SADAN JHA

1. Have you ever felt ‘terrorized’ by something? Have you ever told / described it to someone? Has it found an expression in your work?

My immediate response to the first part of the question was ‘yes’. However, on a second thought, I take a pause. I begin excavating my own experiences. Nightmares of my childhood days and moments of agony immediately come to my mind. A group of dacoits are following me and I am unable to run. They are coming close…and close… the night before those school exams or preparing to face authority with a deep down realization of committing grave wrong, crimes during those early days.

Sharing was not an issue then. Now when I revisit those experiences, they appear banal, everyday life. I question again, are they same — terror and fear? Are they twins? They are inseparable, yet not identical.

Terror has definite political underpinnings. It engulfs or even comes from everything that we own and witness today in our everyday life. But, this everyday-ness has to be distinguished from the moments of the ordinary-ness that I mentioned earlier. Nightmares and facing the authority both can be examples of terror. Yet, the fear of getting scolded in the school or from parents is different from seeing media images of shooting in a non-descript US school premises. The figures like decoits and terrorists though share anti-establishment agenda differ in the sense of their orientation towards desired objectives, their own self image and most crucially in terms of their positioning vis a vis the institution of the state.

To bring together these figures-dakoits and the terrorist may be an act of over simplification but similar argument (albeit in different mold) can be made when we bring traumatic experiences of Partition violence of 1946-50 or from German Holocaust, communal riots or for that matter similar episodes of mass violence along with terrorist attacks of 1980s or of recent origins. The context is different, manifestation is changed and the ramification is at a different terrain.

The second part of the question though posed in the limited sense of telling, expressing experiences of terror actually opens up a much difficult zone of experience that is about sharing. The flip side of the mentioned question is have you listened, shared traumatic part of some one’s life? Sharing has therapeutic potential in both modern modes like psychoanalysis as well as in a number of non-modern practices oriented to share the experiences of another (person’s) body. In modernity, we reduce this engagement in binary terms-a relation between the victim and the perpetrator, between the patient and the doctor/therapist, nature and development, authority and liberation. What about the cultural context of sharing and listening and expressing what body undergoes during episodic outbursts of mass violence?

I am more interested to understand these aspects of sharing to be more precise cultures of listening. However, the key question, here, would not be to develop a scientific language to resolve the complexities inherent in regimes of experiencing and listening narratives of mass violence but to unpack the very category of experience itself. To begin with the need is to rescue experience from the science on the one hand and from poetry on the other extreme. The usual disclaimers must not be avoided-the act of rescue is only a first step and not an end; this rescue operation must not be at the cost of making science and poetry redundant.

2. At a psychological / aesthetic / philosophical level, can terror be ‘represented’ in art? Would you like to name certain works (art/writing) in which it has been done effectively?

There has been a very long debate on representing mass violence. To those familiar with the discourse on Holocaust, this is not a new topic. Yet, this is not a saturated discourse at all. The question on the one hand addresses complexities constituting the concept of representation and its ability re-present a subject. The apprehensions often come shrouded in the language of positivism – in terms of authentic presentation, miss-representation, full-presentation and so on and so forth. On the other hand, we have the subject of mass-violence and the form in which events and experiences related to it can be expressed. In recent years, Giorgio Agamben has been offering us insights to go beyond this binary and stretch the equation between representation and extreme and unique experiences of mass-violence. He argues that the language is the only means to express extreme experiences of violence. There is no escape from language (language here is not one specific linguistic system). On the other hand, language becomes incapable to express/represent certain extreme forms of brutality/trauma and we come across representations that redefine the limits of human language. This engagement with the boundary I believe is the need of the hour.

3. Which would you consider to be the most terrorizing moment / event / ideology you have known?

Twentieth century has been a century of mass violence. It is very difficult to take out a single event. We have state sponsored terrorism (totalitarian regimes are known and well documented for this part) to terrorism along ethnic and racial lines (ranging from east-Europe to western Africa to Middle East to name a few). Other forms of mass violence, if included in this list, would lead us to systematic erasure of cultural memories, civilizational underbellies and physical traces by state-sponsored mega development projects. A majority of such episodes are not even documented. In terms of

ideology, I fear totalitarianism (ranging from communism to fascism to Islamic and Hindu fundamentalism) the most.

4. How do you respond to the rhetoric of terror(ism) in mainstream media and politics?

Gradually the space of critical self-reflection is disappearing from mainstream media. Here, I presume a distinction between self-reflection and critical self-reflection. People are questioning media-bombardment of images, the manner in which specific events are covered in media. But, these criticism remain merely at the level of self-reflection without addressing the deeper questions related to the act. In another word, the mainstream media’s own criticism remains caught up within the singular equation between truth and ethics.

5. Have the (serial) blasts around made you feel insecure?

Insecure? No. But, it is pushing the environment towards more rigid/determined notions of self-hood and less to fragile, not so formulated and wandering personality.