Mob violence has been occurring since human beings started recording history, verbal and written. The secular governments create environs for lumpenisation of urban and semi-urban locations with its mapping and reorientation of voter (read ideological and religious blocks). The anti-democratic or even anti-government forces would always look to use to these lumpen elements to unleash atrocities against innocent and defenseless people.
I remember watching a movie called “Z” by Kosta Gavra which narrated the ringside view of a political assassination orchestrated in the guise of mob violence. It showed the ways in which State uses the lumpen elements of society and unlawful manipulation of its machinery to eliminate political threats for survival. Cuban director Thomas Elia depicted the mob violence as an inevitable threshold of social transition and he showed no mercy for the degenerating feudal family and their extermination by the rampaging mob. Similar point of view was portrayed by Emile Zola in his book Germinal where a bunch of hapless colliers reduced to lumpen existence took to arms to survive. Amrita Pritam painted the deep wounds of partition and a nation’s conscience in her fiction Pinjar (Skeleton). Shashi Tharoor’s Riot is another recent work displaying the chimerical façade of reality and apprehensions of secular Muslim, past grievances of militant Hindu and bureaucrats functioning anarchy.
The effort to confine the flare-ups, spread and retaliatory responses of a riot in ideological (religious, secular) terms is very limiting to comprehend the experiential dimensions of the conflict. The official narratives of several parties narrow it down further to guilt of perpetrators, inciters and a presumably complicit State. While it is fairly easy to determine State and its apparatuses role what is lost in discussion is the victim’s narrative of the events as they unfold and how they become targets identified with the causes (religious or ethnic) of conflict. 1Fadjar Thufail mentions about the need of locating violence in the habitus of religious and ethnic certainty becoming the most serious obstacle to any effort to explore the narrated ephemerality of violence experience in his thesis on South Asian riots.
2Elias Canetti’s Crowd and Power (1966) in the words of Susan Sontag dissolved politics into pathology, society is treated as a mental activity and its barbaric self decoded. Crowd Vs individual, the animalistic drive to out-survive others, grips of fear psychosis and the behavior pattern of crowd being different from the individuals who make up the crowd as units. Canetti took 30 years to complete this brilliant work of rare insights and revelation.
Riots erupted after Cartoon controversies all over Islamic domiciles exemplified the sway of crowd power over seemingly insulated and free societies in Europe.
One of the memorable images from Gujarat riot was Qutubuddin Ansari’s teary eyed plea for life in front of a baying mob. The politics of this heart wrenching image is as enigmatic as the actual event. The narrative of this very image by a religious individual or a secular ideologue or an apolitical entity, would lead to further expressions of conflict in the mass media, intelligentsia and socio-political forums to understand not just the victim-perpetrator relationship, religious and ethnic undertones, flagrant spread of violence across extensive locations and linger over longer periods.
It is important to understand the local dynamics of afflicted community and trace back to the origins of conflict before the aftermath overwhelms our perception and political entities swoop in for the takeover. A self sustainable society must be able to introspect critically and allow humanistic perspectives to unravel the wounds to decide how to heal them.
I will try and follow this up with the politics of Riots.
1. Fadjar Thufail: Ph. D Scholar, Uni. Of Wisconsin. I owe him the concept of this blog.
2. Elias Canetti, German Writer and Thinker
I remember watching a movie called “Z” by Kosta Gavra which narrated the ringside view of a political assassination orchestrated in the guise of mob violence. It showed the ways in which State uses the lumpen elements of society and unlawful manipulation of its machinery to eliminate political threats for survival. Cuban director Thomas Elia depicted the mob violence as an inevitable threshold of social transition and he showed no mercy for the degenerating feudal family and their extermination by the rampaging mob. Similar point of view was portrayed by Emile Zola in his book Germinal where a bunch of hapless colliers reduced to lumpen existence took to arms to survive. Amrita Pritam painted the deep wounds of partition and a nation’s conscience in her fiction Pinjar (Skeleton). Shashi Tharoor’s Riot is another recent work displaying the chimerical façade of reality and apprehensions of secular Muslim, past grievances of militant Hindu and bureaucrats functioning anarchy.
The effort to confine the flare-ups, spread and retaliatory responses of a riot in ideological (religious, secular) terms is very limiting to comprehend the experiential dimensions of the conflict. The official narratives of several parties narrow it down further to guilt of perpetrators, inciters and a presumably complicit State. While it is fairly easy to determine State and its apparatuses role what is lost in discussion is the victim’s narrative of the events as they unfold and how they become targets identified with the causes (religious or ethnic) of conflict. 1Fadjar Thufail mentions about the need of locating violence in the habitus of religious and ethnic certainty becoming the most serious obstacle to any effort to explore the narrated ephemerality of violence experience in his thesis on South Asian riots.
2Elias Canetti’s Crowd and Power (1966) in the words of Susan Sontag dissolved politics into pathology, society is treated as a mental activity and its barbaric self decoded. Crowd Vs individual, the animalistic drive to out-survive others, grips of fear psychosis and the behavior pattern of crowd being different from the individuals who make up the crowd as units. Canetti took 30 years to complete this brilliant work of rare insights and revelation.
Riots erupted after Cartoon controversies all over Islamic domiciles exemplified the sway of crowd power over seemingly insulated and free societies in Europe.
One of the memorable images from Gujarat riot was Qutubuddin Ansari’s teary eyed plea for life in front of a baying mob. The politics of this heart wrenching image is as enigmatic as the actual event. The narrative of this very image by a religious individual or a secular ideologue or an apolitical entity, would lead to further expressions of conflict in the mass media, intelligentsia and socio-political forums to understand not just the victim-perpetrator relationship, religious and ethnic undertones, flagrant spread of violence across extensive locations and linger over longer periods.
It is important to understand the local dynamics of afflicted community and trace back to the origins of conflict before the aftermath overwhelms our perception and political entities swoop in for the takeover. A self sustainable society must be able to introspect critically and allow humanistic perspectives to unravel the wounds to decide how to heal them.
I will try and follow this up with the politics of Riots.
1. Fadjar Thufail: Ph. D Scholar, Uni. Of Wisconsin. I owe him the concept of this blog.
2. Elias Canetti, German Writer and Thinker
5 comments:
I largely agree with the thought process followed here , but it makes me also wonder what would be the limits of society to introspect critically and freely without its own identity being threatened. A powerful and baser perception of such a threat is what often leads to violence.
It is a state of extreme vulnerability.
What is one's own identity? It's an ontological as well as a political question. Who cares about the first one!
Vulnerability induced from the political perception of one's identity is ghastly.
btw I googled around and figured Amartya Sen wrote a book on Identity and violence with a throwback on his personal experience of partition although his politically correct example was that of a muslim knived by hindu fanatics.
"A self sustainable society must be able to introspect critically and allow humanistic perspectives to unravel the wounds to decide how to heal them"
The key word is healing.
The best thing would have been to prevent a situation from blowing up but things sometimes happen. Then relection can only bring about healing, not any kind of retaliation. The retaliation kills a secnond time, the human in man. That's the greatest casualty of any violent act.
Sumita
Sumita, forgiveness is part of healing. But what about the notions of poetic justice, lack of retaliation construed as weakness and mistrust of victims and perpetrators?
I think the human in man dies twice in the victim and perpetrator. They both need to be healed. Restraint is expected from the victim and if s/he complies, we tend to leave the issues untouched. Perceptions and restraints will be at jeopardy with subsequent "situations". Healing is finding solutions for the original causes too.
Rajesh
Couldnt agree with you more.
Both the victim and the perpetrator need to be healed.
Noone has a right to "expect" retraint fom a victim. This is truly the freedom only a victim can exercise, and under no "moral"
compulsion.
If someone hits me thinking am weak, I totoally hold the right to change that perception of weaness by retaliation. I also hold the right to not retaliate despite having the strentght the do so. The non retaliation of one who is "empowered to retaliate" and yet chooses his freedom to not do so is the only one of any meaning.
Without having the strength to retliate, restraint is of no meaning. It then becomes merely a utilitarian response, thereby not inspiring at all.
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