On Topic: Imagery of lynching, sexist liberals, free speech, Orlando shooting

The long summer is upon us, and as we wait for respite from the blistering heat, here is what we have been reading in June.

From home:

According to current Indian medical textbooks, one of the methods employed to determine the rape of a woman is the two-finger test. The two-finger test is deeply patriarchal, invasive and insensitive to rape victims since it is often used to determine a woman’s sexual history in order to decide if her claims are true or otherwise. However, the good news is that a new edition has scrapped the use of this test as reported here.

Nirantar has put together an anthology of writing by Muslim women titled Kalam-e-Niswan. The anthology comprises of wide range of selections from Urdu magazines, and can be accessed here.

Nagaraj Manjule, the director of the critically acclaimed Sairat, has been accused of abuse by his ex wife. Deepika Sarma wonders why we overlook the sexism of liberals in her insightful piece in The Ladies Finger. In a similar vein, Advaita Kala’s article looks at a recent attempt to exonerate Tarun Tejpal, and argues that we must call out the underlying patriarchy of those who claim to represent the liberal cause.

Vqueeram Aditya Sahai writes about his experiences with crossdressing here.

Along with the freedom of speech, there is an urgent need to uphold artistic and creative freedoms, argues Gautam Bhatia in his commentary on the recent attempt to censor and stall the release of Udta Punjab. Bhatia argues that the Censor Board and the Cinematograph Act cannot be the arbiter of what people should be allowed to watch or take pleasure in.

As a follow up to our previous post, which looked at different responses to the JLF sponsored by Vedanta, Omair Ahmad in this article wonders, given the time in which we live, about how safe or radical literary/cultural fests are, and the ethical dilemma faced by writers who participate in such spaces endorsed by corporates and big business houses.

This report gives an account of at the recent protests against outside Manipur Bhawan in the capital.

In the end of May, Rana Ayyub released her self-published book, The Gujarat Files: Anatomy of a Cover Up. The book is a product of eight months of undercover research, and has been read as an unfinished work. You can read an excerpt here.

There is a narrative behind that piece of fish you are eating— a narrative that involves industrialized deep-sea fishing, the precarious livelihoods of fisherfolk, and dietary fads that celebrate seafood. In this account a former captain of a conservation vessel explains why he made a difficult but ethical choice of giving up seafood.

The soon to be pulled down Lohapul or the Old Iron Bridge over the Yamuna river is a site of neglect and decay. Yet, Sreedeep’s lens provides us glimpses of those who inhabit and eke a living in this rusting, dilapidated space in this photo essay.

Long reads:

In this fascinating essay, Megha Anwar excavates the genealogy of lynching by analyzing a series of photographs of lynched subjects. Her compelling argument is that there can be no lynching without spectators, and that these photographs were taken as trophies, souvenirs, or self-congratulatory markers of evidence. She provides a way of seeing images of violence and argues that repetitive, violent imagery does not result in desensitizing the reader. In stead the affective states aroused by such imagery is contingent upon the social context and the politics of the viewer

The camera at lynching sites was not therefore a neutral apparatus objectively recording what transpired. It was an actor in the catastrophe, one that normalised and prolonged the agony of the victim: the mob would often stop their torture in order to have their pictures taken with the battered, torn and quartered bodies of their prey writhing in the background.

Anwar finds a pattern in the lynching photograph— the fact that subjects are lynched in twos. In her essay she goes onto delineate the reason for this pairing, and twinning and the kind of impact it has on the viewer:

Lynching in twos, then, does not just terminate lives but marks the banishment of dangerous liaisons. To be murdered as a twosome is to be punished not simply for a tangible crime, but for forging a bond that ties us unacceptably to another. It converts the very holding of an outlawed affinity – between soldiers, or among racially/communally demarcated men and women, or even a parent and a child – into a punishable offence.

In this interview Lawrence Liang, legal researcher at the Alternative Law Forum reflects on sedition and hate speech laws in India and the United States. He argues that provocative speech of any sort cannot be classified as seditious unless it can be proved that such speech has resulted in violence and material damage.

To my mind one of the credibility tests for determining whether the threat of violence is imminent would be to understand the context of the speech, the status of the speaker and the addressee of the speech. If for example a prominent political leader made a formal speech to his armed cadre threatening to harm another community, one could reasonably assume that the nexus between the speech and the possibility imminent lawless action is very high. But if you were to compare this formal speech with say the Facebook status posted by a 21-year-old girl in Maharashtra after Bal Thackeray’s death, which observed that the state had shut down out of fear and not out of respect, one could also reasonably conclude that there is no real nexus that could be established between the speech and any possibility of violence.

And away:

Recently, Brock Turner a former star swimmer at Stanford University was sentenced to six months imprisonment and probation for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman in January 2015. While this light sentence has been criticized, Turner’s father has chillingly dismissed his son’s deed as ‘20 minutes of action’ as outlined in this report. Opposition to the judge who handed down the lenient sentence grows daily as indicated here. The victim has written an account of what she was subjected to and its aftermath in her impact statement, which can be accessed here.

The shooting at Pulse, a gay club in Orlando has raised questions not only about the easy accessibility of guns in the United States but also the underlying homophobia that resulted in the massacre. This editorial in The Guardian calls it a hate crime driven by a deep-seated abhorrence for sexual diversity. Omar Mateen who carried out the shooting has avowed allegiance to ISIS and has been seen as self-radicalised. Praveen Swami perceptively analyzes the psychology of lone wolf attackers in this article. However, it is also necessary to look at Indian responses to the massacre, and most of them have condemned the loss of lives, rather than acknowledging the queer identities of those who perished. In his critique, Rohan Venkataramakrishnan notes that while such gestures of solidarity are necessary they do not transform the lives of queer subjects in the country. He argues that a concerted effort towards striking down section 377 of the Indian Penal code would be an empowering response to the Orlando shooting.