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3 ✦ Mirrors of Emancipation Images of Sovereignty and Exile in the Balmiki Ramayana usha zacharias Is the paradigm of the universal/particular or the politics of inclusion/exclusion adequate to conceptualize the cultural citizenship that the secular state grants to communities marginalized through sociopolitical hierarchies such as caste? Or does the framing of this question in these terms mask a more primary metaphor, that of the condition of the ban or exile that forms the counterpart of secular citizenship? When the secular state lays the foundation for special citizenship based on forms of cultural marginality , it creates a certain relationship between the part and the whole, the particular and the universal. Integral to this is the constant effort to present the state itself in universal terms in order to ful‹ll its own representational promise. Yet, as Slavoj Zizek points out, the paradox between the particular and the universal is such that the more particular or special interests the state accepts into its fold on the grounds of their particularity, the more particularized and depoliticized do such communities feel. Cultural citizenship thus results in a curious paradox where, as Zizek puts it, “the African American single lesbian mother” is forever denied the possibility of the “metaphoric elevation” of her wrong as the universal wrong.1 In this essay, I focus on the visual imagery of exile created by a particular, marginalized community in India to argue that this seemingly inessential particular —in the visual staging of its condition of banishment—points to the symbolic violence inherent in the public, secular, narrative of sovereign power. The community whose visual interventions I analyze here are the traditional “outcastes” of sweepers and sanitation workers of New Delhi, 70 India, the Balmikis. Constitutionally classi‹ed as Scheduled Castes, the Balmikis, who are primarily waste workers, have long occupied the lowest rungs of the Hindu caste hierarchy.2 The visual metaphors of banishment projected by this community, I contend, are not simply an assertion of “particular” community/caste identity. On the contrary, the enactment of exile and its visual staging script a scenario in which banishment actually precedes citizenship; it signi‹es the critical impossibility of the “particular minority” as a viable form of secular citizenship. Giorgio Agamben’s work takes us to the biopolitical power relations between sovereign power and bare life that precede or are foundational to the state-citizen contract. “All representations of the originary political act as a contract or convention marking the passage from nature to the State in a discrete and de‹nite way must be left behind,” he writes. The primary relation is not a civil contract, but a ban, also corresponding to the ancient mythologeme of exile. “What has been banned is delivered over to its own separateness and, at the same time, consigned to the mercy of one who abandons it—at once excluded and included, removed and at the same time captured.”3 The life of the exile, he writes, borders on the life of homo sacer, bare life, who may be killed at the will of sovereign power without being sacri‹ced. Yet the mythic philosophical context from which Agamben constructs his logic cannot be so quickly translated into the Indian context; instead , it must be carefully worked through in the context of speci‹c tropes of sovereignty, bare life, and banishment.4 The Ramayana, the epic southeast Asian mythological text from which the Balmiki community draws its own cultural identity and images of exile and banishment, is striking in its mythical-philosophical theorization of sovereignty and exile (as does the Mahabharata and a host of other mythological tales regarding kingly power).5 Traveling between the spaces of the kingdom and the forest, the epic tells the story of a prince, Rama, his wife Sita, and the karmic web through which sovereign power must assert itself. In both kingdom and forest, Rama has the exclusive righteous authority to kill or to take the life of anyone deemed to violate a contingently de‹ned dharma, the path of right action. The phenomenally popular telecast of the Ramayana myth in India during 1987–88 made possible, for the ‹rst time on a national scale, an entire new vision and visual imagery of sovereign power through the religious idealization of the ‹gure of Rama who combined secular ethos, Hindu divine authority, and righteous violence. The new Ramayana was a moment of rupture and a moment of suture in visual culture. Despite its cardboard sets, it reterritorialized the...

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