Abstract
Moyukh Chatterjee's Composing Violence opens with a scene not unfamiliar to many of us living in South Asia—corpses on the street; bodies shrouded in white sheets; shops, garages and houses reduced to charred black holes; and survivors like ghosts amidst the carnage. He is writing about Gujarat in the aftermath of the pogrom of 2002. Taking this scene as his point of departure, Chatterjee asks us to consider the pogrom as a technology of power and what work it does in contemporary democratic politics. He suggests that such spectacular, periodical violence whether in India or elsewhere, is not an aberration or an exception. Rather, it is constitutive of majoritarian democratic politics.
When Chatterjee looks on the scene of the pogrom in Gujarat, he sees not only a scene of destruction, death, violation, pain, trauma, and humiliation of Muslims. He sees also a heterogeneous group of Hindu individuals divided by caste, class, language, and regional differences jubilantly coming together as a mob to revel in violence against Muslims. He then sees them unifying into an effective political community and Hindu nationalist voting block for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its agenda of establishing a Hindu Rashtra (nation) in India. In Chatterjee's analysis, the pogrom, which happened under the watch of Narendra Modi, the BJP Chief Minister of Gujarat and his subsequent election as Prime Minister of India are not separate, disparate events but part of the same logic of democracy as well as the mythical history of Hindu nationalism. The pogrom and the election both equally energize, animate and constitute Hindu nationalist subjects, while (re)producing the Hindus as the majority and the Muslims as the minority.
Impunity or the state's refusal to hold to account the individual perpetrators of violence against Muslims in Gujarat is vital to this Hindu nationalist effort to produce an effective, unified Hindu majority. Impunity is one of the threads that runs through the substantive chapters of this book, where Chatterjee explores how the law repeatedly fails to deliver justice to the vast majority of Muslim victims. In Chatterjee's words “To be a minority is not only to be exposed to pogroms and lynching.” It is to later “watch your attackers roam the street freely afterwards. . .” (80). Here Chatterjee moves from the pogrom as a non-discursive event to examine how the violence of the pogrom is discursively produced or “composed” in nationalist narratives and discourses. In doing so, he wants to lay bare what he calls the limits of a “politics of exposure.”
Chatterjee describes the politics of exposure as the dominant mode of human rights activism and anti-impunity work but also scholarly and theoretical work on mass violence. It is based on the assumption that mass violence is hidden, unseen, unwitnessed, and unspeakable. Moreover, it assumes that if only this “dark, deep world of hidden violence” (8) can be illuminated and unveiled for all the world to see, outrage, empathy, and justice will follow; that victims will have their day in court; and that perpetrators will be condemned and punished. But what if there is nothing to expose? What if the violence is spectacularly visible, witnessed by thousands and extensively documented, even televised? What if the “violence is not repressed, not located at the margins of the state, and not even disguised by the participants?” (4), and it is still impossible to hold the perpetrators to account?
Composition is the theoretical alternative that Chatterjee offers to understand how nationalist ideology reframes mass violence as well as its perpetrators and victims to produce “a killable minority and a wounded majority.” It is a framework to help us see the productive force of violence; how “it stitches together new scenes, bodies, spaces” (8). Composition pays attention to the forms and feelings that often lie on the surface of police documents, courtroom documents, human rights activism and media (9). In particular, Chatterjee shows how the manner in which “bodies, affects and spaces” (26) of the pogrom are arranged in nationalist narratives render it impossible to hold perpetrators to account. For instance, in Chapter 2, Chatterjee explores first information reports (FIRs) filed in one police station in the state of Gujarat, following the violence. As he points out, the FIR is the first step to catalyzing any police investigation of a crime. However, the way in which FIRs were written in the vast majority of cases make it well neigh impossible to do so.
Chatterjee's formulation of composition provides a particularly useful theoretical tool to understand how impunity for mass violence against minorities can be entrenched not only in the world's largest democracy but in democratic states more generally. On the one hand, the concept echoes Judith Butlers’ (2016) theorization of ideological frames that shape the way we apprehend violence in war and our ethical responses to such violence. Chatterjee's foregrounding of the scene of the law in the wake of violence also has echoes of Soshana Felman's (1997) theorization of judicial blindness that afflicts judges faced with complex cases at the intersection of law and politics as well as race or gender. Thus Composing Violence complements the scholarship on the figure of the citizen in modern democracies not merely as a legal entity but as one constituted through norms and differentiated by identity. His analysis deepens our understanding of how some citizens can be made “unmournable, and ungrievable lives” and how ideology shapes what is sayable and seeable and who is a reliable witness and who is not in judicial processes.
This is a deeply thoughtful and thought-provoking book, which shines a powerful light on the crisis of democracy in South Asia as a whole and the place of the minorities in our societies. There is however an inherent tension in this book that remains unresolved. Chatterjee argues that the master narrative of the riot is a narrative of primordial and irrational hatred between antagonistic religious communities—in this case Hindus v Muslims—inherited from colonial rule (42). This narrative provides a ready-made, predictable formula to understand every riot as made up of a trigger event and a frenzied crowd, followed by the establishment of law and order. As a narrative form it subsumes local details and replaces class and caste dynamics. However, Chatterjee argues that if attention is paid to the “minor” details that get lost in this master narrative, most riots are triggered by criminal elements acting in cahoots with the police or aided by police inaction and that there is a considerable time lag between what is composed in media reports and police records of the trigger event and subsequent mob violence. Chatterjee defines the “minor” as what everyone knows but is not allowed to circulate publicly (31). Put differently, most riots are orchestrated events not spontaneous eruptions of violence. Moreover, he shows that some minor skirmishes which turn into mob violence doesn’t inevitably escalate into religious riots, despite attempts to do so by nationalist elements and despite being composed as such in the mainstream media and police records. Chatterjee gives the example of riot in a town called Madhavpura in 2011 as an example of the latter.
Chatterjee's account of Madhavpura provides a ray of hope in this book—that ordinary Hindus have the power to defy nationalist provocations to turn against fellow Muslims. Yet this interpretation of the riot, cannot still fully explain the opening scene of the book—the scene of jubilation and celebration and the triumph in the faces that Chatterjee sees. Gujarat was not a “passive spectacle” (23), but a time when ordinary people were afforded an opportunity to join and rejoice in the myth of violent Hindu nationalism. Moreover, Muslims and Hindus in Gujarat were intimate enemies. Many Muslims who fell victim to violence in Gujarat in 2002, did so not from Hindu strangers, but from neighbors who turned against them. As Chatterjee shows, the court cases against the perpetrators failed not only because of the way the violence was composed. They ultimately also failed because Muslims were undone as witnesses in the face of the social relationships that they had to maintain with their neighbors, despite the best efforts of the legal aid NGO, Justice First, to support these cases in court. The violence and its afterlives produced Muslims not only as a killable minority, but also as “unreliable and false witnesses.” Thus, even though Chatterjee makes a powerful case for alternative forms of justice (e.g. South Africa style truth and reconciliation process) that can go beyond the law as a way to address impunity, we know that such processes cannot be so easily exported and replicated. The law is a problem, but as this book makes clear, it simply reflects larger social and cultural antagonisms and divides. The case of postwar Sri Lanka, where I come from provides ample testimony to the way in which truth and reconciliation can become yet another technology of power for subjugating the minor; or following Qadri Ismail (2005), of producing the minor as docile, forgetful, and disciplined citizens. Yet, it is through scholarship of the kind offered by Composing Violence that we can grapple with questions of mass violence, impunity and justice after violence in South Asia, and beyond, in any meaningful way.
