body accordingly describes “a powerful consensus around the subject of violence against women” that cuts across competing communal patriarchies (Menon and Bhasin 57). What the Body Remembers suggests how a feminist literary narration may expose and counter the representational violations of patriarchal memory by foregrounding how bodies are not merely sites or “grounds” of inscription for violence—an overplayed feminist analysis of the place of women’s bodies in war—but as living archives of violence. Revealing how patriarchal memory enacts a kind of textual violence on women’s injured bodies, What the Body Remembers attempts instead to produce a mode of memory that remembers these embodied injuries differently—one way, perhaps, of returning us to the fact of bodily pain that the novel hints at without exploring at length. In returning us to the body—that is, to the fact of its materiality rather than at-
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tempting any simple recovery of it—the text attempts to release the woman’s injured body from its deployment as pure signifier. Of course, the disappearance of women’s bodies into metaphor is not simply a consequence of embodied violence but of its condition of possibility as well. Reading the moment in the novel where Jeevan sees and decodes Kusum’s mutilated body, J. Edward Mallot notes rightly that part of the “message” left by Kusum’s attackers includes “the cruelly obvious body-as-subcontinent metaphor” (173). Here it is somewhat difficult to determine whether the use of Kusum’s body as a metaphor for the partitioned subcontinent can be attributed to the mob in the text or to Baldwin herself. Certainly, the novel’s discourse occasionally seems to risk succumbing to the tropological temptations of woman’s body as a culturally available metaphor, even as elsewhere it critiques the violent symbology of woman as izzat (honor).20 For instance, the text more than once introduces the metaphor of India as a raped woman’s body—a figure that reinscribes the synonymous association between women’s bodies and the nation, which in turn renders real women vulnerable to rape in times of war. In one instance Roop, witnessing the scene of human devastation around her on her way to India, reflects that “[India] is like a woman raped so many times she has lost count of all trespassers across her body”; at another point Roop reflects on British judgments of Partition violence as evincing the savagery of Indians: “Nowhere in their editorials will they acknowledge their own rape and plunder of India” (Baldwin 425, 437; original emphasis). By embedding the trope in Roop’s consciousness, the text produces an interesting indeterminacy regarding the authorship of the trope. On the one hand the trope reminds us of the patriarchal and communal thinking to which Roop, no unambiguous feminist, frequently succumbs in the novel. On the other hand, both moments (above) present Roop in a mode of critical oppositional consciousness, as she critiques the depravity of communal and colonial violence via the rape metaphor, and the reader is drawn into identification with her thoughts. Such indeterminacy presses home the fact that secular, anticolonial discourse too has always been as reliant on patriarchal discourse and its symbology as colonial and communalist discourses have. Despite these textual slippages, I believe that the mutilated body of Kusum may yet be read as a trope for, among other things, the violence of troping. In other words, the trope of the dismembered body allegorizes most pointedly the violent effects of the prior troping of women’s bodies in the discourses of patriarchy—a trope for nation, a trope for community, a trope for male honor. After all, it is the prior troping of woman as nation that makes the woman’s dissected body meaningful as a trope for Partition; the prior troping of woman
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as male honor that makes rape and reproductive violence against women intelligible as an act of emasculating violence against men, and which makes her death preferable to such “dishonor.” If anything, what the dismembered body in What the Body Remembers prompts us to see is how woman is all too often prefigured in the sinister scripts of patriarchal representation—symbolically and literally, as dead metaphor.
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Conclusion The feminist re-narrations of Partition examined in this chapter help us to rethink the Partition and its communal and national legacies in important ways. In deconstructing the heteropatriarchal ideology at the heart of community and writing its violence back into the communal self, I want to suggest that the work done by Baldwin and Butalia, as well as reshaping the discourse on family and communal violence in the Indian subcontinent, also amounts to a transnational feminist project that imaginatively undoes the Partition. That is, these writers counter the partitionist thinking that posits an essential difference between religious communities in the subcontinent. By revealing the violent core of all communities involved in the violence, they defuse the oppositional rhetoric through which Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh, as well as India and Pakistan, continue to imagine themselves in the postcolonial present. The next chapter moves us beyond the violence of Partition enacted in the borderlands of India and Pakistan into the postcolonial moment. If the representations examined up to this point have exposed the violence obscured by the neat term “Partition,” those examined in the remainder of this book implicitly and explicitly give the lie to the myth of “Independence,” by uncovering the violence of the postcolonial state and the hegemonic communities that both produce the state and also act as its agent.
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3 Atrocious Encounters Caste Violence and State Violence “I am a Brahmin, a teetotaller and a vegetarian. I have no social evil, why should I kill people without a reason?” —Daya Nayak, Bombay policeman and “encounter specialist,” denying his involvement in fake encounters1 When they counter you, your hands are tied behind you. All your bones are crushed, your sex is a terrible wound. Killed by police in an encounter . . . unknown male . . . age twenty-two . . . —Mahasweta Devi, “Draupadi”
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It had been in the papers. The news of Sophie Mol’s death, of the police ‘Encounter’ with a Paravan charged with kidnapping and murder. ... All that had been in the papers. The Official Version. —Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
In September 2006 a mob of fifty to sixty caste Hindus in the Indian village of Khairlanji, Maharashtra, descended upon the home of the Dalit Bhotmange family. Dragging out the four family members present in the hut, the mob—armed with axes and stakes, and egged on by the exhortations of caste Hindu women—proceeded to rape, torture, parade naked, and finally murder forty-four-year-old Surekha Bhotmange and her nineteen-year-old daughter Priyanka.2 Surekha’s two sons, Roshan (age 17) and Sudheer (age 18), were also murdered, their genitals crushed with stones after Roshan refused the mob’s bidding to have sex with his sister. The bodies of all four were thrown in the village canal when the crowd had finished with them. The mind-boggling cruelty at Khairlanji was only one of a long series of the many “atrocities” in India’s historical and recent past, the word “atrocity” itself having come to signify acts of inhuman violence of the kind seen at Khairlanji against Dalit and Adivasi (indigenous) peoples. The events at Khairlanji also
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followed the standard contours of such caste atrocities: caste Hindus’ outrage at the upward mobility of the Dalit Bhotmange family; the rape, torture, and parading naked of the women; the genital mutilation and murder of the men; police apathy and collusion with upper-caste interests; and the failure of the state to bring the offenders to book. While most caste atrocities evince some or all of these features, the last—the complicity of the state in caste violence, whether implicit or explicit—appears to be a constant. It is not too far-fetched to argue that the caste atrocity is often also a state atrocity. The title of this chapter refers to the intersection of the “caste atrocity” with the form of extrajudicial state violence known as the “encounter.” Both “atrocity” and “encounter” are terms particular to the Indian state’s official lexicon and widely popularized by the press. As the historical anthropologist Anupama Rao tells us, the term “atrocity,” derived in the Indian context from the colloquialism jatiya atyachar, was legally enshrined in the Prevention of Atrocities (Against Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes) Act (POA Act) of 1989 and broadly refers to the ritual, symbolic, or physical humiliation and violence against members of the scheduled castes and tribes.3 The term “encounter” refers to the Indian police or army’s extrajudicial killing of suspects or prisoners, often by torture while in custody. In “The Official Version,” such killings are typically justified as the defensive response to an ambush initiated by the killed: an escape attempt perhaps, or a show of aggression against the armed and usually numerically superior officers of the state. The popular incredulity around the state’s euphemistic description of such killings as “encounters”—the term disingenuously suggesting an unexpected adventure rather than a planned execution—is aptly expressed in the popular modification “fake encounter killing.” Fake encounters have been utilized by the police in a range of contexts: against alleged Muslim terrorists, against the underworld in Mumbai city, against Naxalite movements across India, and against so-called “antinationals” in Punjab, Manipur, and Jammu and Kashmir. In 2011 the heavily militarized northeastern state of Manipur was second on the “fake encounters” list tracked by the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC).4 Given the lower-caste base of the Naxalite revolt and the racialized construction of the Northeastern tribes in Manipur, the state’s use of torture and encounter killings against Naxalites and Manipuri citizens often takes the form of caste atrocity, even though such killings are unlikely to be classified as an “atrocity” under the POA Act. The intersection between the “atrocity” and the “encounter” reveals at once how the ideologies of caste saturate the state and how the state serves as one of the main enablers for the perpetuation of caste and its related atrocities.
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In this chapter I explore literary and visual representations of such “atrocious encounters” wherein state agents violently suppress the lower-caste and tribal subjects, whether male or female, who are seen to challenge the hegemonic caste community that the state upholds. I begin with Arundhati Roy’s brooding novel The God of Small Things (1997), which tells a story of forbidden intercaste love that ends in the “Encounter” of the untouchable Naxalite Velutha by the “Touchable Police” in the context of caste and communist politics in Kerala in the late 1960s. The legal codification of the “atrocity” in the POA Act combined with the mobilization of this category in Dalit political and media discourse has undoubtedly served to make legible certain forms of violence as caste violence in the Indian public sphere.5 Yet, as Anupama Rao notes, the transformation of a violent event into a legal case also becomes “an act of epistemic containment” as the redefinition of such events as a crime reduces their “range of signification” (Guha, qtd. in Rao 2009, 220). “Legal redefinition,” Rao writes, is “also a form of translation: quotidian practices are recontextualized, and in the process, rendered extraordinary” (220). In contrast, fictional figurations of such atrocities may be better able to capture the wider epistemes and historically overdetermined, everyday practices that produce such violence. While fiction deserves critical study for all these reasons, it is in the domain of visual representation that a public understanding of the atrocity is more centrally constituted. Thus in the latter part of this chapter, I turn to another kind of atrocious encounter—namely, the visual encounter effected by the photographic capture and circulation of caste atrocities in India. I ask what, if anything, is achieved by the circulation of such photographs. Although photographs are often falsely presumed to be transparently referential, I consider through a close reading of their visual and narrative frames how such images constitute the meaning of the caste atrocity rather than simply reporting on it. I wish here to open out the previous chapters’ focus on the violence of religious community in order to include a detailed engagement with the gendered violence relating to caste and tribe as ways of communal and political being in India. In India, Vivek Dhareshwar has observed that “secularism [has] been maintained as another form of upper-caste privilege, the luxury of forgetting about caste” (qtd. in Rao, 10). Dalit and anti-Brahminical critics have frequently complained that progressive critics who have kept up a sustained critique of the anti-Muslim sentiment of the citizenry and the state have not in turn responded with equal intensity to the continued spate of caste atrocities in India. Anand Teltumbde, for instance, observed the sluggish response of secular commentators in India to the torture and murder of
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the Bhotmange family at Khairlanji in 2006, compared with the massive and continued outrage that had followed the carnage against Muslims at Godhra in 2002. If the inattention to caste in mainstream news media and even among secular progressives in India has lately been somewhat countered by a vibrant Dalit blogosphere, constructions of tribe remain underexamined in feminist scholarship in India. In this chapter and the next, I attend to casteist and racialized constructions of ethnic difference (in India’s northeast for instance), and the role of state violence in maintaining these constructions.
Caste, Gender, and Sexuality Some working definitions of caste and its relation to class, gender, and sexuality may be helpful at the outset. Anupama Rao offers an encompassing description of the material and symbolic dynamics of caste:
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Caste is a religio-ritual form of personhood, a social organization of the world through the phenomenology of touch, an extension of the concept of stigma from the facticity of biological bodies to metaphorical collectivities such as the body politic, and most importantly, it is an apparatus that regulates sexuality. Such ideologies are embedded in material forms of dispossession that are also always symbolic forms of dispossession, and they are mediated by the regulation of sexuality and gender-identity through the rules of kinship and caste purity. (5)
Leela Dube notes that sociologically, caste (or jati) signifies a system of kinship or “birth-status [groups]” characterised by the three main principles: physical separation, status hierarchy, and “interdependence” of labor (223). The historian Uma Chakravarti reminds us that the principles of separation and hierarchy of caste groups can only be upheld by an exploitative division of labor—an inequality that is not quite acknowledged by the often-cited formula of “interdependence” between upper and lower castes. Chakravarty clarifies the centrality of lower-caste labor to the economy of caste, and also explains how the labor relations necessary to caste articulate with gender and sexuality: The essence of caste at the ideological level is to protect the purity of the body of the brahmana; a purity that forbids him in engaging in acts of labour which would involve contact with defiling material. Reciprocally it requires that “unclean” castes must perform those tasks for the brahmana. Thus the essence of caste also is the requirement that labouring bodies be reproduced in order that they can be subordinated to maintain the upper castes in their purity. All the injunctions of dharma are predicated upon the labouring lower castes and the reproduction of the labouring being as well as the reproduction of that person’s subordination. (14; emphasis in original)
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Needless to say, the reproduction of this hierarchy of pure and polluted bodies relies heavily on the strict control of sexuality through the principle of endogamy, which permits marriage only within the kinship group and strictly forbids marriage and sexual alliances across caste groups. The Dalit leader Babasaheb Ambedkar was fully cognizant of this interrelation between caste and sexuality when he observed that “[the] real remedy for breaking caste is inter-marriage. Nothing else will serve as the solvent of Caste” (qtd. in Rao, 23). Ambedkar meant this literally: in his view a general social reorganization of caste relations (introducing the practice of interdining for instance) would not be adequate to dissolve caste. He argues that only a “fusion of blood” could dismantle caste at its root, because in his understanding caste is not simply a mode of social but also of biological ordering—much as with race, the purity of the body and of the body politic is secured by the maintenance of caste boundaries.6 Apart from Ambedkar’s clear reading of sexuality as not just one, but the lynchpin of caste, Rao points out that Ambedkar’s comment is significant because of its implicit “acknowledgment of desire between castes.” Since intermarriage would necessarily be a product of choice (rather than an arrangement between families), such choices suggest the possibility of intercaste desire—radical in an ideological context that typically produces desire between castes as unnatural. Arundhati Roy’s novel The God of Small Things too explores the possibilities of intercaste desire—if not in order to propose such desire as a “solvent of caste” then perhaps less programmatically (as befits literature) to posit desire as ultimately escaping the controlling gestures of caste regimes. Below I want to explore how the novel executes its critique of the “Love Laws” not only through its story of intercaste desire but also through an unusual narrative structure that splits and bends back the arrow of time. Detailing the ingenious temporal architecture of the novel, I wish to show how The God of Small Things undoes the “time binds” that constitute the sexually and temporally regulated orders of endogamy and exogamy through which caste reproduces itself. “Time binds,” in Elizabeth Freeman’s formulation, describes the process by which “naked flesh is bound into socially meaningful embodiment through temporal regulation: binding is what turns mere existence into a form of mastery in a process [of] chrononormativity, or the use of time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity” (3). Freeman elaborates that “people are bound to one another, engrouped, made to feel coherently collective, through particular orchestrations of time.” Freeman draws on Dana Luciano’s term “chronobiopolitics, or ‘the sexual arrangement of the time of life’ of entire populations” (3). As a system of organizing labor that also depends on the imposition and regulation of heterosexuality, caste may be understood as a form of just
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such “chronobiopolitics”: an arrangement of lives and relations temporally orchestrated to maximum productivity through “the sexual arrangement of the time of life.” The uncanny temporalities of Roy’s novel attack the violent caste regime of “reproductive futurity” by fundamentally reorganizing the reproductive, future-looking telos of caste.7
The God of Small Things
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Still, to say that it all began when Sophie Mol came to Ayemenem is only one way of looking at it. Equally, it could be argued that it actually began thousands of years ago. Long before the Marxists came. Before the British took Malabar, before the Dutch Ascendancy, before Vasco da Gama arrived, before the Zamorin’s conquest of Calicut. Before three purple-robed Syrian Bishops murdered by the Portuguese were found floating in the sea . . . It could be argued that it began long before Christianity arrived in a boat and seeped into Kerala like tea from a teabag. That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much. (33)
The above lines, which conclude the opening chapter of The God of Small Things, attempt to contextualize the tragic sequence of events that the novel has already recounted in its first few pages. By the time these lines appear we already know that someone called Velutha had died in police custody; that Ammu, the mother of the seven-year-old twin protagonists Estha and Rahel, feels responsible; that Velutha’s death is somehow linked to the death of the twins’ cousin Sophie Mol; that Estha was sent away to his father after Velutha died; and that he has recently been “re-Returned” to Ayemenem, where he now lives in a cocoon of silence, failing to respond even to his lost twin Rahel who has just arrived after years of separation (9). As the novel goes back in time to unravel these happenings, the story that emerges tells of the doomed desire between the upper-caste Ammu and the lower-caste (Paravan) carpenter Velutha. It is this affair that leads to the “Encounter” in which the Untouchable Velutha is hunted down and beaten mercilessly by the “Touchable police”—in the unknown presence of the twins, whose lives are thenceforth shaped by the enduring trauma of the violence they have witnessed. The novel situates the brutal killing of Velutha and its traumatic aftermath within the multiple historical determinants of caste society in Kerala: colonial history, Christianity and conversion, communist politics, and the Naxalite insurrection. However, the primary focus of Roy’s indictment of the atrocity remains on the sexual economy of caste: the endogamous rules of kinship
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enshrined in “the Love Laws” that Velutha and Ammu have transgressed by desiring and loving each other (33). But Velutha’s death is also enabled, like all caste atrocities, by the upper-caste representatives who also control state power. The novel’s assessment of caste and state violence thus proceeds along two simultaneous lines of critique: one repudiating the violent “Love Laws” that control desire, the other exposing the maintenance of those laws by the complicit patriarchies of caste and state.
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Endogamy, Desire, and Violence Roy’s strident critique of endogamy in The God of Small Things is implicit not only in the novel’s tragic plot but also in its experimental narrative structure. As has often been noted, the novel presents its tragic tale of transgression and violent punishment by splitting the story into two separate but intertwining narrative strands: one moving back in time to revisit the past, and the other moving forward, both strands being set in motion by Rahel’s return to Ayemenem at the beginning of the novel. The first narrative strand retrospectively recounts the life-changing events of a two-week period in 1969 in the lives of the twins: the death by drowning of their half-white English cousin Sophie Mol, the killing of Velutha (and a few years later the death of Ammu as well), and the separation of the twins who had once “thought of themselves together as Me, and separately, individually, as We or Us” (2). The second strand tracks the slow and tortured reconciliation of the traumascarred twins when they meet again twenty-three years later, through a shared recollection of the events composing the first strand (9). The dual narrative structure allows Roy to capture the asequential movement of memory as it reconstitutes moments from the past and “imbue[s] them with new meaning” (33). Roy herself has remarked that The God of Small Things is “not really about what happened, but about how what happened affected the people it happened to” (Abraham 90). Indeed, the novel takes the shape of a classic trauma narrative. Structured as a series of revisitations of traumatic events through the subjectivity of the twins, the text discursively replicates the frequent gestures of repetition and reenactment through which trauma survivors typically attempt to take control of their own trauma. In that it is the deeply autobiographical story of the childhood terrors of the writer herself (as admitted by Roy in several interviews), the novel itself arguably constitutes one such gesture of repetition, the writer’s effort to come to terms with and make sense of the terrors of the past through the act of representation.8 The novel is also internally structured through repetition; words, phrases, images, and events recur in the narration. Roy confesses that she favors repetition because it provides a
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“rocking feeling, like a lullaby” that dulls “the shock of the plot . . . or the horror of the settings” (Roy, “Winds, Rivers and Rain”). Along with this anodyne effect, however, the structure of repetition also produces the claustrophobic atmospherics of the cloistered caste universe of Ayemenem. Yet even as the repetitive, circular temporality of the novel sets up the hold of the trauma that the characters appear doomed to repeat perpetually by their inescapable memories, in its final moments Roy attempts to undercut the aura of impending doom that hangs over Ammu and Velutha’s love affair throughout the book. The last chapter, “The Cost of Living,” dwells on the first of a mere thirteen nights of love shared by Ammu and Velutha before “history’s henchmen” in the guise of the Kottayam police swoop in to restore the proper sexual order of things. It ends with the first night of their lovemaking:
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She kissed his eyes and stood up. Velutha with his back against the mangosteen tree watched her walk away. She had a dry rose in her hair. She turned to say it once again: ‘Naaley.’ Tomorrow. (339)
On this parting word of promise, and in the midst of the story’s action, the book closes. Much has been said on the question of what the sexual utopia presented in the last chapter represents politically: is it viable as a political critique of caste? In a broadly positive review, Aijaz Ahmad reads this ending as “the author succumbing to the conventional idea of the erotic as that private transgression through which one transcends the public injuries” (Ahmad 1997, 105). He situates Roy’s novel in a tradition of border-crossing sexual representations in European fiction ranging from D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and E. M. Forster’s Maurice to Hanif Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette—all of which, he argues, dissolve political differences in sexual utopias. Further, he adds, “Cinema, from Hollywood to Bombay, is full of such endings, in which love conquers all and easy personal solutions are offered for intractable social conflicts” (105). Brinda Bose challenges Ahmad’s reading of the erotic encounter between Ammu and Velutha as a realization of some kind of “phallocentric utopia”—a conclusion already rendered unsupportable by Ammu’s initiatory and active role in the novel’s lovemaking scene, which Ahmad himself acknowledges (Bose 36). Bose instead argues that “utopias are not devoid of politics, and a deliberate validation of erotic desire as an act of transgression probably cannot be dismissed as a momentary lapse from the politicization of one’s being” (59). She opposes Ahmad’s positing of the political in opposition to the personal—and indeed any feminist reading of the novel would find it
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difficult to endorse Ahmad’s suggestion that Roy’s “discourse of Pleasure is also profoundly political, precisely in the sense that in depicting the erotic as Truth it also dismisses the actually constituted field of politics as either irrelevant or a zone of bad faith” (Ahmad 104). Bose rightly opposes Ahmad’s restricted notion of “politics” as the field of organized (Naxalite) action—as if sexuality itself stood outside the “actually constituted field of politics” (Ahmad 104). I would like to bring Bose’s observation back to bear on the unique structural function of the novel’s ending, which must be read alongside the two other “endings” in the novel—in other words, the deaths of Ammu and Velutha, and the incestuous union of the twins. Ahmad reads the lovers’ deaths as providing the satisfaction of yet another kind of conventional ending in novels about transgressive desire (the first being the concluding scene of border-crossing sexual union itself); he glosses the moment of incest as “the eroticisation of sisterly mercy” (105). But, I would suggest, the twin’s griefridden incestuous reunion also represents the generational effects of their mother’s brutal punishment. It was, after all, the violent enforcement of the Love Laws that caused the trauma from which the act of incest is both a comfortless refuge and a repetition of their mother’s transgression. Jonathan Culler in his essay “Story and Discourse in the Analysis of Narrative” observes that crucial events in narratives are, rather than being the source of textual meaning, often products of the “demands of signification” and narrative coherence (105). The scene of the twins’ incest in The God of Small Things may be read similarly, as an instance where “event is not a cause but an effect of theme” (105). Of a piece with the novel’s critique of caste endogamy, the twins’ incest thematically expresses the incestuous end(s) of caste itself. Meanwhile, Rukmini Bhaya Nair argues in her review “Twins and Lovers” that Roy’s closing “[opts] in the end for the charm of the fairytale rather than the gravity of tragedy. The God of Small Things prevails.” But I would argue that Roy’s manipulation of the novel’s “ending” pushes the reader toward an overall narrative conclusion that is more complex than either of these critics acknowledge, and it may not be dismissed as a case of easy, saleable resolutions for a fatigued writer. Roy herself provides a useful framework for reading the multiple endings of the novel: “The way the story is told, or the structure of the book, tells you a different story. . . . The structure of the book ambushes the story—by that I mean the novel ends more or less in the middle of the story and it ends on the word ‘tomorrow.’ Though you know that what tomorrow brings is terrible, it is saying that the fact that this happened at all is wonderful. I don’t think I offer you one thing” (Roy, interview). The nonsingular effect of the ending that Roy insists upon here is key to understanding the political import of Roy’s conclusion. Ammu’s hopeful promise—“Tomorrow”—sends
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us back into the thick of the narrative, which has already revealed what had happened on the morrow of their lovemaking: the tragic events with which the novel had begun now attain meaning as the deadly ends of the rapturous desire on which the book closes. Bhaya Nair’s suggestion that the novel opts for fairy tale over tragedy is only admissible if we ignore the manifest dramatic irony of this ending: arguably, the fact that we know (as the lovers themselves do not) what happens “tomorrow” only heightens the tragic tone of the novel rather than defusing it into fairy tale. Nevertheless, it is also true that the novel’s ending strains outward from the grip of the plot, literalizing the unruliness of desire and the final impossibility of regulating it. In fact, one need not choose between these two effects, for the power of the novel’s ending lies precisely in its ambivalence: the narrative effect hovers between the determinism of death and the hopefulness of desire. Indeed, the novel’s formal structure itself encodes the political stakes of the lovers’ “private transgression” (Ahmad). As Bose says, “To lunge, knowingly and deliberately, for what one must not have—for what will result in shame and defeat—is to believe the very process of the pursuit would render the ultimate penalty worthwhile (70). Like the doomed lovers who lunge for what they must not have, the structural ending of the novel strains, against its own self-contained odds, to project intercaste desire outward from the determining hold of tragedy. In other words, this bid—to textually rescue intercaste desire from the grip of violence, which typically overdetermines its “end” (in life and fiction)—is an authorial choice that is already marked by its own impossibility. Far from being apolitical, it is a model for political praxis of the kind that Roy herself has championed in the public sphere for years. Aside from the structural ingenuity and political possibilities that it represents, the novel’s ending is also radical in that it finally offers a deliberate, explicit, and aesthetic imagining of intercaste sexual contact. When the Ipe family finally learns of Ammu’s affair, Baby Kochamma expresses a commonplace sentiment to Mammachi: “How could she stand the smell? Haven’t you noticed? They have a particular smell, these Paravans” (God of Small Things 257) And Mammachi herself visualizes her daughter naked, coupling in the mud with a man who was nothing but a filthy coolie. She imagined it in vivid detail: a Paravan’s coarse black hand on her daughter’s breast. . . . His black hips jerking between her parted legs. . . . His particular Paravan smell. Like animals, Mammachi thought and nearly vomited. Like a dog with a bitch on heat. (257–58)
Refusing to surrender the expression of intercaste desire to the dehumanizing imagination of casteist discourse, Roy counters these images by offering an equally vivid but infinitely more aesthetic depiction of Ammu and Velutha’s lovemaking. Against Mammachi’s revolting vision, Roy imagines in lyrical
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prose “an untouchable tongue touch[ing] the innermost part of [Ammu]” (337). The fully realized erotic passages in the final chapter are there precisely to counter the incomprehension, the unimaginability, of cross-caste desire expressed by Baby Kochamma—precisely, that is, in order to imagine what such desire might feel and look like. This is why the contentious “sex scene” (which prompted one man to bring obscenity charges against Roy) details the intimate bodily contact between Ammu and Velutha—the smelling, touching, licking, and the moment of intercourse, the ultimate transgression. This explicit imagining of sexual desire and consummation between an upper-caste woman and an untouchable man carries much of the feminist and political import of the novel. It presents the woman as the pleasureseeking subject of desire, the Untouchable Velutha as not only desirous but desirable subject. Thus it challenges the caste mentality that demands sexual discipline, especially from upper-caste women, while also giving the lie to the rapacious Dalit male of Baby Kochamma’s fabrications. Nevertheless, perhaps we need to temper readings of this scene as representing the unfettered feminist sexual utopia that Ammu’s initiatory role in the lovemaking at first seems to suggest. Critics have rightly picked up on the affinity Roy sets up between the upper-caste Ammu and the lower-caste Velutha, but they often overlook the cues by which Roy also registers the political differences and the power differential between them. Although Ammu as a woman can identify with Velutha’s rage “against the smug, ordered world” that she herself rebels against, this does not necessarily also translate into a general sympathy with his politics (176). She is undoubtedly a character with all the “grit” that Ahmad observes: divorced, a tender and loving but by no means perfect mother, indeed a mother with sexual urges. While her affair with Velutha is perfectly in line with the self-willed streak in her character, Ammu herself has little regard for left politics and is fairly invested in her own class position—evident, for example, in the many scenes where she exhorts Estha and Rahel to exhibit proper grooming and good manners. Indeed, she is a much more complex character than the idealized subaltern figure of Velutha. For instance, she objects to Margaret Kochamma’s First World gaze, but she also wishes her children to behave like aristocrats rather than clerks (179). It is necessary to acknowledge that Ammu’s sexual advance toward Velutha, however sympathetic, is also irreducibly enabled by her caste and class position. As sociologists have often noted (and as the tragic end of the affair bears out), interactions between upper-caste women and lower-caste men are fraught with the possibility of violent reprisal against the latter by upper-caste men, so that sexual relations between them are very often initiated by upper-caste women rather than Dalit men.9 This explains Velutha’s fear compared with Ammu’s relative calm: “A sudden chill crept over
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him. His heart hammered. It was all a terrible mistake. He had misunderstood her. The whole thing was a figment of his imagination. There were people in the bushes. Watching. She was the delectable bait. How could it be otherwise? They had seen him in the march” (334). If Ammu “takes the initiative in breaking the Love Laws, even as Velutha hesitates,” it is not only because she is a woman of grit but also because she is the only one of the two who possibly can take that initiative (Ahmad 106). For there simply is no space for the expression of Dalit male desire for the upper-caste woman outside the upper-caste fantasy of rape. This discourse of Dalit male rapacity is precisely what makes Velutha fatally vulnerable to Baby Kochamma’s fabricated charges to the police, that the Paravan had kidnapped the white child Sophie Mol and raped Ammu. Adding their sense of caste pride to the lost family honor of the Ipe family, the “Touchable Police” swoop down on Velutha to restore the order of things.
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Patriarchal Complicities of Caste and State Although the scene of Velutha’s “Encounter” only appears toward the end of the novel, the image of his shattered body punctuates the novel from beginning to end and thematizes its inquiry into the relations of caste, gender, and state that cause his death. Velutha first enters the novel “bare-bodied and shining” through the child Rahel’s imagination, as she attends the funeral of her cousin Sophie Mol in the Ayemenem church. Looking up at the painted blue sky on the church ceiling, Rahel thinks of “the someone who had taken the trouble to go up there” and imagines Velutha’s as the face of that unacknowledged laborer in the sanctified space of the (likely high-caste) church: “She imagined him up there, someone like Velutha, bare-bodied and shining, sitting on a plank, swinging from the scaffolding in the high dome of the church, painting silver jets in a blue church sky” (6). But this elegant image of a Velutha-like figure engaged in his airborne tasks is shattered immediately as Rahel considers “what would happen if the rope snapped,” and she now imagines him “dropping like a dark star out of the sky he had made. Lying broken on the hot church floor, dark blood spilling from his skull like a secret” (6). This image of Velutha—bare-bodied, at work, and finally falling to his death on the very premises maintained by his labor—spotlights the intertwined caste, class, and labor relations sustaining the Syrian Christian community in Ayemenem. Velutha is bare-bodied because he is a Paravan, the class of untouchables who were at one time “not allowed to walk on public roads, not allowed to cover their upper bodies, not allowed to carry umbrellas” (74). (This also explains Rahel’s surprise when she sees him at the Marxist rally in a shirt: more than a garment, the
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shirt becomes a symbol of human dignity in the rally against class enemies who are also caste enemies.) Velutha’s unceremonious death (as imagined by Rahel) on the church floor contrasts sharply with the elaborate funeral of the beloved white child Sophie Mol in her “special child-sized coffin” with satin lining and shining brass handles (4). In reality too, at the time that Rahel imagines him falling to his death, Velutha is dying. In the scene toward the novel’s end where the horrified Estha beholds Velutha after the “encounter,” once again (as in Rahel’s imagining) blood “spilled from his skull like a secret.” This time, however, his body now lies not on the “hot church floor” but on the “scummy, slippery floor” of the police locker—the textual resonances suggesting the congruence between the church and the state, which the novel jointly incriminates as the ideological and literal premises of Velutha’s fatal encounter killing (6, 319–20). These two scenes of Velutha’s death bookend the novel’s sustained critique of the state’s central role in preserving the inequities of caste and gender, through official policies as well as by the behavior of its officials. Thus Ammu as a daughter is without locus standi in the writ of the state, while her brother Chacko has claim to the family factory in which they all work. While this institutionalized gender inequality has since been corrected in Kerala (following the legal actions of Roy’s own mother, Mary Roy), reservations policies for lower-castes in India even to this date fail to acknowledge the ground realities of caste oppression, which is not restricted to the structures of Hinduism alone. Dalit Christians in India have been demanding state recognition and inclusion in reservations for scheduled castes and tribes, and this remains an issue of struggle today. In the novel, Velutha himself is descended from the “Rice Christians”—lower-caste Paravans who converted to Christianity in the hope of escaping “the scourge of Untouchability,” only to find that caste had traveled intact with them into their new religion, which improvised for them to have “separate churches, with separate services and separate priests” (74). To make things worse, after Independence these converts found themselves deprived of the state benefits available to other lower-castes since their official status as Christians made them appear casteless. If the Dalit Christians had suffered mistreatment before, Roy reflects that they were now rendered invisible by the unresponsive policies of the state. As also continues to be the case, the disconnect between official policies and the material realities of caste and gender extends beyond government policy and manifests itself in the conduct of the police as the custodians of hegemonic community and patriarchal values. This is apparent in the early scene where Ammu visits the Kottayam police station; it is here, against all expectations, that she intends to set the record straight on Baby Kochamma’s fabrications about Velutha. But when she asks to see Velutha, the lecherous
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Inspector Mathews dismisses her, “saying that the Kottayam Police didn’t take statements from veshyas or their illegitimate children” (8). This language of sexual morality puts Ammu in her place by referring to her status as a divorced woman and the public knowledge of her affair with Velutha (which also suggests that the police must surely have known that Ammu was not raped). When she refuses to be cowed by his words, he approaches her and advises her to go home quietly, and then he “[taps] her breasts with his baton” (8). Reflecting the hollowness of official ideals, this explicit gesture of masculine intimidation takes place in front of a red and blue board that reads:
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Politeness Obedience Loyalty Intelligence Courtesy Efficiency
In this scene, the hypocrisy of the state is not only revealed in the gap between its stated ideals and the impolite, uncourteous conduct of its delegate, but also in the fact that Ammu’s personal dignity is obviously beside the point to the policemen’s moral outrage about her alleged rape. Although Inspector Mathews is the man who had arranged Velutha’s encounter as a reaction to Ammu’s alleged rape, his own treatment of Ammu is far from respectful. It is only what she represents as a “gateway” into the upper-caste that spurs the police to punitive action against Velutha. Although the state police insist on being taking seriously, backing up their threats with real violence, Roy’s satirical construction of the “Touchable policemen” shows scant regard for their show of authority, revealing the hollow core of their carefully constructed aura of menace. Custodians of upper-caste womanhood, the six policemen embark on their mission “Dark of Heart” and “Deadlypurposed,” with a sense of self-importance that far exceeds the task at hand: the decimation of a lone, innocent, and unarmed quarry. In Roy’s relentless caricature, these manly appointees of the state appear in their “wide khaki shorts . . . rigid with starch . . . [bobbing] over the tall grass like a row of stiff skirts” (304). Roy continues to ridicule them in a manner strongly reminiscent of Mahasweta’s fictional treatment of state power, as we shall see: “The Kottayam Police. A cartoonplatoon. New-Age princes in funny pointed helmets. Cardboard lined with cotton. Hairoil stained. Their shabby khaki crowns“ (304). The harshest ethical critique of the novel is, however, contained in the passages that describe the victimization of Velutha. Offered through the eyes of the twins, the scene of Velutha’s encounter is rendered
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through onomatopoeic words and phrases and vivid visuals that capture and relay the sensuous materiality of the event: “ [The twins] heard the thud of wood on flesh. Boot on bone. On teeth. The muffled grunt when a stomach is kicked in. The muted crunch of skull on cement. The gurgle of blood on a man’s breath when his lung is torn by the jagged end of a broken rib” (308). The onomatopoeic thud, muffle, crunch, and gurgle of Velutha’s body as it is being smashed, and the image of lacerated body parts—bone, teeth, lungs and ribs—render palpable the violation of a human body with visual, aural, and indeed visceral immediacy. Similarly, when the seven-year-old Estha beholds Velutha in the police locker, we see Velutha through the childish mind that perceives the broken body in the form of a sinister cartoon that fully relays the exercise of dehumanization that is caste violence: “His face was swollen and his head looked like a pumpkin, too large and heavy for the slender stem it grew from. A pumpkin with a monstrous upside-down smile” (320). Elsewhere, the language used to describe his broken body is clinical, devoid of euphemism: “His skull was fractured in three places. His nose and both his cheekbones were smashed, leaving his face pulpy, undefined. The blow to his mouth had split open his upper lip.” These corporeal details remind the reader of what the policemen forget: “if nothing else, at least biologically he was a fellow creature” (310, 309). Here the text points to the way the category of “the human” functions as a “differential norm” in caste Hindu society, wherein “some humans qualify as human; some humans do not” (Butler 2009, 76). In doing so it “assert[s] a discursive life for a human who does not embody the norm that determines what and who will count as a human life” (76). This appeal to shared humanity elicits from the reader more than concern or sympathy—it attempts to create identification and empathy. Roy herself explains the distinction: “Empathy would lead to passion, to incandescent anger, to wild indignation, to action. Concern, on the other hand, leads to articles, books, PhDs, fellowships” (“Scimitars”). Although Roy acknowledges the worth of “dispassionate inquiry” to politics, it is passionate action that she really advocates in her literary fiction and nonfiction. Her emphasis on the fragility, the breakability of the gendered subaltern body attempts to invoke the empathy she seeks from her readers. And yet, we might ask if such empathy could not have been created by endowing this male gendered subaltern figure with a voice as well as a body.
Arundhati Roy and the Gendered Subaltern Although The God of Small Things has frequently been compared to Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children in terms of style, form, and its critique of colonialism and nation, Roy’s main themes are markedly different from those
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of Rushdie. Despite the inevitable and perhaps obligatory nods to the nation (“[Larry McCaslin] didn’t know that in some places, like the country Rahel came from, various kinds of despair competed for primacy”) and colonial history (the intertextual references to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness), The God of Small Things overall downsizes the grand theme of the nation seen in Midnight’s Children and grounds itself firmly in the local specificities of state politics and social stratification in 1960s Kerala (God of Small Things 19).10 Bishnupriya Ghosh rightly warns that overemphasizing the influence of Midnight’s Children as a moment of literary rupture in Indian writing in English may obscure other political and ethical imperatives in much South Asian writing, including Roy’s: this is true especially as these imperatives change over time (Ghosh 6). Aijaz Ahmad too observes that (resonances with Midnight’s Children notwithstanding), “[for] anything truly comparable [to The God of Small Things], one would have to go to a different Indian language, a different set of formal conventions, different sets of social and political convictions” (Ahmad, 103). Such an exercise might well lead us from Roy back to the Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi, whose writing I explore more fully in the next chapter. Indeed, given Roy’s interest in the politics of class, caste, and gender, she may be better understood as taking the baton from Mahasweta Devi than from Rushdie. Both are perceived as “activist writers,” strongly committed to the dispossessed, although Mahasweta appears to believe in “action” rather than analysis, while Roy sees analysis and exposition as a form of action, and part and parcel of her activism.11 The God of Small Things is set in the context of the rise and spread in Kerala of the Naxalite uprising that had originated in Bengal, where it was the subject of much of Mahasweta Devi’s fiction in the 1970s, including the short story “Draupadi.”12 Roy in interviews speaks of a familiarity with Mahasweta’s writing on the Naxalite movement, and in Roy’s fiction and nonfiction we find the same acerbic derision of the patriarchal state for which Mahasweta is well known. The two writers also take a similar public position vis à vis revolutionary violence, distinguishing its ethical valence from the violence of the state and refusing to pronounce pious condemnations of such violence. While Mahasweta’s fiction openly valorizes Naxalite activity against the state, in many interviews Roy—while not directly endorsing revolutionary violence, and even acknowledging its devastating effects on women especially—has refused to condemn the growing number of violent rebellions in South Asia.13 Despite these broad sympathies, the two writers diverge significantly in their representation of the “gendered subaltern”—arguably a figure that came into view in postcolonial criticism partly through the fiction of Mahasweta, en route of Gayatri Spivak’s translations and critical writings. Whereas the image of the “gendered
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subaltern” is typically female in much postcolonial and South Asian literature and criticism—exemplified by Mahasweta’s protagonists, such as Draupadi, Jashoda in “Stanadayani,” or Shanichari in “Rudaali”—Roy’s The God of Small Things presents the gendered subaltern as male, in the figure of the idealized Untouchable Velutha. Roy’s focus on the Dalit male’s vulnerability might be partly explained by her awareness of the politics of representation around the figure of the Third World woman, particularly the Dalit woman. In 1994 Roy wrote a two-part essay titled “The Great Indian Rape Trick,” a scathing review of Bandit Queen, Shekhar Kapur’s internationally feted biopic on the Indian female dacoit Phoolan Devi. Much of Roy’s outrage about the film was occasioned by extratextual factors: namely, the refusal of the male director and producer (Bobby Bedi) to show the film to Phoolan herself before its release: Phoolan was still alive at the time and had objected to the representation of her own rape on screen on account of the public shame she felt this involved. Roy expressed disgust at what she saw as the film’s single-minded obsession with the fact of Phoolan’s rape, as well as its depiction. She accused Kapur of selecting and altering details from Mala Sen’s authorized biography to create a saleable “Rape ’n’ Retribution” drama, ignoring the fact that Phoolan’s early battles were turf wars fought over territory rather than ones spurred by gender or caste outrage. In Roy’s reading, Bandit Queen collapsed the motivations of Phoolan Devi’s outlaw impulse into the singular fact of her rape: “Rape is the main dish. Caste is the sauce that it swims in” (Roy, “Great Indian Rape Trick”). Roy’s somewhat heavy-handed reading of the film has been nuanced by other feminist critics,14 but more to the point here is that her critique attests to an acute sensitivity to the risks and responsibilities involved in representing lower-caste women as always being recipients of sexual violence. In The God of Small Things Roy steered clear of the Dalit woman as “the most subaltern of subalterns” (the victim paradigm that she had found troubling in Bandit Queen) and focused instead on the vulnerability of the Dalit male body to caste and state violence. And yet, despite the risks Roy points to, surely there must be a way of acknowledging and confronting caste violence against Dalit and tribal women? As Priyamvada Gopal notes of Roy’s reading of Bandit Queen, while Phoolan’s motivations for violence must not be reduced to her experience of sexual violence, “the solution cannot then be to de-gender a specific kind of oppression and suggest that Phoolan’s sexuality would have been irrelevant to the kinds of injustices she faced and dealt with” (Gopal 2001, 300). In the next chapter I examine some representations that compel us to confront the violation of the female gendered subaltern without reducing her to victim. For now, however, I wish to turn to some texts that foreground Dalit and
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Adivasi women’s vulnerability to sexual violence, focusing in particular on a representational form that bears all the risks articulated by Roy: the atrocity photograph, a genre of photography that frames and authenticates “the pain of others” and seeks thereby to provoke viewers’ outrage (Sontag).
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Photographing Atrocity The practice of photographing atrocity emerged most centrally from the archive of war photography dating back to the early 1900s. It has in recent decades come to encompass any photographic work that frames extreme cruelty, the Latin root atrox meaning “fierce” or “cruel” (Prosser 11). Over the first decade of the twenty-first century in the Indian public sphere, there came to public attention a few different atrocity photographs and videos, particularly of violence against Dalit and Adivasi women, that had rarely been seen previously in the mainstream media. Many middle-class Indians will recall seeing these photographs on television, shared on social networks, and found elsewhere online: photographs displaying the body of a Dalit woman, Surekha Bhotmange, after her rape and murder in Khairlanji; of a naked Adivasi woman fleeing through the streets of Guwahati as men pursue her with cameras; and of the dead body of an Adivasi woman trussed to a pole and carried by Indian army personnel after an “encounter” with Maoists in the jungle in West Bengal. What response do such photographs demand of us, and how do they frame their demand? What are the costs of their circulation for the subjects featured? Should we circulate photographs in order to highlight such atrocities, or should we seek other ways of highlighting atrocity that do not place such a burden of proof on the vulnerable to prove their vulnerability? My interest in looking closely at photographs of caste atrocity was sparked by a powerful post in the Dalit feminist blog Savari by Madhuri Xalxo, so it is through Xalxo’s analysis that I wish to route my own exploration of a brief sample of atrocity photographs. Writing in the immediate aftermath of the 2013 Delhi rape case, Xalxo, a self-identified Adivasi woman and a student of law, objected passionately to the continued use of atrocity photographs of another Adivasi woman who had been stripped and beaten a few years prior. From the description she provides, Xalxo was almost certainly referring to an incident from November 2007, when Indian newspapers and television channels beamed a shocking photograph of a young Adivasi woman who had been stripped, publicly beaten, and chased through the streets of Guwahati by a crowd of men. In the ferment of the Delhi anti-rape protests, this particular case had resurfaced as progressive commentators and Adivasi activists called attention to the failure of justice in her case. Notwithstanding the chorus of
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concern on the violated woman’s behalf, Xalxo pointed out that the renewed circulation of the woman’s naked photograph in this moment was “like being paraded naked again and again and again.” While such callousness was only to be expected from caste Hindu society, Xalxo expressed dismay that Adivasi activists acted no differently. Rather than using a pseudonym instead of the real name and pictures of the woman, Xalxo charged, “our Adivasi society would rather gain political mileage by displaying ‘our’ nakedness over and over again.” Anupama Rao notes how by the 1990s, sexual violence had become “a distinguishing feature of caste violence and a sign of its discursive centrality in framing Dalit identity,” partly as a result of Dalit feminists’ challenge to upper caste feminists for ignoring the constitutive role of caste in female sexuality (239). But Xalxo observes that it is still a problem when Dalit and Adivasi women are made to bear the burden of such iconicity for the benefit of the community as a whole (239). In representations that make the violated body of the Adivasi woman stand in for violence against Adivasis as a whole, Xalxo noted that “everybody benefits from her labor/discourse, except her.” Xalxo also reports having this conversation with an Adivasi brother, where the latter argues that “these nasty but true pictures” serve as “proof, so that THEY believe us.” Xalxo’s rejoinder was to note that those unsympathetic to Dalit injury “will not take us seriously even if we show pictures of the injury.” Is it true then that the atrocity photograph carries no potential to elicit an ethical response from those who view it? The conversation between Xalxo and her friend returns us to a familiar question in studies of atrocity photographs: can such photographs make a difference? Xalxo points to an intractable problem with the atrocity photograph: no matter what its intent, it will always implicate the viewer in the “indecency of . . . co-spectatorship” (Sontag 60). This is true even when some identification marks (such as the face) are blurred, since the person in the photograph will inevitably recognize the spectacularization of their shame, even if others do not. Particularly when framing atrocities against “others,” photographs can be double-edged, as Susan Sontag cautioned in Regarding the Pain of Others. Writing about such photographs of African victims of war or famine, circulated in the First World, Sontag noted: “They show a suffering that is outrageous, unjust, and should be repaired. They confirm that this is the sort of thing that happens in that place” (71). Such photographs consolidate as association between wretchedness and “backward” peoples of the world. So also with the circulation of atrocity photographs of caste violence in India: outrageous suffering is both acknowledged and becomes representative of Dalit and Adivasi life and experience as a whole, bleaching out the complexity and richness of such existence.
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Very pertinent here are also Sontag’s cautions about the particular susceptibility of “other” bodies to exposure in the atrocity photograph. In the European and North American media context, Sontag observed, audiences are granted free, full frontal and graphic views of the wounded, the dead, and the dying in Asia or Africa, but never “at home.” In the past decade, these observations have been borne out chillingly on a global scale where we have been barraged by photographs of dead Afghan and Iraqi children by concerned photographers in the media. To take only one recent example of scores of similar photographs, in April 2013, the Huffington Post reported on a NATO airstrike in Afghanistan that killed eleven sleeping children. The article was accompanied by a chilling photograph of the dead children lying on the ground before their funerals, their eyes closed as if in deep sleep (see Gamel). Only a few months earlier, in December 2012, Adam Lanza had shot dead twenty children and six adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. In the latter event, not a single photograph of a dead child (or adult) was to be seen; the children who died in Newtown were pictured in the media always in life.15 As Sontag remarks, the norms deterring the exhibition of dead white bodies do not apply to the bodies of darker others, “for the other, even when not an enemy, is regarded only as someone to be seen, not someone (like us) who also sees” (72). The privacy of grief is reserved for those who are white, whose deaths are already grievable and do not need to be made so by the exhibition of their lifeless bodies. Sontag rightly also links this journalistic practice to the time-worn practice of exhibiting the colonized bodies of darker human beings prompting us to consider how the museumization and exhibition of racialized bodies through the history of colonialism has licensed the ways of seeing that structure visual representations of such populations even today.16 Photography in India has been deeply implicated in this colonial history of representation. The contemporary photographic exhibition of the naked body of a tribal woman must necessarily be located within this history of representation, notwithstanding the intent of such exhibition or even its capacity to inculcate a public horror of caste atrocity (a possibility I do not entirely discount). We must trace the historical provenance of this photographic practice in order to consider how its postcolonial persistence in the “atrocity photograph” may be perceived by the subjects who are visually captured in this mode—namely, Adivasi women. Such a critical practice would position Adivasi women as seers of these photographs rather than merely those who are seen in them. A brief detour into the representation of tribal women in the history of photography in India and its implication with colonial violence will help clarify my point. We know from Zahid Chaudhary that the history of photography in
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India was concurrent with its origins in Europe in the 1830s and quickly became implicated in the British attempt to “pacify” Indians after the Revolt of 1857. Chaudhary shows how, following the Revolt, British governance emphasized surveillance of the Indian population, and photography became a mode of “war by other means” (77). This process took the form of an extensive photographing of “the natives” that culminated in an eight-volume work titled The People of India (1868–1875), which inaugurated the genre of anthropological photography in the Indian subcontinent. Two photographs in particular from this genre, “Group of Five Young Andamanese Women” and “Juang Girls,” both from 1872, have attracted much attention in the scholarship on colonial photography in India. These photographs exemplify the way in which tribal women were stripped and made iconic of an “authentic primitiveness,” which in turn was made iconic of “the people of India” (Pinney 46). In both these photographs, as Christopher Pinney tells us, the women’s nakedness was entirely orchestrated. The photographer G. E. Dobson had seen the central figure among the Andamanese women almost daily dressed “neatly in white,” yet, as Pinney notes, “a photograph depicting her ‘destitute of clothes, shaved, and greased with a mixture of olive-coloured mud and fat’ was greatly preferable, because what Dobson wanted was not to capture in his negatives the complex contemporary reality he encountered, but rather to stage a vision of an authentic primitiveness salvaged from immediate extinction” (46). The photograph “Juang Girls” entailed a similar molestation by the photographer Tosco Peppe, who reportedly had “immense difficulty in inducing [the subjects, ‘wild, timid creatures’] to pose before him, and it was not without many a tear that they resigned themselves to the ordeal” (qtd. in Pinney, 48). In his astute reading of this image, Chaudhary notes how this violence “has left an imprint on the photograph itself, in the glare with which the molested woman on the right stares out at us”—and also, I would add, in the averse, downcast gaze of the woman accompanying her (83). Significantly, all of this was in the name of “salvage.” The photographs of the Andamanese and Juang women were part of what Pinney calls the “salvage paradigm,” the photographic idiom that aimed to visually preserve disappearing customs of fragile indigenous communities (45). To return to the atrocity photograph of the Adivasi woman who Xalxo speaks of: the repeated display of her naked body without her consent but supposedly “in her interest” fits into a longer history of the coerced photographic capture of tribal women’s nakedness in the name of salvage or rescue. While the agents and intents behind this display may vary widely (colonial photographers are not the same as Adivasi activists), their effect is to make once more the body of an Adivasi woman available to a widespread gaze while taking little account of her as the subject who also sees these images.
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This may not mean the photographs are not effective. It is difficult to dispute Xalxo’s friend’s contention that for a middle-class, upper-caste Indian viewing public, the photographs of the atrocity provided graphic and undeniable evidence of what caste violence actually looks like, in all of its brutal detail. Photographs deprive us of the luxury of abstraction and the remove provided by journalistic reports of atrocities. As Jay Prosser observes, “In cases as notable for their photographs of atrocity as Abu Ghraib and the Holocaust, it took the images for us to really believe what went on, even when we already had the words” (7). For non-Dalit/Adivasi observers, the same may be true of the photographs of caste atrocity listed above: to read yet again about the “stripping and parading” of yet another Adivasi woman is one thing; to see a photograph of a man laying his foot directly in the mid-section of a woman as her ripped clothes fall off her (another memorable photograph of this same atrocity that circulated very widely online) is quite another. “So this is what cruelty looks like!” we say. But at what cost, for whose edification, and to what effect? I turn now to two recent atrocity photographs in order to explore these questions. My method below will be to closely read these photographs and their visual and narrative frames in order to understand how they attempt to produce a wider public understanding of “caste atrocity” as a form of violence. The first of these photographs frames the event mentioned by Xalxo in her blog post. In November 2007 The Telegraph, a Calcutta-based daily, carried a front-page article titled “Shame on Guwahati Streets” along with a photograph of a young Adivasi woman who, we learn, had been stripped and beaten publicly. Her face is blurred and her private parts covered by black strips. Her hair untied, one leg off the ground, the woman runs, holding in her left hand the remnants of her bright blue sari that had been torn off her. Behind her are seen a group of men who rush to capture her naked body on their cell phone cameras. To the right of this photograph appears a vertical panel of three separate photographs, which are mug shots of the three local men most directly involved in the attack. Arguably, the downcast eyes of two of the three serve as the visual identifier of guilt, irrespective of whether such guilt or shame was actually felt. The second photograph I wish to examine was first published in June 2010, when the Chennai-based newspaper The Hindu ran a story on the raid of a Maoist hideout in West Bengal. Accompanying the story were two photographs. The first is of a young man who appears with bare torso amid fully clothed security personnel, captioned: “SUCCESSFUL OPERATION: A suspected Maoist who was arrested after a gun battle between security forces and Maoists in the Ranjha forests of Paschim Medinipur district in
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West Bengal on Wednesday. Eight rebels, including three women, were killed in the encounter” (Bose). The second photograph accompanying this story—the one I will focus on here—is of one of these rebels, a woman killed in the same raid. Her dead body is carried by security forces like an animal carcass on a pole. The caption reads: “Security personnel carry the body of a woman who was killed in the raid.” The photographs are presented as a visual aid to a news story about a successful “six-hour encounter,” evidence of the state’s triumph over the population dubbed by the state as “India’s Public Enemy No. 1”—the phrase exemplifying once more the affective placement of this population outside “India.” The photographer for this second photograph is unnamed (the source is listed simply as “PTI”), raising the question of whether this photographic evidence of a “successful operation” was provided by the state itself. It is worth asking why, of the eight dead rebels—among which a minority (three) were women—it is the dead woman’s body that is selected for reproduction by The Hindu, while the Maoist male appears alive, though under arrest. Given the inevitably iconizing function of photographs, what does this gendered process of selection do? Who is the assumed viewer of these photographs—the middle-class Indian readers of The Hindu, or the Maoist rebels themselves? For whom is this “encounter” being staged? A brief comparison between the mainstream news media’s photographic capture and narrative framing of the two images also demonstrates the absence of any cultural consensus on what properly constitutes an “atrocity.” Writing about Nick Ut’s momentous photograph of children running with napalm burning their skin, the photograph credited with massively mobilizing public sentiment against the Vietnam War, Nancy Miller writes that atrocity photographs like these are effective because viewers “cannot fail to register the violation of some profound cultural norm” (148). And yet such norms are far from shared.17 Judith Butler writes in this regard, “There are norms, explicit or tacit, governing which human lives count as human and as living, and which do not. These norms are determined to some degree by the question of when and where a life is grievable and, correlatively, when and where the loss of a life remains ungrievable and unrepresentable” (2009, 74). Thus it was possible for The Hindu to present matter-of-factly the photograph of the dead woman being carried like a carcass on a pole as an accompaniment to a news story about an “encounter” carried out by security forces. There was hardly any sense in the report of this treatment of dead bodies as a violation of a “profound cultural norm.” The same photograph of the dead tribal woman reappeared shortly after in Outlook magazine, this time in color, accompanying an outraged piece by the
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sociologist Nandini Sundar, titled “The Trophies of Operation Greenhunt.” For this article, however, the photograph was repurposed, presented as evidence not of the triumph of the Indian state in quelling the “Maoist threat” but as proof of the state’s brutality toward its own citizens. Sundar cataloged the rampant use of rape by the government’s “Special Police Officers” (SPOs), providing an ironic counterpoint to the government’s stated concerns about the sexual exploitation of women by Maoists. For the women of Dantewada today, she noted, “they are safe from one army (the PLGA) but not from the other (the Indian paramilitary and SPOs/police).” Sundar’s article hints at the likelihood that the photograph released by the state to the Indian public via the media also functions perhaps as a message to the Maoists themselves. The selection of the dead body of a tribal woman functions as a signifier of what the state has done, can do, to female rebels. The photograph iconizes the dead female rebel as an icon not only of tribal women as a whole but also of the Maoist rebellion. In the photographs originally printed by The Hindu, the live male body represents the ongoing Maoist threat, while the dead female body represents the successful subjection of the threat. The photograph of the unnamed Maoist woman became an “atrocity photograph” only when reframed in Outlook magazine’s reprinting along with Sundar’s article. To draw once more on Butler, our task here should “not be to locate what is ‘in’ or ‘outside’ the frame, but what vacillates between those two locations, and what, foreclosed, becomes encrypted in the frame itself ” (Butler 2009, 74). In The Hindu’s first printing of this photograph, encrypted in the frame is precisely the nongrievability of the life of the unspecified “Maoist woman.” There is a dead woman in the frame, her body trussed to a pole in violation of any cultural norms regarding the treatment of the dead, but it is not readable as an atrocity; instead, it is recoded as a successful “encounter.” The loss of life in that frame remains both unrepresentable and ungrievable. In Sundar’s framing, it is given meaning as an atrocity—moreover, as a caste atrocity against a tribal woman. Sundar’s narrative frame makes that lost life in the photograph grievable. It makes atrocious the content of the photograph, refusing its veneer of objectivity. It recomposes an atrocious photograph into an atrocity photograph. Unlike the photograph of the “Maoist woman” printed originally by The Hindu, the image printed in The Telegraph in 2007 was presented as an atrocity from the start, insofar as it was framed, visually and narratively, as a condemnation of the woman’s attackers. The key to reading this photograph is in its inclusion of bystanders, a typical characteristic of the atrocity photograph, which heightens the atrocity by highlighting the bystanders’ lack of response. The photograph, by encompassing this kind of apathetic, spectato-
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rial gaze within its frame, enjoins the viewer toward another kind of gaze, for as Prosser writes, the viewer of such an image “will not want to replicate this failure of witnessing” (10). In the photograph we are examining, the gaze of the onlookers is not apathetic but itself violent, extended in its prurience by the cell phone cameras they are seen wielding. Hardly mere bystanders, the male onlookers in the photograph line up to capture the woman’s naked and fleeing body on their cell phone cameras, their laughing faces betraying their enjoyment rather than their concern as “citizen-journalists” interested in broadcasting the atrocity. In capturing these voyeurs and their leering gaze in the frame, the camera distinguishes its own gaze from theirs and also calls upon the viewer to do so. It is in this gesture of differentiation that the camera designates the scene within the photograph as an atrocity, and the photograph itself as an atrocity photograph. And yet in The Telegraph’s coverage of this event, we see a different strategy of containment, one that mitigates, if not cancels out, a reading of the obscene event as a caste atrocity. In the cover story accompanying the photograph of the fleeing woman and her three central attackers, the sequence of events was described thus: “The victim was probably a participant in the armed Adivasi procession in demand of Scheduled Tribe status that had turned violent and damaged private and public property, including cars.” The paper reported the following month that the NHRC demanded a report from Assam police officials on the incident. The account provided for the violence was as follows: “Trouble broke out in the Beltola area of Guwahati on November 24 when Adivasi students marching towards Dispur Last Gate to demand Scheduled Tribe status started ransacking shops and damaging vehicles. Taken aback by the rampage, local residents retaliated, leaving one person dead and over 300 injured. It was during this counter-attack that the girl was stripped.”18 Both reports followed an all-too-familiar plotline whereby an Adivasi mob breaks into irrational violence and damages public property, occasioning a “counterattack” during which the girl was unfortunately stripped. Missing from this account are some significant details recounted elsewhere by the woman herself. In that account, a young man had run his bike into the marching crowd of protesters, seriously injuring another young woman. The youth refused to take her to a hospital for treatment, angering the Adivasi protesters but gaining the support of the local crowd. It was in the ensuing violence against the protesters that she was subjected to a form of violence so familiar in scenarios of caste violence that it has become emblematic of the “caste atrocity”—stripping and parading (see Bisht). In The Telegraph’s narration, however, we have a classic instance of the redefinition of Dalits and Adivasis “as the perpetrators of social violence rather than its historical
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[and contemporary] victims” (Rao 2009, 165). Despite the outrage it seeks to provoke around the woman’s humiliation, the report participates in producing Adivasi rather than anti-Adivasi violence as the original cause of the atrocity. The caste atrocity is thus made intelligible, ironically, as a result of Adivasi violence, and thus it is presented as not a caste atrocity at all. Here we are returned to Xalxo’s question about whether those otherwise unsympathetic to the violence inflicted on Dalit and Adivasi bodies are likely to be persuaded of their caste-specific vulnerability by a photograph, even one that provokes their immediate horror? The humanitarian narrative constructed around such a photograph can defuse any understanding of this as a caste-specific atrocity, presenting it instead as an unfortunate by-product of caste-based identity politics. Is the gaze of the photograph that appeared in The Telegraph so easily separable from that of the leering onlookers who also photographed the Adivasi woman’s naked body with their cell phones? If we who are outraged by anti-Dalit and anti-Adivasi violence choose to circulate these photographs in order to magnify the visual and visceral evidence of caste atrocity, we must do so while fully bearing in mind the risks entailed by such a practice.
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Conclusion Whereas a novel like The God of Small Things allows for a synoptic excavation and historicization of the deep structures producing the violence of the caste atrocity, a photograph frames an instant. Sontag likens the photograph to a quotation or proverb—photographs constitute a shared cultural memory and may be instantly recalled and cited by entire populations long after their first appearance. Yet for her, photographs lack the power of narrative in producing understanding: “Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us” (89). In Butler’s view however, Sontag overstates the split between prose and photography when she argues that “sentiment is more likely to crystallize around a photograph than around a verbal slogan” (qtd. in Butler 2009, 70).19 Butler contests Sontag’s claim that the photograph fosters unthinking sentiment: “Sentiment can crystallize without affecting our capacity to understand events or to take up a course of action in response to them” (70). Indeed, the sentiment generated by atrocity photographs is neither an automatic obstruction to nor an automatic guarantor of understanding or action. Perhaps haunting is not the other of understanding, but a form of understanding in itself. Perhaps this is why Sontag exhorts after all: “Let the atrocious images haunt us” (115).
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4 “Are You a Man?” Performing Naked Protest in India
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What’s the use of clothes? You can strip me, but how can you clothe me again? Are you a man? —Mahasweta Devi, “Draupadi”
So speaks the raped tribal revolutionary Draupadi in the eponymous story by Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi. In the story’s conclusion, Draupadi refuses to put on her clothes after she has been taken into custody and then raped by soldiers of the Indian army. By refusing the disciplining power of shame scripted into the act of rape, Draupadi becomes, in the words of Mahasweta’s translator Gayatri Spivak, a “terrifying superobject” (Spivak 184). At the end of the story it is Senanayak, the army officer who has sanctioned her rape, who stands before the naked Draupadi—“an unarmed target”—in a state of terrified paralysis usually associated with the victim. In July 2004 a group of Meitei1 women staged a naked protest in the state of Manipur in Northeast India, a region that has seen a long history of separatist movement against the Indian state. The women were protesting the torture, rape, and murder of thirty-two-year-old Thangjam Manorama while she was in the custody of the Indian army’s Assam Rifles battalion, which had been holding her on the charge of militancy. According to press reports, an Assam Rifles officer walked up to the group with hands joined in supplication, pleading with them to put on their clothes, and it was only after much pleading that the group walked away. In July 2007 a twenty-two-year-old woman in the Indian state of Gujarat, Pooja Chauhan, walked in her underwear through the streets of Rajkot, followed by television cameras. She held a baseball bat in one hand, while dangling a bunch of bangles and a red rose in the other. Chauhan was protesting police inaction in response to her complaints that her in-laws had been mentally harassing, physically abusing, and even threatening to kill her for failing to procure a dowry as well as a male child.
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In this chapter I want to consider what it might mean for women in India to deploy nakedness as a tool of embodied resistance against the patriarchal violence of the state. What is the cultural imagination from which these radical protests materialized? How and to what extent do such protests succeed in interrogating the gendered violence of the state, as well as the patriarchal scripts underlying gendered violence more generally? Commentators in India were broadly sympathetic to the protests by the Meitei women as well as by Pooja Chauhan, but there has been relatively little analysis of why nakedness served as a particularly apposite form of protest to the violence of the state, or indeed if nakedness may have signaled something more than just a desperate bid for publicity. If the viability of these protests is to be gauged in terms other than mere theatrical displays, shows of angry desperation, or even a heroic “sacrifice” of modesty, then they must be examined in terms of the meanings and stakes of nakedness in each of these specific contexts. In what follows I attempt to show that although naked protest effects a radical break from everyday norms of feminine modesty in India, there is nevertheless a somewhat coherent repertoire of representations around women’s nakedness or “shamelessness” in which these protests participate, intentionally or otherwise. At the same time, each of these deployments of nakedness also posits a particular relation between women, gender, and violence that deserves scrutiny. Accordingly, my analysis will alternate between mapping the wider context of representation within which all of the above protests emerge into meaning, and the gendered logics specific to these individual protests.2 It is only by doing both that the upshot of these protests may be adequately gauged in a feminist perspective.
Apprehending Draupadi The Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi’s story “Draupadi” is an apt place to begin this examination, not only because it is chronologically the earliest of the instances I consider here, but also because the story’s content as well as its remarkable social life situate it as an important intertext for the subsequent naked protests in India. I will begin, however, with an analysis of the story itself, which is useful both for the profile of the state that Mahasweta Devi sketches at the intersection of gendered, caste, and feudal modes of power, and for its suggestion that violence inheres in a system of meaning as much as in a physical act. “Draupadi” is set against the backdrop of the Naxalite revolt, a major peasant rebellion that began in the late 1960s in the Naxalbari region of the Indian state of West Bengal.3 The peasant rebellion was inevitably also a caste
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rebellion by the largely lower-caste cultivators against the upper-caste feudal landowners. The revolutionary movement in favor of agrarian reform grew in response to several generations of feudal exploitation in the form of extremely low wages, exorbitant rates of interest charged by landowners, and sexual exploitation of tribal women, among other things. This is the broad context within which the action of the story takes place: the protagonist Draupadi and her husband Dulna are among the tribal revolutionaries who are engaging in guerrilla warfare against the landlords, using methods like attacking police stations, stealing guns, and even murdering landowners. In the story, the Special Forces of the Indian army—long in cahoots with the upper-caste landlords—are now going after them with a vengeance, trying to suppress the rebellion. As chief instigators in the Naxalite revolt, Draupadi and Dulna have become prime targets of the state. Dulna is hunted down and shot to death; after a long search, Draupadi is also finally “apprehended”—the word appears in English in the Bengali text and constitutes a central trope within the story, compelling the reader to ask: what is it to apprehend somebody or something?4 Once apprehended, Draupadi is brought to Senanayak, a government specialist “in combat and extreme-Left politics.” He utters a single command to his men: “Make her. Do the needful” (188, 195). What follows this abstruse command is of course the brutal sexual torture of Draupadi—a violence clearly deemed unspeakable even by Senanayak himself, who will not say the words for the act he has sanctioned. In “Draupadi” Mahasweta Devi renders the state as a gendered institution that bestows on its male, upper-caste representatives a prosthetic masculinity that stems from official power. The masculinity of the army officers Senanayak and Arjan Singh derives from precisely such an institutional arrangement: thus Mahasweta Devi writes that “Arjan Singh’s power also explodes out of the male organ of a gun”; later in the story, Draupadi’s rape is figured as the rise and fall of “[a]ctive pistons of flesh” over her body (188, 195).5 But while it is true that the “male organ of a gun” keeps the law in place by backing up its foundational authority, Mahasweta Devi shows that the power of the state is also contingent on the obedience and docility of its subjects. In the story’s conclusion, the multiply raped Draupadi issues a brazen challenge to the state agents whose masculinity resides in state power. The soldiers come to summon her before Senanayak and throw her cloth at her, but Draupadi tears her garments, refusing to cloak the violence that her injured body bears witness to. Instead, she forces Senanayak to come face to face with the violence he has sanctioned but does not want to witness: “You asked them to make me up, don’t you want to see how they made me?” (196). Advancing menacingly toward Senanayak, she demands:
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“What’s the use of clothes? You can strip me, but how can you clothe me again? Are you a man?” She looks around and chooses the front of Senanayak’s white bush shirt to spit a bloody gob at and says, “There isn’t a man here that I should be ashamed. I will not let you put my cloth on me. What more can you do? Come on, counter me—come on, counter me—?” Draupadi pushes Senanayak with her two mangled breasts, and for the first time Senanayak is afraid to stand before an unarmed target, terribly afraid. (196).
With this image of the terrorized bureaucrat in the bloodied bush shirt (perhaps the most recognizable sartorial emblem of bureaucratic masculinity in India), the story concludes. This resistance to disciplinary power through the body is also found elsewhere in Mahasweta Devi’s work. In “Shishu,” the Agaria tribals who have been forced into hiding in the forest for ages suddenly emerge to confront Singh, the Block Development Officer who has been pursuing them for stealing government relief. Pushing at him with their diminutive, child-sized, undernourished bodies, “They rubbed their organs against him and told him that they were adult citizens of India” (250). It is significant that the Agarias’ sexual organs are their chosen instruments of resistance. The withered, impotent reproductive organs on their child-like bodies represent the impending extinction of their numbers, the denial of any kind of entry into the nation-state, and their programmatic infantalization and diminution by the state. As the Agarias suddenly and unexpectedly render themselves visible: “The only recourse left to Singh was to go stark, raving mad, tearing the expanse apart with a howl like that of a mad dog. But why wasn’t his brain ordering his vocal chords to scream and scream and scream? Only tears ran down his cheeks“ (Mahasweta Devi, “Shishu” 251). Indeed, Mahasweta Devi’s stories often conclude with such a moment of utter terror for the representative of upper-caste, middle-class patriarchy. In “Arjun,” the Shabars of Purulia routinely go to jail for felling the Forest Department’s trees under the employ of the timber merchant Ram Haldar. When the landlord and political aspirant Bishal Mahatao orders the felling of the arjun tree at the intersection of the government road, the Shabars, who consider the tree a sacred vestige of their earlier forest-dwelling lifestyle, find an ingenious way to prevent the felling of the tree. Under the shrewd guise of paying obeisance to Bishal Mahatao’s instructions given in a dream, the tribals seal the base of the tree in concrete. People from the Santhal, Khedia, Shohish, and Bhumij tribes now arrive there to place their offerings. Realizing that he has been duped, Bishal Mahatao is struck by fear:
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This tree, these people—he knew them all. He knew them very well. And yet, today they seemed like strangers. Fear. An uncomprehending fear gripped him. (Mahasweta Devi, “Arjun” 130)
Terror and incomprehension, or the incomprehension of terror: in both of the above stories, as in “Draupadi,” it is a sudden loss of comprehension that generates the terror experienced by the male government officials and upper-caste landlords. In “Draupadi,” it is the sudden falling away of established ways of knowing the tribals that stymies this man of the state, Senanayak, whose name means literally “army chief.” The moment at which the raped subject refuses the obedient, shame-ridden femininity that is scripted for her is the moment when administrative masculinity falls apart, if only for a moment. But if the raped woman’s disobedience in itself poses a challenge, the tribal Draupadi’s disobedience gathers charge in light of the longstanding and commonplace practice in India, of “stripping and parading” of Dalit (“untouchable”) and adivasi (tribal) women. Naked parades of Dalit women are a stock form of humiliation used against Dalits to “show them their place.”6 Draupadi’s “parading” of her own naked body necessarily recalls and inverts this infamous mode of caste violence. In his book Seeing Like a State, James Scott demonstrates how modern states assert power over their subjects by attempting to make them legible in the codes of the state. This explains, for instance, the state’s quest to settle its itinerant populations so that it can “see” where they are and thus include them within the purview of its control by including them in census counts or subjecting them to taxes, for instance. Mahasweta Devi’s Senanayak may be similarly understood as the eager agent of the state’s panoptical desires. This is why Senanayak is always engaged in “seeing” the tribals by learning about them: “In order to destroy the enemy, become one” is Senanayak’s dictum (189). Senanayak’s strategies for overcoming the tribal rebellion therefore involve an anthropological will to know: to measure, catalog, document, to render legible—and finally to apprehend—the Other. At the same time he tells himself it’s for their own good, he’s on their side: “He is Prospero as well,” Mahasweta Devi writes (189). His chosen method of getting rid of the young revolutionaries is by “apprehension and elimination”—the English word “apprehension” in the story referring at once to Senanayak’s efforts to physically capture the revolutionaries and to know and understand their modes of organization. Thus will he bring them into his grasp. For the rebels, then, an important strategy of resistance is to frustrate legibility by becoming suddenly unknowable. The story dwells frequently
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on the unimaginative nature of state methods of comprehension and control: the persistent drive toward knowledge is repeatedly compromised by the rebels’ inability to transcend book learning and incorporate practical knowledge into their method of reading and writing. As Spivak points out, “Senanayak’s project is interpretive: he looks to decipher Draupadi’s song” (179). But his texts are no good: the “primitive” guerrilla warfare scorned by the Army Handbook prevails in favor of the revolutionaries more often than not; the Hoffman-Jeffer and Golden-Palmer dictionaries used by the government’s “tribal specialist types” prove to be useless compared with the local knowledge of Chamru the water carrier. The project of interpretation fails to the last, when Senanayak is confronted with Draupadi’s uninterpretable behavior. Draupadi’s body, which has been “made” and presumably known by so many, asserts its absolute unknowability in the end. Her theatrical disobedience appropriates the power of signification over her own raped body by rendering that body unreadable—resistant to patriarchal scripting, while producing its own script. If the state agents try to interpellate Draupadi as victim, Draupadi refuses the hegemonic script of shame that the wounds of sexual violence are meant to evoke, resignifying her own raped body to produce an inscrutability that escapes Senanayak’s interpretive grasp. This is why, as Spivak points out, “[t]he army officer is shown as unable to ask the authoritative ontological question, What is this?” (Spivak 184; Mahasweta Devi 1988, 196). Senanayak’s disabling incomprehension arises from two competing modes of embodiment in Draupadi’s shameless challenge: how the body looks and how it acts. After repeated rape, Draupadi stands naked, the very icon of a victim: “Thigh and pubic hair matted with dry blood. Two breasts, two wounds” (196). In what follows, however, we witness a theatrical unyoking of appearance from demeanor: Draupadi looks like a victim but acts like an agent. Indeed, the binary of victim and agent falls apart as Draupadi effectively separates violation from victimhood. As she stands insistently naked before her violators, Draupadi manages to wield her wounded body as a weapon to terrify them. Refusing the self-evident testimony of her victimized body, she enacts a new testimony that contradicts the installing of her injured body as evidence of her total apprehension. Custodial rape is frequently understood as a signal to the extended rebel community, but it also functions as a violent putting back into place of the shameless female rebel who flouts bourgeois feminine decorum, participates in violent revolution, and roams alone. As a counterinsurgency tool, rape attempts to script the insurgent’s body as a dual metaphor: the raped Draupadi’s body is made allegorically representative of the rebel community but
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also (and particularly) of female rebels who are particularly susceptible to this specific form of disciplinary violence. Draupadi, however, intercepts both of these communiqués at once: as a rebel she refuses discipline (“I will not wear my cloth”), as a woman she refuses shame (“There isn’t a man here that I should be ashamed”)—and, fusing the two in a single act of resistance, she sutures “rebel” and “woman” (196). It is the state that is finally rendered as the subject of a serious misapprehension. It is arguably the story’s striking ability to imagine into being this crisis of meaning as a successful moment of resistance that has assured it of an enduring status within the postcolonial feminist canon. Since its publication in Bengali in the 1970s and Spivak’s English translation in the 1980s, “Draupadi” has reappeared in influential collections in India such as The Inner Courtyard and Women Writing in India, and it has become a staple on women’s studies and postcolonial literature syllabi in India and globally. In the next section I chart a more recent trajectory through which the story has traveled within India, gathering meaning through a sequence of translations, including those that Mahasweta Devi’s text itself performs. In the process, I suggest the story partly constituted the regional discursive context for the Meitei women’s protest in 2004—which itself became a national media event that set the context for Pooja Chauhan’s protest three years later. Equally, however, these subsequent protests inscribe Mahasweta Devi’s story with new meaning in a contemporary context where the Indian state today faces a veritable crisis of political integrity. Putting aside the question of whether the protests by the Meitei women and by Pooja Chauhan represent “intentional” citations of Mahasweta Devi’s story and its subsequent translations, we might see how the three nevertheless resonate against each other within various regional and national contexts of reception that shape their meaning.
Translating Draupadi: From Mahabharata to the Manipuri Stage The concluding scene in “Draupadi” is, as is well known, a rewriting of a key scene from the ancient Indian epic Mahabharata, which has since at least the nineteenth century been a source text for the mythology of the Indian nation in anticolonial as well as postcolonial phases of Indian writing and performance.7 In the epic, Draupadi is the polyandrous wife of the five Pandavas, who stake and lose her in a game of dice with their enemy cousins, the Kauravas. Summoned to the Kauravas’ court after being thus won by them, Draupadi first refuses, whereupon the Kaurava prince Dushasana drags her in by her hair. As Dushasana pulls at Draupadi’s sari in an effort to disrobe
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her publicly in the Kaurava court, Draupadi prays to be rescued by the male Lord Krishna; miraculously, her sari extends to never-ending length even as Dushasana pulls on it, and Draupadi cannot be disrobed after all. This is the tale that Mahasweta Devi adapts or “translates” to the political context of Naxalism and counterinsurgency state violence in West Bengal in the 1970s. In the foreword to her translation, Spivak highlights the terms of Mahasweta Devi’s rewriting: unlike the mythological Draupadi, who is saved by Krishna, the tribal Draupadi (or Dopdi, the tribal version of her name) neither hopes for nor aspires to being thus rescued. “Rather than save her modesty through the implicit intervention of a benign and divine . . . comrade,” Spivak points out, “the story insists that this is the place where male leadership stops” (184). If Mahasweta Devi’s story represented a feminist literary appropriation of the Mahabharata toward an excoriating critique of the Indian state in the 1970s, its own recent adaptation to the stage marks an equally significant moment of translation. In 2000, the renowned Manipuri theater director Heisnam Kanhailal adapted Mahasweta’s “Draupadi” to a performed play in the Manipuri language. As mentioned above, the canonical status of Mahasweta Devi’s story is based partly on the theatrical moment at its conclusion, which exemplifies how women’s nakedness may perplex the scripts of gendered intelligibility that enable the violence of rape—as such its selection for stage adaptation is not surprising. But there is also a continuing political context that has made it useful for fresh adaptation. In the intervening decades between the publication of “Draupadi” in the late 1970s and its adaptation by Kanhailal, separatist insurgencies against the Indian state in Kashmir and India’s Northeast8 have grown, as has the presence of the Indian military personnel in these areas, where the latter are popularly detested for their “counterinsurgency” tactics (including rape) exercised indiscriminately against insurgents as well as civilians.9 Kanhailal’s play imports the willfully naked figure of the raped Draupadi into the political framework of “counterinsurgency” state terrorism in Manipur, where today more than thirty insurgent groups remain in a violent deadlock with the Indian state.10 Performing the role of Draupadi was the veteran actress Sabitri Heisnam, a woman in her sixties who in the final act of the play appeared completely naked on stage, provoking a fair amount of discussion in the Manipuri press.11 One of the key aspects of translation from text to performance is grounded in the body of Sabitri Heisnam herself—not in her nakedness alone, but in the particular body-centered performance style (which encompasses her powerful voice) for which she is known. Watching Sabitri’s rendition of Draupadi, one cannot help but be immediately struck by the stylized movement with which she takes the stage, as well as the ex-
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pansive rage compressed in the few words she utters. In the segment of the performed play included in Amar Kanwar’s documentary Roushan Bayaan (Lightning Testimonies), Sabitri, her back to the audience, advances menacingly toward the soldier, initially holding together at her front the single length of cloth that has been handed back to her after her rape. As she approaches the now-cowering soldier, she opens out her cloth all at once with a bloodcurdling scream—“Confront my body!”—swirling the cloth around to cover the soldier almost completely, while she herself stands naked over him—the cloth functioning aptly as the material signifier of the shame that Draupadi turns back on the soldier. This performance and the public reviews of it prompted in Manipur (which I will turn to shortly) is beyond doubt a flashpoint in the cultural consciousness that precipitated the Manipuri women’s protest in 2004.12 Before I turn to that discussion, however, I wish to pause briefly over some of Sabitri’s other performances, which are also relevant, if less obviously so, to the discursive milieu in which the Manipur women’s protest took place. Interestingly, around this time the tactile body of this performer itself comes to be a site of transmission for some of the diverse traditions of representation around women’s nakedness in India, across various sites of feminist cultural performance. While the commitment to physicality over the verbal among Kanhailal’s actors has sometimes been critiqued,13 it also renders their performances mobile across regional and linguistic boundaries, possibly explaining Sabitri’s selection for projects seeking to explore specifically the construction of meaning around women’s bodies. In 2000 Sabitri appeared in Madhushree Dutta’s Scribbles on Akka, a documentary that explored the contemporary relevance for women of the twelfth-century naked bhaktin saint Akka Mahadevi.14 Akka, one of the several women poets in the Vaishnavite bhakti tradition, was said to have renounced her clothing along with conjugal life when she declared herself wedded to the Lord Shiva. Wandering naked thereafter, she composed the devotional verse (vachanas, much of which thematized her decision to be naked and without shame) through which her memory has endured for more than eight centuries in south India, where she continues to be revered today, and in the Vaishnavite tradition more broadly.15 Indeed, not only has Sabitri played both Draupadi and Akka—two ur-figures of female nakedness in the Hindu imagination in India—but in 2001, she played Draupadi at the Akka Theatre Festival in Mysore, a women’s theatre festival organized by the Karnataka state-run repertory, Nataka Karnataka Rangayana.16 The Akka Festival was meant to bring together women in theater, as well as productions about women or gender, to pay “tribute to the spirit and power of Indian womanhood”—all in honor of Akka, whose poetry was also
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performed at the festival (see Mehu). I mark these intersections to observe how the circulation of Sabitri’s naked performances in these varied sites (the Manipuri stage, Kanwar’s documentary, and the state-sponsored Akka Theatre Festival) functions to unify a scattered genealogy of female nakedness in subcontinental memory; to transmit it across regional and national contexts; and to suture it to a critique of counterinsurgency state terrorism. That this should sometimes occur under the auspices of the paternalist Indian state itself, in its touted commitment to “cultural development” or “the spirit and power of Indian womanhood,” is of course a crowning irony. The Manipuri response to Sabitri’s “Draupadi” performance is more directly relevant to the Meitei women’s protest. Perhaps predictably, this performance met with some controversy in the Manipuri press. In Kanwar’s Lightning Testimonies, Sabitri reflects on the negative reception to her performance, urging her critics to look past the mere fact of her nakedness and to discern what, and how, her naked body signifies, within the political and dramatic context of the performance.
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Many people in Manipur said, “Sabitri, what you have done is disrespectful to women.” . . . You write this because you don’t think it through. Not one, many women have been stripped, and their rape took place in front of their husbands and fathers in law. The Indian army raped them while making their fathers and husbands watch. Their fathers in law and husbands could only keep looking. You, who are educated, and write books . . . you don’t understand that when I play Draupadi and take my clothes off, it’s nothing to take my clothes off, it’s about my insides, my feelings.
Shrewd to the theatricality of the very violence to which her own performance responds, Sabitri invokes the regular stripping and rape in Manipur of women like Draupadi, specifically the fact that such sexual violence is frequently staged by the Indian army for the captive “audience” of the woman’s male relatives. Sabitri insists that her own nakedness on the stage forces upon the (thoughtful) viewer a consideration of these realities. Her performance must be read within a frame where being a woman is constituted as a condition of violability, rather than within some abstract frame of idealized or respectable “womanhood.” This discussion was already in progress when the Meitei women’s protest took place in 2004. In July of that year, Thangjam Manorama had been picked up from her home and taken into the custody of the Indian army’s Assam Rifles personnel. The Assam Rifles were acting under the powers granted to them by the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), which gives the army extraordinary powers to “maintain order” in the Northeast.17 Manorama’s arrest
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warrant had stated that she was apprehended on suspicion of being a militant with the People’s Liberation Army; it also stated that no incriminating evidence had been found in her house. Her bullet-riddled body was found a few hours after she had been picked up, and a postmortem report also revealed bullet marks on her genitals. Later that month, the twelve Meitei women stood naked outside the Assam Rifles headquarters, holding up banners (in English) that challenged in red text on white: “Indian Army, Rape Us!” and “Indian Army, Take Our Flesh!” The group left only after much pleading on the part of an Assam Rifles officer. Asked why they chose such a dramatic form of protest, one of the activists responded: “We decided to strip as our protest against extrajudicial killings and molestation of women in Manipur went unheeded. We are Manorama’s mothers. We do not believe in judicial probe. We demand public trial of the guilty” (Thockchom 2004). They also reiterated the longstanding demand for the withdrawal of the AFSPA. Occurring fairly soon after Sabitri’s naked performance and the discussion surrounding it, the women’s protest came to be read at least by some as an “enactment” of Kanhailal’s play. Writing a few months after the protest, Guwahati-based journalist Nava Thakuria wrote: “The highpoint situation of the Padmabhusan S Kanhailal directed play had turned into reality on the streets of Manipur capital Imphal on July 15” (25).18 Kanhailal himself recounts in Kanwar’s documentary that no sooner had the protest occurred than he received a phone call from his friend, who remarked: “Your play Draupadi was performed today by 12 Imas [mothers] in Kangla. The newspapers are calling you a prophet, and the people as well.” And of course Lightning Testimonies itself situates Sabitri’s performance and the Meitei women’s protest in relation to each other. In thus bringing together protest and play, I would suggest, the documentary itself stitches together a new site of meaning for remembering both enactments in a continuous frame where each may be considered as constituting the meaning of the other in retrospect. In this section I have attempted to map a wider representational context that “set the stage,” so to speak, for the political protests by the Meitei women and Pooja Chauhan, which otherwise seem to have appeared “out of nowhere.” Knowingly or not, the latter nevertheless draw authority from the circulation of these earlier and contemporaneous representations of resistant naked female bodies. I turn now from these framing contexts of representation to the representational logic specific to the protests themselves. A close reading and comparison of the gendered ideological discourses utilized by the protesters in question will demonstrate the contestatory potential of naked protest as well as the undercutting risks implicit in some framings of naked protest.
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Unmanning Violence Perhaps the most immediate question that hyperbolic, theatrical modes of protest inevitably raise among those who view them is the question of whether they succeeded. Was anything besides a grand show really achieved by the performance? The measures of efficacy are many: the success of a performance protest may be gauged by outcome; by the extent of local, regional, national, or even international notice they garner; by the kinds of conversations initiated, carried forward, or reinforced by the protest; and, not least, by what the performance reveals about the thing it stages. In the case of all the protests examined in this chapter, that thing is women’s vulnerability to the patriarchal violence defining state authority in India. If the success of these protests arguably depends on their ability to destabilize such patriarchal authority, then it is worth scrutinizing how they attempt to do so and whether the attempt itself succeeds. But let us begin with the more mundane measures of success to evaluate what these protests may have accomplished, while also considering what local contingencies made it possible for such demonstrations to have even been taken seriously, as undoubtedly they were. A brief look at the outcome of the protests in Imphal and Rajkot shows that a responsive “action” was indeed taken, although closer examination shows even more clearly how the state rushed to “cover up” following the naked protests. In the immediate aftermath of the Meitei women’s protest, the Indian government set up a committee to review the AFSPA; they recommended repealing it, but the government has not yet done so, apparently because of protests from the armed forces, whose extrajudicial violence was at issue in the first place. The act remains in place today.19 In Pooja Chauhan’s case, a previous attempt by her to immolate herself at the office of the police commissioner drew no action from the police (who managed to thwart that attempt). In contrast, the police acted swiftly after her naked march through Rajkot, arresting Chauhan’s husband and in-laws—but also threatening to arrest Chauhan herself for indecent exposure. In both instances, the state acted so as to be seen as working to remove the causes compelling the women’s nakedness, thereby “covering up” the naked women in question, as a good patriarch should do. But also in both cases, the superficiality of the action taken reveals that the gesture really was a cover-up for what had been revealed about the state itself. Still, it may have been more than what had been done previously to address the grievances raised by the women. Media attention to these issues following the protests was also markedly greater than it had been previously. Tellingly, the naked protest in Manipur
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achieved the kind of national and international notice that the (arguably) equally dramatic fast undertaken by activist Irom Sharmila—also against the AFSPA, and then in its fourth year—had not yet elicited.20 In Pooja Chauhan’s case, her previous attempt to immolate herself at the police commissioner’s office barely came to media or public notice until her naked protest the following week. The disproportionate attention received by naked protests in the press raises an uncomfortable question: do the protesters’ naked bodies serve to interrogate the patriarchal scripts enabling violence, or rather reinforce it by making female bodies once more available to the commodifying gaze of the media—notwithstanding the protestors’ intentions or even those of many sympathetic people in media? Especially given the wide circulation of objectified, exposed women’s bodies in the mass media at large (including the formidably influential vehicle of Hindi cinema, or “Bollywood”), might women’s naked protest necessarily run the risk of reinscribing the commoditization of women’s bodies? At one level, both protests may certainly have played on the scandalous media appeal of nudity in general and female nudity in particular: the first in order to draw attention to the extrajudicial rape and killings of women at large in Manipur; the second to bring attention to dowry-related harassment and police inaction endured by the individual protestor herself. Although it is impossible to predict or control the terms in which nakedness may be read in any context, in neither case did the protesters seem inclined to (or in the Meitei women’s case, able to) objectify themselves in the mode of the aestheticized women’s bodies on circulation in the mass media.21 In the Meitei protest, the women’s age, combined with their affective register of rage and ironic “invitation” to be raped (“Indian Army Rape Us!”), explicitly contested the visual language of availability through which naked women’s bodies are often commodified in the popular media. In contrast, Chauhan’s relative youth and the fact that she was not completely naked made her more vulnerable to media objectification: television cameras followed Chauhan closely, while they had maintained their distance from the Meitei women’s completely naked bodies. The fact that Chauhan was also on her own, rather than within a collective of enraged and combative women, may have contributed to her objectification. On the other hand, in both cases it was paradoxically the pervasive regulatory culturalist discourses about Indian women’s modesty—encoded firmly in the Indian Penal Code22—that may have shielded the protesters from the charge of frivolity or the dangers of open objectification. The sheer outrageousness of such a mode of protest would seem to render it a desperate measure of last resort, even lending it a certain ethical validity: this appears to have
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been the sentiment underlying the sympathetic response of many commentators to both protests. While the potential objectification of the twenty-two-year-old Chauhan’s naked body may remain one concern for feminists, the symbolic logic of her own performance raises other pressing concerns—not least for the representation of failed masculinity caricatured in Chauhan’s carefully assembled performance. As mentioned earlier, Chauhan had walked in semi-undress through the streets of Rajkot to protest dowry harassment from her husband and in-laws, along with the apathy of the police toward her complaints. Hers was an elaborate performance: she proffered a bunch of bangles and a red rose in one hand, and (somewhat surprisingly) a baseball bat in the other, which she threw over her shoulder. The performance tauntingly suggested an ironic reversal of gender roles. It was she, a woman violated by those men of family and state who should have protected her, who had to take in hand the means of self-defense (the baseball bat); in exchange, she offered the feminizing symbols of the bangles, the red rose, and her own exposed body.23 Ensconced within this paraphernalia, her own naked body seemed to testify to the breakdown of the normative structures of gender that would ordinarily include a need for modesty on her part. If the Meitei women’s naked bodies, like the Naxalite Draupadi’s, evoked violation without suggesting victimhood, Chauhan’s exposed body signified a vulnerability from which she sought masculine protection. In a television interview, Chauhan said that an “unrelated man” (intriguingly she used this phrase, “ghair mard,” to refer to either her husband or her father-in-law) should not have raised his hand on her, as it was an insult to womanhood. Such men, she said, should be made to wear bangles (“chudi pehnani chahiye”)—this being a well-worn figure signifying emasculation in Hindi. Chauhan also brought up the fact that police apathy had enabled her abuse, thereby including the state in her emasculating gesture. Framed by the “chudi” (bangles) gesture, Chauhan’s naked protest made clear appeal to a “logic of masculinist protection” (Young).24 The dangers of protectionist appeals by women to community and state have been well elucidated by a number of feminist theorists. Feminists in India have frequently objected to the “chudi” gesture, which historically has been used by men as well as women to goad other men into violent action.25 While the gesture stigmatizes and entrenches femininity as a condition of inaction, the proactivity demanded of men as proof of manliness also produces the realm of circumscribed activity to which women have been historically confined. Wendy Brown reminds us that apart from justifying women’s exclusion, protection codes have also historically served to link “femininity” to race and class privilege, thus functioning as markers for divisions among women,
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distinguishing those considered violable from those considered inviolable. This has surely been true in India, where upper-caste women have been cast as violable and in need of protection from religious and caste others; conversely, protection has not been a viable term in relation to Dalit men and women, who on the contrary frequently suffer the violence of protection codes.26 Angela Davis sums up the dilemma of appeals to state protectionism: “Can a state that is thoroughly infused with racism, male dominance, class-bias, and homophobia and that constructs itself in and through violence act to minimize violence in the lives of women? Should we rely on the state as the answer to the problem of violence against women?” (Davis). In a similar vein, Young observes that “central to the logic of masculinist protection is the subordinate relation of those in the protected position” (4). In this logic, women surrender decision-making autonomy to “good,” gallant men in exchange for protection from “bad” men who threaten to breach the familial walls fortified by the good men. This image of “good” masculinity may appear to be opposed to “bad” masculinity, but Young reminds us that bad masculinity in fact provides the most effective foil for the goodness of good masculinity to appear in relief. Thus “dominative masculinity . . . constitutes protective masculinity as its other” while assigning to women the subordinate position of the protected (4). It follows that the false binary of “good” and “bad” masculinity also keeps firmly in place the male/female binary to which feminists have often traced the violent power of patriarchy. By alternately invoking both good and bad masculinities, Chauhan’s lament reinforced an idealized masculinity by marking its absence and revealing in its stead a failed (bad) masculinity, which in the relational logic of gender is no masculinity at all. In effect, her naked body functioned not as a challenge to masculinity but as a signifier of its proper role. The Meitei women’s protest signified the relation between violence and women’s bodies somewhat differently, resisting such invocations of chivalrous masculinity and instead foregrounding violence at the intersections of gender and citizenship. Evident in Chauhan’s protest was a commonplace conflation between gender identities and gendered modes of power, in taking on gender as reference point for protest. As Wendy Brown points out, “While gender identities may be diverse, fluid and ultimately impossible to generalize, particular modes of gender power may be named and traced with some precision at a relatively general level” (166; emphasis in original). What we understand as “masculinist” (violence, for instance) is not reducible to the behavioral propensities of men. Likewise, gender- or caste-specific violence and vulnerability must be understood not as functions of the relative attributes of men and women, upper- and lower-caste, but as mechanisms of domination, through which women as well as men may be subjected to
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gendered violence, by male or nonmale actors, across the spectrum of race and caste. Rather than staging women’s bodies as the grounds of essential feminine vulnerability, the Meitei women’s protest staged women’s bodies as sites of violence, and their vulnerability to custodial rape as the historical, legitimated, and legislative product of a state in which gendered and caste-based (as exemplified in “Draupadi”) modes of power converged in the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. While their positioning of themselves as Manorama’s mothers certainly established a “feminine” relationship of care, protection, and nurturance, the maternal here also symbolizes the bonds of political solidarity with the dead woman. It possibly also represented a claim to respectability that may have provided the women with a strategic legitimacy.27 Furthermore, the Meitei women’s protest also retains the viability of the protestors as political actors, rather than exhorting men of the state to relieve them from the burden of action. Unlike Chauhan’s performance, the Meitei women’s protest refrained from appealing to a notion of chivalrous masculinity, focusing its ire on the violent triumph of masculinity in its dominative aspect. As in “Draupadi,” the wilful nakedness of the protestors mimes but also inverts the enforced nakedness and vulnerability of rape. If the protesting women’s naked bodies signified vulnerability by a metonymic association with Manorama’s absent(ed) body, their peremptory signage bearing a pseudo-invitation to rape (“Indian Army, Rape Us!”) undercut and turned that performance into one of agency. Their protest thus foregoes the gender binaries of vulnerable women and violent men, as well as that of good and bad men of the state. Finally, I would like to return to Draupadi’s question, “Are you a man?” The question provides an opportunity to reflect on the ways in which nakedness frames the relationship between masculinity and femininity by reference to shame, an affect in every way integral to the violence of rape. “There is no man here that I should be ashamed,” Draupadi asserts (196). The statement implies that if there were a man, then she would be ashamed; but since she stands unashamed in her nakedness, surely the one witnessing cannot possibly be a man. But Draupadi’s utterance, while powerfully unmanning her assailants, leaves intact the logic of women’s shame as an effect of a properly masculine presence. The gesture is particularly taunting because it invokes “good” masculinity in order to evacuate its “bad” other: the (absent) patriarchal ideals of honor, valor, and protectionism are invoked in order to overwrite rape’s masculinist script of domination. Indeed, the efficacy of Draupadi’s protest lies precisely in its ability to hijack the hermeneutics of rape by calling the patriarchal state to account on its own discursive terrain. The naked protest tauntingly punctures the triumphalist structure of rape-as-power—by recod-
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ing rape as an unmanly act of cowardice. Like Chauhan’s “chudi” gesture, the question “Are you a man?” is a taunt that derides the failure of the norm, and in so doing upholds it. The ideal of masculinist protection remains. This is the logic that the Meitei women’s protest usefully sidesteps by framing itself as a challenge rather than a taunt: the women are unashamedly naked in spite of the presence of men. By resisting the draw of symbolic castration as an effective counter to masculinist state dominance, the women effectively sever the causal relation between the male gaze and the interpellative effect of female shame, which literally adds insult to the injury of rape. If there is an effect of unmanning here, it is directed at the masculinism of state violence, not the manliness of men. In marking this final distinction, my aim is not to valorize the Meitei women’s naked protest as representing the best possible method of protest on the landscape of women’s organizing in India. A closer analysis of the Meitei women’s activism in general reveals some dissatisfaction among feminists, especially on the count that they have prioritized a “civil rights first” approach rather than incorporating women’s rights into the struggle for civil rights in Manipur (Thokchom). More recently, the Meitei women’s organization that staged the naked protest, Meira Paibi, has been critiqued for remaining silent about the rape of twenty-one women and girls by insurgent groups of the hill tribes in 2006. Ethnic divisions between the valley-based Meitei and the tribes of the surrounding hills in Manipur have often presented a roadblock to building solidarity in women’s organizing in the Northeast. The issue of Meitei women’s selective organizing around upper-caste Meitei women’s issues recently resurfaced after the 2013 Delhi anti-rape protests. Even as they joined calls for a national recognition of militarized sexual violence in the Northeast, Manipuri and Assamese researchers also warned of the dangers of producing the Indian state as the only patriarchy in the region. Reproaching the Meitei activists for their selective concern about upper-caste Manipuri women’s dignity, Sengangly Thaimei asked why they had been silent following the recent gang rape of a tribal woman in Vishnupur district: “Is this tribal woman’s dignity included in the collective dignity of Manipuri women (which ‘also’ includes non-Meiteis)? Or are they silent because the violence was meted out by our own ‘valley brothers’ (Meiteis) towards a ‘hill woman’ (Manipuri euphemism for ‘tribal’) and not a case of rascals from Assam Rifles raping a Meitei woman?” Similarly, Mayur Chetia and Bonojit Hussain reminded us of the violation of the Adivasi woman protester, Laxmi Orang, discussed in the previous chapter. As Chetia and Hussain wrote: “Laxmi’s case is symptomatic of the strange predicament that the gender question faces in north-east India, a militarized region, endlessly balkanized by ethno-nationalist politics. Being an adivasi woman it is not
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surprising that Laxmi’s case did not get any attention that the gravity of the case demanded. The reason for the apathy was that she was not even an ‘Assamese’ woman. Or to put it in another way, she was not Assamese enough.” Chetia and Hussain point to a “strategic silence” similar to that identified by Kimberle Crenshaw in her examination of antiracist discourse around rape and domestic violence within communities of color in the United States. In the case of Assam, Chetia and Hussain note, such silence obscures instances of sexual violence not perpetrated by the military in the region but within Assamese civil society itself: “The silence around Laxmi and many women like her was the fact that she was not assaulted and brutalised by the army or security forces, but by civilians; some city dwelling Assamese men.” The point here is most certainly not that Manipuri and Assamese society should turn their attention centrally to examining local patriarchy instead of pinning their critiques of patriarchy on the state, but rather that we recognize how the state’s oppressive presence in these states strengthens local patriarchies, as has been seen again and again in militarized societies. In chapter 2 I attempted to disaggregate the category “woman” in my reading of Krishna Mehta’s memoir Kashmir 1947, drawing out the Hindu affiliations of the author. In the context of Manipur, however, with its racialized populace, the category “Hindu women” is constituted very differently. It does not preserve Meitei women from the racialized and regionalized taint of antinationalism, despite their upper-caste Hindu affiliations; indeed, it is doubtful whether these populations are seen as Hindu from mainland India. And yet that does not mean their upper-caste affiliations are stripped entirely of their power within the region. An intersectional analysis must necessarily acknowledge how their Hinduness intersects with racialized constructions of “Northeasterners” to situate them simultaneously as a minority and majority population. While categories such as “Manipuri women,” “Assamese women” and “Kashmiri women” fracture the overarching category “Indian women” circulating in the aftermath of the Delhi rape protests and point to the inevitable intersection of gender with regional identity and location in militarized territories, Thaimei, along with Chetia and Hussain, prompt us to acknowledge that even these regionalized minority identity categories may obscure other intersections still, and they can work in a hegemonic way if they are deployed without accounting for their internal diversity. “Majority” and “minority” are shifting categories, depending on the frame of reference: whereas Meitei women are part of a racialized minority in India, within Manipur they are very much a “majority.” While accounting for these complexities, we can nevertheless, I hope, make productive analytical use of the ability of the Meitei women’s protest to destabilize masculinism without reifying manliness, and
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to situate patriarchal state violence within gender- and caste-based modes of power rather than individual gender and caste identities.
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Theatricalizing Rage, Rescripting Violence As a mode of embodied resistance, naked protest instantiates what Judith Butler has called the “theatricalization of political rage” (1993, 232). Writing in the context of U.S. queer politics, Butler observes the increasing reliance in queer activism on theatrical methods like kiss-ins, die-ins, cross-dressing, drag balls, and so on. The conjunction of theater and politics in these methods, Butler argues, allegorizes a “recontextualization of ‘queer’ from its place within a homophobic strategy of abjection and annihilation to an insistent and public severing of that interpellation from the effect of shame” (233). A similar strategy of recontextualization, I believe, is at work in the naked protests described above, which appropriate naked female bodies from a normative discourse of feminine victimhood and shame, or of seduction and guile, to one of (feminist?) resistance. To this extent, these defiant protests broadly challenge the “rape script” underlying the disciplinary violence of the state. The “rape script” is famously defined by Sharon Marcus as the set of gendered cultural narratives that enable the violence of rape by producing women as subjects of shame, fear, and violence, and men as subjects of aggression backed up by physical prowess. Rather than ascribing rape to the “terrifying facticity” of the penis, Marcus suggests that we should turn our attention to the cultural scripts that “write” women’s bodies as penetrable or violable, and challenge those instead. Toward this end Marcus calls for “new cultural productions and reinscriptions of our bodies and our geographies [that] can help us begin to revise the grammar of violence and to represent ourselves in militant new ways” (400). I share Marcus’s faith in “a politics of fantasy and representation” to resist rape as well as other forms of gendered violence. To me, the moments of willful nakedness examined in this chapter do represent a “militant new way” of creatively rescripting the gendered grammar of violence. However, even as we acknowledge the potentially subversive effects of such a resignification, it would be wise to consider also its potential limits. In an assessment of the changing career of the term “queer” and its appropriation in queer activism from hateful slur to affirming self-description, Butler raises a series of questions that I believe will have relevance here as well: “If the term is now subject to a reappropriation, what are the conditions and limits of that significant reversal? . . . How and where does discourse reiterate injury such that the various efforts to recontextualize and resignify a given term meet their limit in this other, more brutal, and relentless form of repetition?” (1993, 223). Butler’s note of
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caution is particularly pertinent in light of the exceptional attention received by naked protest, especially when compared with other forms of embodied protest by women. To be sure, these protests were probably intended in their very conception as media spectacles—the shaming impulse of the protesters would not amount to much without the media’s amplification of the gesture. Yet the singular efficacy of nakedness as a means of mediating women’s grievances to a larger public should alert us to the caution that Butler articulates. To what extent are the wilfully naked bodies of the tribal Draupadi, the Meitei women, or Pooja Chauhan unshackled through such protest from the heavily overdetermined scripts that have made women’s bodies—especially those of Dalit and Adivasi women—historically intelligible as violable, penetrable, sexually available? To ask these questions is not to take away from the radical potential of the protests examined here but rather to recognize how resistance is all too frequently shaped by the parameters of power itself and to seek evernew ways of reconceptualizing resistance.
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Conclusion My attempt in this chapter has been to examine some of the cultural specificities within which nakedness becomes intelligible as a “feminist” mode of protest to the violence of the Indian state, while also examining the epistemic stakes of nakedness as a gendered mode of protest by women. Acknowledging its potential to generate a cognitive dissonance and thereby reconfigure the gendered scripts shaping violence against women, I have also sought to highlight some of the risks that threaten to undermine the subversive potential of naked protest by women. Across the literary, dramatic, and political representations of naked protest examined here, nakedness has served as a powerful tool to spotlight and destabilize the nexus of caste patriarchy with the Indian state. Yet, particular ways of framing naked protest often tread the dangerous ground of appeals to “good” masculinity and protectionism. Pooja Chauhan’s protest illustrates what is at risk in framing naked protest as a jibe at failed masculinity, which serves to reinforce a notion of idealized gender norms. Undeniably, selective invocations and reappropriations of ideals of masculinity may serve the strategic purpose of resisting these violent normative scripts. However, an exhortation to idealized manliness cannot in the long run serve the purpose of destabilizing state patriarchy. For women’s public nakedness to embody a truly counterhegemonic antiviolence politics, what is absolutely crucial is an ongoing interrogation of the binaristic male/ female distinction underwriting gendered violence in any context.
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5 “This Is Not a Performance!”
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Public Mourning and Visual Spectacle in Kashmir
The popular Kashmiri demand for azaadi (independence) presents one of the most pressing contemporary challenges to the idea of India. In recent years, this demand has been fueled by growing public awareness of the scale of indiscriminate torture and enforced disappearances of largely young Muslim men (an estimated eight thousand to ten thousand during the past two decades) by Indian security forces, on charges of anti-state militancy.1 In this chapter, I want to consider how public understanding about these disappearances is being constructed through the efforts of Kashmiri activists, photographers, and artists. Today, the public mourning of the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) stands at the center of a much larger field of cultural production that keeps the disappeared alive in public memory. The image of the APDP’s grieving mothers and “half-widows” (as the wives of disappeared men in Kashmir have come to be called) has been widely mobilized across fiction, music, film, painting, photography, and graphic art dedicated to constructing awareness around the violence of enforced disappearances. Rita Manchanda has noted how the figures of the Grieving Mother and the Martyrs’ Mother have become iconic in the Kashmiri nationalist imagination, the grief of mothers providing a powerful aesthetic resource to the nationalist conception of azaadi. As Seema Kazi observes, “This conception of Kashmiri women as victims rather than survivors does not correspond with women’s subjective experience and removes them from the political canvas of militarization” (138). Here, therefore, I will consider how the mothers of the APDP are not simply icons of grief but are also agents of practices that organize public understanding around this form of violence. In the following pages, I scrutinize some of the visual and performative strategies through which the APDP protesters seek to cognitively “reappear”
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the disappeared, as well as call attention to the gendered vulnerabilities created by the phenomenon of enforced disappearances. Equally, I am interested in some creative visual practices that have fanned out around the APDP’s protests, including some examples of graphic, cinematic, and photographic work through which the visual rhetoric and affective power of the APDP’s protests have been greatly magnified. In addition to considering the visual rhetoric of the APDP protests, I also look at the graphic art of the Kashmiri cartoonist Malik Sajad and the photography of Altaf Qadri, as well as some examples of public art representing disappearance and its gendered effects in Kashmir. Arguably, it is through a composite of these visual practices that public perception around disappearances and its explicitly gendered significance is being shaped within and outside Kashmir. For while I saw “with my own eyes” one of the monthly APDP protests in July 2012, I also have come to see these protests through the composite visions provided by the representations I examine here. These visual texts have prompted me to think about the nature of sight and seeing in Kashmir; about the various ways in which power-laden, regulated, and resisted looking relations between Kashmiris and the Indian state structure the scene of disappearance, and about the ways in which mainstream Indians as well as Kashmiris might develop a practice of critical spectatorship that acknowledges that spectacles can structure as well as reorient our gaze, and thereby our reality. “Not only will I stare. I want my look to change reality”; in bell hooks’s powerful formulation of “the oppositional gaze,” this is what it means to look back (116). In this, hooks theorizes the gaze that emerged in response to slavery’s brutal regulation of “black looks,” whereby black people were punished for merely looking, even as their own bodies could be subjected relentlessly to the probing white gaze in various “scenes of subjection” (as Saidiya Hartman puts it), such as the auction block or the minstrel show. “Even in the worst circumstances of domination,” hooks writes, “the ability to manipulate one’s gaze in the face of structures of domination that would contain it, opens up the possibility of agency” (116). If the oppositional gaze can restructure the reality of those who had previously only been looked at, I believe it can also transform the reality of those looking on—us, in mainland India, or in diaspora, or in multiple locations, whether Kashmiri or Indian, all removed from the scene of disappearances, witnessing the exchange of looks between Kashmiris and the state, having our sight carefully controlled and channeled by what the state wishes us to see, ignore, or repress. What if we refused to submit our sight to the state and allowed our vision to be guided instead through the perspective of those living in the midst of violence—while never displacing that perspective or glibly assuming it to be the same as our own?
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What might we come to see? At the very least, I hope, we might come to see how we see what we see. That is, we might “learn to see the frame that blinds us,” and the “forcible dramaturgy” of the state (Butler 2009: 100, 73). This is what separates the act of “just looking” from the practice of critical spectatorship: the latter entails that spectators “actively resist the imposition of dominant ways of knowing and looking” (Taylor xii; hooks 128). With this in mind, I want to situate the resistant visual corpus of this chapter against the optical regime through which the Indian administration has sought forcefully to imprint an idea of India in the Kashmiri eye, even as it seeks to render the suffering of Kashmiris invisible in the national eye, through the collusion of the Indian media as well as by preventing foreign journalists and analysts to report openly from Kashmir. The visual texts I consider below offer a way of reflecting on the state’s attempts—not always successful—to blind the Indian civic body, while at the same time foregrounding the Kashmiri view of things, one that has been occluded in mainstream representations of the Kashmir conflict. These visual texts also run counter to the oppressive history of the camera in Kashmir as documented by the literary historian Ananya Jahanara Kabir. Against the “Kashmir views” proffered by European and Indian photographers, and then by Bollywood cinema, the use of photography by the APDP activists and Kashmiri visual artists represents a view of Kashmir by Kashmiris themselves, one that de-composes the view of Kashmir as “territory of desire” for India and Indians (Kabir 72).2 They seek to engender an alternative gaze in Kashmir and beyond, shaping the ways in which their varying audiences perceive the gendered landscape produced by the violence of disappearances.
The Optics of Disappearance July 10, 2012. Once again the members of the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) had gathered in Srinagar’s Pratap Park, as they had been doing on the tenth day of every month for more than two decades. I had previously seen scores of photographs of these iconic protests in newspapers, online blogs, networks, and various friends’ Facebook pages. This time, I was there myself. The group was there to protest enforced state disappearances of young Muslim men in Kashmir, notoriously one of the most militarized zones on earth, with over a half million Indian troops in the region. The APDP’s members, all relatives of disappeared persons themselves, sat in a broad semicircle, women to one side, men to the other. As I walked the periphery of the circle taking photographs and talking to others present at the event, I heard a kerfuffle a little to the side of the main protest. Parveena Ahangar, the inexhaustible co-founder of the APDP, was being baited by a man who
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APDP protesting in Pratap Park. Photograph taken by author, July 2012.
had come there to publicly insist that the protest was pointless. Shut down this shop (dukaan karyiw band), he said; nothing would come of it, it was time to end this show (tamasha). After a few minutes of argument, Ahangar, losing patience, marched to the center of the semicircle and set up a defiant chant. “Yeh tamasha nahin hai!” (This is not a performance!) she began. And quickly came the response: “Yeh maatam sahi hai!” (This mourning is real!). The ready chant, while echoing a popular refrain in Kashmiri street protests, indicated to me that it was not the first time the group had found itself needing to counter the allegation that it was all “just drama.” One can easily imagine why the protesters would wish to repudiate the word tamasha. Literally meaning “spectacle” or “entertainment,” the word tamasha across many Indian languages invokes notions of vulgar display. The APDP members understandably wished to distance themselves from this term as they insisted on the genuineness of their grief. Instead, the women presented their protest as maatam: in addition to generalized mourning and grief, in Kashmir the word maatam also recalls the public self-flagellations of Shi’a mourners at Muharram, where young Muslim men commemorate and mourn the death of the Prophet’s grandson, Imam Husain. Within this context, the vocabulary of maatam hence confers a genuineness onto the women’s protest that is at once highly performative and legitimate. I nevertheless want to suggest that we retain one sense of this word to understand the APDP’s public protests: that of spectacle. The APDP’s monthly sit-ins, I would argue, are powerful public spectacles that foreground an integral relationship between violence and visuality in Kashmir. They do more than simply “draw attention” to the protesters or their cause (although
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this itself is a significant achievement on a national media landscape, where enforced disappearances are afforded little coverage). These self-consciously visible and visual protests expose, deconstitute, and recompose the wider visual regime within which young men in Kashmir can seem simply to “disappear.” As theater scholar Diana Taylor argues in Disappearing Acts, her study of disappearances in Argentina, “Understanding spectacles, with their repeated gestures, might enable us to foresee (and perhaps intervene) in their political dénouement” (1997, 23). Nobody simply “disappears” into thin air, of course. Neighbors and family members had seen many of the disappeared young men being picked up by the Indian security personnel. When some of these disappeared turned up for burial in mass graves, gravediggers (often coerced to dig graves by security forces) saw these bodies; some even documented these deaths by taking photographs. How did the vision of such witnesses come to be rendered null and void through the state’s story of disappearance? In order to answer that question, one must attend to the techniques of ocular control through which the sight of Kashmiris and others is systematically overseen, neutralized, overlooked. Enforced “disappearance” involves the literal and metaphorical reorganization of perception. It is a process that extends beyond the mere abduction of a person; it is the process by which the seen is rendered unseen. For example, in the 2009 human rights report Buried Evidence, published by the Indian People’s Tribunal on Kashmir, a Kashmiri gravedigger testifies how the security forces confiscated and destroyed photographs he himself had taken, his purpose being to help relatives identify those buried in unmarked graves: Initially I myself was taking photographs of the bodies with an intention to keep a record source for identification of the deceased. I had dozens of photos with me, and a few times families from downtown Srinagar came here and identified the bodies of their slain from those photos. All those photos and other testimonials recovered from the dead were taken away by the army, the police, and other [state] agencies during various raids at my house. (Kashmiri gravedigger, qtd. in Chatterji 52).
And as an activist with the APDP noted to me in conversation, when someone is picked up on charge of being a “militant,” neighbors and acquaintances will often destroy any photographs of themselves with that person, lest they be tainted by association and become vulnerable to disappearance. In this way the visual record of the missing person is often “disappeared” along with the person. While the person is rendered invisible, all around Kashmir mass graves have cropped up, the visual displays that serve as a reminder of the army’s power to disappear you into an unmarked grave.
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And indeed, the spectacular nature of the army and paramilitary presence in Kashmir is one key aspect of the visual order in which disappearances can occur and, further, become significant as a symptom of power. In Kashmir, antidisappearance activists understand full well the role of visual display in the maintenance of state power. The APDP’s website notes the visual ubiquity of the military presence across Kashmir: “Armed personnel are deployed not only on the borders but in every street and town square, every village and hamlet. Gigantic army camps surrounded by sandbags and barbed wire sprawl across urban and rural landscapes, forest and mountain giving a visual reality to the frequent observation that Kashmir has been transformed into a prison or a city of bunkers” (emphasis added). (And yet to the tourist’s eye, these same visual signs inspire relief and confidence that the “militant threat” is under control.) The Kashmiri poet Ather Zia writes about the visual impact of the “fancily named ‘concertina’ wire” found everywhere in Kashmir:
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toothy, metallic, shiny, gloating wantonly lying on the roadside, one with dust, spit, dried blood, ash, in that intimate display with AK-47’s looking over the heaps of abandoned shoes, and puddles of endless dog-mess
The authors of Buried Evidence characterize the mass graves in Kashmir (connected by the authors to the phenomenon of disappearances) as “contiguous displays of death,” underscoring that the intent of mass graves is not only to kill with impunity, but also “to forge an unremitting representation of death” (21, emphasis added). These activists understand that the purpose of disappearances is not simply to get rid of irritants to the state but also to serve as a theatrical display of power to those witnessing this violence. The APDP’s deliberate movement of their grief into the public visual sphere is arguably provoked by a keen awareness that “disappearances” are a product of a wider “scopic regime” by which the Indian state organizes what its citizens must, may, and may not see. Writing in the context of Northern Ireland, anthropologist Allen Feldman uses the term “scopic regime” to name the state’s “agendas and techniques of political visualization: the regimens that prescribe modes of seeing and object visibility and that proscribe or render untenable other modes and objects of perception. A scopic regime is an ensemble of practices and discourses that establish the truth claims, typicality, and credibility of visual acts and objects and politically correct modes of seeing” (1997, 7). A similar regime of visual prescription and pro-
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scription operates in Kashmir. Kashmiris may, indeed must, see the theatrical spectacle of military power: the armed personnel, the barbed wire, the mass graves, even the rape, torture, and murder that are often forcibly flaunted before Kashmiri eyes. They must see evidence of the power with which India occupies (“administers”) Kashmir. On the other hand, both Kashmiris and mainstream Indians must not see the tenuousness, the artifice, the provisionality of India’s territorial claim to Kashmir. In February 2012 the Indian government compelled The Economist to distribute its print copies in India with a white sticker over the map of Kashmir published in that magazine. As opposed to India’s official map, which “subsumes without comment or qualification the entirety of pre-1948 Jammu and Kashmir,” the Economist map had shown the varying territorial claims of India, Pakistan, and China, representing current effective international borders by a dotted line (Kabir 8). India had insisted it would only allow cartographic representations that depicted India’s full territorial claims on Kashmir by a solid line rather than a dotted one. As Kabir points out, the official Indian map serves as “the visual equivalent of the oft-repeated claim, ‘Kashmir is an integral part of India’” (8). The visual proscription of the Economist map represented quite neatly how the state seeks to construct and maintain a national fantasy of India through scopic manipulation. These are the techniques by which the nation-state seeks to visually construe itself as a solid given rather than as a construct open to reconstruction. Given this environment of intense visual control, for the APDP and its supporters an important task is not only to retain the memory of the disappeared and highlight the devastating effects of disappearances but also to counter the process of visual manipulation and erasure through which that violence is achieved. The “repeated gestures” performed in the APDP’s public protests constitute a countervisual repertoire that fundamentally challenges the scopic regime of the state through the creation of public spectacle (Taylor 23). As Taylor argues, there is an intense theatricality to the act of political disappearance, discernable not in the domain of visibility but in the potential of disappearances to dramatically refigure the visual sphere by “mak[ing] the visible invisible, the real unreal” (132). It is worth considering, then, how the protesters of APDP deploy public spectacle to performatively reverse this theatrical “disappearing act” and perceptually “reappear” the disappeared.
The Repertoire of Protest The APDP was founded in 1994 by Parveena Ahangar (whose nineteenyear-old son Javaid had been taken away by security forces in 1991) and the
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human rights lawyer Pervez Imroz. Both came together to place scrutiny on the practice of enforced disappearance, whereby security forces would pick up young men who were branded “militants” and then were never heard from again. The organization has since split into two organizations with the same name, led by Ahangar and Imroz, respectively, each still dedicated to documenting disappearances, filing cases, and broadly holding the state to account for enforced disappearances.3 Both organizations have also carried forward an investment in public visibility, in the form of public protest they first initiated when they were together—and it is arguably this aspect of their organizing that has placed them at the center of the field of visual cultural production that I trace here. Indeed, one of the key tactics of the APDP since its formation has consisted of moving the private mourning of relatives of the disappeared into the public domain. Early in the organization’s life, APDP members met at Ahangar’s home in Batmaloo; soon however, the organizers decided to move their meetings into a public park in Srinagar. In addition to gaining greater visibility in their attempt to bring the state’s abuses to light, the public protests serve the purpose of constructing a public “postmemory” for a younger generation that many activists fear have no recollection of the dark decade of the 1990s, when both the militancy and the practice of enforced disappearances was at its peak (Hirsch 5). Each organization continues today to organize these public protests on different monthly dates in Srinagar’s Pratap Park. These protests in the middle of Srinagar’s bustling Lal Chowk, month after month, with garnered media presence, represent a significant visual appropriation of public space, one that claims and redirects the gaze—of passersby, of tourists, of Kashmiris themselves, and not least, of the state. It is a gesture that not only indicates a wish to be seen or looked at by all these audiences but indeed to be seen in the act of looking, that is, to be seen actively surveying the state’s scopic regime. It is a gesture that disrupts the tourist postcard vision of Kashmir as paradise. “The tourist can never see what the Kashmiri sees,” Akhil Katyal writes in a moving review of Aamir Bashir’s 2010 film Harud. “The tourists’ gaze is circular, he looks at that which others exactly like him also look at, so he only sees Dal Lake or its shikaras, in soft light and sanitized proportions, and he goes back to the hotel room at night” (Katyal, n.p.) The tourist’s fleeting gaze does not register the experience of Kashmiris who live in fear of army crackdowns or the grief of relatives searching for their disappeared kin. As discussed in chapter 2, it is partially this restricted gaze, focused on a recycled stockpile of popular images, that has produced Kashmir as a desirable territory in the Indian nationalist imagination. The APDP’s public protest, by foregrounding that which the tourist’s gaze circumvents, reterritorializes Kashmir, presenting it
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as a territory of conflict with effects that go beyond the loss of a yearned-for vacation destination for many mainland Indians. To at least some extent, it makes the landscape intelligible as a landscape of loss for Kashmiris rather than for Indians. In this, the APDP protests, visually proliferated through photographs, documentary films, artwork, and news reports, are part of a larger effort by Kashmiris to claim a public gaze that has historically tended otherwise to rest either on a de-peopled landscape or on reductive and fetishized representations of Kashmiris in Bollywood cinema (Kabir). Today, photographs and videos of military abuse posted by Kashmiris abound on YouTube and Facebook, two sites that are often preemptively blocked in Kashmir by the state. One such video from 2010, the year of mass public protests across Kashmir, serves as a potent reminder of the ways in which violence, visual spectacle, and visual access are fundamentally gendered and the ways in which gendered modes of looking might enable a particular model of resistance. In September 2010, a YouTube video titled “Indian Security Forces Kashmiri Youth to Walk Naked on Road” began to be widely circulated. It was quickly taken down by YouTube, but not before it had been viewed by thousands of people on Kashmiri networks and on Facebook. According to Shuddhabrata Sengupta, writing on the Indian political blog Kafila, “A concerted online effort across two facebook pages by a constellation of people who did not know each other prior to this incident made sure that the video was momentarily up on Youtube. Notices went out across facebook walls to download the video from the concerned Youtube site so that the video could have a distributed, viral presence across several hundreds, if not thousands of computers. By the morning of Thursday, the 9th of September, the effort to ‘erase’ the video from public consciousness had failed.” Kashmir-based newspapers and websites reported widely on the viral video and responses by both outraged Kashmiris as well as Indians. Pertinent for my inquiry here was the textual injunction prefacing this infamous video of Kashmiri male youth being herded naked by Indian military personnel: “brothers please watch, sisters please do not watch.” What presumptions about gender and sexuality underlie this attempt to both invite and censor the witnessing gaze? Why is it presumably permissible or indeed necessary for men to behold the nakedness and humiliation of “brothers,” but not for women? Parsing the seemingly obvious answers to this question may perhaps reveal the heteronormative presumptions underpinning the rules of visual access reiterated by this viral video. The injunction “brothers please watch, sisters please do not watch” invites Kashmiri men to witness the kinds of indignity they themselves might be subject to, calling them to action. The sight of women or “sisters,” meanwhile,
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is sought to be deflected: because of the presumption that feminine eyes must be shielded from unpleasant things; because of the perceived added injury of having men’s sexual vulnerability and humiliation seen by womenfolk; because naked male bodies are not and must not be available to the gaze of women, which must be preserved from corruption. And yet of course the very inclusion of this text within the viral video presumes that “sisters” are already watching, online and off. Online sisters, witnessing the suffering of Kashmiri men, hear the cries of other “sisters” within the video loudly lamenting what they see, only to be derided by the officers who laughingly mimic their cries. The injunction also operates within a framework of naturalized heterosexuality, whereby the gaze of women presumably risks eroticizing the nakedness of these vulnerable male bodies, while also possibly corrupting the female looker. The gaze of men (“brothers”), on the other hand, is deemed secure from the risk of such violations to both the seer and the seen, and it is presumed to hold the ability to galvanize the male holder of the gaze, either to resistance or to self-protection, but never to desire. More recently, in January 2013, a YouTube user named “seeker7676” uploaded a video titled “Kashmir: Indian militiamen assault detained Kashmiri teenagers,” featuring two young Muslim men being beaten mercilessly by Jammu and Kashmir Police (JKP).4 In the course of the beating, carried out by several uniformed and smiling JKP officers who obligingly step aside for the male videographer when asked, both men are stripped of their clothes, with one in particular having his jeans yanked off. In an accompanying note, seeker7676 marks the video as “the latest of a series of video evidences . . . which shows how Indian occupational forces commit war crimes in Kashmir,” also noting the significance of the stripping: “Some of the detained Muslim Kashmiri boys have been sodomised inside the detention and many have been tortured.”5 These video testimonies rely on the “proof value” carried by film to provide testimony of the often-sexualized violence against Kashmiri men. They rely on the spectacle of such sexualized violence to galvanize Kashmiri consciousness around the excesses of the Indian state. The mothers of the APDP, on the other hand, provide a different kind of evidence, evidence not forensically verifiable through photorealist claims. Instead, they offer maternal grief and anger as evidence of disappearances, tapping into a deeply naturalized regard for maternal love. The presence of these women in the park with photographs of their sons comes to serve as evidence of disappearances. The APDP protests comprise much more than the mere presence of bodies in the park. There is in fact in these protests an entire visual repertoire that performs the work of remembrance in very specific ways. For example, the APDP members typically seat themselves against a large photographic collage of the disappeared; they hold against their bodies photographs of their
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disappeared sons; they wear badges and headbands bearing the trademark silhouette icon used by APDP and in antidisappearance activism globally. And, of course, the moving image that people most often remember from these protests is the weeping of mothers, sometimes quiet, occasionally loud, always a reminder of loss. The protest strategies, artwork, and banners I examine here are largely those utilized by Ahangar’s group, although I occasionally refer also to those organized by Imroz’s organization. While Ahangar herself was closely involved in the planning of the monthly meetings and served as a primary figure in the protests, raising slogans and welcoming supporters, there were many volunteers who created the banners, posters, and badges utilized by APDP protesters, not any one artist. Many of the visual elements of protest mentioned above are drawn from a repertoire of global activism against state disappearances. The “wall” of photographs; the use of the silhouette; and the public expression of maternal grief are forms of protest first made iconic by the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo of Argentina and reproduced across Latin America as well as in activism against state disappearances in Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and Indonesia. Indeed, organizers with both APDP groups acknowledged the Argentine Madres and other organizations of the Asian Federation Against Involuntary Disappearances (AFAID) as inspirations for their aesthetic strategies. The APDP’s use of this repertoire thus joins them to a transnational community of activists both politically and performatively. Despite these similarities, we might also consider how these familiar visual elements of protest have a specific significance in Kashmir, where they fit into a very particular epistemology for an audience who may or may not be familiar with the transnational solidarities expressed by the protests. What do these elements make visible about disappearances in Kashmir? One of the central aspects of the protest relates to the use of photographs and photography by the protesters. APDP protesters make extensive use of photographs of the disappeared, and, of course, the protest is itself meant to be photographed, as protesters make use of the local media to magnify their reach. Like the mothers of the Argentine movement against disappearance, APDP members use photographs as “a kind of proof ” in the face of the state’s denials (Taylor 2002, 159). “These people were here,” the photographs held up by the protesters say. Or as one activist put it to me: “People are becoming faceless, but we are giving a face to this disappearance. . . . The state is making them faceless by disappearing them, but we have a face with us of that person. So we want the face to be visible, and that is possible only in a photo ID.”6 The composition below by Altaf Qadri, from the online photo series “Mughli: The Lonely Mother,” metaphotographically foregrounds the role of the photograph in the movement’s repertoire.
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Remembering the disappeared. Photograph by Altaf Qadri.
Qadri’s photograph compositionally replicates the archival collage or “wall” of photographs of the disappeared utilized in the APDP protests, displayed in the APDP office in Hyderpora and on their website. The topmost row of photos in Qadri’s photograph features the disappeared themselves (the cutting off of this row suggests that the wall extends upward, possibly infinitely); but in the main, it is the parents and relatives of the disappeared who appear on the photographer’s wall. They appear here in their classic “protest pose,” bearing photographs of the disappeared in their hands. Placing photographs of the disappeared themselves alongside those of their relatives, Qadri’s composition registers these relatives as now part of the casualties of disappearance. The arm that cuts across the photograph points our gaze to the well-loved Mughli (a figure whom I return to later in this chapter), the first APDP activist to die without ever seeing her son again and the subject of numerous visual texts by Kashmiri artists close to the movement. This same arm leads us back to a very young Parveena Ahangar, on the bottom left. Now considerably older, Ahangar is today a familiar face in the Kashmiri and also the international media, where she is frequently photographed in an aspect of mourning. It is impossible to view Qadri’s photograph, dated “2012,” and not be struck by the image of Ahangar’s youth, which functions in this photograph to quietly document the sheer length of time spent by relatives looking for their missing. We see this hand in the act of adding yet another such photograph to the wall; this, along with the empty space at the bottom right, serves as a chilling reminder of the ongoing nature of disappearances:
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the children have disappeared, and the generation of parents who keep their memory alive are now disappearing too. One of the most photographed “poses” of the protest, reproduced widely across local and global media, is of course the iconic pose of the mother sitting with a photograph of a disappeared son.7 This gesture, of wearing the photograph of the disappeared on or against the body of the parent, visually restores the familial bonds disrupted by the state; it also lends the body of the parent/relative to mark the place of the disappeared. Another by Qadri, below, neatly brings out the logic of substitution at work in the pose. The photograph, taken from a low angle, “disappears” the mother’s upper body to the same extent that her son’s body appears in the photograph she holds. Her upper body “disappears” and reappears as a silhouette, recalling another visual tool familiar from APDP protests, where parents “wear” silhouettes representing the disappeared on their headbands or on badges. Here, rather than wearing the silhouette against her body—a gesture that ordinarily highlights the maternal bond between the protester and the missing son—the mother has herself become the silhouette. The protesting mother has “disappeared” behind the son’s image, lending her own body to mark the place where he had been. If the darkening-out of the woman’s face to focus our gaze on the disappeared male child risks a disconcerting erasure of the individual mother in question, the sight of her foregrounded overlarge hands holding the photograph of her son reminds us that she, like all the APDP women who position themselves behind photographs of their sons at protests, shares authorship of this image.
Mughli in “protest pose” with her son’s photograph. Photograph by Altaf Qadri.
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Qadri’s photograph recalls and references the use of silhouettes in APDP iconography. The recognizable silhouette of a male figure in a collared shirt appears on headbands worn by APDP members and is used on APDP banners and badges. Writing in the context of the Argentine Madres’ movement, Ana Longoni notes that whereas the use of photographs marks the unique individuality of each of the disappeared, the silhouette serves the function of quantification, standing for each of the innumerable disappeared, many of whom left no photographic trace, in Argentina as in Kashmir. As Longoni notes, the use of silhouettes in antidisappearance activism “[represents] ‘the presence of an absence’”; silhouettes represent “not simply what is absent—for all representation is, by definition, a representation of an absent object—but rather, what is intentionally made absent” (9). The iconic silhouette, lacking indexicality, of course cannot represent the disappeared themselves; what it represents is their mass disappearance. Recently, students of Kashmir’s Fine Arts College produced a striking, large-scale silhouette and installed it in Pratap Park on the International Day of Disappeared Persons in Srinagar.8 The oversized silhouette traces the gap left by the disappeared in the communal fabric of Kashmiri society. The silhouette, cut from a framing canvas of newsprint, perhaps gestures to the national and international media’s implication in enabling such disappearances through silence; but it may also serve as a reminder of how a supportive local media within Kashmir has succeeded in drawing attention to the gaping absence in Kashmiri society. The photographic framing of this artwork by the photographer Fayaz Kabli for Reuters is possibly as striking as the installation itself.9 The explicit inclusion of three young male bodies in the frame is a telling choice: to look at these mobile male bodies, clambering perilously close to this static cutout of the disappeared, is to be reminded once more of the vulnerability of young men in Kashmir as well as the ongoing nature of this violence. There is no telling which of them might disappear into the gap next. Quite another kind of gendered vulnerability is figured in the weeping of mothers, who often break down at the protest, where they are photographed by sympathetic (male) photographers. What is achieved by this act of public mourning? Mothers’ grief for sons, deeply naturalized as the grief to surpass all grief, inconveniently displayed in the public domain, makes it impossible for onlookers to claim innocence about their suffering. If the above malefigured silhouette and Kabli’s photograph point to the embodied vulnerability of young men to disappearance, the proliferating photographs of weeping and suffering mothers [and often half-widows] underscores the social vulnerability of the women left behind. Indeed, the paradigmatic photographic image of the APDP protests is that of the weeping mother. A Google image
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search for “APDP Kashmir,” for example, pulls up scores of images of bereaved mothers (and sometimes half-widows) that saturate the local press and online news networks. This visual image fits into a wider narrative of maternal suffering and is replicated across the literature, poetry, and music of protest in Kashmir. In order for an audience to consciously register the violence of disappearances, the helplessness of female survivors must be emphasized, their suffering foregrounded. Another graphic by Malik Sajad (not reproduced here) captures this dynamic perfectly: a man wearing headphones marked “UN” holds a microphone up to a half-widow as she weeps copious tears. “Can you cry a little louder,” he says, “I want to check the sound quality!” The need for international intervention necessitates the performance of grief as “evidence” of the devastation wrought by disappearances. Since there is no body (literally) that can testify to the violence of enforced disappearance, that violence must be made visible and authenticated through the spectacle of grief, publicly enacted by mothers and half-widows. The disappeared can only become “visible” through the suffering women they have left behind. Certainly the display of maternal suffering achieves many of the APDP’s own aims: in addition to keeping the memory of the disappeared alive, it powerfully interpellates a younger generation that has not directly witnessed the decade of disappearances (the 1990s). The protests also provide a communal space for shared experience of grief; even the onlooking Jammu and Kashmir Police (JKP) rarely bother the protesters during the protest. And yet, the elevation of the spectacle of maternal suffering in the visual narrative has its costs. For one, despite a concomitant narrative about the resilience of Kashmiri mothers in the movement, the dominant media image of Kashmiri women still appears to be one of victimhood, as one may glean from the proliferating images of mourning Kashmiri women that routinely accompany news stories about tragic killings of young men by the state. The APDP’s presentation of maternal suffering, even when set forth as an act of political agency, risks shoring up such a narrative. Second, as I began to realize only after I returned and set about reviewing the video I had taken at the protest, the photographic framing of maternal suffering also obscures something: the presence of a substantial number of men who also appear at these protests. In fact, about 40 percent of relatives who appear at these protests are men. Unlike Argentina, where fathers of the disappeared are said to have “turned inward, often isolating themselves from any collective projects,” in Kashmir the presence of fathers, brothers, and other male relatives of the disappeared at the protests has been palpable (qtd. in Taylor, 193). Perhaps for good reason, given the women-led character of the movement, the men at these protests are cast in a “supporting role”; it is the spectacle of maternal suffering and grief that carries the most affective charge here. This was reflected by the
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very visual organization of the protest: spread on the ground as a key point of visual interest was a large canvas painted by the well-known Kashmiri graphic artist Malik Sajad, and it was the women who were seated around the periphery of this canvas while the assembled men sat at some distance from it. Sajad’s packed canvas, a vertical rectangle on which the faces of twentyodd men jostle for space, faced not the protesters themselves but away from them. Now a regular exhibit in the APDP’s monthly protests, it was laid out for those witnessing and photographing the protest: the press, onlookers, and researchers like myself followed it like a pointer, looking at the artwork, then looking at the women seated behind it. The arrangement was a reminder of the “photographic-ness” of these monthly protests and also a clear marker of the gendered organization of this monthly public spectacle. While the grief of women is foregrounded, the grieving of fathers and brothers correspondingly finds relatively little space in visual representations. This may be explained in part by the fact that women’s mourning is more amenable to visual representation: mothers and wives can cry while fathers and brothers must swallow the pain, or else turn to anger. (In fact, as I heard later, Ahangar’s heckler at the start of the protest was himself the brother of a disappeared person; once a supporter of the APDP, he had turned away from the organization as his brother’s case languished for years in the courts and then, APDP members felt, misdirected his anger at them rather than at the state.) And yet fathers are present at these protests; they are just cut out of the media’s photographic frame. Is there space for their grieving in the visual narrative emerging around the antidisappearance protests? What would it mean to place these grieving fathers and brothers before sight? I realized only in retrospect that what I saw in Srinagar in July 2012, what I looked for and “zoomed in” on as I stood there alongside so many others with my camera, had been given to me to see by the visual representations I had already seen before.10 At the protest, finally, I saw for myself the subjects of these images: I saw the women gathered in a semicircle, sitting with their photographs just as I had seen them in the photographs that I had been viewing from a distance. It is only now that I see what the photographic framing of these protests frequently excludes and overlooks in order to magnify and make iconic: The vastness of the bunkered cityscape wherein these parents occupied but a small part of a public park. What these protests looked like in motion and with sound, the women finally unfrozen from the photographs that had previously held them, some weeping, yes, but also smiling, talking, welcoming supporters. The gathered crowd. And notably, the presence of a substantial number of male relatives of the disappeared, who seemed to be attracting little to no attention from the reporters and photographers pushing their lenses into the women’s faces.
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But I was still looking through the camera’s gaze: only after I left the protest that day did I realize I had forgotten to look at the men. I had to return to the brief video I had taken of the larger protest in order to look at these male relatives of the disappeared. Why had I not looked? Had I felt my gaze would be inappropriate? Did my own gender bar my visual access to them in this loosely gender-segregated space? Would it have been appropriate to look at the men, to photograph them while everyone else, not least the male cameramen, focused on the women? Would it have denied the female-led character of the group to have focused on these male supporters? To look at the men at these protests, I realized, I would have to unlearn the ways of seeing the protest that had been constructed through the protest itself as well as the photographic representations that rendered mothers’ grief spectacular.
The Gendered Landscape of Disappearance
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The context of killings in Kashmir has engendered a landscape where the death of men has rendered vulnerable the living, especially women, children, and other gender identified groups —Angana P. Chatterji, Buried Evidence
This evocative graphic illustration by Malik Sajad appeared in Al Jazeera’s in-depth feature on Kashmir in April 2011, accompanying an article titled “The Disappeared of Kashmir,” a report on “the boys who never came home.” Sajad’s rich illustration captures with astonishing visual economy the gendered landscape of grief created by the disappearances of the last two decades. An open hand stands against Kashmir’s ubiquitous barbed wire, a deadly constant that cuts across the landscape of time represented in the frame, significantly close to the wrist. Positioned not in the center of the image but a little to Mass graves in Kashmir. Illustration by Malik Sajad.
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
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the left, the hand is turned slightly away from the viewer, its tilt representing the passage of time. It is missing three fingers, the tips of which appear spectrally in the image; they once existed, still to be seen for those who care to look. Embedded at the base of these ghostly fingers are three signs. The one closest to the foreground reads “Mass Graves,” a reference to the unmarked mass graves uncovered by human rights activists in 2011. While this sign is in English (the language of internationally oriented human rights activism and report writing in Kashmir), the signs further in the perspectival distance appear to be marked in illegible Urdu script—presumably the names of the disappeared, their illegibility also suggesting the challenges of remembering who exactly these disappeared persons were from the perspective of the present. A buttoned shirt hangs precipitously off the farthest sign; as the last material vestige of the disappeared, the shirt calls attention both to the absence of the shirt’s wearer and to the male gender of the disappeared. The entire hand appears shrouded in the flowing burial cloth (kafan). Like the empty shirt that hangs over the edge, the past itself seems in danger of disappearing off the edge of time. Sajad makes masterful use of the graphic form’s ability to represent time as space on the page. As Hillary Chute notes, “The way that time is shaped spatially on a page of comics—through panel size, panel shape, panel placement, and the concomitant pace and rhythm the page gestures at establishing—is essential to understanding how comics works” (7). Sajad’s single panel presents time past from the perspective of time present, while gesturing toward an ambivalent future that is visually located, oddly, between the present and past in this panel. In disrupting the linearity of time in this way, the image captures the grim temporal stagnation that characterizes the lives of the relatives of the disappeared, giving visual form to the frequent observation made in Kashmir that time stands still for those who grieve. And yet, in the figures of the women, in the midst of this temporal stasis, we see movement. It is the women of Kashmir, appearing as the surviving two fingers of the larger communal hand, who represent both the devastation of disappearances and the hope of rebuilding community. The woman figured as the index finger appears to move resolutely toward the gravesites beneath the spectral fingers, her eyes fixed on this target. She is holding by the hand—indeed, seems to be pulling up behind her—the woman closest to the foreground and presumably (given the temporality represented by the tilt of the hand) most recently bereaved by the tragedy of disappearances. The two women, hands conjoined, appear to be “progressing” up an incline; yet they progress not into the future space represented by the image’s foreground but into its past. In the temporal and topographi-
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
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APDP poster. Photograph taken by the author at APDP’s Hyderpora office, July 2012.
cal scheme of the image, time present appears as an impediment to be surmounted, while “progress” is represented as an uphill journey leading back to the brutal past of the occupation. Sajad’s illustration suggests that the way “forward” is inevitably through the past, through this history that has trapped women in the limbo state captured by the term “half-widows.” Where this journey leads, however—beyond the acknowledgment and commemoration of the missing—seems uncertain. The lines of fate, doubling here as the folds of time, radiate outward from these female figures. As an internal visual counterpoint to the dismembered hand in the image, Sajad’s illustration features two other hands: those of the women, whose own joined hands appear to bind together the two surviving “fingers” of the larger hand, symbolizing the possibility of survival and rebuilding through mutual support, even as they mourn. Sajad, a public supporter of the APDP, is drawing, of course, on the icon widely utilized by the APDP in its posters, banners, and website: the image of a hand with a missing middle finger, bearing on its palm the Urdu word “missing.” When I met Ahangar in July 2012, she explained the significance of this APDP logo with the words: “yeh shareer ka ek ang hai” (this is a body part). Ahangar’s annotation perhaps unwittingly recalls the “atoot ang” (unbreakable body part) metaphor whereby Hindu nationalists frequently proclaim that “Kashmir is an integral limb of India” (Kashmir Bharat ka atoot ang hai). Ahangar’s utterance privileges another body (politic): not that of the nation-state, but the communal body that has been dismembered in order
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to maintain the bodily integrity of the Indian nation-state. While Sajad’s graphic draws upon the APDP icon, it also redraws this icon through a different visual idiom, mining the metaphoric potential and visual resonances of the hand image across the Kashmiri, Indian, and international public imagination. Unlike the APDP logo’s hand print—which itself draws upon widespread protest iconographies where attending protesters add their hand print as a metonymic sign of solidarity—Sajad’s hand, which proceeds down to the wrist, ironically evokes the iconic Congress Party’s longstanding hand symbol for national integration. Its scattered fingers appear as the other of the Congress Party’s “national integration” symbol (with its gapless fingers), but also of the closed fist long associated with “solidarity” in international movements. The dispersed, spectral fingers in Sajad’s panel speak to the dis-integration of the Kashmiri communal body, as well as the difficulty of forging solidarities when integral members of the community are missing. Its scattered fingers also appear as the negative of the closed fist long associated with “solidarity” in international movements.11 Although vulnerable and victimized, women are figured here as a remaining resource for community as they support each other in an environment where women now outnumber men across the state. What lies ahead? The path toward a public acknowledgment and memorialization of the devastation of their families and communities (“mass graves”), yes, but what else? Does the movement also envision a regendering of Kashmiri society, a challenging of gender roles? What does “forward” movement mean in this context?
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“The Lonely Mother” I turn now to Altaf Qadri’s photo series “Mughli: The Lonely Mother,” a sequence of twenty-two photographs that uses the medium of photography not only to transmit knowledge about the phenomenon and tragic effects of disappearances, but also to deconstruct the visual logics within which such violence could occur in the first place. Posted as a slideshow on Qadri’s website under a tab titled “Stories,” this is a story that can perhaps only be told through photography, a medium that exposes what Benjamin called the “optical unconscious” (Wells 13). “The Lonely Mother” begins with a textual description of context: the first slide in the series provides an overview of “Enforced Disappearances” as “one of the most harrowing” aspects of the Kashmir conflict, and then goes on to describe its gendered repercussions. “Of the disappeared persons, between 2000–2005 most of them were married males. Although men have
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been subject to disappearance largely, women have been adversely affected because of being related to them as daughters mothers, sisters and wives.” It goes on to profile the deceased Mughli, one of the earliest members of the APDP, and the first to die without having seen her son again. The slide details her desperate attempts to trace her disappeared son Nazir Ahmad Teli, despairingly noting that his return “seems to be just a dream of hope of a desperate mother who too wants her missing son to return alive.” The text ends by noting that Mughli died in the fall of 2009. The series thus carries the aura of elegy, not for the disappeared son, but for the mother who looked for him for nineteen years. A word about the social life of these photographs may speak to the interpenetration of Qadri’s photographs with other visual sites that house the memory of the now deceased Mughal Mase. My own recent encounter with these photographs was through Iffat Fatima’s documentary Where Have You Hidden My New Crescent Moon? which opens with a selection of photographs from Qadri’s series. Subsequently I traced and was able to view the entire series at length and repeatedly on Qadri’s website as a slideshow; at this point I realized I had visited Qadri’s website previously, probably by clicking through the Facebook page of a friend or a network. As I viewed the images, I sent the link to friends in Mumbai who would be unlikely to stumble across this work in the wilderness of cyberspace. Later, in conversation with Iffat Fatima, I learned that she herself had come across Qadri’s photographs in the large archive of documents housed in the APDP office in Hyderpora, where they may be shown to visitors among other visual and textual documents that form part of the institutional memory of the organization. Needless to say, each of the “framing” contexts mentioned herewith—Qadri’s website, the Facebook pages of individual Kashmiris, and Kashmir networks online; the APDP documents archive; Fatima’s documentary—also makes for a vastly different experience of viewing the photographs in question. This brief trajectory of viewing, sharing, and circulating these images is a reminder that one does not simply “come across” images but that they are rather pushed into view through various fields, visual and nonvisual, that one passes through. One’s transit through those fields, too, is never incidental; what one sees within those fields is so irreducibly moored to where one stands that any reading of the visual fields of production from an assumed position of omniscience would be disingenuous at best. I have read these images, as indeed I have read all the texts examined in this book, from my own situated perspective as an Indian citizen but also a Kashmiri from a diasporic Pandit family and as an academic reflecting on the long history of violence associated with the
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nation-state whose privileges I inhabit as a middle-class Brahmin woman. And so my analysis here may be read as my own effort to reorganize the way we see these images from the viewing post of “India,” or even to add to their visibility in the first place. At the same time, I would not wish to suggest that the vision imparted to us by Qadri’s photographs is entirely determined by subjective location. I would agree here with Judith Butler that “interpretation is not to be conceived restrictively in terms of a subjective act. Rather, interpretation takes place by virtue of the structuring constraints of genre and form on the communicability of affect—and so sometimes takes place against one’s will, or, indeed, in spite of oneself ” (2009, 67). Thus it is also worth considering how Qadri’s compositions themselves attempt to structure the way we see, literally and metaphorically, the violence of disappearances. In Qadri’s photographs, this violence becomes apparent both in the tragic, gendered aftermath of this phenomenon (the loneliness of mothers embodied by Mughli, the “subject” in and of the photographs) and in the structures of seeing, through which the spectacle of disappearance is managed by the state. Qadri’s series is perhaps less about the disappeared themselves and more about the “disappearing act” staged by the state through a manipulation of public sight.12 Engaging closely with these images, I suggest, may make more critical spectators of us all, and thereby move us to a different vantage point. I wish to proceed, therefore, with a subsequence of three images that compel us to consider the relationship between violence and vision.13 In this sequence of images, Mughli is captured in the act of rubbing her eyes; appearing for an eye test; and finally having her eye scrutinized by someone as the photograph of her disappeared son looks directly out at the viewer. All three images draw the viewer’s attention to Mughli’s apparently failing sight, as if to ask wryly whether this might be the reason Mughli is unable to trace her son—for how can someone simply “vanish into thin air”?14 It is worth pausing over one particular photograph in this sequence, arguably one of the most arresting images in the series. Of all the photographs in Qadri’s series, it is perhaps this one that is most clearly marked with the Barthesian punctum, that accidental feature captured in the photograph that “rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces [one]” (Barthes 26). Unlike Barthes however, whose examples of punctum are intensely personal, I locate the punctum of this tableau-like photograph in the lines of sight structuring the image. Qadri shows us a scene that, apart from its photographic framing, might be an unremarkable sight: a woman (Mughli) having her eyes tested while another, younger woman waits, her child in her arms. What first arrests our gaze is the dramatic “eyeline” leading from the white sclera of the woman on the right of the frame
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
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Vision in the time of disappearance. Photograph by Altaf Qadri.
to the chart above Mughli. Combined with the pointer in the man’s hand (a second leading line in the photograph), this woman’s gaze first fixes the viewer’s eye on the chart. Two other lines of sight, the child’s and the man’s, direct our gaze at Mughli. She herself is not looking directly at the chart above her head but presumably at its reflection; with her uncovered eye she looks out at something beyond the frame. Mughli’s gaze with its missing referent: here is the photograph’s punctum. Once it has risen, this detail is invested with a “power of expansion” that at once invokes what is outside the frame and itself “fills the whole picture” (45). It creates what Barthes calls a “blind field” by invoking something external to the picture (57).15 We are led to ask what Mughli is looking at, and, of course, we know what the referent is: the reflection of the chart, but also the missing son. Poignantly, while Mughli’s gaze is missing its object, the woman on the right holds on to the object of her gaze as tenaciously as she holds on to her child, seemingly a young boy who has not yet reached the age when disappearances become a danger. What makes this image work in the series is that it functions as such an apt deconstruction of the visual economy within which the violence of disappearance occurs. In these photographs, Qadri deconstructs the fiction of direct visual access. The very next image presents a similar scene—Mughli’s eye is being examined by a man, but directly in front of us is a photograph of her missing son—a reminder of the representational nature of the medium itself. As Nazir Ahmed Teli looks out at us we are made freshly aware that
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we are looking not at Teli but at a photograph of him; in fact, we are looking at a photograph of a photograph of him, and it is through the photograph that he is rendered present. There is no “plain sight” that is not already manipulated through the technologies of seeing, including the camera. Qadri’s photographs compel us to ask, with Allen Feldman, “Where does violence emerge into visibility, and what kinds of visibilities does violence create?” (1997, 31). In Qadri’s photographs violence is not directly visible, and yet it creates visibilities, visual worlds shaped by violence, in which grieving mothers become spectacularly visible both as political agents and as vulnerable survivors of the disappeared. The title of Qadri’s online exhibit, “Mughli: The Lonely Mother,” and the opening slide both direct our reading of these photographs as they cannot, for example, in the APDP photograph archive (unless also accompanied by a similar title there). I wish to ask whether we can read these images to place some pressure on the title—the given “story” of the photo essay—without negating the loneliness that must certainly attend to this mother’s loss. It is not that, seduced by a desire to establish “women’s agency,” I seek to displace the story of maternal loneliness signaled by Qadri’s title. But I see an advantage to sorting out the nature of that loneliness, partly by foregrounding certain images within Qadri’s own sequence and partly by tracing the transmission of some of these photographs into another visual site where their meaning comes to be somewhat modified—in this instance, Fatima’s documentary film. What produces and exacerbates maternal loneliness and vulnerability in a time of disappearances? How might we understand, frame, and memorialize these vulnerabilities even as we acknowledge the impressive political agency of the women who are thus framed? Whereas Qadri’s series compels us to consider the role of the state in producing the vulnerable condition of maternal loneliness through the practice of enforced disappearances, Fatima’s documentary also probes the role of existing patriarchy in exacerbating the vulnerability produced by state violence. The first image in Qadri’s series (discussed earlier) provides a thematic overview, so to speak, to the “story” of maternal loneliness in his photo essay. Mughli appears alone in the iconic APDP “pose,” seated in the outdoors with a photograph of her son. On Qadri’s website and in Fatima’s tribute film where this photograph reappears, the appearance of this photograph after Mughli’s death poignantly marks the fact that Mughli is no longer around to lend her body to the disappeared son as she had been able to do at the time of Qadri’s photographing. In positioning Mughli herself as the subject of the visual artwork, this photograph in both Qadri’s and Fatima’s visual texts establishes an equivalence rather than a substitution between
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Mughli and her disappeared son: Mughli too has now disappeared, and her disappearance is (made) as significant as that of her son. Whereas Qadri’s first image accentuates Mughli’s loneliness by capturing her in isolation (although even here we see the arm of another APDP woman on the edge of the image), the next several images in the photo essay locate Mughli within the wider community of the APDP. Yet these public scenes are frequently punctuated by images of Mughli in isolation. In four consecutive images we see Mughli stepping through the door of a darkened house; Mughli drying clothes in her courtyard; Mughli locking up the house as she leaves (for there is no one there); and, finally, Mughli walking alone through Habbakadal in a striking image that both relays and freezes her forward movement, a visual rendering of the everyday experience of time for the relatives of the disappeared. But if these isolated shots relay her loneliness, other images foreground the political community that leavens that loneliness: we also see Mughli walking together with other activists in an APDP protest, and in the company of other women, and of course, we are aware of the photographer’s presence even when Mughli appears in isolation. Loneliness is distinguished from being alone, as Mughli’s political community appears in several of the pictures. Mughli is not alone, Qadri’s photographs suggest, yet she is lonely.
Mughli in Habbakadal. Photograph by Altaf Qadri.
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In Iffat Fatima’s documentary film Where Have You Hidden My New Crescent Moon? this trope of loneliness is carried forward yet substantially transformed. Fatima explores both the role of state disappearances as well as local patriarchal structures in creating the particular gendered and agebased vulnerability Mughli faces in late life. Unlike static representations that frequently freeze Mughli in an aspect of vulnerability, Fatima’s film is able to provide a more complex portrait of her vulnerability, partly by capturing Mughli’s persona on film. Shot in the space of a single afternoon, the film consists of the filmmaker’s visit to meet Mughli along with Parveena Ahangar. It is composed almost entirely of conversations with Mughli, relying heavily on her own charismatic personality and poetic narrative style to convey the texture of her everyday life in the absence of her son. The film pays tribute to the now-deceased Mughli, memorializing her not only for what she represents as an icon for the movement but also as an individual: the woman who, when asked by soldiers if she was keeping a gun in the house, thrust the nozzle of her hookah at them and said, “here’s my gun,” then asked them to help her move firewood since they claimed to be “on duty.” Fatima’s film significantly translates the trope of maternal loneliness introduced in Qadri’s photo series (which prefaces the film), rebuilding this narrative by also spotlighting the local patriarchal structures that so many sympathetic representations of grieving mothers miss. Married at fourteen and then deserted while pregnant by her husband after only three months of marriage (during which her son was conceived), Mughli raised her son with the support of her parents. Now, Mughli laughingly tells Fatima, her husband wants her back in his dotage, but she has refused. “I have been hurt deeply,” she says, prioritizing her personal feelings over the potential practical advantages of her husband’s companionship. If Qadri’s photo essay is careful to present Mughli as lonely but not alone, Fatima’s documentary emphasizes Mughli’s autonomy and presents her as she presents herself: not (or not just) as a “lonely mother,” but as a single mother. In other words, Mughli is made visible as an autonomous rather than merely lonely subject, an older woman who insists on retaining her independence rather than reuniting in old age with the husband who had once left her for another woman and now wants her back. Mughli’s story emerges not only as one of vulnerability but of chosen self-sufficiency and endurance in the face of vulnerability. Acknowledging the autonomy of this determined woman need not, indeed should not, minimize our acknowledgment of her pain or even her loneliness. But it might perhaps aerate the narrative of stateinflicted maternal vulnerability with a sense of other gendered, and aged, vulnerabilities that intersect with it.
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Conclusion Largely, in the iconic visual narratives surrounding disappearances in Kashmir, men disappear, and women grieve. Do women disappear? Do men grieve? As I observed of the press photographers at the APDP protest, the visual narrative of the protesters and of the press frequently declines recognition to either the grief of men or the embodied violence against women. Indeed, in much of the visual production examined in this chapter, male vulnerability is embodied, whereas female vulnerability is figured as indirect, consequent upon the loss of male family members and their protection. Across visual and nonvisual representations of disappearance, the bodies of young Muslim men have lately come to inhabit the image of which bodies are most vulnerable in Kashmir, so much so that activists report that it is men who are much more vulnerable to sexual violence than women in Kashmir.16 On the one hand this emphasis on male sexual vulnerability must be commended for its willingness to denaturalize the myths of masculinity whereby men are only ever agents and never victims of violence. On the other hand, the claims of exceptional and extreme embodied suffering of men in the visual narrative might risk deflecting from militarized violence against women. After all, as is well known, women have also been raped and tortured in large numbers. Moreover, as the human rights activist and anthropologist Angana Chatterji explained to me when I asked if she had heard of women being “disappeared”: “Regarding disappearances in Kashmir, it is [largely] men that are disappeared, even as gendered and sexualized violences are perpetrated on women. However, in the event of rape and murder, as in Shopian in 2009, women are ‘disappeared’ in the process.”17 Chatterji points to the real and metaphorical ways in which “disappearance” might operate vis á vis women in Kashmir—women are raped, tortured, murdered, killed in crossfire, disappeared into homes as a result of the sexually predatory nature of the state and of local patriarchy. There exists, in fact, a growing movement against the sustained use of rape, of women as well as men, by the Indian military. Very recently, for instance, more than fifty Kashmiri women lawyers, teachers, and students filed a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) demanding a reinvestigation into the mass rape of an entire village of Kashmiri women in Kunan Poshpora in 1991. But sexual violence does not easily lend itself to effective visual strategies of representation, and perhaps understandably so. The dangers of visualizing rape have been apparent in the range of posters utilized in the Delhi rape protests, which frequently represent women cowering, weeping, and bleeding. While these seek to create empathy for victims of rape and call out for redress on their behalf, they undoubtedly
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also consolidate the images of female vulnerability that underpin the “rape script.”18 Thus I am certainly not calling here for a visual campaign around the rampant prevalence of sexual violence by military personnel in Kashmir, to parallel the visual strategies of the antidisappearance movement. Nor, in drawing attention to these other vulnerabilities, do I wish to suggest that young Muslim men are not vulnerable in a very specific way to the state’s violence—precisely because they are young, Muslim, and male, and fit the image of the antinational, physically fit, arms-trained/trainable “terrorist” that the state sees in all young Muslim men in Kashmir. Rather, I mean to raise the question of what kinds of gendered violence are amenable to visual representation and what kinds may not be represented quite as pervasively in the visual domain. That question also reminds us of the kinds of activism that lend themselves to visual representation and thereby command some space in the optical unconscious in the public sphere, and those that do not. As we acknowledge the value of lending representation to the disappeared by keeping them spectacularly alive in public memory, we might also keep in mind the limits of visual spectacle as a means of representing violence, bearing in mind forms of gendered and religionized violence that may not lend themselves to such representation but nevertheless must be kept in the public eye in other ways.
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Epilogue The Violence of the Oppressed “I do not have the strength to fight anymore. After 58 murders, no one is guilty. The courts are theirs, the government is theirs, the lathi [the baton of power] is theirs. The poor have nothing. This is injustice.” —Baudh Paswan, responding to the Patna High Court’s acquittal, on grounds of “insufficient evidence,” of all twenty-six accused in the 1997 slaughter of fifty-eight Dalits in Laxmanpur Bathe by the upper-caste militia Ranvir Sena.1
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“Why do I have to take the law into my hands? I’ll tell you why, because the government isn’t implementing its own laws—police and government take bribes. But now no one even goes to police and government; they say ‘these people won’t get the job done, Sampatji will get it done.’ That is why people look up to me.” —Sampat Pal, leader of the “Gulabi Gang,” a women’s vigilante organization based in Bundelkhand, Uttar Pradesh, with a membership of more than twenty thousand members.
Throughout this book I have mapped the many forms of gendered violence generated by varied and often dissonant ideas of India—some widely understood as “gendered violence,” such as rape and reproductive violence; others less so, such as genital violence against men, deturbanning, and enforced disappearance. In uncovering the gendered scripts enabling such forms of violence against men, which in each of the above cases intersect with constructions of religious identity, I have presented these forms as also instances of “gendered violence,” seeking to correct the frequent conflation in academic, activist, and popular discourse of “gendered violence” with “violence against women.” Such a move compels us to recognize the shared stake across all genders in recognizing not only how the nation is itself gendered but how it has gendered us—all those of us, that is, who have been subject to the interpellative force of some idea of “India,” whether that interpellation has been successful or not. The preceding chapters have also considered some
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powerful forms of women’s protest that reveal the semiotic content of violent acts. Embedded in creative acts of embodied resistance, such as naked protest and public mourning, are implicit representations of the violence that has prompted these performances of “theatricalized rage” (Butler 1993). In other words, naked protest in front of army headquarters encodes an understanding about sexual violence and custodial rape; the alternately wounded and enraged performances of Kashmiri women who use their bodies to “bookmark” the disappeared in public space certainly encode an understanding about the visual regime in which enforced disappearance can happen.2 From (indeed even before) the nation-state’s inception in 1947 to the current moment where India faces the possibility of new partitions in the form of various secessionist movements, violence has been a steady offshoot of varied dominant imaginings of India, producing a range of populations vulnerable to the violence of powerful groups. In this epilogue, I want briefly to consider the violence “from below” that responds to the violence of powerful groups backed by the state, or enacted by the state itself. The frustration and defiance, respectively, expressed by Baudh Paswan and Sampat Pal in the epigraphs above raise the question of how feminists might respond to the violence deployed by the disempowered: violence arguably understandable as “self-defense” in a scenario where the lack of access to legal justice makes some minority populations exceptionally vulnerable to the violence of powerful groups. When, for instance, the women vigilantes of the Gulabi Gang bypass the legal mechanisms of the state and take up the lathi (the wooden stick with which the gang’s women train to fight) in defense of rural poor and largely lower-caste women experiencing violence and abuse within and outside the family, how might we respond, knowing what Paswan points out: “The courts are theirs, the government is theirs, the lathi is theirs”? If the experience of the widely photographed Adivasi protester discussed in chapter 3 is anything to go by, petitioning the government by protesting on the streets as a Dalit or Adivasi woman, far from generating the desired transformations, may result in further violence. Indeed, a comparison of that Adivasi woman’s fate as a protester with the supportive public reception of the Delhi rape protests shamefully highlights how “streets are gendered spaces that are mediated by caste” and not equally available to everyone as sites for protest (Kannabiran and Kannabiran 256).3 What, too, might we make of the violent resistance of the Maoist insurgency in central India, fueled by the large-scale dispossession and displacement of Adivasi peoples as a result of the Indian government’s appropriation of indigenous lands on behalf of multinational mining corporations? As Arundhati Roy recently pointed out, what alternative to the brutal methods chosen by
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the Maoists do middle-class Indians have to suggest? “Do a dharna at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi? A rally? A relay hunger strike? . . . Which democratic institution in this country should they approach? Which door did the Narmada Bachao Andolan not knock on during the years and years it fought against Big Dams on the Narmada?” Peaceful protest, while staging powerful symbolic interventions (as with the protests examined in chapters 4 and 5 of this book), and opting out of the cycle of culpability that characterizes vigilantism of the kind favored by the Gulabi Gang, is seldom an effective means of achieving demands unless one is prepared to wait for years, often only to receive the kind of ruling delivered in the case of Laxmanpur Bathe.4 From the vantage point of those disempowered subjects for whom India’s decolonization has been largely a fable, might it be true, as Frantz Fanon famously argued, that “life can only spring up again out of the rotting corpse of the settler”? (84). If this formulation seems provocative, I pose it thus not in order to produce a simple defense of resistant violence but to take seriously what it means to condemn it in the absence of other viable options. I wish to approach these questions through a reading of an (in)famous recent essay by Arundhati Roy, wherein she provided an account of her travels with Maoist rebels in the Dandakaranya forests, provoking a debate on the ethics of violence and nonviolence in the Indian mainstream and within the Indian Left. In her 2010 nonfiction piece “Walking with the Comrades” for Outlook magazine, Roy recounted her travels in the Maoist heartlands of central India, clearing space for a historicized consideration of Maoist violence, its sources and effects, and countering the immediate and often pious condemnations that were being replayed ad nauseam on Indian television channels at the time. The piece is worth considering both for the sobering questions it raises about the conditions that produce armed insurrection and as an example of the dangers of relying on tropes of innocence (in this case tribal innocence) in order to shield violent actors from immediate dismissal. While this was not the first time Roy had sought to complicate mainstream media representations of Maoist violence by referring to the failure of the state toward indigenous peoples, in “Walking with the Comrades” Roy’s prose appeared to succumb heavily to the romance of the revolution, even as she maintained a perfunctory log of excessive violence committed by the revolutionaries.5 Paradoxically, Roy’s celebratory prose valorized and aestheticized the revolution in ways that risked minimizing the harsh living conditions of the very population whose turn to violence she sought to understand. For example, Roy wrote: “Dandakaranya, the forest I was about to enter, was full of people who had many names and fluid identities. It was like balm to me, that idea. How lovely not to be stuck with yourself, to become someone
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else for a while.”6 This is very far indeed from the hunted nature of Naxalite existence conveyed in Mahasweta Devi’s short story “Draupadi” (discussed at length in chapter 4). That story opens by indicating the all-seeing eye of the Indian state in the form of a register of names, as a liveried soldier remarks: “What’s this, a tribal called Dopdi? The list of names I brought has nothing like it! How can anyone have an unlisted name?” (91). Dopdi is located soon enough, listed as “DRAUPADI Mejhen” (named thus by a landowner’s wife), for as the text indicates, “in this India of ours, even a worm is under a certain police station” (91). In Roy’s narrative, however, the necessity of changing names and identities for the insurgents is presented as a charming novelty, as if it were a choice rather than a life-preserving necessity borne of living amid perpetual violence and in impasse with the state. The examples indicating the middle-class author’s enchantment with rustic village living pile up: “Three beautiful, sozzled men with flowers in their turbans” join Roy and her escorts for a while; the simple food Roy is served is “fabulous”; she hears “cowbells, snuffling, shuffling, cattle-farting” and admires the “spare beauty” of the impoverished village; her outdoor sleeping arrangement is likened to a “private suite in a thousand-star hotel”; all around her are “strange, beautiful children with their curious arsenal [their weapons].”7 These sentimental visions of impoverished and militarized Naxalite life peak in a sentence where Roy works in a reference to the protagonist of her Booker prize-winning novel The God of Small Things (discussed in chapter 3): “There is nowhere else in the world that I would rather be. Who should I be tonight? Kamraid Rahel, under the stars?”8 Roy’s sentimentalized wild Adivasis remain stuck within the paradigms of the happy poor and the noble savage through which the idealized and largely silent Dalit hero Velutha had been presented in her deeply insightful and deeply flawed novel. The insurgent violence of these wild, antimodern forest-dwellers itself appears in the mode of adventure rather than as a product of decades of extreme poverty and dispossession, despite the history lesson Roy provides in the middle of the essay. The figure of the wild and innocent Adivasi also falls directly in the lineage of the “salvage paradigm” discussed in chapter 3. But Roy also posed a provocative series of questions around insurgent violence that countered the moral condemnations of the mainstream Indian media: “When a country that calls itself a democracy openly declares war within its borders, what does that war look like? . . . Is armed struggle intrinsically undemocratic?” As Priyamvada Gopal points out, here Roy follows Fanon into a critique of nonviolence “as both ineffective and politically compromised,” noting that moral champions of nonviolence fail to answer the strategic question: What are vulnerable citizens to do when no other
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means of redress are unavailable from the structural and direct violence of the state? (Gopal 124). Indeed, that is a question that has resonated globally within resistance movements time and again, with compelling defenses of violent self-defense and armed struggle emerging from within the Palestinian struggle, the Egyptian Revolution, and the Occupy Movement. Here, for example, is the advice given by Egyptian activists to activists in the Occupy Movement sweeping across the United States and the world in 2011:
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It is not our desire to participate in violence, but it is even less our desire to lose. If we do not resist, actively, when they come to take what we have won back, then we will surely lose. Do not confuse the tactics that we used when we shouted “peaceful” with fetishizing nonviolence; if the state had given up immediately we would have been overjoyed, but as they sought to abuse us, beat us, kill us, we knew that there was no other option than to fight back. Had we laid down and allowed ourselves to be arrested, tortured, and martyred to “make a point,” we would be no less bloodied, beaten and dead. Be prepared to defend these things you have occupied, that you are building, because, after everything else has been taken from us, these reclaimed spaces are so very precious.9
The statement encodes an acute theoretical deconstruction of “nonviolence,” one that follows somewhat in the footsteps of Malcolm X: “I don’t mean go out and get violent; but at the same time you should never be nonviolent unless you run into some nonviolence” (149). Rather than a straightforward embrace of violence, these words call attention to the violent inseam of nonviolence, an ideology that entails an absorption of violence onto one’s own self and body and therefore cannot be categorically separated from violence. Noting repeatedly the failure of the state, whether in Egypt or the United States (“Who is there to protest to? What could we ask them for that they could grant?”), the writers of the above document call attention to the importance of occupying the space that had been wrested by the state, with force if necessary.10 The Maoist rebellion too may be seen as one way of reoccupying the land wrested from indigenous peoples and sold off by the Indian state—indeed, so it is seen from the Maoist perspective. And yet, the example of Maoist violence also undeniably presents us with the aftermath of a sustained period of militarized resistance, where the forms of spectacular violence employed by these revolutionaries range from the beheadings of policemen and those considered their informers, to the killing of village dogs in order to prevent them from alerting security forces to their movements in the jungle. If the premature dismissal of violence from below prevents us from seeing the direct and structural violence to which such violence is often posited as a
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response, an uncritical (or sometimes barely qualified) embrace of such violence potentially obscures the ways in which such violence so often runs awry from its stated path, frequently turning inward. It is crucial to acknowledge, as so many feminist scholars across the globe have insisted, that the violence of the disempowered, while often a function of last resort, is rarely a pure ethical product despite its stated ends, and that “conceptual distinctions between forms of violence, based on the ethical ends they seek to achieve, are largely unsustainable in practice” (S. Roy). To be sure, the disavowed prevalence of violence against women or the poor within armed leftist and “progressive” movements in South Asia and beyond—ranging from the Naxalbari movement in India to the campaign for a Tamil homeland in Sri Lanka and the Black Panther struggle in the United States—has been well explored by a number of feminist scholars and activists.11 In the context of the LTTE in Sri Lanka and antistate militancy in the Kashmir conflict, Neloufer de Mel and Rita Manchanda, respectively, have observed how noncomplying civilians were frequently subject to the violence of revolutionary fighters, sometimes on suspicion of being informants or for failing to support the movement in other ways. In the Naxalbari movement, as Srila Roy notes in her study of women’s memories of the movement, the construct of a rapist state “aided the creation of an illusion of safety within the movement,” obscuring its own internal violence and rendering untellable the sexual violence experienced by women within the organization, even as the sexual violence perpetrated by the state was made hypervisible (143). Where such violence is acknowledged by progressives and feminists, Roy observes, the tendency is often to understand it as the “dark underside” of otherwise progressive revolutionary movements, rather than as a “product of violent political cultures” (145). As Gopal suggests, drawing on the thought of the well-known human-rights activist and intellectual K. Balagopal, an acknowledgment of the political “afterlife” of violence is indispensable to any feminist position on the ethics of resistant violence.12 This is as true of seemingly “less threatening” vigilantes such as the all-female Gulabi Gang, whose lathi wielding has generated more admiration than censure in Indian and international media than the vigilantism of the highly militarized and armed Maoists. As exhilarating as the spectacle of the Gulabi Gang is in issuing a symbolic counterthreat to upper-caste male hegemony, such violence may be as capable of coming loose from its stated ends as the actions of the two protagonists in Manto’s “Halal Ya Jhatka,” where the co-religionists turn their knives against each other in a dispute over the correct method of killing. To take another recent example, in the midst of the widespread Delhi anti-rape protests, a group of women belonging to the Nationalist Congress Party vandalized an upscale
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bar in Mumbai that had advertised a cocktail labeled “Balatkari” (Rapist). The form of the attack included destruction of property and the symbolic shredding of the menu on which the offending item appeared; as well, the barman who was unfortunately at hand as a representative of the business was beaten up. Meanwhile, the wealthy owner of the bar received the wrath of the women in the form of their statement to the press (see “India Gang Rape Outrage”). The course of violence never does run smooth. From the foregoing discussion it should be clear that the question of whether violence is good or bad is a false one, one that in India is overwhelmingly shaped by the media, the luxury of debating it belonging largely to those who do not reside directly within the field of violence. As Roy herself observed in an earlier piece titled “Mr. Chidambaram’s War”: “The people who have taken to arms are not spending all their time watching (or performing for) TV, or reading the papers, or conducting SMS polls for the Moral Science question of the day: Is Violence Good or Bad? SMS your reply to. . . .” Roy here traces the easy moral binarism in this debate to the simplistic media format of the SMS viewer poll, in which complex questions are broken down into “yes” or “no” answers. On the contrary, violence is a complex ethical terrain that can only be assessed through deep contextualization. Therefore, rather than falling back into a framework that sorts the “good” violence of the disempowered from “bad” violence of the state and powerful groups, or declares both to be equally reprehensible in the end, I would propose, in line with the preoccupations of this book, that we attend to the imaginative possibilities suggested by the violence of the oppressed. How does such violence index and act upon—perhaps even do violence to—the ideas of India backed by the strong arm of the state and its benefactors? How does it rewrite and re-envision the idea of India? What does it say about the authority of the state as a representative of the nation of “India”? As Nandini Sundar reminds us, “Vigilantism by definition presupposes a state against whose monopoly over violence . . . vigilante violence is measured” (2010, 116). We might read the violence of vigilantism from below as a push toward a more expansive idea of India, one that accommodates its minority and disempowered populations more hospitably. To draw once again on Sundar, “subaltern insurgencies or Robin Hood style vigilantism may be aimed less at reorganizing the state and more at making it live up to its promises” (116). My point is not that the idea of India may not be expanded in other ways that are equally significant and do not involve violence, but that as one expression of the disempowered, the violence of the oppressed may not be summarily dismissed, just as it may not be summarily celebrated. To say that the violence of the oppressed gestures toward a more expansive idea of
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India is not simply to endorse violence or turn away from its unpredictable aftermath, but rather to invite scrutiny of the long history of ideas of nation, failed as well as successful, that have created these oppressed groups and their resistant violence. It is to search for new idea of India, perhaps even going so far as to ask whether that idea is recuperable at all.
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Notes
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Introduction 1. The phrase “the idea of India,” coined by political scientist Sunil Khilnani in his book by that name, has come increasingly into mainstream circulation in English-language media. 2. This formulation characteristically belies the economic nexus between Hindutva and neoliberalism via cultural purity. 3. “India Shining” is, of course, the name of the advertising campaign undertaken in 2004 by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led coalition government in power at the time. The international advertising agency Gray Worldwide was reportedly paid close to 500 crore rupees to tout the economic achievements of the BJP-led Hindu nationalist government. 4. Gupta refers here to Gayatri Spivak’s well-known formulation, “white men are saving brown women from brown men,” to describe colonial constructions of native masculinities as uniquely and exorbitantly misogynist. 5. See, for example, Jones, “Sexual Violence”; O’Neill, “Delhi Rape.” These editorials bear the stamp of influential critiques articulated in the work of feminist scholars Chandra Mohanty and Uma Narayan. In her landmark essay “Under Western Eyes” Mohanty argued against the construction of Third World women as universal victims. Uma Narayan’s Contesting Cultures launched a powerful critique of the “death by culture” framework, which diagnosed domestic violence in India as a product of “Indian culture.” 6. Syama Sundar’s cartoon was published alongside Madhuri Xalxo’s blog post, “Delhi Protests and the Caste Hindu Paradigm: Of Sacred and Paraded Bodies,” examined in fuller detail in chapter 3. See http://www.dalitweb.org/?p=1388. 7. The exodus of thousands of students and workers from the Northeast from the cities of Bangalore, Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai, and New Delhi came reportedly as a result of rumors spread on social media and via text messages that they would be punished violently for the displacement of Muslims in Assam by Hindu Bodos. 8. Bora’s work explores how first colonial and then nationalist discourses produced Northeastern subjects as “the ‘Mongolian other’ of Aryan India” (346).
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9. See Sanjib Baruah’s book India against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality for a detailed analysis of the politics of subnationalism in Assam. 10. “Dalit” is the preferred term of self-description by lower-caste communities in India known previously as “untouchables.” “Dalit” means “downtrodden” or, literally, “broken to pieces” in Hindi and Marathi. 11. For some estimates of the destruction of lives and property during Partition, see Butalia, The Other Side of Silence; Menon and Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries; Pandey, Remembering Partition. 12. Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, Punjab, is where in 1919 British General Dyer opened fire on a peaceful protest against the hugely unpopular Rowlatt Act, legislation that allowed the imprisonment of Indians without trial. 13. See Ranajit Guha’s “The Small Voice of History.” Sahni and Hussein themselves also explore the intersection of masculinity with violence. Sahni’s Tamas, in particular, offers a detailed description of the test of masculinity through which the fifteen-year-old boy Ranvir is ceremonially initiated into the Hindu mob by the violent ritual of slaughtering a hen (80–86).
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Chapter 1. Anatomy of a Riot 1. A note on translation: as I lack written literacy in Urdu, I have relied on a combination of translations from Manto’s original Urdu into English, on transliterations into Devnagari script, and on the generous assistance of colleagues in translating directly from Manto’s Urdu originals. As Hindi and Urdu share a large overlap in vocabulary and sentence structure, I have referred to Devnagari editions of Manto’s texts in Devendra Issar’s Mantonaama as well as Narendra Mohan’s Manto ki Kahaniyaan. These Hindi editions are largely transliterations and offered a useful route to Manto’s original Urdu text. Although difficult Urdu words are also translated into Hindi in these editions, they preserve most of the sentence structure of the Urdu originals (they occasionally do deviate from them as well). Most Urdu-to-English translations from Siyah Hashiye in this chapter have been taken from Rakshanda Jalil’s translations in Black Borders, which I have found to be the most reliable translation of these sketches in their entirety. In several instances, particularly when closely reading the text, I have translated the texts directly from the Urdu originals with the help of a translator. Where possible I have transcribed the original Urdu into Roman script in the body of this chapter. Translation is always an imperfect business, and opinions vary widely on whether translators should attempt to render original texts in letter or spirit. I have found it useful to adhere to Manto’s original formulations, perhaps sometimes allowing the prose to be weighed down with literalisms. I trust that the scholarly reader will understand my intent here; were I translating these texts for a popular audience rather than to substantiate critical close readings, I might have chosen to translate them differently. I can hardly sufficiently thank my old friend Parul Bharadwaj at Miranda House for her gracious assistance with translations from the Urdu originals. I am also thankful to Professor Moinuddin A. Jinabade of Jawaharlal Nehru University for his help with this chapter. 2. Siyah Hashiye is typically translated into English under the title Black Margins or Black Borders, but I use Priyamvada Gopal’s translation “Black Marginalia,” as it seems
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to better capture the multiple significations of the title (“siyah” meaning both “black” as well as “ink”). 3. I refer here to critical work on Manto in English. Recent writings by Aamir Mufti and Priyamvada Gopal provide insightful readings of Manto’s short stories and the court cases in which he was embroiled. Black Marginalia, however, still awaits a full critical examination. 4. I owe this publication date to Leslie A. Flemming, Another Lonely Voice (72). 5. The collection Chughd (Blind Fool) was also published in 1948 in Lahore, but Flemming tells us that the stories in that collection were almost certainly written in Bombay before Manto left for Lahore in January 1948. See Flemming 58. 6. Progressive writers and critics, including Sajjad Zahir, Ali Sardar Jafri, and Ahmad Ali, had decried what they saw as the dilution of the socialist cause and the presence of reactionary and perverse elements in Manto’s writing. For a full account of the Progressive critique of Manto’s work, see Flemming 27–30. 7. Manto retaliated with choice words, of course, for despite his stoic assertion that “[w]hile revenge is a human instinct, tolerance is a sign of wisdom,” he was never wont to turn the other cheek. Manto, along with his contemporary Ismat Chughtai, denounced the movement as “morbid and sterile,” pushed by “the Red revolution . . . into the dark tunnel of conformity” and attempting to produce a kind of literature where “a poem was a machine and a machine a poem” (qtd. in Hasan 1991, xiii). In essays like “Progressives Don’t Think” and the satirical short story “The Progressive” Manto certainly took the opportunity to “answer [his] critics in kind” (qtd. in Hasan 1991, xii). 8. See for instance Bhalla, Stories from the Partition of India, 3 vols.; Mushirul Hasan, ed., India Partitioned: The Other Face of Freedom; and Manto’s For Freedom’s Sake (2001). Select vignettes were also excerpted from Hasan’s India Partitioned in the 50th Independence Day issues of Outlook magazine as well as on the news website rediff.com (go to http://www.rediff.com/freedom/28manto.htm). 9. See Flemming, Another Lonely Voice; Bhalla, “Dance of Grotesque Masks”; Gopal, Literary Radicalism in India. Flemming has noted the anecdotal quality, the bare language, punning references, and bitter irony of the sketches, while Bhalla remarks their “fragmentary, spasmodic and unremittingly violent” character. Gopal notes that each sketch is a portrait in perversion, showcasing the warping of traditional morality in a context of violence. 10. Indeed, the first generation of Partition fiction generally took the short form. 11. This is not, of course, to say that historicizing violence is without its virtues: in a post–9/11 world we have been made painfully aware of the violent consequences of selectively fetishizing a particular moment of violence—and replaying it into spectacle—to the insistent exclusion of all historical context. In the context of state and nationalist histories of the nation’s foundational violence, however, there is something to be said for foregrounding the moment of violence rather than allowing its absorption into the grand narrative of the nation. If anything, these seeming contradictions reiterate for us that strategies of representation with regard to violence must always be contextually specific. 12. Writers on the Jewish Holocaust and in South Africa have also repeatedly confronted the larger problem of representing violence: How do we make sense of violence while insisting upon its senselessness? How does one undertake the task of representing violence
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Notes to Chapter 1
without inflicting a further violence on its survivors? Scholars in these fields have drawn our attention to the dangers of producing saleable and sensational representations of extreme violence and trauma on the one hand, or of “treating” violence by providing sentimental resolutions and comforting fictions on the other hand. See for example Gubar, Poetry after Auschwitz; and Coetzee “Into the Dark Chamber.” 13. I refer here to the version of the story in Narendra Mohan’s Manto ki Kahaniyan. In Mottled Dawn, Hasan translates the title of this story into English as “Bitter Harvest,” losing the titular resonance of the name “Sharifan” with “sharafat” (decency or respectability). Manto’s own title points to a better interpretation of the story, which offers a potent critique of the masculine investments in women’s respectability that make sexual violence a viable form of violence. This is particularly apparent in the moment where Qasim, before rushing out to reenact the same violence on another’s daughter that he has witnessed on his own daughter Sharifan, absently tosses some clothes over Sharifan’s body and fails to notice the clothes fall some distance from her, missing their mark both literally and symbolically. 14. I have translated this sketch from Mantonaama, ed. Devendra Issar. Hasan translates the title as “Ritualistic Difference”; a more approximate (though somewhat clunky) translation might be “Kosher and Non-kosher.” The title “Halal Ya Jhatka” refers to the permissible methods of animal slaughter for dietary consumption: ritually speaking, Muslims may only eat halal, while Sikhs and Hindus eat jhatka meat. 15. Of course, the communal riot was certainly not the only space where violence occurred during that time, although it was perhaps the most visible. We know that violence was present not only in the streets amid the mindless mobs but within the “safe” zones of the home, within families, and even, as Manto himself so poignantly shows in his 1949 short story “Open It,” within the refugee camps. 16. Pro-Hindutva websites, for instance, carry detailed population statistics emphasizing the declining percentages of Hindus versus Muslims over the years. Such anxieties about a changing demography were of course at their peak during Partition, which was nothing if not a huge demographic change demanded by a new national paradigm. 17. This was certainly true of the recent Gujarat riots, of which the historian Tanika Sarkar remarks that “[women’s] sexual and reproductive organs were attacked with a special savagery.” What such sexual violence against female bodies represented was not only the punishment of the fertile female body but also the symbolic destruction of “the sources of pleasure, reproduction and nurture for Muslim men, and for Muslim children,” while the murder of babies and children represented the “symbolic destruction of future generations” of Muslims. See Sarkar, “Semiotics of Terror.” 18. Author’s translation. 19. I owe the term “religionized” to Angana Chatterji, who uses it to describe the ways in which embodied identities in Kashmir are performatively constituted through various discourses about religious identity and difference. 20. Author’s translation of Narendra Mohan’s Manto ki Kahaniyan. 21. Jisha Menon rightly alerts to the possibilities of ambivalent homoerotic pleasures in such spectatorial moments, which produced “a slippage between the pleasures of indignation and those of desire” (151). 22. Author’s translation from the Urdu text. Manto renders this word as “mishtake” rather than “mistake,” using a vernacularization of the English word that perhaps also suggests the lower-class status of the perpetrator.
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23. Of the five Ks prescribed in Sikhism, only “kes” (hair) is a bodily marker; the rest—kirpan, kachha, kada, kanga (sword, cotton underwear, steel bracelet, comb) are sartorial accessories, although arguably they may be understood as integrated into the body over time. Initiated Sikhs are not permitted to cut hair from any part of the body. 24. In the Urdu text, Manto writes: “le jaao is ko, apney mazhab ko.” A more faithful translation of this would be “Take this away, and your religion too.” 25. The film does not reflect on the choice to leave Meerut for New Delhi as an ironic one, given the extremity of anti-Sikh sentiment and violence in the capital New Delhi (the setting of Garg’s story), which made it no safer than Meerut.
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Chapter 2. The Violence of Memory 1. Mankekar provides an evocative description of this scene of mass suicide in the televised Tamas (310–11). Tamas was telecast in 1988, in the shadow of the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, following the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards. This invocation of jauhar by Mankekar’s friend thus also represents a subsuming of Sikh women’s experience into a longer cultural memory of Hindu women’s tradition of death-over-dishonor. Considering that Sikhs across north India only four years previously had been perceived and persecuted as radical others of India’s Hindu majority, such a forgetful collapse of Sikh and Hindu female victims becomes possible largely on the basis of a common Muslim enemy. As Sikh artists like Baldwin and the Singh twins show, for Sikhs these Partition deaths fit into a very different memorial tradition—that of Sikh martyrology—notwithstanding the still-flexible boundaries between Hindus and Sikhs at Partition, which then came to be subsequently hardened following anti-Sikh violence by Arya Samajis. 2. Here I qualify the descriptor “feminist” with quotation marks to mark the unfinished nature of feminism as a project, and in acknowledgment of the incompleteness, complicity, or contestable nature of the “feminism” articulated in some of these representations. 3. Thus, for instance, when the Sikh Canadian novelist publishes in 1998 a thick Partition novel just as India completes fifty years of Independence and Partition is being revisited, we need to locate this text not only in the context of the reflections engendered by India’s fiftieth year of independence but also in the context of a Sikh diaspora in Canada that grew exponentially after the anti-Sikh violence of 1984 and the crackdown that followed Operation Bluestar. Baldwin’s Canadian diasporic location forms part of the context from which the novel emerges, and this location is significant with regard to how the novel reflects critically on ideas of India. 4. This tension had been briefly broken in 2005, the year of Mehta’s republication by Penguin India, by the possibility of a fragile peace, indicated by the launch of a bus service from Srinagar to Muzaffarabad—incidentally, the very same journey Mehta undertakes at the beginning of her memoir. It is tempting to assume this thaw as a motivator for Penguin’s republication of Mehta’s memoir. 5. The picture is culled from a website called Indiapicture.com, incidentally a subsidiary of Mahattas, a premier photo studio in Srinagar co-founded in 1918 by the Kashmiri photographer Ram Chand Mehta (Kabir 75). Boasting a fund of “rights-managed, royalty-free, Indian images,” the website offers a fund of “shikara” images. 6. Kabir here references Stephen Greenblatt’s concept of mimetic capital, which “convey[s] the sense of a stockpile of representations, a set of images and image-making
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Notes to Chapter 2
devices that are accumulated, ‘banked,’ as it were, in books, archives, collections, cultural storehouses, until such time as these representations are called upon to generate new representations. The images that matter, that merit the term capital, are those that achieve reproductive power, maintaining and multiplying themselves by transforming cultural contacts into novel and often unexpected forms” (Greenblatt 6). The ready obviousness of the shikara image for Penguin’s cover, which almost wilfully courts cliché, only further testifies to the mimetic capital already accrued and still accruing around this image as part of a ready “stockpile of representations.” 7. For instance, as Butalia recounts in The Other Side of Silence, in the Constituent Assembly debates of the 1940s, Professor Shibban Lal Saxena bemoaned the treatement of “our sisters from Kashmir” as he presented abducted Hindu women in the image of Sita: “For the sake of one woman who was taken away by Ravana the whole nation took up arms and went to war. And here, there are thousands.” Another member of the assembly urged, “As descendants of Ram, we have to bring back every Sita that is alive” (qtd. in Butalia 141; original emphasis). Through the postindependence decades, Hindu nationalists have continually used the Ramayana to furnish the narrative of Hinduism under siege from India’s Muslim minority, cast as lustful Ravans after virtuous Sitas. 8. The Ramayana tells the story of Lord Rama, the prince of Ayodhya, banished by his father to a fourteen-year exile in the forests, where he is accompanied by his wife Sita and brother Laxman. While in exile, Sita is abducted by Ravana, the King of Lanka. Yet Sita maintains her virtue in captivity, which she proves by surviving a trial by fire after she has been rescued by Rama and his army. The epic (like that other foundational Hindu epic the Mahabharata) has been allegorically manipulated into nationalist narrative in postindependence India, particularly in its televisual adaptations, but it has also been harnessed to more critical takes on the nation. Jamila Hashmi’s short story “Exile,” for instance, provides an intriguing reworking of the tropology of the Ramayana by casting an abducted Muslim woman at Partition as Sita; Mani Ratnam’s film Ravann (2010) also revisits the epic by casting a tribal forest-dwelling “Ravann” as the true hero against a Machiavellian Ram, figured as a police officer and agent of the state. The gender scripts of the original epic, however, undergo a much more radical reworking in Hashmi’s story than they do in Ratnam’s retelling. 9. See Scott, “Evidence of Experience”; Bhabha, “World and the Home.” 10. This combination of Indian structures of belief with gothic tropes exemplifies a typical indigenization of the gothic form that came to India via the British novel—an instance of how, as Priya Joshi notes, the British novel in India did not simply colonize existing forms of narration, but “was in turn colonized by those forms and refashioned in the twentieth century” (201). In India, as Meenakshi Mukherjee and Priya Joshi have documented, the popularization of the novel form among readers occurred not through the realist fiction that ruled Victorian literature in Britain but through melodrama, romance, and the gothic—antirealist forms that were much more popular among Indian readers, and which left their stamp on novels in a number of other Indian languages. Vijay Mishra also observes an indigenization of gothic narrative in Hindi cinema contemporary with Mehta’s writing. Kamal Amrohi’s Mahal, acknowledged as the first cinematic instance of what Mishra calls “Indian gothic,” was released to wide acclaim in 1949, possibly before Mehta’s original writing. One can only speculate about the possible influence of these cinematic elements on Mehta’s narration; it may be relevant to note that Mehta reports going to the cinema frequently—twice a week—during the time she spent in a refugee
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175
camp in Amritsar after crossing into India (165). At any rate, it seems fair to suggest that Mehta’s memoir to some extent participates in the moment of emergence of Indian gothic narrative. We may also speculate that in Indian cinema, the emergence of this uncanny genre in 1949, immediately after Partition, may have had something to do with the malaise of unhomeliness brought on by the displacements of the Partition. 11. I have observed that Mehta’s nonfictional memoir utilizes some of the narrative techniques of gothic fiction, but I do not wish to suggest that these are fictional fabrications added in by Mehta purely for the sake of literary effect. It is entirely possible, for instance, that vultures, owls, and snakes did dominate the landscape that was the setting of Mehta’s home at the time. But the inclusion of these specific elements to organize her memory of this period suggests that existing narrative conventions (of gothic fiction in this case) may have structured Mehta’s own understanding of her experience and provided the means for relaying this experience through narrative. 12. They key difference here is that the women, in drowning their children before themselves, seem still capable of some action, whereas the Musselmann in Holocaust writings comes across as a figure utterly incapable of any action or reaction. The fact that the women do not simply wait to be raped or killed by the raiders and instead “opt” for drowning does not negate the comparison, for it is difficult to say in this case whether they “chose” their form of death or whether death chose them in its seeming inevitability: death by drowning may have been no more or less a “choice” than death at the raider’s sword. In other words, I am not convinced we can read these women’s killing of themselves or their children clearly as an action animated by a fully (or even partly) present will, especially when Mehta’s description suggests something akin to an evacuation of subjecthood in this moment immediately before death. 13. Veena Das points out Agamben’s silence on the fact that bare life in the concentration camp “is imagined as another form of life—that of the Muslim—and that it comes to be equated with animal life”—or at least with nonhuman life (2007, 244). Indeed, Agamben, while reflecting on the provenance of the term Musselmann, never quite acknowledges the pejorative dimensions of the term used by Jewish concentration camp inmates. It would be a mistake to adapt his analysis to the Indian context without problematizing the term Musselmann, as the association of Muslims with an over-zealous submission to god, a figure at the limits of the human, certainly extends to South Asia. 14. This is notwithstanding the fact that by this point Mehta already has an inkling that her husband may not have survived when she speculates on a household servant’s report that he heard someone groaning inside the house she had just fled with her children: “It struck me that what he did not say was more ominous than what he did say” (11). 15. For example, in The Goddess and the Nation, Sumathi Ramaswamy details how, immediately following Bhagat Singh’s hanging in 1931 by the British colonial state, popular visual artists all over India took up the execution as a theme in their patriotic visual art and refigured his hanging as a decapitation in a series of prints depicting a headless Bhagat Singh offering his severed head as a gift (bhent) to Mother India. Ramaswamy notes how this visual strategy allowed visual artists to connect Bhagat Singh’s death “at the hands of the cold, calculating apparatus of the colonial state to the desired and desirable death of other exemplars of self-effacing devotion, such as the mid-eighteenth-century Sikh martyr Baba Deep Singh, whose passing is depicted in a similar manner in many bazaar prints” (226).
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176
Notes to Chapters 2 and 3
16. I take the phrase “martyrological consciousness” from anthropologist Cynthia Keppley-Mahmood, who makes a similar point with regard to the representational apparatus around Sikh militants in the 1980s movement for a separate state of Khalistan (126). The political imperatives and representational effects of the latter are, of course, necessarily different from those prevalent at Partition, but the imagery of martyred bodies was influential in both contexts. 17. Bir Bahadur Singh also narrates two other incidents of men asking his father to kill them rather than allowing their “Sikhi to get stained”—but in his narration, the men ask his father to take their lives. whereas in the women’s case the decision was made for them (Butalia 1998, 179). Butalia also reflects on the case of women who were aware of and involved in the decisions to “choose” death over dishonor, but in light of the lack of other options and the possibility of male protection, Butalia rightly asks: “Where in their decision did ‘choice’ begin and ‘coercion’ end? What, in other words, does their silence hide?” (169). 18. It should be noted that children, both boys and girls, were in fact frequently “sacrificed” along with women, as the many survivors speaking in Butalia’s book have testified. In the novel, however, Bachan Singh’s commitment to rescuing his grandchildren occurs explicitly because they were the precious male heirs who would carry the line forward. 19. While both Taylor and Kusnetzoff use the term to represent the Argentine military’s “attack on the perceptual organs of population” during Argentina’s state-sponsored “Dirty War,” the term may also be adapted to contexts where the attack on perception is effected by less apparently hostile subjects on more apparently agreeable objects (Taylor 1997, 268). 20. Elsewhere I have observed how an author’s deconstruction of a particular kind of national allegory—for example, Rushdie’s deconstruction of Indira Gandhi’s auto-allegory (“Indira is India”) in Midnight’s Children—need not preclude their own use of women’s bodies as national allegories, albeit in a different mode.
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Chapter 3. Atrocious Encounters 1. See “Bombay’s Crack ‘Encounter’ Police.” 2. For a full fact-finding report on Khairlanji, see Manuski Advocacy Center, “Caste Atrocity in Khairlanji,” available at http://atrocitynews.files.wordpress.com/2006/10/ khairlanji.pdf (accessed February 21, 2014). 3. For a detailed discussion of the term’s legal definition and its effects, see Rao 2009. 4. “UP Tops ‘Fake’ Encounters List, Manipur Second: NHRC,” August 7, 2011, available at http://news.outlookindia.com/items.aspx?artid=730444 (accessed February 21, 2014). 5. I am relying here on Arvind Rajagopal’s definition of the public sphere as “the space in which publicity is said to operate.” That space, Rajagopal notes, is defined by the effect of publicity rather than a cause, such as “media” (2). 6. There exists a heated and complex debate on the relation between caste and race in India. In 2001 the refusal of the Indian government to accept caste as a form of race at the U.N. World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa, provoked much ire among Dalit activists who demanded the inclusion of caste on the agenda. 7. “Reproductive futurity” is queer theorist Lee Edelman’s term for the mainstream cultural imagining of the future as a future “for the children” and therefore requiring reproduction. Futurity is represented in the image of the innocent child, the symbol of
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wholesome “family values” who emblematizes the reproduction of the social order. Roy’s novel seeks to disrupt this promise. 8. The autobiographical basis of The God of Small Things is well-known: the character of Ammu is modeled on Roy’s mother Mary Roy; Rahel is a clearly autobiographical figure for Roy herself, who has also admitted in interviews that the novel represents her personal effort to make fictional sense of painful events and memories that she can hardly bear to revisit except in fiction. See Roy, “When You Have Written a Book, You Lay Your Weapons Down.” 9. See for instance Anandhi, Jeyaranjan, and Krishnan, “Work, Caste and Competing Masculinities: Notes from a Tamil Village.” Based on fieldwork in Tamil Nadu’s Thirunur village, the authors note that “sexual encounters between mudaliar women and Dalit men were initiated by mudaliar women and not by Dalit men. [Dalit respondents] talk about how Dalit men were forced into or invited to have sex with mudaliar women” (439). 10. I do take Alex Tickell’s point that although the novel does testify to what Graham Huggan observes to be “the continuing presence of an imperial imaginary lurking behind Indian literature in English,” it is also necessary to acknowledge that “Roy explores cosmopolitan’s limits and local re-translations . . . bringing about an uneasy disclosure rather than a complicit mystification of the realities of globalization” (Tickell 62, 74). This argument has been made frequently through readings of the Kathakali dancers in the novel. 11. See Mahasweta Devi, “Independence Has Failed,” and Arundhati Roy, “Scimitars in the Sun.” 12. The Naxalite movement took its name from the region of Naxalbari in West Bengal, where it had started in 1969 as a peasant rebellion that was inevitably also a caste rebellion against the feudal landlords. This is the broad context within which the action of the story “Draupadi” takes place: Dopdi (the tribal version of her name) and her husband Dulna are among the tribal revolutionaries who are engaging in guerrilla warfare against the landlords. 13. Roy has taken this position in a number of interviews. See for instance Roy 2004; Roy 2007. 14. See Gopal 2001, for example. 15. In June 2013 Connecticut lawmakers passed a law prohibiting the release of images of homicide victims in deference to the privacy of the surviving family members of victims, but the proscription was clearly already being observed even before the passage of the law. 16. Here we might consider the long history of such practices, from the exhibition of Sara Baartman in London and Paris in the nineteenth century to the 2005 exhibition of black bodies in an “African Village” festival at the Augsburg Zoo in Germany. 17. It is also worth asking why the scores of photographs of traumatized and dead Iraqi and Afghan children over a decade of war have not been similarly effective. 18. “Rights Notice on Stripping,” The Telegraph, Guwahati, December 28, 2007, available at http://www.telegraphindia.com/1071229/jsp/guwahati/story_8721773.jsp (accessed February 21, 2014). 19. Sontag perhaps also seriously underestimates the sonic power of a slogan to crystallize sentiment, as anyone who has heard the chants of protesting crowds from Egypt to Kashmir to the streets of New Delhi can imagine.
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178
Notes to Chapter 4
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Chapter 4. “Are You a Man?” 1. The Meitei are the majority ethnic group in Manipur. They are upper-caste Hindus and reside largely in the valley of Manipur; the surrounding hills are largely populated by other tribes, such as Naga, Kuki, and Hmar. 2. While the representational sites and stakes of literary fiction and political protest are admittedly very different, what holds them together in my analysis is the ideological discourse in which they participate and undoubtedly inflect each other. 3. West Bengal is a state on the eastern part of India, lying fairly close to the territory known within India as the “Northeast.” Also see note 9. 4. I have used Gayatri Spivak’s translation of the story, in which the English words in the original are reproduced in italics. 5. The italicized words “male organ” and “piston” are in English in the Bengali original. The image of the gun in the context of the “male organ,” also the instrument of rape, emphasizes the official, sanctioned, militaristic nature of this rape. 6. Some of the perceived “aggravations” that result in naked parade of Dalit women include upward mobility, Dalits objecting to encroachments on their property, refusing implicitly or explicitly to take a subordinate position, imagined or real relations between Dalit men and non-Dalit women (typically interpreted as rape), and Dalit women’s refusal to submit to sexual advances of upper-caste men. 7. Mahasweta Devi’s story is part of a wider tradition of postcolonial (including feminist) literary, cinematic, theatrical, and popular appropriations of the Mahabharata. For a useful overview of theatrical and televisual adaptations of the Mahabharata, see Dharwadkar and Mankekar, respectively. Dharwadkar points out that unlike the neonationalist Hindu imaginary established in the influential television adaptations of the Mahabharata, theater practitioners, particularly in the postindependence period, have interpreted the Mahabharata toward “critical self-scrutiny” in imagining the new Indian nation (Dharwadkar 217, 181). More recently, Laxmi Orang, the Adivasi protester discussed in chapter 3, cast herself as Draupadi in an interview with the press: “Draupadi, too, was stripped in public. She fought on and lived to see the end of those who committed the crime.” See http:// www.telegraphindia.com/1081120/jsp/northeast/story_10133407.jsp 8. “Northeast India” refers to the states of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Mizoram, Manipur, and Tripura. Peripheral to the Indian nation-state, this region is widely understood by its own residents as standing outside rather than within “India.” For a history of the term in colonial and postcolonial usage, see Baruah. 9. The growth of insurgency in the Northeast is frequently attributed to the Indian state’s counterinsurgency backlash itself. 10. Manipur was one of the last states to be incorporated into the Indian union in 1949, in what is widely perceived as a merger forced upon Manipur by a duplicitous Indian state. This unratified accession to India remains one of the resentments fueling insurgencies in the region, in addition to the Indian government’s failure to respond to democratic voices demanding people-oriented development. Manipur today registers the largest number of underground groups in India’s Northeast. For an overview of the “bewildering array” of these groups, their varying agendas, political influence, and popular perceptions of them, see Baruah; and Mehrotra (58).
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11. My discussion of the play relies on Amar Kanwar’s documentary Lightning Testimonies, which features a segment from a stage performance of the play, as well as a separate performance by Sabitri for the documentary itself. In my discussion of Sabitri’s rendition of Draupadi I refer to the stage performance. It is significant that the role of Draupadi in the play is shared by a younger woman, but it is Sabitri who plays the final scene—in shrewd cognizance—or concession—of the very different sexual valences of young bodies and older women’s bodies. The documentary is in Hindi; translations from Hindi are my own. 12. Yet, strikingly, this connection remained utterly unremarked in the national coverage of the event—testifying perhaps once more to the remove of the “Northeast” from the Indian mainstream. I myself encountered this connection for the first time in the article by Nava Thakuria cited here, which I found in the Centre for Education and Documentation in Mumbai, and then in Amar Kanwar’s documentary, which may be one of the first to mark a connection between Mahasweta Devi’s story, Sabitri’s performance, and the Meitei women’s protest outside of the Northeast. 13. Rustom Bharucha, for instance, finds that the emphasis on physicality and nonverbalism in Kanhailal’s actors comes “at the expense of confronting the spoken word” (751). 14. The bhakti movement began in the sixth century in south India as a religious movement that attempted to democratize religion by questioning the Brahminical stronghold over Hindu religious practice. As Madhu Kishwar points out, by moving the language of worship from Brahminical Sanskrit to colloquially spoken languages, the movement allowed for the expression of women’s creativity in devotional discourse. 15. Incidentally, most of the Meitei, Manipur’s majority ethnic group to which the naked protesters belong, are Vaishnavite Hindus. Like Akka in the Vaishnavite tradition, the fourteenth-century Kashmiri bhaktin Lal Ded also renounced domestic life and discarded clothing. In Scribbles, a retelling by two women of the myths around Akka’s nakedness, seems to be clearly mediated through the Draupadi myth. As the popular legend goes, when Akka rejects a proposal of marriage from the king Kaushika, he attempts to strip her; at this she herself sheds her clothes and from that moment on, it is said, wanders alone naked. But in the women’s telling of the legend, Akka prays to the Lord for rescue, and grows a heap of hair that covers her as she is being stripped—a (male) godly intervention that echoes clearly with Draupadi’s endless sari. 16. I owe this information about the date of the performance to the website of Natarang Pratishthan, a resource center dedicated to documenting Indian theater history. See http:// www.natarang.org. 17. The Armed Forces Special Powers Act allows military personnel to shoot and even kill anyone on grounds of suspicion. It is a descendent of the colonial Armed Forces (Special Powers) Ordinance introduced by the British in 1942 to quell the Quit India Movement. In independent India this ordinance passed through several avatars until it became the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (1958), which has been enforced in some parts of Manipur since 1960 and across the entire state in 1980. For a complete history of this act, see Mehrotra (62–72). 18. Kanhailal has in fact been awarded not the Padma Bhushan but Padma Shri (2004), which is nevertheless one of the high honors awarded by the Indian government. Sabitri Heisnam received the same award in 2008.
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180
Notes to Chapters 4 and 5
19. The concession that the government did make, under pressure of the tension in Manipur, was to open out the historic Kangla Fort to public entry in November 2004. Kangla had been occupied by the Indian security forces since Independence and barred to civilians in Manipur. Since Kangla has been a site of great mythological, historical, and political significance, as Deepti Mehrotra points out, this must be counted as a political gain, even if it served the government as a way of putting off the main demand of withdrawing the AFSPA (196–99). 20. Irom Sharmila began her fast in November 2000. 21. Compare this with the objectifying use of naked female bodies in the U.S. animal rights organization PETA for instance. 22. Indian feminists have been campaigning for reform in India’s rape law, covered under Section 354 of the Indian Penal Code, which states: “Assault or criminal force to a woman with the intent to outrage her modesty—whoever assaults or uses criminal force to any woman, intending to outrage or knowing it to be likely that he will thereby outrage her modesty, shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to two years, or with fine or both” (emphasis added). 23. Of all Chauhan’s repertoire, it is perhaps the baseball bat that appears as the most striking element (apart from her undressed body). Given that baseball is not traditionally a sport played in India either at the professional level or even on the streets, Chauhan’s access to and use of the baseball bat as the “masculine” element in her repertoire may be read as one index of the thoroughly mediatized nature of her protest. It speaks to the penetration of the same global media apparatus that she now sought to activate through her protest—testifying to its effectiveness in relaying American cultural codes of sport and masculinity, both to her and the media audience she had hoped to address. 24. Young herself attributes the phrase to Judith Stiehm. 25. Recently, for example, Bal Thackeray, the head of the right-wing Shiv Sena in Mumbai, used it to criticize those Indian politicians who do not take an antagonistic stance toward Pakistan on the issue of terrorism. 26. Where the politics of protection has been mobilized by the Indian state to protect minority subjects, it has often been marked by a failure. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan observes that “the failure of the state’s functioning as a protective agency is indicated by the increase in the incidence of violence despite the laws [to check violence against women], the virtual absence of court convictions in most cases of violence, the paucity in the numbers and amenities of custodial institutions for victims, and the instances of custodial rape” (2003, 26). 27. Of course, as Papori Bora cautions, the strategic legitimacy of the protest relies on a fundamentally patriarchal nationalist imagination, “whether [in] Indian nationalism or Meitei nationalism,” of women as heterosexual and reproductive mothers. This conflation of women with mothers means that “if women wanted to participate in politics in the Northeast they have to be mothers or understood as potential mothers” (354).
Chapter 5. “This Is Not a Performance!” 1. For more information on these figures, see the reports Half Widow, Half Wife? and Buried Evidence: Unknown, Unmarked and Mass Graves in Indian-Administered Kashmir (Chatterji et al.). Although some disappeared persons have been carried away by militants, the vast majority of disappearances have been conducted by security forces. A smaller
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number of Pandits have also disappeared, so the issue of enforced disappearances by nonstate actors has also been raised. Most of the disappeared are men, although there have also been some reported cases of women disappearing. In Kashmir, the growing awareness of these disappearances—now chillingly corroborated by the recent discovery of a large number of unmarked graves and mounting revelations about the systematic torture techniques utilized by the Indian army—has added to a laundry list of reasons the disenchanted Kashmiri populace has long sought self-determination from the Indian state. 2. See chapter 2 for a discussion of Kabir’s conceptualization of Kashmir as a “territory of desire.” 3. The differences that led to this cleavage are beyond the scope of my analysis here and are difficult to ascertain without in-depth conversations with both groups, but they appear broadly to include tensions around the use of funds, the political character of the group, and the possible links between disappearances and mass graves. Ahangar has stood resolutely against the suggestion that the disappeared may be dead and insists they be brought back alive, whereas Imroz, one of the co-authors of the IPTK report, believes that the bodies turning up in mass graves in Kashmir are in fact those of the disappeared. For more on Ahangar’s position, see her sharp letter of October 4, 2011 (“Disappeared Persons”) to the Indian newspaper The Hindu for their inadvertent substitution of the word “killed” for “disappeared.” As Ahangar then wrote, “The families of the victims of enforced disappearances are living in hope of the return of their ‘disappeared’ family member. You will not find any of them referring to their ‘disappeared’ kin as ‘killed.’” 4. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=EJ3Vqes S7Mg. 5. The user “seeker7676” also refers to an “earlier video, available at http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=sUDenTPFPnA” uploaded by one SHAHID4446 (“shahid” meaning “witness” in Urdu), titled “Indian Army’s war crimes in Kashmir - 2011 .flv.” The accompanying description explains: “Indian Army soldiers accompanied by a senior officer are shooting from point blank an unarmed man in Pulwama district on July 8, 2011. This is the clear evidence of the war crimes committed by Indian soldiers in Kashmir. An unarmed man is clearly seen waving his hand and he can be heard shouting in pain underneath the rubble of the destroyed house. The residential house was bombarded by Indian soldiers using mortars and rockets. This is in clear violation to Geneva Conventions and a war crime to kill a wounded civilian or combatant.” Both videos testify to the significance of bearing witness through the dissemination of visual evidence and rely on the proof value of visual forms to claim the position of “objective” witness. 6. Interview with Khurram Parvez. 7. Kashmiri “half-widows” and children also hold up photographs of the disappeared, but it is the Kashmiri mother who is the dominant icon of suffering in photographic representations. 8. The gathering, organized by the APDP, provided a venue for artwork produced by Kashmiri students. 9. Kabli’s photograph and other photographs of the protest in the park may be viewed at http://www.hindustantimes.com/photos-news/Photos-India/lookingforthemissing/ Article4–921945.aspx. 10. These included the still very limited mainstream national and international coverage of the Kashmir conflict, in which the APDP woman (often Ahangar herself) with
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Notes to Chapter 5 and Epilogue
her iconic headband figured frequently as a symbol of the daily tragedy of Kashmiri life. It also included the photographs I had been viewing for some months on the internet before I went to Srinagar—not only those that I came across in media coverage or on Facebook, but those that I sought out actively on the internet. My Google search for images for “APDP protests” yielded scores of images of women of all ages holding photographs of the disappeared, many openly weeping, consoling each other. Despite the frequent insistence that Kashmiri women were not victims, these images seem to disseminate an idea of Kashmiri women as being precisely that. 11. Incidentally this closed-fist icon was recently utilized by the rapper MC Kash on his Facebook page: out of this hand grows the word “free,” and emblazoned across the bottom of the graphic appear the words “At Last.” The icon explicitly acknowledges a debt to the Black Panther movement in America, which has provided much creative inspiration to youth in Kashmir. 12. I borrow the phrase “disappearing act” from Diana Taylor’s book Disappearing Acts. 13. The entire series can be viewed on Qadri’s website at www.altafqadri.com. 14. They Vanished in Thin Air is also the name of one of the earliest reports documenting disappearances. It might be noted that artists and activists in Kashmir are in close conversation with each other, and the visual metaphors (“vanished in thin air,” “disappeared in plain sight,” and so on) through which information about “disappearances” travels in human rights circles are not exclusive to those communities but also organize the imagination of journalists, activists, and artists who in turn access such reports and overlap with these circles. 15. The punctum, Barthes writes, is “what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there” (57, 55, emphasis in original). 16. When I put the question of the exceptional sexual vulnerability of men in Kashmir to a noted human rights activist with the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS), he agreed that larger numbers of men than women have been tortured, but he also pointed out that women who have been tortured often do not come forward with narratives of their violation owing to issues of shame and honor. In comparison men may come forward with narratives of torture, including sexual torture, without fear of being shunned by families and communities. 17. Email communication. 18. See chapter 4 for a discussion of Sharon Marcus’s theorization of the “rape script” that underwrites rape.
Epilogue 1. See Gaikwad. 2. See chapter 4 for a discussion of Butler’s conception of some forms of public protest as forms of “theatricalized rage.” 3. As Vasanth and Kalpana Kannabiran have pointed out, “When dalit women step onto the streets in protest, they are seen as transgressing their limits. When upper-caste women take to the streets in protest, their sense of wrong and their appropriation of public space is immediately legitimate” (256–57). The Delhi anti-rape protests were certainly not uniformly upper caste, but in drawing a large number of upper-caste and middle-class women onto the streets, their composition was markedly different from the specifically
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Adivasi protest in which the Adivasi woman had been walking when she was stripped and paraded in Guwahati. The protest in which she had marched had been organized by the All Assam Adivasi Students’ Association (AAASA). The marchers were protesting the delay in granting of Schedule Tribe status to tea plantation workers of Assam. For an account of the assault by the woman herself, see Bisht. 4. Nandini Sundar cautions that vigilantism inevitably involves “a displacement of culpability, both by the state, which can blame people for taking law into their own hands, and by people, who can blame their own actions on state inaction” (“Vigilantism” 114). 5. See “Mr. Chidambaram’s War” and Roy’s interview with Shoma Chaudhury for other elaborations of Roy’s thoughts on resistant violence. 6. As Priyamvada Gopal points out, here “Roy projects onto the young tribal cadres she meets a sense of joyous ontological fluidity for which there is little evidence beyond the protective, shifting code names they give themselves” (2013, 124). 7. Gopal credits Roy with cannily “construct[ing] her authorial persona as a middleclass Indian who walks naively into the situation carrying the usual liberal prejudices and, despite herself, is slowly brought to a testimonial understanding of why violence becomes necessary” (2013, 123). It is true that Roy provides a detailed history of the insurgency by way of explaining the turn to violence as a product of a long history of oppression. However, the figure of the wild Adivasi never quite disappears and is difficult to read as part of Roy’s deliberate construction of naïve authorial persona. 8. The self-indulgent remark serves as an embarrassing reminder of that novel’s overwhelming preoccupation with the effects of a moment of heinous caste violence against a Dalit man on the traumatized upper-caste, middle-class protagonists at the center of the novel. 9. “From Egypt to Occupy: ‘Keep going and do not stop.’” Available at http://southissouth .wordpress.com/2011/10/24/from-egypt-to-occupy-keep-going-and-do-not-stop (accessed January 10, 2014). 10. “Force,” “resistance,” and “fighting back” are the terms preferred to “violence” in the document when describing the actions of the Egyptian protesters, as opposed to the “direct and indirect violence” of the state. This use of language indicates the activists’ awareness of a widespread cultural agreement about violence as unethical—in fact the writers invert the language usually favored by state actors when describing the violence of the state. Here is a fuller excerpt that illustrates the strategic use of the word “violence” by the writers, who describe a range of forceful actions taken by the protesters, refuting the narrative of exemplary nonviolent resistance as leading to the successes of the revolution: We faced such direct and indirect violence, and continue to face it. Those who said that the Egyptian revolution was peaceful did not see the horrors that police visited upon us, nor did they see the resistance and even force that revolutionaries used against the police to defend their tentative occupations and spaces: by the government’s own admission; 99 police stations were put to the torch, thousands of police cars were destroyed, and all of the ruling party’s offices around Egypt were burned down. Barricades were erected, officers were beaten back and pelted with rocks even as they fired tear gas and live ammunition on us. But at the end of the day on the 28th of January they retreated, and we had won our cities. It is not our desire to participate in violence, but it is even less our desire to lose.
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Implicit in this is the argument that these gains were in fact won by violence. Yet only at the very end of this catalog is there an acknowledgment that the protesters’ actions were also “violence,” and it is validated via an emphasis on the other of violence as not nonviolence, but loss: the loss, that is, of political space and life that “nonviolence” frequently entails as it participates in the production of “bloodied, beaten and dead” bodies of martyrs. 11. See, for example, Srila Roy, Neloufer de Mel, Rita Manchanda, and Aishah Shahidah Simmons. 12. Here Gopal gestures toward both the psychic effects of being engaged in violence as well as what happens after the stated ends of violence are won: Does violence simply disappear? Balagopal argued that while peaceful agitation is not necessarily more effective than violent agitation, it allows for the politicization of larger numbers of people and enables “dialogue not so much with the establishment as with society” (qtd. in Gopal 2013, 126).
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Bibliography
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Index
“Aaraam ki Zaroorat” (The Need for Rest), 30, 35 Abu Ghraib prison, 108 Adivasis, 104–5, 107, 108, 110–12, 129–30, 162–63 “Adoration of Hair,” 51 Agamben, Giorgio, 66 “Agli Subah” (The Morning After), 47–49 Ahangar, Parveena, 135–36, 139–40, 143, 144, 151–52 Ahmad, Aijaz, 94–95, 97, 102 Ahmed, Sara, 58 Akka Festival, 121–22 alienation, 5–6 Al Jazeera, 149 Ambedkar, Babasaheb, 91 Andersen, Kathryn, 74 Anderson, Benedict, 71 Arendt, Hannah, 36 “Arjun,” 116 Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), 5, 122, 124–25, 128, 179n17 Asian Federation Against Involuntary Disappearances (AFAID), 143 Assam Rifles battalion, 113, 122–23 Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP), 23–24, 133–34, 181–82n10; gendered landscape of disappearance and, 149–52; optics of disappearance and, 135–39; protests, 135–37; repertoire of protest, 139–49 atrocity photographs, 104–12
Balagopal, K., 165 Baldwin, Shauna Singh, 8, 22, 69–70. See also What the Body Remembers Bandit Queen, 103 Baruah, Sanjib, 6 Bashir, Aamir, 140 beheading, 70, 79, 81–82 “Being Female in India: A Hate Story,” 2 Besteman, Catherine, 13–14 Bhabha, Homi, 71 Bhagwat, Mohan Rao, 1–2 Bhakti movement, 179n14 Bhalla, Alok, 28, 33 Bhan, Mona, 6 Bhasin, Kamla, 37, 55, 56, 68, 84 Bhaya Nair, Rukmini, 95–96 Bhotmange, Priyanka, 87 Bhotmange, Roshan, 87 Bhotmange, Sudheer, 87 Bhotmange, Surekha, 87–88, 90, 104 Black Marginalia, 22, 25, 170n1–2; absence of sentiment or emotion in, 30; as escapism, 29; extension of authority to the reader, 32; fragmentary form, 28; intent and focus of, 33; lack of interiority in sketches of, 31; male body in the riot in, 40–43; Manto’s reason for writing, 29–30; metonymy portrayed in, 37–40; morality vignettes of, 36–37; publishing of, 27; representation of the violence of Partition in, 33–34; scholarly examination of, 25–26, 28; sketches of violence in, 30–31;
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
196
Index
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Black Marginalia (continued): violence against women portrayed in, 34–35 Body in Pain, The, 72, 83 Bora, Papori, 5 Borders and Boundaries, 56 Bose, Brinda, 94–95, 96 Bose, Subhash Chandra, 4 Brown, Wendy, 126, 127 Buried Evidence, 137, 138, 149 Burton, Antoinette, 63 Butalia, Urvashi, 58, 59, 62, 64, 70, 174n7; The Other Side of Silence, 56, 63, 74, 79, 174n7 Butler, Judith, 109, 110, 112, 131–32 caste: Dalit anti-rape protests and, 165–66, 182–83n3; definitions and relation to class, gender, and sexuality, 90–92, 170n10; legislation regarding, 88, 89, 92–93, 95, 98; patriarchal complicities of state and, 98–101, 115–16; peasant rebellions and, 114–15; sexuality and, 90–92, 96–98; terror and the upper-, 116–17; violence, 87–90, 105, 127–28. See also God of Small Things, The Chakravarti, Uma, 90 Chandralekha, 51 Chaos in Kashmir, 58 Charred Lullabies, 13 Chatterji, Angana P., 149, 159 Chaudhary, Zahid, 106–7 Chauhan, Pooja, 23, 113, 119, 124–29, 132, 180n23 Chetia, Mayur, 129–30 Christians, 99 chronobiopolitics, 91–92 chrononormativity, 91 Chughtai, Ismat, 27; “Communal Violence and Literature,” 27 Chute, Hillary, 150 circumcision, 38 colonialism, 106–7, 175n15 communal riots, 172n15; male body in, 40–43; metonymy and, 37–40; portrayed in Black Marginalia, 25–27; symbolic violence of, 37–38 Conrad, Joseph, 102 conversions, religious, 50 Crenshaw, Kimberle, 130 Culler, Jonathan, 95 custodial rape, 118–19 “Daawat e amal” (Invitation to Action), 25 Daiya, Kavita, 8, 12, 37, 71
Dalits, 3–4, 87–88, 117, 162, 170n10; anti-rape protests, 165–66, 182–83n3; Christian, 99; feminism and, 104–5, 178n6; male vulnerability, 103; relationship between caste and sexuality and, 91 dance, 51–52 Daniel, Valentine, 13 Das, Veena, 37, 175n13 Davis, Angela, 127 “Delhi Protests and the Caste Hindu Paradigm,” 169n6 De Mel, Neloufer, 165 Devi, Phoolan, 103 Dhareshwar, Vivek, 89 Didur, Jill, 63 disappearances of Muslims, 133–35, 159–60, 180–81n1; gendered landscape of, 149–52; mass graves and, 149–50; optics of, 135–39 “Disappeared of Kashmir, The,” 149 Disappearing Acts, 137 Dobson, G. E., 107 “Draupadi,” 87, 102, 113, 114–19, 128, 164; Mahabharata and, 119–20; stage production of, 120–23 Dube, Leela, 90 Dutta, Madhushree, 121 Dwelling in the Archive, 63 Economist, The, 138 Edelman, Lee, 176n7 Egyptian Revolution, 165 empathy, 32 endogamy, 93–98 escapism, 29 Facebook, 141 fake encounters, 88 Fanon, Frantz, 47, 164 Feldman, Allen, 10, 138 feminism, 3–4, 56–57, 104–5, 178n7; logic of masculinist protection and, 126–27; rape laws and, 180n22; representations of violence and, 10–12 Flemming, Leslie, 27, 28–29 Foreign Policy, 2 Forster, E. M., 94 Freeman, Elizabeth, 91 Gandhi, Indira, 26, 48, 69 Gandhi, Rajiv, 50 Garg, Mridula, 47, 50; “Agli Subah” (The Morning After), 47–49 gendered landscape of disappearance, 149–52
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Index 197
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gendered subaltern, 101–4 gendered violence, 74–73, 161–62 George, Rosemary Marangoly, 8 “Ghaate ka Sauda” (Losing Bargain), 39–40 Ghosh, Bishnupriya, 102 Goddess and the Nation, The, 175n15 God of Small Things, The, 23, 54, 87, 89, 91, 164; critique of endogamy in, 93–98; gendered subaltern and, 101–4; patriarchal complicities of caste and state in, 98–101; sequence of events in, 92–93; time binds and sexuality explored in, 91–92 Gopal, Priyamvada, 26, 36, 103, 164, 170– 71n2–3, 184n12 Gopinath, Gayatri, 71 gothic narrative, 174n10, 175n11 “Great Indian Rape Trick, The,” 103 Grewal, Inderpal, 2 Grewal, Zareena, 13 Guha, Ranajit, 21 Gulabi Gang, 161, 162–63, 165 Gulzar, Meghna, 70 Gupta, Amith, 2 “Halal Ya Jhatka” (Kosher or Not), 30, 35 “Hamesha ki Chutti” (Permanent Vacation), 30 Hartman, Saidiya, 32, 134 Harud, 140 Hasan, Khalid, 62 “Hatak” (Insult), 30 Heart of Darkness, 102 Heisnam, Sabitri, 9, 120–23 Hindu, The, 108–9, 110, 181n3 Hindus, 38, 174n7; anti-Sikh, 48–50; categorization of, 130; Kashmir and, 57–62; male body as proof of religion, 41–42; patriarchy among, 68–69; women linked with Sikh women, 70 Hobsbawm, Eric, 71 Holocaust, the, 66 honor, 39–40, 55–56, 65–66 Huffington Post, 106 humanitarianism, 6 humility, 36–37 Husain, Imam, 136 Hussain, Bonojit, 129–30 Hussein, Abdullah, 16, 21 iconography of the ethnic Other, 38 Imroz, Pervez, 140, 143 India: alienation within, 5–6; British novel in, 174n10; colonialism and photography
of, 106–7; complicity between the state and caste in, 98–101; cultural history of violence in, 4–6; gothic narrative, 174n10, 175n11; literary and visual representations of, 8–9; perceived as colonizing entity, 5–6; postcolonial period history, 6–9; urban versus rural, 1–2; Western views of, 2–3. See also Partition of India Indian Penal Code, 125 Inner Courtyard, The, 119 insurgent violence, 162–68, 183–84n10, 183n7 interiority, 31 inter-marriage, 91 International Day of Disappeared Persons, 146 Irom Sharmila, 125 irony, 36 “Islah” (Reform), 40–2 “Istikaal” (Firm Resolve), 40, 44 Jack, Dana C., 74 Jadaliyya, 2 “Jaiz Istimaal” (Legitimate Use), 36, 39 Jauhar, 56 Jews, 44–46 Kabir, Ananya Jahanara, 60, 135 Kabli, Fayaz, 146 Kafila (blog), 141 Kanhailal, Heisnam, 120, 123 Kanwar, Amar, 121, 122; Lightning Testimonies, 121, 122, 123 Kapur, Shekhar, 103 Kashmir, 60, 62, 181n5; mass graves in, 149– 50. See also disappearances of Muslims Kashmir 1947: A Survivor’s Story, 11, 22, 57–62; as gothic, melodrama, and memoir, 64–69; as a Partition memoir, 62–63; on suicides by women, 65–67 Kashmir per Hamla, 58 Katyal, Akhil, 140 Kaul, Suvir, 8 Kaya Taran, 50–53 Keppley-Mahmood, Cynthia, 176n16 “Khaad” (Fertilizer), 40, 43 “Khabardar” (Warning), 32 Khamosh Pani, 70 Kikon, Dolly, 5 “Kismat” (Destiny), 31 Kumar, Priya, 8, 59 Kumar, Sashi, 50; Kaya Taran, 50–53 Kureishi, Hanif, 94 Kusnetzoff, Juan Carlos, 84
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
198
Index
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Lall, Rashmee Roshan, 2 Lanza, Adam, 106 Levi, Primo, 66 Lightning Testimonies, 121, 122, 123 Longoni, Ana, 146 looting, 39 Luciano, Dana, 23, 91 Madhavan, N. S., 50; “When Big Trees Fall,” 50 Mahabharata, 119–20, 178n7 Mahasweta Devi, 8, 87, 102, 113, 114, 164, 178n7; “Arjun,” 116; “Shishu,” 116. See also “Draupadi” Mahmood, Saba, 47 Malcolm X, 165 Mallot, J. Edward, 85 Manchanda, Rita, 133, 165 Manipur, 121–23, 178n10, 179n15, 180n19 Mankekar, Purnima, 56, 173n1 Manorama, Thangjam, 113, 122–23, 128 Manto, Saadat Hasan, 8, 12, 22, 25, 170n1, 171n7; “Aaraam ki Zaroorat” (The Need for Rest), 30, 35; “Daawat e amal” (Invitation to Action), 25; “Ghaate ka Sauda” (Losing Bargain), 39–40; “Halal Ya Jhatka” (Kosher or Not), 30, 35; “Hamesha ki Chutti” (Permanent Vacation), 30; “Hatak” (Insult), 30; on intent and focus of Black Marginalia, 33; “Islah” (Reform), 40–2; “Istikaal” (Firm Resolve), 40; “Jaiz Istimaal” (Legitimate Use), 36, 39; “Khaad” (Fertilizer), 40, 43; “Khabardar” (Warning), 32; “Kismat” (Destiny), 31; “Manto’s Prayer,” 33; “Mazdoori” (Wages), 30, 39; morality vignettes of, 36–37; Mottled Dawn, 25, 172n13; “Mozail,” 44–46; move to Pakistan, 27; “Munasib Karavaii” (Appropriate Action), 36; “Murli ki Dhun” (The Melody of Krishna’s Flute), 31; “Open It,” 28; “Pathanistan” (Permanent Vacation), 30, 40; popularity of writings by, 27–28; “Qasr-e-nafsi” (Humility), 36; reasoning for writing Black Marginalia, 29–30; “Riyayat” (Lenience), 35; “Saate-Shirin” (Sweet Moment), 30, 35; “Sadke Uske” (Glory Be), 40; “Safaaipasandi” (A Love of Cleanliness), 36; “Saha’e,” 31; scholarly examination of, 25–26; “Sharifan,” 34–35; shift in post-Partition fiction, 28–29; Siyah Haashiye, 33, 170n1–2; on social outcastes, 33; “Ta’awun” (Close Cooperation), 36; “Thanda Ghosht” (Cold
Meat) 28, 30, 34; “Ulahana” (Reproach), 37. See also Black Marginalia Manto ki Kahaniyan, 25, 172n13 “Manto’s Prayer,” 33 Maoist rebels, 108–10, 163, 165 Marcus, Sharon, 131 martyrological consciousness, 73, 176n16 mass graves, 149–50 mass rape, 159–60 mass suicide, 56–57, 65–67, 173n1 “Mazdoori” (Wages), 30, 39 McClintock, Anne, 71 media: APDP protests and, 141–42; coverage of naked protests, 124–31; Western, 2–4, 105–6 Mehta, Krishna, 11–12, 22, 57–62; Kashmir per Hamla, 58; Pativrata dharma, 68; on suicides she witnessed, 66; This Happened in Kashmir, 58–59. See also Kashmir 1947: A Survivor’s Story Meira Paibi, 129 Meitei women’s protest, 113–14, 124–31, 132, 178n1 memory, patriarchal, 83–86 memory’s truth, 56 men: APDP protests and visual images of, 141–42; body as determinate proof of religion in, 38, 40–45; logic of masculinist protection and, 126–27; subaltern, 103; symbolic violence against, 37; turbans worn by, 45–47, 51–53 Menon, Jisha, 8, 53 Menon, Ritu, 37, 42, 55, 56, 84 metonymy, 37–40 Midnight’s Children, 55, 101–2 Miller, Nancy, 109 Mohan, Narendra, 170n1, 172n13 Mohanty, Chandra, 3, 9 Mottled Dawn, 25, 172n13 “Mozail,” 44–46 Ms. magazine, 2 Mufti, Aamir, 31 “Munasib Karavaii” (Appropriate Action), 36 “Murli ki Dhun” (The Melody of Krishna’s Flute), 31 Muslims: of Kashmir, 60, 62, 133–35; male body and, 38; veils worn by, 47. See also disappearances of Muslims Nairn, Tom, 71 nakedness: on Manipur stage, 120–24; photographing of atrocity and, 104–5; in protest, 113–14, 124–31, 131–32
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
Index 199 Narayan, Uma, 3 narrations, 74–83; gothic, 174n10, 175n11 National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), 88 Naxalite movement, 102–3, 115, 164, 165, 177n12 Nayak, Daya, 87 Nihalani, Govind, 56, 70
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Occupy Movement, 165 “Open It,” 28 optics of disappearance, 135–39 Orang, Laxmi, 129–30, 178n7 Other Side of Silence, The, 56, 63, 74, 79, 174n7 Outlook, 109–10, 163 Oza, Rupal, 1 Pakistan, 27, 31; Kashmir and, 58, 59–60 Pal, Sampat, 161, 162 Palestinian struggle, 165 Pandey, Gyan, 20–21, 30; “In Defense of the Fragment,” 30 Partition of India, 7; events in Kashmir, 1947, 57–62; literary explorations of official documentation of violence during, 14–21; national versus local in, 20–21; reading memoirs of, 62–63; Sikhs under, 69–70, 173n3. See also Black Marginalia; What the Body Remembers Paswan, Baudh, 161, 162 “Pathanistan” (Permanent Vacation), 30, 40 Pativrata dharma, 68 patriarchal memory, 83–86 patriarchy, 68–69; complicities of caste and state, 98–101 peasant rebellions, 114–18; custodial rape and, 118–19 People of India, The, 107 Peppe, Tosco, 107 perceptide, 84 photographs: of atrocity, 104–12; of Kashmiri victims of violence, 142–46, 181–82n10 Pinney, Christopher, 107 “Poem 3: Journey across the ConcertinaWire,” 138 Pooranmashi, 70 Prevention of Atrocities Act of 1989, 88, 89 Progressive Writers Association (PWA), 27 Prosser, Jay, 108 prostitution, forced, 39–40 protests: anti-rape, 165–66, 182–83n3; APDP, 135–37, 139–49; naked, 113–14, 124–31, 131–32 Puar, Jasbir, 46–47
Qadri, Altaf, 134, 143–46, 152–58 “Qasr-e-nafsi” (Humility), 36 racialized bodies, 106 rage, theatricalizing of, 131–32, 162 Ramaswamy, Sumathi, 175n15 Ramayana, 61, 174n8 Rankin, John, 32 Rao, Anupama, 88; on caste violence, 105; on definition of caste, 90; on intermarriage, 91 rape, 1, 34–35, 55–56, 103, 113; custodial, 118–19; Dalit protests against, 165–66, 182–83n3; laws, 180n22; mass, 159–60; photography and documentation of, 104–5; script, 131; Western media coverage of, 2–4 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, 1 Recasting Women, 11 Regarding the Pain of Others, 105 Remembering Partition, 20–21 Renan, Ernst, 71 repeated gestures, 139 reproductive futurity, 176n7 rescripting of violence, 131–32 Revolt of 1857, 107 riots. See communal riots ritualistic violence, 35–36 “Riyayat” (Lenience), 35 Roushan Bayaan, 121 Rowlatt Act, 170n11 Roy, Arundhati, 5, 8, 12, 23, 54, 87; gendered subaltern and, 101–4; “Love Laws,” 92–93, 95, 98; on intercaste desire, 91; on legal codification of atrocities, 89; on violence from below, 163–67. See also God of Small Things, The Roy, Mary, 99 Rushdie, Salman, 55, 56, 101–2; Midnight’s Children, 55, 101–2 “Saat-e-Shirin” (Sweet Moment), 30, 35 sacrificial deaths, 69–74, 176nn17–18 “Sadke Uske” (Glory Be), 40 “Safaaipasandi” (A Love of Cleanliness), 36 “Saha’e,” 31 Sahni, Bisham, 14, 21 Sajad, Malik, 134, 147, 149, 151–52; “Disappeared of Kashmir, The,” 149 salvage paradigm, 107 Sangari, Kumkum, 11 Sarkar, Tanika, 172n17 Sasta Sahitya Mandal, 58
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
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200
Index
sati, 56 Scarry, Elaine, 72, 83 Scenes of Subjection, 32 Scott, James, 117 Scott, Joan, 63 Scribbles on Akka, 121 Seeing Like a State, 117 self-immolation, 56, 66, 69 Sen, Mala, 103 Sengupta, Shuddhabrata, 141 sexuality and caste, 90–92, 96–98. See also God of Small Things, The “Shame on Guwahati Streets,” 108 “Sharifan,” 34–35 “Shishu,” 116 Sikhs: anti-Sikh Hindus and, 48–50; hair and, 43–44, 48–50, 51, 173n23; Kashmir and, 62; male body, 26, 38, 43, 44–45; massacres of, 72–73; under the Partition, 69–70; turbans worn by, 45–47, 51–53 Singh, Bir Bahadur, 176n17 Singh, Manmohan, 5 Siyah Haashiye, 33, 170nn1–2. See also Black Marginalia Sontag, Susan, 105–6, 112 “Sorry,” 40, 42–43 Speaking Peace: Women’s Voices from Kashmir, 58, 59 Spivak, Gayatri, 102–3, 113, 118, 119, 120 Sri Lanka, 165 state, the: and caste, 98–101, 115–16; tribal rebellion and, 114–18 “Story and Discourse in the Analysis of Narrative,” 95 subaltern, 101–4 suicide, mass, 56–57, 65–67, 173n1 Sumar, Sabiha, 70 Sundar, Nandini, 110, 167 Sundar, Unnamati Syama, 3 symbolic and structural violence, 6, 37–38 “Ta’awun” (Close Cooperation), 36 Tamas, 14–21, 56, 70, 170n13, 173n1 Taylor, Diana, 84, 137, 139 Telegraph, The, 108, 110–12 Teltumbde, Anand, 89 testimonial discourse, 74–83 Thaimei, Sengangly, 129 Thakuria, Nava, 123 “Thanda Ghosht” (Cold Meat) 28, 30, 34 Theatricalizing of rage, 131–32, 162 They Vanished in Thin Air, 182n14
Third World violence, 12–14 This Happened in Kashmir, 58–59 “Trophies of Operation Greenhunt, The,” 110 turbans, 45–47, 51–53 “Twins and Lovers,” 95 “Two-nation theory,” 7 “Ulahana” (Reproach), 37 Ut, Nick, 109 Vaid, Sudesh, 11 veils, 47 Vietnam War, 109 vigilantism, 167–68 violence: based on male body, 40–44, 53–54; beheading, 70, 79, 81–82; caste, 87–90, 127–28; communal riot, 25–27; cultural representation of, 9–12; empathy and, 32; feminism and, 10–12; gendered, 74–83, 161–62; historical trajectory of, 29–30, 171n11; insurgent, 162–68, 183–84n10, 183n7; looting, 39; against men, 37, 40–43, 141–42; of metonymy, 37–40; official documentation of facts related to, 14–21; Partition, 57–62, 69–70; perceptide of, 84; photographing of, 104–12; riots of 1947 and (see Black Marginalia); ritualistic, 35–36; sacrificial deaths, 69–74, 176nn17– 18; self-immolation, 56, 66, 69; symbolic, 37–38; testimonial narrations of, 74–83; theatricalizing rage and rescripting, 131– 32, 162; Third World, 12–14; unmanning, 124–31; Western media representations of, 2–4, 105–6; against women, 1–4, 34–35, 55–56, 104–5, 118–19, 127–28, 172n17; of women’s sacrificial deaths, 69–74. See also disappearances of Muslims “Walking with the Comrades,” 5, 163 Weary Generations, The, 16–21 Western views of India, 2–4, 105–6 What the Body Remembers, 22, 69–70; patriarchal memory in, 83–86; testimonial discourse, 74–83; violence, memory, and embodiment in, 70–74 “When Big Trees Fall,” 50 Whitehead, Andrew, 59, 62 women: as bereaved mothers of the disappeared, 143–49; categorization of, 130–31; facing sexual dangers, 65–66; feminist, 3–4, 56–57, 104–5, 126–27, 178n7, 180n22; forced prostitution of, 39–40; gendered
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
Index 201 Women Writing in India, 119 Xalxo, Madhuri, 104–5, 107, 108, 112; “Delhi Protests and the Caste Hindu Paradigm,” 169n6 Young, James, 62 YouTube, 141–42 Zia, Ather, 138; “Poem 3: Journey across the Concertina-Wire,” 138 Žižek, Slavoj, 19
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telling of violence and, 74–83; honor and, 39–40, 55–56, 65–66; Kashmir 1947 and, 57–62; mass suicide by, 56–57, 65–67; metonymy and, 38–39; naked protests by, 113–14, 124–32; photographs of victimized, 108–12; rape of, 1–4, 103, 104–5, 113, 118–19, 159–60, 165–66; representation in liberalized India, 1–2; sacrificial deaths of, 69–74; self-immolation by, 56, 66, 69; symbolic violence against, 37; veils worn by, 47; violence against, 1–4, 34–35, 55–56, 104–5, 118–19, 127–28, 172n17
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
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deepti misri is an assistant professor of women and gender studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
Dissident Feminisms
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Hear Our Truths: The Creative Potential of Black Girlhood Ruth Nicole Brown Muddying the Waters: Coauthoring Feminisms across Scholarship and activism Richa Nagar Beyond Partition: Gender, Violence, and Representation in Postcolonial India Deepti Misri
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.
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The University of Illinois Press is a founding member of the Association of American University Presses. ___________________________________ Composed in 10.5/13 Adobe Minion Pro by Lisa Connery at the University of Illinois Press Manufactured by Sheridan Books, Inc. University of Illinois Press 1325 South Oak Street Champaign, IL 61820-6903 www.press.uillinois.edu
Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition : Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India, University of Illinois Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nmims-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3414405. Created from nmims-ebooks on 2020-05-04 03:24:03.