Who is Afraid of Mourning?

Abstract

Mourning and solidarity are intense inner feelings as well as an outward ‘show’ of emotions. Both have to be demonstrated. In the moment of loss, mourning seeks alliances and opens up a new possibility for bonding. Mourning carries the intensity of feeling and moving gestures that create a rare trust among the participants. In the case of violent and unnatural and unjust deaths, mourning turns into a protest. Beyond the social and ritual significance of mourning, it opens up an ethical encounter in which mourning becomes too ‘political’. It is not surprising that the act of mourning is getting curtailed under the rising culture of authoritarianism across the world. In Performing Mourning, Guy Cools discusses the prevention of mourning in Western society. He writes, ‘Our Western Society has suppressed external rituals. It has interiorized mourning, which carries serious risks of psychological, physical and energetic blockage in the body.’ (2021: 51). While Western individualist societies and bourgeois societies at large try to prioritize and privatize grieving, it is mourning that brings us to share the embodied loss in movement and gestures. Though grief and mourning cannot be separated, the global capitalist society tries to individualize the loss and escape the collective responsibility.

Thinking through the cultural performance of mourning and its curtailment by the Indian authorities, this article analyses the power of mourning from which radical solidarity can be forged. But what is the nature of this solidarity? How exactly is solidarity conceived and practised in the situation of mourning? How do the mourning practices in non-Western societies help us to learn something about solidarity? While I recognize the gendered role of women in mourning, I argue that it can also serve egalitarian purposes. In the case of genocide and other forms of structured violence and increasing biopolitical regimentations of life, mourning facilitates marginalized and minority bodies and voices to come together and participate in sharing their grievances.

Notes

1 In the case of a newborn child, the mourning period is small; in the case of youth, there is less festivity around mourning; in the case of the elderly, which is considered as natural death, an elaborate festivity is organized depending on the family’s socio-economic condition.

2 This can be seen as part of women’s exposure to education and modernity rather than caste or class. Even the lower caste or Dalit (untouchable) has abandoned these traditions after getting exposure to modernity and education.

3 Clark-Decès in the context of Tamil Nadu also underlines that while higher caste women simply weep, ‘women from middle, lower or untouchable castes do not simply shed tears, but cry out well-made statements that possess a generic structure, and their weeping is tuneful’ (2005: 5).

4 Bhat was considered the architect of the Kashmiri freedom struggle. He was hanged by the Government of India at New Delhi’s infamous Tihar Jail on 11 February 1984 and was buried in the jail complex.

5 See ‘Mother of Hathras victim cries in front of UP police, appeals to take her daughter’s body home’ (2020).

6 I have briefly discussed this point elsewhere. See Prakash 2020.