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Abstract
This article offers a close textual and visual analysis of some of the most iconic photographs of the COVID pandemic’s second wave in India, to examine how they evoke violence both within and outside the photographic frame, and become sites of critical reflection. The pandemic’s second wave witnessed a proliferation of images in social media and online news portals representing mass deaths, corpses floating in rivers, and mass funerals executed in makeshift crematoria. Pointing out how the widely circulated photographs deployed an excess of violence to represent death as a dreaded event external to life, this article contends that the violence in these images not only evoked shock and horror but also interrupted mourning both in the private and the collective realm, furthered through violence in the images and the interruption of familiar mourning rituals for those dead. Deriving from Ariella Azoulay’s idea of the ‘civil gaze’ to ‘watch’ photographs, the article explores how these photographs configure a space of critical reflection and responsibility towards those photographed, which uncovers the crucial biopolitical interfaces between disease, death, the state, and the precarity of citizens. It simultaneously deliberates on the role of the visual and the photographic gaze in foregrounding these intersections.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Samaddar, Borders of an Epidemic, 2, 3, 7, 9; and Guha, “India in the Pandemic Age,” 13–30.
2. Ibid.
3. The Indian Culture listed in its website that the Kumbh Mela or Kumbha Mela spans across four cities within India and is observed by a mass congregation of pilgrims who gather to take a bath/dip in a sacred river.
4. https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/10-states-account-for-73-of-covid-19-deaths-here-s-all-you-need-to-know-101620107136224.html; https://edition.cnn.com/2021/05/10/asia/india-ganges-river-bodies-intl/index.html; and https://thewire.in/health/ganga-covid-19-bodies-uttar-pradesh.
5. Smith, The Edge of Sight, 6.
6. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 106.
7. Chouliaraki, The Spectatorship of Suffering, 3; and Stratton, “Death and the Spectacle.”
8. Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death; Chouliaraki, The Spectatorship of Suffering; Debord, Society of the Spectacle; and Stratton, “Death and the Spectacle,” 1.
9. Ibid.
10. See note 8 above.
11. Renshaw, “Dead and their Public,” 36.
12. Scanlon and Stoney, “Ad hoc Rules,” 1 and 4.
13. Azoulay, Civil Contract of Photography, 13–28.
14. Ibid., 92.
15. Azoulay, Civil Contract of Photography, 13–28, and 92.
16. Ibid., 135–6.
18. Azoulay, Civil Contract of Photography, 91–92.
19. Ibid., 92.
20. Ibid., 93.
21. See note 19 above.
22. Facts and Details.
23. Aries, Hour of Our Death, 1.
24. Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 5.
25. Vinitzky-Seroussi and Maraschin, “Between Remembrance and Knowledge,” 1475–88.
26. Azoulay, Civil Contract of Photography, 21.
27. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 115.
28. Tagg, The Burden of Representation, 3.
29. Butler, “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance,” 12–26.
30. Butler, Frames of War, 1.
31. Ibid.
32. Lesy, The Forbidden Zone, 3.
33. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 244–46.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Purbita Das
Purbita Das is a Junior Research Fellow (PhD) and Teaching Assistant of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Bhopal. She is currently working on the representation of epidemics in Indian literary and cultural texts from the late nineteenth century to the contemporary time for her doctoral thesis. Her research area includes Literary Medical Humanities. She has presented research papers in international conferences including the CNAM Conference conducted by the University of Edinburgh, the IMH Conference organized by Durham University, the SOKA Conference, and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Antara Chatterjee
Antara Chatterjee is Assistant Professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Bhopal, India. Her research interests include South Asian literatures, Partition studies, trauma and memory studies, and environmental and medical humanities. She has published in South Asian Review, Humanities, and in edited collections The South Asian Short Story (Palgrave) and Science Fiction in India: Parallel Worlds and Postcolonial Paradigms (Bloomsbury). She has co-edited and contributed a chapter to the book Pandemics and Epidemics in Cultural Representation published by Springer in 2022. She has received grants and awards from the University Grants Commission, India, the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, the Charles Wallace India Trust, the Indian Council of Historical Research, the 1947 Partition Archive and Tata Trusts. She was the Strauss Visiting Fellow at the Cedars-Sinai Center for Medicine, Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, United States in 2022.