Terror myths and scenes of violence: A visual essay

Abstract

This essay brings attention to the representation of terror, to highlight the visual engagement with terror discourses. By looking at a spectrum of images that evoke revolutionary politics, the Gulf War, 9/11 and 26/11 (the Mumbai attack), and an Anti-Terrorist Squad interrogation, this essay focuses on a colonial chromolithograph, submissions to an amateur cartoon contest, sand sculptures, and an illustration of torture testimony in India. These disparate visual scenes offer juxtapositions and readings of terror that cannot be easily categorized as either universal or local discourses, and history or myth.

Acknowledgements

I thank Dr Khan of Milli Gazette and Sudarsan Pattnaik for their kind permission to use their images. The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library facilitated permission to use Figure 1. In 2003, the Sahitya Kala Parishad organizers permitted me to photograph submissions from their competition. My thanks also go to Nusrat Chowdhury, Lynn Kwiatkowski and Bhaswati Roy Choudhary for their insightful comments and questions.

Notes

1. These texts punctuate various times of my research in 1993, 2003, and 2008 when I pursued projects on colonial print culture and newspaper cartoons. I came across Pattnaik's work through news reports of his award-winning topical sand sculptures. Ephemerality is a common link in the short lives of these texts. Meant for public consumption as bazar prints, an on-the-spot created cartoon submission to a contest that was destroyed after the event, and sand art that disintegrates in a couple of days. The illustration of torture, however, stands apart – it was widely reproduced on the Internet, assuring a longer shelf-life than it would have as a news report. Due to space constraints I do not discuss the important aspect of memory as archive.

2. I have discussed this in-depth in Gairola 1995 and Khanduri 2001. Also see an insightful essay on this visual politics in Pinney 2007. Nair 2009 also has a nuanced reading of this moment between Gandhi and Bhagat Singh.

3. I was unable to confirm the identity of the fourth figure to the right, perhaps it is Bhagat Singh's mentor and the journalist, Ganesh Vidhyarthi, who was also killed.

4. Rajan (2001) follows Gillian Beer's argument in Arguing with the Past: Essays in Narrative from Woolf to Sidney (Routledge 1989), pp. 4 and 6.

5. http://samueljbutcher.com/profile.html

6. http://www.archiesonline.com/gateway/hallmark/Archies-tie-up-Hallmark.php

7. Author phone interview with Sudarsan Pattnaik, 3 March 2013. All quotes are from this interview and translated from Hindi.