Politics and Spectatorship 1: Viewing Love, Religion and Violence

Abstract

For me, the recent communal violence in India — specifically the organised, large-scale genocide of Muslims by Hindus belonging to or protected by the Indian state apparatus — is a subject that cannot easily be encompassed by words on a page. Yet in a book about the discursive universes of contemporary Hindi film viewers, it is necessary to reiterate the connections between right-wing discourses on gender, sexuality and religious intolerance in India that inflect both on- and off-screen beliefs and behaviours. The exhortation to Hindu men, in much right-wing Hindu literature circulated by the World Hindu Organisation (VHP) and the RSS, to purge India of Muslims (and now Christians)¹ has been shown to be inextricably bound up with Hindutva appeals to Hindus to ‘recover’ their ‘masculinity’ and to ‘punish’ Muslims via sexual humiliation and torture (see, amongst others Butalia 1995; Sarkar 2001 and 2002; Banerjee 2002; Mangalik 2002). Writers such as Purshottam Agarwal, Vasant Kannabiran and Kalpana Kannabiran urge a consideration of such fascist rhetoric side by side with each community’s location of women, and ‘femininity’, as the site of a community’s honour.

Spectatorship is not just the relationship that occurs between the viewer and the screen, but also and especially how that relationship lives on once the spectator leaves the theatre.

(Judith Mayne 1993: 2–3)

There is a dark sexual obsession about allegedly ultra-virile Muslim male bodies and over-fertile Muslim female ones that inspires and sustains the figures of paranoia and revenge. [World Hindu Organisation] leaflets, openly circulating in Gujarat today, signed by the state general secretary promise: ‘We will cut them and their blood will flow like rivers. We will kill Muslims the way we destroyed Babri mosque’… At a mass grave that was dug on March 6 (2002) to provide burial to 96 bodies from Naroda Patiya [Gujarat, India], 46 women were buried. Bilkees Begum … told a tale that seemed to confirm a recurrent pattern in most places, in most survivors’ accounts. She was stripped, gang-raped, her baby was killed before her, she was then beaten up, then burnt and left for dead. There will be a massive effort by Hindu Rashtra to produce a will to forgetting, to make things that happened disappear from memory, to fill up memory with images of things that had not happened, to generate counterfeit collective memories, amnesias.

(Tanika Sarkar 2002)