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eleven RevisitingTrauma,Testimony, and Political Community 2 0 5 toward the end of chapter 3, I alluded to the feeling that I was not able to name that which died when the citizens of the newly inaugurated nation in reclaiming their honor as husbands and fathers were simultaneously born as monsters—or at least that is how the literary figures I read saw the matter. I would like to imagine that this was not a straightforward assimilation of notions of trauma into the historical record in the sense that an unassimilated experience was coming to haunt the nation. I am not saying that there is nothing to be gained from such an understanding of history, but it seems to me that notions of ghostly repetitions, spectral presences, and all those tropes that have become sedimented into our ordinary language from trauma theory are often evoked too soon—as if the processes that constitute the way everyday life is engaged in the present have little to say on how violence is produced or lived with. If the process of naming the violence presents a challenge, it is because such naming has large political stakes, and not only because language falters in the face of violence. The complex knotting of several kinds of social actors in any event of collective violence makes it difficult to determine whether the event should be named as an instance of “sectarian,” “communal ,” or “state-sponsored” violence. Is it described appropriately in the framework of “riots,” “pogroms,” “civil disturbances,” “genocide,” or a combination of these? As Deepak Mehta has shown in meticulous detail, the term riot itself emerges in late nineteenth century as part of the colonial government’s technology of control, and every kind of conflict that involved the imagination of unruly crowds is fitted within this protocol in official discourse, academic writing, and even individual testimony.1 The political scientist Paul Brass argues that neither riot nor pogrom effectively captures the dynamics of most violent occurrences involving large crowds.2 Though the presumption is, he says, that riots are spontaneous acts of violence in response to a provocative event directed against an ethnic, religious, or linguistic group whereas pogroms are organized events of violence carried out through the agencies of the state, the boundaries between these are increasingly blurred. Naming the violence does not reflect semantic struggles alone—it reflects the point at which the body of language becomes indistinguishable from that of the world; the act of naming constitutes a performative utterance. We can see the enormous stakes in these terms even in the structures of anticipation. For instance, in the wake of the recent violence (March 2002) against the Muslim minority in Gujarat in India, the prime minister at the time, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, is said to have warned the opposition in Parliament that they should not use the word genocide to describe the violence. “You should not forget,” he said, “that the use of such expressions brings a bad name to the country, and it could be used against India in international platforms.”3 On the other hand, a group of legal activists in India were engaged in forming legal strategies to see if on the basis of arguments advanced in the international tribunals on Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia it was possible to argue in Indian courts that even though the Indian Constitution does not name genocide, such a crime can be read in the Constitution—hence the perpetrators of the violence should be tried for the crime of genocide. Others have tried different legal strategies, and though the outcomes remain to be seen in the face of great intimidation faced by survivors, it is clear that the struggle over naming reflects serious political and legal struggles. Allow me to reflect on these issues by recapitulating the experiences on which I base my observations. I consider 1984 to be a major marker in the understanding of communal violence in India and the role of civil society in contesting the received pictures of what constitutes collective violence. This is not because academic studies were lacking earlier, but because the relation between the production of knowledge and the needs of immediacy was articulated in important ways for salvaging the democratic project in India in 1984. The reports prepared by civil rights organizations such as the People’s Union r e v i s i t i n g t r a u m a 2 0 6 [3.142.200.226] Project MUSE...

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