The Politics of Shaming
Manash Bhattacharjee As the 5th annual gay parade in Delhi walked the streets with colourful pride on 25th November, 2012, I remembered the outrageously disturbing story two years back, which shook every gender sensitive conscience: the alleged suicide of Dr Shrinivas Ramchandra Siras. The possibility of Dr. Siras committing suicide didn’t hold much conviction in the face of everyone’s disbelieving shock upon receiving the news. Those who were empathetically in touch with the AMU professor claimed he was happy about the Allahabad High Court’s decision to stay his suspension. Dr. Siras was also quoted as saying he wanted to go to America, where he would be allowed to live freely as a gay man. He wanted to spend the rest of his life fighting for gay rights. It’s tragic he had to fight the first battle, without luck, for his own life. The Question of Evidence: If it is a Miracle, any sort of evidence will answer, but if it is a Fact, proof is necessary. ~ Mark Twain The police and others said it couldn’t be murder as the doors were locked from inside. As if locked doors were such a conclusive clue. The farce of prima facie evidence had always sought to transform countless murders into suicides. Suicide is the official euphemism for murder in India. It has become the most convenient cover-up story. What comes readily to the investigating police officer’s lips is “suicide” whereas the most obvious possibilities of deliberate poisoning or other subtle ways of stage-setting a murder as suicide doesn’t seem to occur to the qualified gentleman. Such a defensive strategy raises more suspicion than hope. Worse is the tacit assumption that suicide is an angst-ridden private act whereas the reasons behind even legitimate suicide cases are socially instigated. The Question of Shame: Thus speaketh the discerning one: shame, shame, shame – that is the history of man! ~ Nietzsche The lure of shaming others publicly now has a lethal weapon: the spy-camera. The spy-camera, used to shame something ethically private before the eyes of the public, gets into a dangerously unrestricted territory of manipulation. It ends up being a bizarre syndrome where neo-perverts exploit others for money or revenge. The film LSD showcased how women are used as tools into unknowingly performing sexual acts before a hidden camera for the sake of profit. Other people are made victims of hate because of their queer sexual identity. Their sexual practices are termed ‘immoral’ by the moral police who comprise religiously conservative, heterosexual goons. This psyche was exemplified by those students who surreptitiously filmed Dr. Siras’s consensual sexual act. As if Dr. Siras being gay posed a threat to the paranoid norms of the hyper-masculine, heterosexual brigade. They decided to strike back at the professor with a fascist mindset. It was a premeditated act by the students in the name of stirring up an utterly reactionary public scandal. They saw themselves as representatives of the entire heterosexual community’s moralistic concerns. This seemed to legitimise their act. They gave the impression, as if acting in the larger interest kept them outside charges of private motivations. But what is most private is the pleasure involved in shaming. The pleasure of shaming occurs in the individual, even though it is shared in the larger realm of public consumption. The pleasure of shaming comes from the desire to humiliate. Humiliation is instigated by the breakdown of erotic and altruistic ties among human beings. In such an exceptional situation, hate wages war against shame. Shame is the irreducible, ethical essence of a human being. Humiliation is aimed at the dis-possession of the other’s shame. But it includes the violator’s shamelessness. Shamelessness is the most consciously violent mode of terrorising shame. It can be best defined in modern times as possessed rationality. Humiliation is the most venomous form of shamelessness, while erotic shame, always exposed to the possibilities of assault, is the most vulnerable part of our solitude. Kafka had painfully discovered “the violation of solitude”(to use Milan Kundera’s phrase), chased by the state’s secret police. Dr. Siras had discovered a similar kind of violation in the shape of a bunch of heterosexual moralisers hell-bent on exposing his private life to public gaze in the name of social duty. What is common in both cases is the desire to humiliate the victim and try and ensure that “the shame of it must outlive him”, to quote the last line of The Trial. The Question of Justice: Murder is not the crime of criminals, but that of law-abiding citizens. ~ Emmanuel Teney The question of justice takes on a different dimension after the victim’s death. It shifts the whole responsibility to the public who are concerned about the victim receiving justice at the hands of the state. Dr. Siras symbolised a collective cause – of gay rights and a respectful place for sexual minorities in Indian society. The question of justice in Dr. Siras’s case encompassed a larger justice which is awaited in favour of the gay cause in India. Emmanuel Teney seems to tell us, we cannot make easy distinctions between criminals and law-abiders. People follow the law to keep their own hegemonic interests intact. The law itself is a product of and run by the dominant class. It suits this class to be within law. But once the hegemonic order is threatened by people who challenge their social, cultural and sexual norms, the dominant class takes recourse to violence outside the law, in the name of another law. It is the notion of justice before justice – a pre-judicial justice, violently meted out by the moral vanguards of society. It challenges modern law and the foundation of its secular institutions. These institutions have to be predisposed in favour of the victimised crusaders and act against such criminal law-abiders. Or else these institutions of justice would be accused of being complicit in fostering pre-judice. Dr. Siras’s case was a reminder for the law to push its horizons further
On Space (s)
Ronojoy Sircar This screen is space. Moving in and out of this space, are these words as they are being written/read right here and now. These words form a direction. Not just a path, seeing that this is not a metaphor, but has begun to move beyond that. These words are signals; flares, shooting off into the night sky. This sky is space. Bodies within space Fig. 1. Klaus Rinke, Time-Space-Body and Action. There are two bodies. There is a clock. The viewer, forever entering the picture, finds him/herself locked out – at standstill, like the clock, like the bodies, caught in motion, caught in space. Fig. 2. Klaus Rinke, Vertical. There is no space, without time. The man’s held hands, hold time by its spine. He is tensed, for time constitutes tension. Time splitting space in two, is tension. The breath, held back, speaks in time of silences, in time with silence. Fig. 3. Geof Kern, Midtown Exit. A camera on an arch, balanced between the sky and the ground, looks on, along with the traffic below, as a man – possibly a salesman – floats across the Manhattan skyline forming questions, along his way, in minds, still caught between the cityscape – is he happy though? No faces were turned, but many were raised. Balloons, the color of the sky, in the colorlessness of this view, are transporting subversion of space into moments of suspension – of belief, and of laws. Fig. 4. Geof Kern, Untitled (man leap-frogging over another man). A man looks down, as another questions the importance of standing still, when standing still itself, is being within fingers distance from jumping over. These figures are rotating. This is but one frame, of reference. To catch a moment in space is after all, to capture it. Bodies without space Fig. 5. Helena Almeida, Voar (Fly). Balanced to fall, flight itself unhinges towards falling, connected only by the desire to fly. Truth speaks, at the moment of contact, revealing the ill kept secret – there was no flight, there was always flight. Slanted towards the ground the body learnt to fly. Fig. 6. Helena Almeida, Screen Inhabited. A blank slate and film stretched across its frames. There is no such thing as blank space. Moving towards the frames and ripping the illusion of space, in one steady movement captured in frames of collected moments, she walks away with her prize. The space refilling, appears the same, bridging the gap between longing and getting, and thus forever changed. This is a movement from within, to without. Fig. 7. Francesca Woodman, Then at one point I did not need to translate the notes; they went directly to my hands. The hands stretched out on the wall; create gaps, as the body attempts to submerge. Drowning is always an option. Fig. 8. Francesca Woodman, Untitled. Turning in circles, but losing sight of what’s spinning in reality – the body, or the space; differences ceasing to matter within the attempts to disappear – space becoming the body, the body moving towards becoming space. At the closing, the flares disappearing beyond the horizon of appearances – of contrasts – leave images lasting but a fraction as long as the flares themselves, thriving on the contrast created between light, and the darkness; the foreground, and its background; bodies, and space. The image fades, while these words continue to unfold (here in this moment) – recording space within memory. Memory is a space. ————- Images: Almeida, Helena. Screen Inhabited. 1976. Photograph. Private collection. Voar. Perf. Helena Almeida. Galeria Helga Avelar, Madrid. 2001. Performance. Kern, Geof. Midtown Exit. 1991. Photograph. Private collection. _________ Untitled (man leap-frogging over another man). 1999. Photograph. Private collection. Rinke, Klaus. Time-Space-Body and Action. 1972. Photograph. Gallery L’Attico, Rome __________ Vertical. 1972. Photograph. Private collection. Woodman, Francesca. Untitled. 1976. Photograph. Private collection. __________________ Then at one point I did not need to translate the notes; they went directly to my hands. 1976. Photograph. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California. —————— Ronojoy Sircar is in the MPhil programme in English at Jamia Milia Islamia, New Delhi. adminhumanitiesunderground.org
The Afterlife of a Certain Body
Srirupa Prasad The news of Ajmal Kasab’s execution was sudden. Like everyone, I too was stunned. Despite my being aware of the obvious. But what disturbed me deeply was the affective spectacle that was created by mainstream media—the news bites, images, and words. It was to make the most of the first big opportunity of a ‘terrorist’ being brought to justice. The Indian public had to be made aware that Kasab had finally paid his dues. The cheer and jeer following his death were creepy and unsettling, be it in the newspaper images or fervent posts on Facebook. Here was a nation all fired up and ready to let the world know that terrorists deserve death, because with death comes closure. There have been a few thoughtful and stirring pieces questioning this burst of collective celebration of Kasab’s death. But they were just a handful. I wondered what it was all about. Where did such passionate hatred and jubilation come from that made rejoicing someone’s death in the most public way (even when he has committed the most heinous crime) kosher and almost a moral necessity that day? While Kasab’s body remained ‘unclaimed’, for the Indian media this heightened moment had to be ‘claimed’ and made into a throbbing, emotional drama. I tried to make sense of this sad and brutal ‘claiming’ of Kasab’s body by the mainstream Indian media. After all, such triumphant celebration is not an uncommon phenomenon, thanks to present-day global media. But there was something distinct about the urgency with which mainstream Indian media tried to exact Kasab’s body. It seems India is finally mastering the language of a hyper-vigilante counter-terrorism and moral guardianship that accompanies it. Like the United States, it has ably moved into this role as the nation’s defender against a new kind of enemy. An enemy who is at once highly mobile and multiple- an organization of global reach or a rogue state. The enemy is also highly strategic and frightfully well-organized. So nations like the U.S. and India are on the path of a ‘global’ war on terrorism. Strikingly similar are some of the rites of passage that allow nations to become part of this consortium of “the willing”. For example, anniversaries of terrorist attacks are claiming and attaining a sacral, diurnal dimension: days to be memorialized. Likewise, old-new words/phrases are turning into motifs, becoming part of our everyday consciousness and public discourse: from ‘terrorist’, ‘jihadist’ to phrases like ‘nation under threat’. While counter-terrorism experts would shudder at the thought of these highly charged words being used loosely, for the public there is an overarching moral clarity that effortlessly fuses these differences to create this visceral condemnation for the enemy. The nature of the passionate jubilation that took place after Mohammad Ajmal Amir Kasab’s was hanged, took me by surprise as much as the suddenness with which his execution was announced. Nobody had the faintest idea that this ‘lone gunman’ would be executed so hastily within two weeks of President Pranab Mukherjee’s rejection of Kasab’s clemency plea. But such a triumphant commemoration usually concludes such dramas of modern statehood. What I was really not prepared for was the gradual unfolding of it in the mainstream media and its changing colors and mood as more information filtered in. I guess for the media too it was a bombshell. The first news bite was short and to the point and Hindustan Times reported it in a big bold letters but without any other frills. But then within a very short time almost all the major national dailies just burst with energy as if trying to win a race of who could cover Kasab’s death in the most macabre way. There was a surge of photographs of people rejoicing the moment in all possible ways. Policemen, politicians, and the aam janta, not to mention the kin of the victims’ distributed sweets, burnt effigies of Kasab and speeches were made. Emotions flowed while the nation won a major victory in the war on terror. What was really disconcerting was not so much the deafening celebration of Kasab’s death by the public and the media. There was similar rejoice when Saddam Hussein was put to death or Osama Bin Laden was killed. And of course mainstream media in the U.S. was similarly sensational in its reporting of both. But there is a difference. While there was a scramble over how much detail each cable channel could deliver for the hungry public, be it in the case of either Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden, I felt there was something curiously distinct about the way in which the Indian media covered Ajmal Kasab’s execution. To my mind that had to do with the fact that after four years, the killing spree of Kasab and the terror he unleashed had shrunk into the figure of this ‘lone gunman’ who remained isolated and powerless in an Indian prison. There was almost a ‘need’ for the mainstream press to re-visit and re-create every part of that entire saga, from the ‘26/11 attack’ to Kasab’s petition for mercy and finally its rejection. Kasab was no Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden for that matter, in his stature as a perpetrator of terror and violence. Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator and Osama Bin Laden evil personified. At one point Hindustan Times even used the word ‘butcher’ to describe Kasab’s crime. There was definitely a need to re-create a Kasab who was a heartless killer. A second reason I presume has to do with the peculiar nature of capital punishment in India. Retaining capital punishment is based on a rather fanciful and inconsistent justification that it is used on ‘rarest of rare’ occasions. But Shivam Vij argues on the basis of a report published by PUCL and Amnesty International (an extensive study of judgments between 1950-2008) that there is a marked degree of arbitrariness to the extent that it amounts to a “lethal lottery”. With very few legal safeguards, there is
To the Assembly of the Common Peasantry
Thomas Müntzer (spring 1525) On False And Unlimited Power, Which One Is Not Obliged To Obey. All the popes, emperors, kings, etc. who puff themselves up in their own estimation above other pious poor Christians, claiming to be a better kind of human – as if their lord-ship and authority to rule others were innate – do not want to recognize that they are God’s stewards and officials. And they do not govern according to his commandment to maintain the common good and brotherly unity among us. God has established and ordained authority for this reason alone and no other. But rulers who want to be lords for their own sake are all false rulers and not worthy of the lowest office among Christians. For God alone wants to be lord and he says in Deuteronomy 12 [:11], “You shall keep my commandment in your hand like a measuring rod according to which you shall judge – straight ahead, not deviating either to the left or to the right.” The same point is made in Job 5 [:8]. Therefore whichever prince or lord invents and sets up his own self-serving burdens and commands, rules falsely, and he dares impudently to deceive God, his own lord. Where are you, you werewolves, you band of Behemoths, with your financial tricks which impose one burden after another on the poor people? This year a labour service is voluntary; next year it becomes compulsory. In most cases this is how your old customary law has grown. In what”dementia” or “camouflage” did God, your lord, give you such power that we poor people have to cultivate your lands with labour services? But only in good weather, for on rainy days we poor people see the fruits of our sweat rot in the fields. May God, in his justice, not tolerate the terrible Babylonian captivity in which we poor people are driven to mow the lords’ meadows, to make hay, to cultivate the fields, to sow flax in them, to cut it, comb it, heat it, wash it, pound it, and spin it – yes, even to sew their underpants on their arses. We also have to pick peas and harvest carrots and asparagus. Help us, God! Where has such misery ever been heard of! They tax and tear out the marrow of the poor people’s bones, and we have to pay interest on that! Where are they, with their hired murderers and horsemen, the gamblers and whoremasters, who are stuffed fuller than puking dogs? In addition, we poor people have to give them taxes, payments, and interest. And at home [they assume that] the poor should have neither bread, salt, nor lard for their wives and small children. Where are they, with their entry fines and heriot dues? Yes, damn their disgraceful fines and robber’s dues! Where are the tyrants and raging ones, who appropriate taxes, customs, and user fees and waste them so shamefully and wantonly and lose what should go into the common chest or purse to serve the needs of the territory. And nevertheless no one can turn up his nose at them, or he is immediately treated like a treacherous rogue – put in the stocks, beheaded, quartered! He is shown less pity than a mad dog. Did God give them such power? On the peak of what monk’s cowl is it written? Indeed, their authority is from God. But so remotely that they have become the devil’s soldiers and Satan is their captain. Yes, they have been truly rejected, being enemies in their own territory. And what about their serfdom? Damn their unchristian, heathen nature. How they torture us poor people! We are the spiritual serfs of the clergy and the bodily serfs of the secular powers. Help us, eternal God! What great unchristian misery and murder is being done to your property, which your only-begotten son, lord of heaven and earth – and lord of this band of Behemoths – purchased at such a high price with his bitter death! Put these Moabites and this band of Behemoths as far behind you and as far away [as you can]. This is God’s greatest pleasure. And how little there will be prayed for! If one of their village officials wanted to impose anything on the poor in his own self-interest, they would depose him with a harsh punishment. The princes and lords themselves deserve nothing less for making self-serving commandments, which are outside the common good and unserviceable for brotherly unity. Do not let yourselves be led astray and blinded to any degree because every day the authorities endlessly repeat what the apostle Peter says in I Peter 2 [:18]: “You should be submissive to your lords, even if they are rogues,” etc. In truth, the sword [of Scripture] cuts sharply on both sides, and until now they have fought masterfully with it. But we want to see how Tileman [a foolish man], confuses divine Scripture again, and the wolf so cleverly puts on sheep’s clothing. Truly, truly, St. Peter’s view means something very different; for according to their interpretation, we would have to deliver our pious wives and children to them, so that they could satisfy their lust with them. The basic cause and source of the whole confederation of the Swiss was the unlimited, tyrannical power of the nobility and of other authorities. For daily, with their unchristian, tyrannical rape, they did not spare the common man, but forced and compelled him contrary to all equity. And this grew out of their pride, blasphemous power, and enterprise. Their rule had to be abolished and rooted out through great war, bloodshed, and use of the sword, as is indicated in the Swiss chronicles and in many other reliable histories and writings. The conclusion of this pamphlet talks a bit about this. The lords were also allowed to murder pious and upright people for hunting a hare, and