FOOD FOR THOUGHT
In this Volume’s Food For Thought, we are grateful to have Dr. Joeeta Pal’s contributions on invisibilized deaths in India. Resham was a participant in a curated educational series Dr. Pal presented in 2022 in collaboration with The Collective for Radical Death Studies, titled “Death De-eroticized: Counting and Countering Invisible Deaths in India.” Dr. Joeeta Pal is a researcher of death practices with a PhD on the The Body in Death in Early Buddhism from the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. They can be found on Twitter as @joeeta15.
In this piece for CDD, Dr. Pal explores how depictions of India by the Global North are both in service of our own countries’ invisibilizing of deaths and plagued by racist tropes. She brings our attention to the inherently complicated idea that is India, widening income disparities there, the role of the Multi-National Corporation, and how we can more critically examine how we think of the other.
Bloodless Violence: Invisibilized Death in the Global South
by Dr. Joeeta Pal
The portrayals of India in western media conform to a bunch of unpleasant stereotypes. A cursory glance of the reporting of major media networks in the Global North shows India as associated with violence, poverty and superstition. It is an interesting choice of representation where the slum is preferred over the high rise and discussions on witch burning predominate over those on rapid economic growth. Conversely, depictions of poverty in the Global North only enter international news as recession looms. Stray reports of the UK and the USA being unable to provide lunches to school children have entered global news reportage. The fact that India runs the largest scheme, providing nutritious lunches to all children enrolled in government run schools, every day, escapes reporting. Seventy-five years after gaining independence from colonial rule, India does not face the spectre of immiserating poverty but of stark inequality.
Impressions, prejudice, imagination and emotion constitute the representation of the other. Western media portrayals of death in India naturally take on from portrayals of India itself. Rather than coming from state-of-the-art hospitals, reporting comes from the scene of death, or in front of blazing pyres, the exotic mystical unknown. Death can also take the shape of a cold large numbers as in the case of mass death. It is interesting to note the ways in which the sheer weight of numbers erases discussions on the meaning of loss and bereavement. These are limited to singular tragedies of the accomplished.
These acts of producing an image of India are not without major repercussion. The problem of presenting India as impoverished and backward is not benign. The relationship between one wielding power and the recipient can never be. Rather it is a part of silent, insidious structural violence that contributes to the suffering and death of many. In perpetuating dramatic and exotic imagery, attention is taken away from invisibilised death, a wide phenomenon with actors ranging from the local to the global.
Death studies in India ask different questions and profess different aims. From the attainment of independence seventy five years ago, massive strides have been made in reducing mortality. For example, infant mortality has gone down to below twenty seven per thousand live births, from previously distressing higher numbers. And this is where one of the major challenges in representing India lies. India reflects as much inequality as diversity. Representing India requires an awareness of the multiple identities of a single individual, including religion, region, caste, class, gender and the ways in which these intersect to create the individual and their lived experience.
So some parts of India have significantly better health and standard of living indicators than the richest countries in the world, whilst others rival the indicators of the poorest countries in the world. Thus, representations of India are rooted in editorial choice; a choice most often without balance. This largely holds true for representations of most countries of the Global South.
In some ways, then, the Indian scenario is somewhat relatable to global patterns of poverty pockets and inequality. As the pandemic wreaked havoc on the economy, with many families being pushed back into poverty, India simultaneously produced the largest number of billionaires it had ever seen. In representing death in India through outdated tropes, we can conveniently shy away from genuine problems of structural violence. This essay speaks generally of processes of invisibilisation of death and structural violence and how India relates to the world in that respect.
Invisible forms of violence are far more insidious than disturbing, crass bloodshed. These are unleashed on the most marginalized groups in society, who often are at the crossroads of intersecting variables. As argued above, there are several actors who encourage such violence, right from the local to the global. Women of groups of low socio-economic standing become more vulnerable still. The modes of invisibilization of death while India-specific speak to larger global concerns with familiar patterns being focused on.
Invisible violence in this context refers to the reduction of life to its bare necessities and providing for the same. Where bare necessities are denied, individual life spans are cut short due to preventable reasons. Access to health care and nutrition are the most important factors. Liberalization and the opening up of the economy have pulled groups out of sheer poverty, creating the improved situation we see today.
Thus, poverty is no longer the spectacle of misery but not distant enough either. In his book, Red Tape: Bureacracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India, Akhil Gupta explains the nature of invisible violence in India. He argues that, events beyond one’s control can have catastrophic implications for those just out of impoverishment. Thus, illness or loss of employment can lead to immiseration. Even where families are able to come out of their poverty, prolonged undernourishment make for frail and vulnerable bodies. Thus, the problems are not of the brute violence of starvation but the slow, silent violence of undernourishment contributing to compromised life spans.
Such deaths do not produce the same responses as those to a natural disaster, for example. As such violence is routinized and made banal, it does not provoke the same reaction. And yet these are the mass deaths that India faces. It is violence without marked intent. The hand behind the violence is difficult to see. Even where there is not hand, indifference can be as active a factor in ensuring subjugation and exploitation. As Gupta reminds us, even being indifferent requires the act of an agent.
Structural violence creates this natural state of affairs where mass death is not considered to be worthy of an emergency response and is normalized. It causes the disproportionate deaths of the poor. The structural violence of poverty ensures that there is no one who can be held accountable for the violence meted out. To quote Gupta, ‘it is the opposite of a victimless crime; it is a crime without a criminal’. And yet, the various levels of the local and the global, and even all of us perpetuate some violence, either through action or indifference.
At the global level, Multi-National Companies are known offenders. Their exploitation ravages the landscape and everything that lives off such a landscape, while bringing in varying levels of income to others. They share bonds with the local wielders of power who profit from their exactions. There are thus, multiple parties to blame. For example, the victims of the Bhopal gas tragedy, the world’s worst industrial disaster, have been denied adequate compensation. In 1984, the leaking of methyl isocyanate killed over 15,000 and affected over 600,000 workers in the city of Bhopal. The Union Carbide Company that has now been taken over by the Dow Chemical Company (effectively excusing itself from any further liability) made an out-of-court settlement to provide compensation to some in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. While several died as a result of the tragedy, the after effects are felt to the present day which compromises the lives of contemporary residents. A recent decision by the apex court denied them any further compensation. Thus, in the exercise of power by the American MNC, visible death received meagre compensation, while for the Indian state and the American company, invisible death does not need to be addressed.
The pandemic, in many ways exacerbated the inequalities at all levels. COVID caused a near global invisibilisation as systems across the world failed to adequately care for their dead. The dead turned from loved ones to lifeless bodies in the deluge of mortality that most countries were faced with. In India there were the tragedies of mix ups, with the wrong corpse handed to the wrong family, with corpses being moved in garbage vans when nothing else was available, and being cremated on wood pyres on the pavement as crematoria were overburdened. Heart wrenching images of death sometimes without adequate contextualization were portrayed globally. But grief sometimes transcends context. That the emphasis of the Global North in ensuring its own vaccine supply rather than need-based distribution is also to blame for the massive mortality in India and other countries of the Global South, is barely acknowledged.
Beyond the actions of large global forces, it is local action and inaction that also contributes to marginalization in life and death. Scholars have argued that the attainment of independence did not affect all groups equally positively, as one group of elites replaced the other. Global capitalism has made the burgeoning middle class a beneficiary. It performs violence in clearly demarcating its space as distinct from those beneath. This can be seen in physical demarcations of space which the lower classes are not allowed to transgress, such as separate stairwells and elevators for delivery persons; and also in practices of low wages and subordination.
The gaze of the Global North also wields a certain power. It is difficult being a researcher from the Global South, understanding the failures of the nation-state while battling Orientalist tropes. There is a danger of reinforcing stereotypes through which power is exercised by the first world. A critical lens must not be restricted by modern boundaries but should understand how the global and local forces come together at the peril of the marginalized. It is reminiscent of the destruction or covering up of slums when international events of eminence take place in India. The act fights against hegemonic associations of poverty without any benefit to those who bear the actual brunt.
While the circumstances are unique to India, the phenomenon of inequality and poverty is not. It is that the Global North invisibilises these in their own countries. The self is constructed in response to the Other. Thus, in portraying the image of being laden with morals and values, as those upholding democracy and justice, the marginalized are kept confined. This enables the Global North to think of itself as not like the Global South. This explains why even though the face of poverty had changed following the liberalization of the economy, portrayals of India in the West seem to be stuck in a time warp.
Invisibilisation lacks the horrors of blood-filled war and yet destroys those subject to it. And yet, it is important to recognise the marginalised as neither docile nor passive but fighting against their exploitation . They are just as much responsible members of their community using a variety of means for uplifting themselves and their families. It is just that battles cannot be won in isolation. Critically thinking through representations of the other and who gains from such representation may just be a very small first step.