-An angry grieving person, Maggie Paul
TISS, Mphil Student
And lo! The carnival begins. What do you say…?!
An opportunity for the inquisitive, generally concerned upper/middle class mind to encounter an Ota Benga (a Congolese man displayed within the monkey house of an American human zoo in the early 20th century) or a Sarah Baartman (a South African Khoisan woman displayed in Western Europe around early 19th century for her “large buttocks”) from within the plush comforts of once own four cornered space one calls home? Oh, that is double bonanza; that too without having to purchase a ticket! The spectacle of endless human self flagellation in the recent re-spurt of agrarian suicides beginning with the utmost shocking and disappointing suicide of a farmer named Gajendra Singh amidst the din of a protest march – packaged in auto-looped media bites and emotion heavy WhatsApp messages – is the modern avatar of the spectacle of the human zoo/museum, which in erstwhile times was marked for those who had fallen off the evolutionary “forward march”.
After all, the farmer (as well as the adivasi) is the new age “pygmy in the zoo” or the “hottentot venus”. He or sometimes she (that is, if she is worthy enough to be considered a farmer doing productive labour although she spends an equal amount of time on the field as her male counterpart) is the specimen frozen in time – having lacked the ability to hop into the development bandwagon propelling the ever “developing” national imagination. He or sometimes she is the fossilized “past” that the urban media can only but unduly glorify or slyly dismiss.
The usual frenzy of what Gramsci aptly typified as the bourgeoisie media or what many Dalit intellectuals rightfully designate as the Brahminical media (or one that postmodern scholarship might do well to term as a ‘performative automaton’) around the farmer’s public act of suicide – characterized by the obvious clamour by politicians for immediate investigations, the customary condolences, the magnanimous compensations, the shameless political blame-games and now additionally the prompt tweets expressing “deep pain” or oddly timed (read blatantly hypocritical) promises of a collective “better tomorrow” – that should have by now been chastised as being a gruesome insult to the dead person is instead repeated endlessly as a self-evident truth – the veracity of which is so embedded in the majoritarian psyche that it passes every single time unquestioningly as “news”.
Renowned feminist philosopher Professor Judith Butler, who has for over a decade espoused a political project of trying to forge “new ways for bodies to matter”, in her now famed 2004 book titled Precarious Life: the powers of mourning and violence (written in the context of the September 11 attacks and the subsequent American invasion of Iraq – as a response to popular media representations of the war) and a later 2009 work titled Frames of War: When is life grievable highlights, among many other things, the particular framing acts of mainstream media that renders some deaths ‘ungrievable’. She delineates the inherent violence in media portrayals that fudge the sense of precariousness (or the sense of a life being in danger) and therefore the ‘humanness’ (which she links with this precariousness) that further lead to a fudging of ‘loss’ such that it cannot then support public grieving.
This differential media framing of grievability and recognizabilty has politically important effects on differential affective dispositions felt by public at large – ranging from horror and guilt to indifference. Grievability according to her is the premise for “lives that matter” or are worthy of protection. The ungrievable lives therefore are “losable” since the frames deem them already lost or surrendered.
This philosophical exploration of image and news production in situations of war or conflict and state aggression might also be extended to the logic of the state and popular Indian media’s relation with the abject bodies of the Indian farmers.
The mainstream media’s framing of the tragic farmer suicide (as well as the subsequent portrayals) riddled with allusions to compensation, unavoidability and inevitability – masks, hides and dismisses the interdependencies between ‘us’ and ‘them’, the intricate inter-relations and the angst related with the lost life; thus preventing the use of public grief as a resource for a different kind of politics; a politics of remembrance and mourning.
The farmers do not fit into the paradigmatic principles of humanity of the urban media – which are inextricably linked to a West-styled modernizing human agent. That is why they perhaps have to resort to such tragic exaggerated strategies such as taking one’s lives in the middle of a gawking public or staging equally physically torturous stunts such as the water protest in Khandwa in Madhya Pradesh against raising of water levels in Omkareshwar dam (which continues still, without much media attention). Moreover the images of their repeated suicides divorced from the contexts of their various movements, protests and petitions (the latest being against the proposed “revamped” land acquisition bill) reduces them to the one minute blurb that they are on the moving panorama of 24*7 news blitz which overall numbs most people towards death – especially that of ‘obscure’ characters such as farmers.
The critically acclaimed 2014 released historical drama film titled Selma that was based on the 1965 march for voting rights of African-American citizens from Selma to Montgomery in Alabama state led by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the peak of the 1960s American civil rights movement emphasizes the role that media played in the portrayal of state sanctioned police aggression towards the marching protestors by showing up the precariousness and thus the humanness of ordinary people asking for their rights, instead of hinting of it as an mpractical/improbable/helpless attempt of the less evolved to immaturely achieve something that they could not or should not.
This media portrayal was able to arouse a sense of grief in the general American public of all hues, even moving people into collective action of solidarity and thus soliciting the power of public mourning into a politics of resistance.
It is therefore a plea to the mainstream 24*7 urban media channels that if they lack the capability to engage fruitfully and creatively with issues relating to farmer suicides including the multiple effects of large-scale development projects such as big dams and nuclear reactors or the possible effects of the desperate attempts at re-jigging of the land acquisition bill – both physical and mental, then to atleast refrain from turning the tragic loss of a life into a pointless media circus.
English