From Newtown to Delhi
In this final month of the year,
we (a notoriously vague pronoun, perhaps best reduced to the royal ‘we’) were distracted
from our everyday lives by two visitations of unimaginable horror. In Newtown, Connecticut,
twenty children were gunned down in their elementary school, along with a
half-dozen teachers. And in Delhi, a young woman was raped on a bus, attacked with an iron rod, and then
tossed out to die. These are, of course, disconnected incidents, one deadlier
than the other, on opposite sides of the world and indicative of different
social pathologies. Nevertheless, I want to discuss them in the same frame, not
only because they merged in my stomach into a single pool of unexpressed vomit,
but also because they suggest some connections between how modern societies
generate and respond to extreme violence. In each case, there is a discernible
tendency to reduce the problem to a set of symptoms that can be treated with
legislation. In each case, there is an explosion of speech around a pit of
silence that shields a wider societal culpability.
In a country where school
shootings are fairly common, the slaughter in Connecticut was especially
horrifying because children were so young, and because the killer was more or
less an adult. The American school massacre typically features teenagers being
shot by one of themselves: we have learned how to think, talk, and even write
black comedies about that scenario. We have not learned to think about
child-murder as an act of shooting downwards. We have not learned to imagine
what happens to a six-year-old body when it is shot eleven times with a version of the same rifle that is used by the US military. We have learned
to accept that school shootings leave some students dead and others wounded, but
not to face a situation where there are no wounded, because each child has been
carefully executed at close range. I found myself wondering how there could be
space for eleven rifle bullets in such small bodies. I could not imagine an
answer, so I fell back to thinking of my own daughter, and wanting to pick her
up early from daycare and wrap my arms around her small, solemn self. That
reaction, I think, was fairly common among friends of mine who have young
children, and for parents around the country. We personalized the calamity,
withdrawing into ourselves and our families.
In that maneuver, as in all
maneuvers, certain refusals and silences are imbedded: the refusal, for
instance, to put ourselves fully in the shoes of the police and other
first-response personnel who entered the school when the shooting was over. We
talk around what they saw: we sympathize with their predicament, we acknowledge
that they will be scarred, we are relieved that they have taken that
responsibility off our shoulders. We do not invite them to actually describe what they saw. Not even the New
York Post will seek out the initial police photographs for its front page. Such
images will perhaps be left to the horror movies in ten years’ time, but even
then, no director would dare to actually ‘show what happened,’ or linger on the
visions for more than a split second.
To do those things would shut us
down as a society. It would shut us down not only because it would show us the
costs of the Second Amendment, the NRA, inadequate mental health care, and
other such specific phenomena, but also because it would show us what we are
capable of as a society, and indeed, what we routinely do as a society. It is
not, after all, enough of an explanation that Adam Lanza, the killer in
Newtown, was mentally ill, or even that he had access to guns. He also had a
particular vision of what a man in his situation does, and that vision included
shooting first-graders. An individual acts according to the templates with
which he is provided, such as the template of the massacre by an angry man (or,
for that matter, templates of men having fun in particular ways). Adam Lanza
followed the template.
What I am getting at is that
killing children is not all that extraordinary in our society. It can, in fact,
become almost casual. I am reminded of the supersaturation of popular culture –
especially the culture of young males – with the toys, games and pornography of
violence, which make shooting at people harmless, aesthetically pleasing and erotic.
I am reminded that our most normative form of political organization is based
on the idea of legitimate homicide, so that the willingness and ability to kill
permeates our idea of what it is to live a worthwhile life. I am reminded of Seymour Hersh’s reporting on the My Lai massacre, the phenomenon of ‘collateral
damage,’ and the entire premise of nuclear deterrence and strategic bombing. We
accept that children will be shot, burned or blown up. We expect only that it
will not be our children and that we will not have to look, and are flustered
when Hersh – or Adam Lanza – violates that tacit agreement.
Now, on to Delhi: the city where roads, rebels, refugees, invaders, migrant workers and graduate students converge, the city that is always the destination and a little too far, Dilli chalo and Dilli durast, where my wife - unnerved by the experience of being stared at by yet another open-mouthed stranger - snarled 'Kya dekh rahe ho ji? Ghar mein ma-behn nahin hai?' ('What the hell are you staring at? Don't you have a mother or sister at home?' I was reminded of Captain Haddock's encounter with a Nepali porter.) Delhi is simultaneously graceful and ugly, it tends to set women and even men on edge, it has a reputation, it is the notorious 'rape capital.' That sobriquet may be unfair; there are cities where women fare worse. But in Delhi, crowds of angry citizens have been facing off against police armed with water-cannons. They are angry because there has been another rape in the Indian capital. A young paramedical student and her male friend, returning from watching Life of Pi, were waiting at a bus stop at around ten o’clock at night. They were given a ride by an off-duty bus. The bus crew and their joyriding friends – six men in all – immediately began to taunt the couple, then attacked them, beating the man unconscious and raping the woman for over forty minutes. Thrown out of the bus, the victims were discovered by passers-by and hospitalized. The media then descended upon the story, and a crescendo of public rage quickly developed, directed at the government, the police, and Delhi itself. There have been calls in Parliament to amend the law and institute the death penalty for rape; the demand appears to have overwhelming public support.
Now, on to Delhi: the city where roads, rebels, refugees, invaders, migrant workers and graduate students converge, the city that is always the destination and a little too far, Dilli chalo and Dilli durast, where my wife - unnerved by the experience of being stared at by yet another open-mouthed stranger - snarled 'Kya dekh rahe ho ji? Ghar mein ma-behn nahin hai?' ('What the hell are you staring at? Don't you have a mother or sister at home?' I was reminded of Captain Haddock's encounter with a Nepali porter.) Delhi is simultaneously graceful and ugly, it tends to set women and even men on edge, it has a reputation, it is the notorious 'rape capital.' That sobriquet may be unfair; there are cities where women fare worse. But in Delhi, crowds of angry citizens have been facing off against police armed with water-cannons. They are angry because there has been another rape in the Indian capital. A young paramedical student and her male friend, returning from watching Life of Pi, were waiting at a bus stop at around ten o’clock at night. They were given a ride by an off-duty bus. The bus crew and their joyriding friends – six men in all – immediately began to taunt the couple, then attacked them, beating the man unconscious and raping the woman for over forty minutes. Thrown out of the bus, the victims were discovered by passers-by and hospitalized. The media then descended upon the story, and a crescendo of public rage quickly developed, directed at the government, the police, and Delhi itself. There have been calls in Parliament to amend the law and institute the death penalty for rape; the demand appears to have overwhelming public support.
On the surface, the violence
inflicted upon the couple in this particular case is appalling but not
extraordinarily so – not at the level needed to bring out enraged citizenry,
water-cannon and hangmen. Yes, the couple had been badly beaten; yes, the woman
had been raped; but those things happen in Delhi, and in other cities. Other
people shake their heads and carry on. The extraordinary horror of the bus rape
lies below the surface. Tucked away in the coverage of the incident, on the
first day, was a report of just what been done to the woman by her attackers.
She had been raped with an iron rod (specifically, the crank that is used to raise and lower the jack),
rupturing her uterus and destroying her intestines. Doctors expected that she
would die, and it speaks volumes for the staff at Safdarjung Hospital that
she is still alive.
From the second day onwards, as
if by a quiet agreement, the details of the assault vanished from the news. The
story continued to dominate the news but the text changed subtly. A coded
language emerged: the woman had been ‘beaten’ with the iron rod, although it
had become necessary for surgeons to remove nearly her entire intestinal tract,
the attackers were ‘sadistic,’ they had ‘tortured’ the woman, the police chief
had never before encountered such a brutal rape. Nobody is deluded about what
happened on the bus, of course. Everybody knows exactly what took place, and is
horrified. That is why there are crowds, police batons and panicky politicians
on the streets. But the particulars were deemed so shameful, so unspeakable,
that they had to be rendered in a combination of silences and codes.
How do we unpack the horror that
is shrouded by this rendition? In an editorial in The Hindu, Ratna Kapur offered one approach. The attack on the
unnamed woman (who is now being called Amanat in the press, in yet another
display of coded speech) represents the fury of men confronted with ‘smartly
dressed women’ in all walks of Indian life, Kapur wrote: as men perceive
themselves losing exclusive control of their social and economic bastions, they
(and the less educationally and economically competitive among
them in particular) are lashing out violently.
That insight, while not quite
new, is reasonable enough, and revealing beyond the author’s intentions. The
incident has laid bare, especially, the class tensions of urban India. In an
unmistakable yet unthinking attempt at restoring the disturbed balance of power
between the ghetto and the gated community, middle-class journalists armed with
television cameras, blinding lights and great hairy microphones descended upon
the slum where the alleged rapists lived, barged into their homes, and
interviewed the cowering families about what should happen to their sons, not
letting up until one obviously intimidated father agreed that hanging was the
only acceptable option. It is inconceivable that power, privilege and
presumption would have been deployed so contemptuously towards ‘respectable’ Delhiites
in Defence Colony or Vasant Vihar.
Kapur’s analysis is also somewhat
incomplete. For one, the woman on the bus does not seem to have belonged to the
‘smartly dressed’ set of middle-class Indians: her family comes from the
subsistence level of the economy, although they clearly had middle-class aspirations. For another, while it is certainly true that
middle-class women in Delhi and other Indian cities are vulnerable to sexual
assault, the likelihood of their being raped by the proverbial rogue
autorickshaw driver is considerably lower than that possibility that rural,
poor, Dalit or tribal women will be sexually assaulted by a policeman, an employer,
a village politician, a neighborhood bully or a husband. This is a pattern of
violence that middle-class Indians are aware of, but prefer not to look at.
Their adoption of the bus-rape victim as one of their own was almost
accidental: a slippage within liberal citizenship, as well as a sentimentality.
Consequently, Kapur’s essay only
obliquely explains the explosive public reaction to the bus rape: the unedifying
and ubiquitous calls for the death penalty and castration, the near-rioting
which may have cost a policeman his life, the violence unleashed on the
protesters – in the name of crowd control – by an angry police force and a beleaguered
administration. The Indian middle class does not typically react to rapes with
such extraordinary vehemence. It has been suggested that the protests of this
December are about more than this particular incident: that they form an extension
of the middle-class disenchantment with the nature of the Indian state, which
became evident during the Lokpal movement a couple of years ago. (‘Nothing
works,’ as one angry demonstrator shouted at a journalist.) In other words, while
we are ostensibly talking about a rape, we could also be talking about the
municipal water supply, the mismanagement of the Commonwealth Games or cronyism
in land development.
I would suggest that that
analysis too, while entirely accurate, is quite inadequate. Its inadequacy is
indicated by the violence of the protests – the startling rhetoric of
mutilation and hanging – as well as by the gaps in what is being said about the
rape of ‘India’s Amanat.’ Much like the Newtown
massacre, the naked savagery of the assault has forced a traumatic surfacing
into the public consciousness of the violence woven into everyday
reality of Indian nationhood: the violence of gender and class, the violence of the
state, the violence within families, the violence of the mob in Gujarat in 2002
(where disemboweled Muslim women were effectively disowned by the nation).
Like child-murder in American culture, that violence lies below the skin of society; it is intractable, overwhelming and intimately familiar. In it, there is an unbearable interpenetration of the ordinary and the extraordinary: the extraordinary is within the ordinary, and vice versa. Rape with a 'foreign object,' perpetrated by a gang of drunk and laughing young men, may appear to overshoot all templates of masculinity, violence and community, but it is the template: a part of the cultural mainstream. For all its horror and outrage, the Delhi incident has already passed into advertisements for Amul butter. Some years ago, when a woman was raped with a flashlight (and murdered) off the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass in Calcutta, a defensive/dismissive Jyoti Basu remarked, 'These things happen.' ('Ei rokom to hoyei thake.')
'These things' thus have to be acknowledged as real, even commonplace; yet they cannot be spoken in the ordinary way. How do you talk about rape with a tire iron without talking about pathological gender norms? How do you talk about violence and gender without talking about the family, labor relations, the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, and the implication of all sections of society in all of the above? It would be like discussing the bayonet rapes of Nanjing without raising broader questions about the organization of life and thought in 1930s Japan. It is easier to not talk: i.e., to talk around the particulars of yet another rape, about ‘anti-social elements’ or poor government or the death penalty for rapists. The periodic, anguished howl of the mob takes the place of what cannot be spoken by liberal citizens confronted by the limits of liberalism.
Like child-murder in American culture, that violence lies below the skin of society; it is intractable, overwhelming and intimately familiar. In it, there is an unbearable interpenetration of the ordinary and the extraordinary: the extraordinary is within the ordinary, and vice versa. Rape with a 'foreign object,' perpetrated by a gang of drunk and laughing young men, may appear to overshoot all templates of masculinity, violence and community, but it is the template: a part of the cultural mainstream. For all its horror and outrage, the Delhi incident has already passed into advertisements for Amul butter. Some years ago, when a woman was raped with a flashlight (and murdered) off the Eastern Metropolitan Bypass in Calcutta, a defensive/dismissive Jyoti Basu remarked, 'These things happen.' ('Ei rokom to hoyei thake.')
'These things' thus have to be acknowledged as real, even commonplace; yet they cannot be spoken in the ordinary way. How do you talk about rape with a tire iron without talking about pathological gender norms? How do you talk about violence and gender without talking about the family, labor relations, the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, and the implication of all sections of society in all of the above? It would be like discussing the bayonet rapes of Nanjing without raising broader questions about the organization of life and thought in 1930s Japan. It is easier to not talk: i.e., to talk around the particulars of yet another rape, about ‘anti-social elements’ or poor government or the death penalty for rapists. The periodic, anguished howl of the mob takes the place of what cannot be spoken by liberal citizens confronted by the limits of liberalism.
December 26, 2012
