Stories of Catastrophe,Traces of Trauma

Abstract

The “act of terror” in Mumbai in November 2008 has been widely regarded as “India's 9-11.” This article proposes that the proper setting of the “Mumbai attacks” is neither provided by what occurred in New York in 2001 nor by accentuating how the event engaged an audience of “distant others.” It is, similarly, not made sufficiently comprehensible through representations of Mumbai as the most cosmopolitan space in India and of India as “shining.” It, rather, consists in the violent founding of the Indian Republic and the traumatizing and traumatic vision that was inscribed through and into it. Such an alternative rendering of the “Mumbai attacks” offers a critical purchase on the notion of “governing traumatic events.” It also situates the analysis in the tension between assumptions about an immanence of trauma and depictions of trauma as eruption and (dis)rupture. While the independence of India equals the traumatic in its function as a founding act or moment, the “Mumbai attacks” ought to be regarded as confirmation of reified and presently hegemonic forms of political life.