Fierce pajamas

On bloodlust: notes towards four imminent executions

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

~A.E. Housman

ज़िन्दगी और मौत ऊपर वाले के हाथ हैं जहापनाह, उसे ना आप बदल सकते हैं न मैं, हम सब तोह रंग-मंच की कठपुतलियाँ हैं, िजनकी डोर उपरवाले की उँगलियों मे बंधी हैं: कब, कौन, कैसे उठेगा, कोई नहीं बता सकता.

~Anand (1971)

I write in an evening shrouded in anticipation, but it is an anticipation of death. I will write in short, for it is to this that lives lived in an age of bureaucratic rationality are destined—shortness. I sit here, not in judgment, for that has already been done. The state, its arms, the bureaucracy and judicature, the presidency, have all circulated files and documents. Files have become the epitaph of life, tending with acceleration, to legal murder at the gallows. Let us know this and think it through—as the last hours of life of four men, destined by law, to death confront us. It is a luxury to think and imagine that I claim forcefully, for it was denied us by the secret extinguishing of the life of that ‘public enemy’, Afzal Guru. And in this brief aporia that has opened up before us, before the next round of state-murders return to secrecy (for the President in Rashtrapati Bhavan has removed the online, realtime, list of pending mercy petitions), let us rise to thinking the ordinariness of state-killing, the banality of the procedures of this dying, and the phenomenal inordinariness of the death of four men awaiting execution. Behind the façade of routine and rational bureaucracies of killing remains, still, killing. It is the shock of that fact that we must grasp and keep alive. (more…)

Desires of planning and the planning of Desires: Vignettes of a Rape Culture and Beyond:

{first published, with revisions, in Kafila}

Each person, withdrawn into himself, behaves as though he is a stranger to the destiny of all the others. His children and his good friends constitute for him the whole of the human species. As for his transactions with his fellow citizens, he may mix among them, but he sees them not; he touches them, but does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone. And if on these terms there remains in his mind a sense of family, there no longer remains a sense of society.

~Alexis de Toqueville (Epigraph to Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man)

Friends! You drank some darkness

and became visible

~Tomas Tranströmer (“Elegy”)

An hour is what it took for a band of six males to show a woman, a paramedic, ‘her place’ in contemporary Delhi (December 16, 2012). Often, in our pathological public places, it takes a mere moment. This case is different because it compels us to think through the limits of brutality of the living; it compels us to confront the limits of our capacity to inflict violence. But the night of December 16, 2012 also confronts us with the kind of cities we are building and the kind of places we want to inhabit. It is a different, by no means less important, matter that this woman—from whatever one has gathered these past weeks through the periodic medical bulletins—has battled to compel us to confront all of this and more, for the pain of her body and the brutality of an experience that she had survived for two weeks, serves a specular role—through it, we bear witness to ourselves, or so one hopes.

Plenty is being written about ‘what now needs to be done’, as well as about the very anatomy of rape. Some have spoken and voiced the outrage that this episode has engendered. Others have commented on the culture of impunity—bureaucratic, legal and familial; some also speak of the symbolic, material and affective construction of womanhood in our times—a construction and a culture that underlie the very construction of our rape society. These are all very valid concerns, and I am glad that we are beginning to think about them. I only wish to add a few points of my own, admittedly disjointed, as I try and think through the miasma of brutality and impunity, as I confront the terrible transformation of a school-bus in Delhi into a mobile site where dark fantasises of phenomenal violence have been enacted, as we all (re)confront societies where women’s bodies for long have been made the objects of a certain kind of politics, a politics if not of death then certainly of dehumanization.

Thesis: Pathological Space

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The Hidden Injuries of Race

A Response to Lawrence Liang

Turn on the television any given day now, and you will be greeted by the news-media in unison informing you about the psychosis of fear—“north east fear/scare” is a useful shorthand—that seems to have gripped some of our fellow citizens. The numerous characterizations, all of which are variations on a theme, are not only ill-informed, they are also wholly inadequate and directionless. What does it mean to say that north-easterners are in the grip of fear, running away herd-like to their corners of the home-world? The bovine image, though useful in the sense of visualizing the sheer numbers involved, doesn’t allow us to think beyond.

This piece is an attempt in that direction. The fear is real, it is palpable on the railway platforms and at airports of major cities, and it surely has had the potency to disrupt a large number of people in the steps and motions of their daily lives. Others, including on Kafila, have written about the contentious issue of borders and migrants, of numbers and mutable identities; The Hindu has featured a series of interesting articles under the Sunday Story section, delineating the central role of information-technology and communication—technology whose role itself has radically transmuted amidst the last few months of the troubles, where we have seen the emergence of the cellphone screen as the new, unchartered frontier of radical, affective simulacra. Fingers have been raised, especially by our ever-articulate military-intelligence-scholarly community, against the customary foreign hand, and many of their accusations, might, in the days ahead, speak their own truth.

I am more interested in a different issue here, one that seeks to make all of us culpable. It is an attempt to converse with Lawrence Liang’s admirable piece regarding belongingness in the city, the idea of integration in a substantive sense, as opposed to the ‘lip-service’ we see being bandied about these days. In one way, this is tied up with the idea of alienation, and to a further extreme, anomie. It is this entity that I wish to explore further here. Lawrence writes in his piece, “While there has been a lot of lip service in the last few days to Bangalore being a hospitable city, perhaps it is time to acknowledge that we may have bestowed the tag on ourselves in a moment of self-conceit. Perhaps it is a much more tenuous compact based on benefits gained from migrant labour without the grant of full cultural citizenship. And perhaps it is time to ask if years of having to deal with quotidian humiliations, passive aggression directed at cultural practices (dress, food, sexuality) is what is responsible for Bangalore’s failure to instill a sense of belonging among migrants.”

The problem, however, is this: it isn’t merely cultural integration, or the lack of it, that explains the spark-like burst of exodus of the past few days; the issue, merely, of hospitability, of belonging, of the ‘right not to be treated as strangers’. There is something, it seems to me, much more pernicious, much more ordinarily sinister at play, which has lit the powder-keg of flight. This is the everyday game of collective recognition and selective disregard that those who are ‘different’ must endure (and often, in turn, participate in). This is the manufacture of marginalization in the nuances of daily life, and its best instances may be experienced on the streets. Yesterday, after a haircut, I was on my way home when I stopped by the local grocer’s for some sunday topping-up of essentials. The scene is a man with visibly mongoloid features, walking past me, hailing an autorickshaw, seeking to hire it till the nearest metro station; the auto-wallah has seen him approach, but ignores the presence of the man; the next moment, he drives off to the exact same destination with another customer, leaving our protagonist in the wake of dust and indignity. This is the indignity of non-recognition, the everyday artefact that is so corrosive to so many amongst us in so many of its different permutations; this is the sharp, stinging acid in the social fabric of cities that those of us who do not fit the bill of the norms of performance and appearance must endure. Chinki, tribal, easy-women, snake-eaters, dirty, animals—this is the cosmos of awful indignity that our fellow citizens suffer, and it is with this in mind that we may better approach the wholly inadequate ‘fear-psychosis’ that seems to have gripped a large number of people who happen to belong to a particular corner of the cartographic field. Fear, as a collective phenomenon, then arises as the festering wound of everyday life—as the blade that has hacked–away any possibility of allowing for the setting down of roots in a place. It is at this level that we are all culpable, for we have not developed the skills necessary to live with difference. I use the word ‘skill’ advisedly, and I shall return to it subsequently.

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