S: Krishna and Rama are two incarnations of Vishnu. Both warriors. But they are complete opposites.
A: In what way?
S: Rama rescued his wife from a man that tried to abduct her. Krishna consorted with the wife of another, Radha. He took someone’s wife away from them. Not just one woman, but all of them, all of the wives, the Gopis. Rama followed the law of matrimony. Krishna is above the law.
A: Anything else?
S: Rama, when he was exiled to the forest, accepted that another rule in his place. He let the usurper rule the throne when he was the firstborn son and the throne was his inheritance. Krishna, when he was dispossessed of his throne, he killed the usurper and reclaimed his throne. Rama accepts dispossession and unjust usurpation. Krishna fights against it.
A: I know you will say there is more.
S: Krishna has a good stepmother. Rama has an evil stepmother.
A: Always the mother with you.
S: Krishna was raised in a humble background then became a royal. Vice versa for Rama. And then, Krishna is known as the thief of butter because he stole butter. And Rama? He does not steal. Krishna is his own law. Rama follows the law of the other. Even at the end of the story, Rama sacrifices his wife in the name of the law of matrimony, because the people cannot accept that she is pure because she had been abducted by another man.
A: I think I know where this is all leading.
S: I am named after Krishna.
A: Whether it is Krishna or Rama, they are the hero.
S: Rama is the hero of the conservative. Krishna is the hero of the revolutionary.
A: It is a name. I have told you before. It is not an identity.
S: And yet, you can model yourself on that identity. The anarchism of Krishna. And the liberation of Narsimha, the man-tiger, the other incarnation of Vishnu. After all, one of my names is Tiger.
A: This obsession with names and identities, it is old fashioned.
S: I am six thousand years old. And yet, I am fresh. Because I am not just the past and the present. I am also the future. I believe. So does India.
This piece was submitted for a journalism internship as a writing test. The author, Dr. Suneel Mehmi, is proud to come from the Dalit Community and to be an Untouchable.
06.09.2025
India, which has a caste system and caste discrimination against Dalits (the lowest castes) also has the largest population of 287 million illiterate adults in the world. That is 37% of the global total [1]. If illiteracy can be considered an indicator of exclusion from education, then Dalits must be considered as victims of this educational poverty and deprivation, since 62% of Dalits are illiterate indicating they have likely not completed primary school [2]. Informal data indicates that more than nearly 60% of children who drop out of school are Dalit children [3].
Caste discrimination aligns with gender discrimination to fuel illiteracy, evident in the fact that the literacy rate of female Dalits in Bihar was 38.5% in 2011 [4]. To put that into perspective and stark contrast, the literacy rate in the United Kingdom is considered to be 99% for both men and women [5].
Despite the fact that education is the best way to eradicate poverty and build a better future, this education is still systematically denied to Dalit children in India [6].
While the caste system has been abolished in the law, there is ongoing discrimination and prejudice against Dalits throughout India including in the field of education. Dalit students face unique challlenges in becoming students. The family is so poor and unemployment rates are so high that even in today’s world, Dalit children are sold into bonded labour so that they cannot study, just so that the family can eat [7]. Many Dalit children are studying while they are malnourished.
In schools, Dalit children are often bullied and discriminated against. In Bihar State in India for instance, while there is a legal obligation to include children from all castes, still schools are either abandoned or barely functioning. If Dalit children attend the schools, they are treated with cruelty or neglected. Practices of discrimination include being forced to sit at the back of the class and prevented from touching or interacting with classmates from other castes [8]. Far from being able to join in school activities, stories of verbal and physical abuse against Dalit students from both teachers and classmates are rife [9].
The dropout rate for girls is exceptionally high. Children already vulnerable due to caste prejudice are placed in even greater danger, and there is the perpetuation of a cycle of poverty which has remained unchallenged for generations [10].
Education is key to increasing the prosperity, security and happiness of any country. If there is systematic and institutionalised exclusion of the Dalit community in India from learning, then the country cannot advance as a whole. To counter poverty, we must first counter the educational poverty and deprivation for Dalits.
When I did my PhD and then got my doctorate published as a monograph, I showed that, just after the invention of photography, Victorian authors associated photography with women and a challenge to the patriarchy and its law. Because of this, throughout the novels of Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens, Henry James and Wilkie Collins, photography was belittled and there was an attempt to exorcise it from the text. They associated photography with a woman’s supposedly superficial and legally ignorant gaze in The Moonstone (alongside the Indian gaze of the Idolater). The reason was because photography was used to photograph the body and women were seen as bodies rather than minds. Therefore, the denigration of photography was the denigration of the body in Judaeo Christian culture and the repressed times of the Victorians. The most obvious equation of photography with women and their bodies is in She, where Ayesha, the epitome of feminine beauty and physical attractiveness is able to make telepathic mental photographs of the male heroes through her surveillance in her feminine empire and as an expression of her womanly power.
It was the feminine body of photography that was thought of as such a challenge to the male body of the law in these novels that I studied. A usurper to the throne. The medium of revolution.
Almost two hundred years after that equation of the photographic with women, I walked into a feminist protest through the means of photography at the South London Gallery. It was an exhibition space where women were fighting against injustice, state regimes and the law, like the laws controlling abortion. These women were trying to extend the meaning of protest photography. It was a fight of the truth of women against the ideology of the patriarchal state.
The exhibition label calls this ‘the fourth wave’ of feminist protest which is about the empowerment of women, uses internet tools and includes factors such as intersectionality, where there are overlapping oppressions such as misogyny, race and class (Wikipedia). The exhibition is organised in four different sections:
– Body as Battleground
– Institutional Failure
– Revising Histories
– Feminist Futures
Here, in this review, I am going to consider the photography that I had a particular interest in.
Sofia Karim, Ihtijaj (Resistance) (Delhi, 2019)
This photograph is part of a series against anti-Muslim citizenship laws in India which have gone against the ideals of cosmopolitanism and acceptance that Indian descent people like me have grown up on. The title of the series is Turbine Bagh, which is a woman’s resistance movement intended to go against the oppressive laws. The image is printed on a samosa packet made out of newspaper – Sofia was served a samosa packet with court hearings on it once. The image is something that is being fed to the recipient of the law, of news. It is food, nourishment. For the women’s resistance movement.
What strikes me in this black and white photograph is the relationship between the active body of the woman holding her hand above her head to make a gesture and the seemingly passive bodies of the other seated women around her. This is what is apparent at first sight: the movement towards resistance, the action. The active woman’s mouth is forming words. She is communicating, acting. She is energy in the face of passivity. And you look closely to the woman in the right that creates a relationship to this action – her hands are clasped in seeming prayer. The resistance is the prayer of the people, of women. The active woman is the heroine that they are praying for to overturn the injustice of the modern day state. And then, the passivity of the other seated women becomes something else. It is the gesture of waiting. Patient waiting. For the revolution. For the fire that burns and sears the world.
The humble samosa packet which contains the greatness of the revolution.
Hoda Afshar, In Turn (2023)
Tehran’s ‘morality police’ killed twenty-two year old Mahsa Amini for not wearing the hijab under government standards. These photographs are one with the protest against that legally sanctioned murder of a woman’s freedom and choice over her body.
The photographs are staged images that utilise the imagery of the doves, birds that are released at the funerals of those that have lost their lives in the protest. The birds stand for martyrdom and peace.
The women in the photographs are largely anonymous because anonymity protects the protesters on social media. These protest photographs show women plaiting each other’s hair and discarding their veils. The hair is plaited as respect is given to women freedom fighters fighting in Kurdistan against the Islamic state. They plait their hair before battle.
These monumental photographs are impressive and powerful. They give a body to the protesters and, with it, humanity. A community is formed around hair and the freedom to show it. The large format itself is a celebration of women and female bodily display, the ‘exposure’ that photography gives. Because, despite the fact that most of the models are anonymous, in the final images as we walk through the space, as you journey through the images and the story they are telling, you see the full frontal body of the woman with doves and her face is completely visible. And on the reverse, you can see the profile of a woman that braids the hair.
The plaited black hair of warfare and the white doves of peace tell a story. To have peace, you have to have the war first. Peace is the aim that can only be achieved through fighting for the rights to have choice and freedom. In the final photograph, a pair of hands braids the hair Another pair of hands superimposed on the back of the woman whose hair is being plaited holds the dove of peace and martyrdom. A reminder that freedom costs something. The fight.
These photographs are an inspiring celebration of heroism.
Sheida Soleimani, ‘Tulip Poster’ from the Series To Oblivion (2016)
This poster is a tribute to the Iranian women unjustly imprisoned and killed by the state. The tulips reference an Iranian revolutionary song that sees the flower as revolutionary hope – because although it is fragile, it is resilient and it regrows every spring. The numbers on the back of the poster show current published data of those arrested and killed by the Iranian state.
The redness of the flowers. Blood. Against the mountain in the background. With their stalks, the tulips are the ladders up to the peak. They are the scaffolding that can even go above the peak. To ascend the ladders, you have to have the revolutionary hope. Which no sword can cut down. Which no gun can diminish. The tulips are the beauty of hope. The beauty of the revolution. They transcend death with their growth. They have the beauty of growth, nature, resilience. To ascend the ladder of hope is the ascent into heaven. In the religious context of the photographer’s background, this is the image of faith in the revolution and eternal justice. Like Antigone, the photographer promotes the eternal laws of justice rather than the man-made laws of the earth.
Wendy Red Star, Amni (Echo) (2021)
This is a tribute to the matrilineal clan membership of the Appsalooke Nation which was erased by colonialism and its patriarchal laws. The artwork gives power back to the women in her family (the photographer who is Wendy Red Star, her daughter and her great-great-grandmother). And the power back to the names of the women of the Nation.
This was one of the most moving of the artworks in the exhibition for me. They called them Indians when they are Native Americans. They took their land and tried to destroy their culture and their people. They are us. We also have clan membership through our mother – Mother India is our mother and the religion of my mother is the Mother Goddess. It is this which the patriarchal, colonising state wishes to destroy and, with it, difference.
The names of power call out in the background, behind the photographic sculptures. And the photographs themselves build power. Out of the small photograph at the base, a greater entity is formed through the use of overlapping photographs. If you look carefully, you see that the aura is extended into the names of power behind, with the use of negative white space.
One of the ideas around photography when it first came into widespread use was that it could take away the soul of the sitter. Here, that idea is reversed through resistance against the patriarchy.
Because the photograph of the great-great-grandmother is there and the different generations, the photograph scultptures build up the matrilineal history which the law and the colonising state wanted to end. In the face of erasure, we have the form that has come back to us, become literalised in word and image. The phoenix has emerged from the flame.
…
The exhibition included many other pieces worth a careful examination and study. My overall impression of this exhibition is that I learnt a lot from it and I was inspired by it. We, our community, we also fight the wars against the patriarchal state and its patriarchal laws. For our way of life. For our culture. The patriarchal law wishes to kill what we are. We, the ethnic minorities, even if we are the men, we are also the women.
And the photographs showed the resistance can take many different forms. There are many dances to learn. Many songs to sing.
Time and time again, the photographs exposed what the patriarchal law of the state is. And why it has to be fought against. Not just in ‘other countries’. In Western type countries like Australia and Poland.
Sometimes, I was disappointed. One video installation said to become a ‘peaceful warrior’ and not ‘an angry warrior’. I don’t believe we should spit out our anger. But the philosophy of India is that everyone has their own path. Who are we to judge? As long as the warrior remains the warrior. That is the point.
The union of women with photography suggested calamity to the male Victorian authors that I studied. It suggested the revolution. The exhibit of feminist protest photography is the natural outcome of the resistance. As a form of truth which exposures the corrupt heart of power, photography has few rivals. These images demand more attention and more thought. Within them, they contain the resistance to the state structure and the patriarchal law. And, within them, they contain the conception of justice that the patriarchal law does not have, with its false claims to universality, timelessness and ‘truth’. By making photography concrete, by giving it the female body, these photographers have fought against the male body of the law with its male subject. They have created women’s – and photography’s – jurisprudence in the present moment.
In the end, the warrior loves the warrior. The exhibition is warrior culture.
Buddha’s Parents. Or Bringing Children into a World of Suffering
22.05.2023
The other day, I was telling someone my jaded views of dating and relationships. The guy told me that I was really negative (all I was doing was telling the truth). The topic changed slightly. I said that, for me, one of the main motivations for being in a relationship was having children. The guy stared out into the distance with a frown on his face, asking me, in a tone of wrenching gravity, ‘how can you bring children into this suffering world?’ To my lukewarm negativity, he had suddenly brought a fire of absolute negativity as a response.
I won’t share what I said at the time. However, I did think about this generalised, modern (and to my mind, completely perverse) response to the idea of giving more children to humanity as its future. The story that came to mind was the origin of the Buddha. I hope you are familiar with it, but I will go over its general perimeters again.
Like the guy I was talking to, Buddha’s parents couldn’t stand the thought of bringing a child into this world of suffering. They basically imprisoned Gautama the Buddha – a prince – in the walls of a palace. Here, he could see, hear nor taste any suffering. There were not the old. There were not the sick. There were not the hungry. The Buddha lived in a bliss of non-awareness and ignorance as to the human condition.
As you may know, one day, the Buddha saw an old, sick, emaciated beggar somehow. The walls of ignorance were suddenly torn down. He had encountered all the suffering in the world. Despite the best efforts of his parents, the Buddha had now become chained to suffering, to being.
What I want to point out is this. Buddha’s parents wanted to protect the child from any form of suffering. But this is the human condition. They were really imprisoning the Buddha in a golden cage, separating him from the great mass of humanity. They were making him ignorant, inconsiderate, without compassion, without the means to end suffering for others. They were making him spoilt and careless. Like the rich and powerful, who live a life that is mostly without suffering (let us remember that his father was a king).
So, I have no qualms about bringing a child into this world of suffering. I come from a people that have suffered for thousands of years. But it is our duty, the aim of our life, the source of our greatest happiness to have children to bring into this world of suffering. We do not want to control their existence and keep them cooped up in any kind of golden cage to make them spoilt, isolated and separated from true existence. These are ideas that are foreign to us. We know that the chain of suffering binds us, that the chain of humanity and the human condition binds us to this existence. Yes, I have suffered. But the only things I would change are the mistakes of ignorance that I made when I was younger and more foolish than now, if that is possible. The mistakes that have hurt others. Suffering has taught me. And this is the flower of suffering which Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about. For the Buddha only became the Buddha, the Enlightened One, because he suffered. If we pluck at all the thorns, we cannot truly taste the perfume of the rose or truly see its bloom. Without the possibility of danger and mortality, there is no flower that we can set in our hearts. There is no enlightenment and there is nothing. We will bring children into the world to suffer, because we are the children of suffering.
Often, we retreat from the very great but empty noise that the Oscars make. However, on this occasion I decided to watch one of the films that was up for the nominations, ‘Writing with Fire’. Famously, if one is from an Indian ethnic background, the documentary is the first Academy Awards nomination which has been directed by an Indian director (Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh). It is also one of the only films, Indian or otherwise, which has ‘untouchable’ women as heroines. Luckily for me, the film is on BBC IPlayer and is available to stream online as part of their ‘Storyville’ series.
‘Writing with Fire’ is about the perils and adventures of three lower caste (‘Dalit’ which translates as ‘oppressed’) women journalists, Meera, Suneeta and Shyamkali. They work for the only entirely woman run newspaper in India, Khabar Lahariya or ‘Waves of News’. In the opening credits, the film makers write that when these Dalit women set up a newspaper in 2002, they ‘started a revolution’. The film follows the newspaper story from 2016 when the publication went digital. The attempt is to show a sea-change. Meera says, “In our region, a journalist meant you are an upper-caste man. A Dalit woman journalist was unthinkable. Over the last 14 years we’ve changed this perception.” Meera asks us to consider what it would be like if Dalit women had power and what they would do with it.
What follows in the film is a traditional and thoroughly conventional hero narrative which has been built up over thousands of years. The difference is that the hero is not a hero, but a heroine, and from the lower castes. What is the traditional hero narrative? The hero comes from humble origins, like the Greek demigods raised secretly by peasants as children. However, such humble origins disguise the greatness, nobility and royalty of the hero, which are revealed later. The hero faces adversity and mortal danger, as in a glorious battle. It is stated in the credits that India is one of the most precarious places in the world to be a journalist, with many murdered. The film shows the response to one murder of a female journalist by the workers of Khabar Lahariya. The hateful trolling of the women journalists is illustrated as well as their vulnerability to the Indian mafia. The hero is threatened by a return to quotidian life, like Hercules compelled to clean the stables. Thus, the women’s husbands attempt to stop them writing for the newspaper to work in the home instead as housewives. Finally, the hero must triumph. Khabar Lahariya is presented as an out and out success, measured by the amount of YouTube views it attracts, which number in the tens of millions.
This hero narrative unfolds amidst a glorification and justification of journalism, the pursuit that the women have dedicated their lives to. Towards the end of the documentary, Meera recites that the journalists are fighting to transform society. That they are holding the powerful to account. That they have made their journalism the voice of democracy. That they didn’t let the fourth pillar fall. And that they continue to hold a mirror to society. Thus, the film seems to be about everything that lip service holds dear: truth, balance, democracy.
Not only this, but the journalists are presented as law-givers. The screen first jumps into motion with Meera asking a woman in person about being raped multiple times in her home by four men. The opening credits mention how many Dalit women are subjected to violence across India and the film shows how Meera and others are trying to challenge the justice system which doesn’t respond to these atrocities. The unnamed rape victim says that the police refuse to lodge her complaint and intimidate her when she attempts to do so. The woman is going to newspaper because they are the only ones that listen to her story. As the husband of the victim says, “We don’t trust anyone else. Khabar Lahariya is our last hope”. Meera confronts the police about the multiple rapes and she proclaims that she is “fighting for justice in a democracy”.
My impression of the film as a whole was that it was a story told well. Certainly, Dalit women deserve to be seen as heroes too. The focus on the stories of the three women journalists gave that personal touch which made the abstract ideals the film supports into something concrete and something that the viewer could really relate to. The cinematography by Sushmit Ghosh and Karan Thapliyal was very beautiful. However, I am more pessimistic about the role of journalism in society. The documentary aims to present the journalist as objective, neutral, impartial, a server of truth, justice and democracy. These are claims that are a stretch of the imagination much too far for me. Again, I am troubled by why the Western media has nominated the film for an Academy Award. Khabar Lahariya is the voice of the poor, oppressed women in India. Naturally, they are pessimistic about power and the government in India. That is, they criticise the society they find themselves in because they hope to transform it and make a better position for themselves. This is fine. This is acceptable. Indeed, I support these women in their mission. However, what is unacceptable, is that the Western media and its public discourse always criticise India when they know nothing about it, in a supreme act of Orientalism and racism. The Academy seems to have selected a film which presents India as a colossal sewer because this is what they think about the country. This is not fine. This is what is unacceptable. And in this, they are trying to use that objectivity associated with journalism to try and present their racist notion of a whole country as the unqualified truth. Final verdict? A good, revolutionary film spoiled by an Oscar nomination and Western practices of racism.
Is it wrong to desire revenge? Some people suggest that it is. My own research into the Victorian period has shown that not only is the desire for revenge seen as irrational, being emotional, and unreasonable, but that it is also feminised. The desire for revenge is a transgressive desire which attacks the very foundations of Western rationality, the rationality and reasonableness of (white, middle-class) men. Perhaps the most famous example of this feminisation is Miss Haversham in Great Expectations which I read as a schoolboy, but it is also in other famous novels like Vanity Fair, where Miss Sharp favours revenge too.
It is with some surprise that I noted that revenge was also feminised in my favourite Hindi film, starring my favourite actor, Sunny Deol. The name of the film is Ghayal, which means, literally, “wounded”, although I believe the correct translation into English should be “The Wounded”, which would make a significant difference to the overall meaning of the film. Ghayal is not just a film, it is an entire philosophy, some of which I will try to make clear in this little piece. I return to the film when I begin to forget who I am and where I come from. The film is a revenge story. The villain kills the hero’s brother. He is framed for the murder and then an accusation that he killed his brother because he was having an affair with his sister-in-law leads her to suicide. The hero triumphs and has his revenge outside of the law. The film is divided into a number of sections, but the obvious structuring is to contrast everything that follows with a first happy period.
Female revenge is present even in the first happy period, which is full of comedy. One day, the heroine of the film travels to see the boxer hero at his training camp. Because he is scared that he might get sent home, he says to her that he doesn’t know her and tells her to go away. The hero is the only person in the world that the heroine loves and who loves her back. She has no family as her mother and father are dead. When the hero tells her to go away and pretends that he doesn’t recognise her, he is refuting his love for her and treating her as a non-person with no identity. He is excluding her and returning hate and apathy for her love. He hurts her badly, he wounds her absolute trust in him and herself, in other and self.
The heroine does go away. But then, the hero has to apologise. He finds her in a restaurant and tries to speak the words of love to her. But now, the heroine’s mind is concentrated on revenge. She tries to provoke the other customers in the restaurant by turning all of the hero’s words against him to insult them, saying that he has called people bald or fat, etc. She wants the hero to be beaten by the mob, she opportunistically manipulates them to give the hurt and the satisfaction that she will feel. The customers are equated with India – this is an explicit comparison that is made. But Mahabharat (Great India, or ancient India) is also invoked when the hero actually touches the heroine.
As soon as the woman is touched, she opportunistically uses the status of victim to further manipulate the mob. She pretends that she is a damsel in distress, she mimics completely passivity and helplessness. She calls out that the hero, who she pretends is a stranger, mirroring his refutation of her identity, has touched her and rhetorically questions the crowd: Is there no man among you (to protect me, to have the courage to protect me, to protect not only me but all women, the women that are your sisters and mothers)? Here is when the Mahabharat comes to the rescue in the form of Bhima. Bhima is perhaps most famous in the epic saga because of his relationship to women, law and revenge. Draupadi, the wife of five men, was dishonoured by Dushasana who vowed to keep her hair unkempt and unmanaged until they were washed with the blood of her oppressor. Bhima was one of her husbands and he vows not only to bring his wife the blood, but also to drink it. Their vows and laws are based on their revenge. The beginning of legality is based on revenge, the revenge of a woman.
The heroine only forgives the hero when he falls from an elephant in trying to win her over. It is only when the hero is hurt that the heroine is able to forgive him. He has now shared her hurt. He has felt what it has been like to have been in pain. He has hurt himself for her. This is love.
The main revenge story is also marked by its relationship to the law and feminisation. First of all, the hero is clearly “the wounded”. I was discussing wounds and their relationship to femininity with one of my supervisors – someone had questioned my tying together of the wound with femininity in a poem by Robert Browning at a postgraduate reading session – and she told me that the wound has indeed been historically been associated with women, which a number of commentators have noted. He has been hurt badly. The hurt is that his loved ones have been taken from him. But the hurt is not just the loss of his brother, who is murdered, but also his sister-in-law who is like his mother that commits suicide. She is murdered just as much as his brother because she is dishonoured and shamed by what the world has been led to believe about her and her brother-in-law. However, the main hurt has been from the law. The law rejects the hero’ hunt for his missing brother and then he is subjected to brutal torture when he is framed for his brother’s murder. It is in the courtroom that the accusation of the incestuous relationship with his sister-in-law is made that leads to her suicide and extinction, her non-identity. The entire legal system fails him. What he should have been able to trust does not help him, it takes away his love, what he loved most. It takes away that which gives him his identity – his family, the brother and sister-in-law that are like his father and his mother.
Thus, the hero’s quest for revenge is a quest for revenge against the law. It is explicitly stated that his campaign of revenge is a campaign against the law since it is a direct challenge to law and the rule of the law. Of course, this law is only there to protect the villain, the rich man who plays Western music on his piano. Yet every time the hero pulls the gun against the villain, he is impotent. The crisis of impotence reaches its head towards the end of the film. Yet, in the most beautiful scene of the film, when the hero’s campaign of revenge is about to fail and he is pounded by a group of policemen and the law which forms a tight circle around him, the heroine sees him as the victim. She remembers what it is like to be the victim. She knows its reality. She knows what it is to be the wounded. And it is woman and the wounded that help the wounded. They see the place of woman in the wounded. She gives him the loaded gun and he is no longer impotent. He shoots and he does not miss. He hands himself over to the police with a smile on his face and a child that he rescued from the villain, the child that was separated from his mother by the villain and snatched from her, separated from the one he loves the most, applauds. The crowd of the people applaud too. The hero walks beside the heroine who gave him back his potency, both towards the law.
On ethics and law. There is a structuring of five. Draupadi had five husbands. There are five in the family: the hero, his brother, his sister-in-law, the heroine and the evil uncle who is a lawyer, the one that makes the suggestion of the incestuous affair. The brother, before he dies, says that five fingers of the hand are not all the same. The hero has four associates in his desire for revenge (five in total), each of which fall, leaving only him. This is because in revenge, the only one concerned and interested and self-serving can carry out their revenge for themselves. The hero kills the evil uncle, the lawyer: the identity of lawyer, liar, must be eliminated. Law itself is a prostitute: it is said to sleep on the bed of those such as the villain, the rich man. It is not the sacred prostitute, it is the one that only serves the rich. Law is there to be hated. It destroys love and unity. It is the insertion of law and the lawyer into the family which leads to the dishonour of woman and her extinction. It is law that stops a woman becoming a woman and which threatens her integrity and existence.
There is a lot to learn from “The Wounded”. Hurt is only appeased by hurt. Because when the oppressor is hurt, it is then and only then that they learn what it means to be hurt. It is only then that they learn the disintegration of self and integrity. It is only then that they learn what it is to be a victim, to be woman. And all of the negative stereotypes associated with an angry and revengeful women are the very things that we need to be: touchy, sensitive. When we want to hurt the law, we have to attack the places that hurt most. We must take everything from the law and give nothing. We must be merciless and relentless. For it is only the execution of revenge that teaches empathy. It is there to eliminate the ego. The oppressor must be humiliated in a contest, in a duel. In the film, the hero kills the villain, but the real defeat of the villain is in knowing that the law which protected his vicious self cannot save him because he has hurt others. Either no-one must be hurt or all must hurt. This is the lesson of empathy. Hurt only desires further hurt. Hurt can only be satisfied by further hurt, by being placed in the exact same place and position that you place another through hurt. Revenge is the teaching of empathy and the production of emphatic persons, learning empathy with woman. This is what is law.
One day, after having arrived back to England and our home from a trip to India, my mother dressed me and my two brothers up in brown kurtas and pyjamas. She then adorned our foreheads with vermillion, put crowns upon our heads and handed us each a bow and an arrow. We sat there, waiting to strike our enemies with our keen eyes. There is a photograph in the family album which bears witness to the event. There were various motivations behind this re-enactment. We watched the Mahabharata religiously every week on the Indian morning on British TV. The characters in the epic were our heroes. It was the love of my Indian mother for her children that led her to see us as those inspirational warriors in the Mahabharata and as princes. It was the uncanny intuition of an Indian mother that we were in an invisible war and were to fight an invisible enemy. This intuition, compelled by instinct and knowledge beyond comprehension, was absolutely correct.
Let us not start with the Mahabharata, however, for we will return to this great work and I will explain why my Indian mother was correct in her intuition. Let us start with the Iliad by Homer, a work with which my Western audience will have much greater familiarity, I hope. The Iliad, it is somewhat apparent, is about beauty and its destructive force. The most obvious subject of the work is therefore beauty and its relationship to vision. The Trojans take off with the most beautiful woman in the world, called Helen (which means “Greek”). However, Helen belongs to the Greeks. They feel they have the monopoly on beauty. They punish what they call the abduction of Helen, although it is clear that Helen elopes with the supposed culprit of her own volition, to bring the greatest beauty in the world to Troy.
How do the Greeks beat the Trojans in the contest of beauty? Famously, it is the Trojan horse stratagem that wins the war for them. The Greeks hide inside the Trojan horse which is presented as a gift to the Trojans. Through hiding, they enter the city at night and then massacre all of the Trojans in an ancient genocide. But have you ever considered carefully how the Trojan horse is related to vision in this epic about beauty and the contest to possess it? Let us take a little time to do so now.
The Trojan horse stratagem works through concealment, invisibility and blindness. The Greeks hide inside the Trojan horse, concealing their identities. They are invisible. They present the Trojan horse as a gift when in fact it is more akin to a curse, the reverse of a gift. They thus conceal the meaning of what the Trojan horse is and do not allow it to be seen for what it literally is. The Greeks therefore institute blindness on several levels: the Trojans can neither see the horse for what it is nor can they detect that their enemies are concealed inside it. The Trojans become blind. However, it is not just the Trojans who are blind. Everyone is blind. The Greeks hiding inside the horse cannot see the outside world. They sit in darkness. They are abstracted from the outside world.
The Trojan horse is the product of a Greek and Western culture in which what is considered valuable is not external appearance, but what is conceived of as hidden deep inside things, their essences. The Trojans are considered foolish because they look at external appearance and do not go deeply into the essences of things, the inside. This is regarded as their fatal weakness. This simple idea, that external appearances are deceptive is the founding tenet of Western civilisation and its supposed truth. It is the mark of the Western visual culture in which our thinkers state that the externally visible world does not exist, just as the Greeks blindly sit in the belly of the horse, doing away with the vision of the world. It therefore becomes clear why Helen is castigated for her very beauty, our heaven on earth. The external beauty of persons and their visual appearance are at odds with the idea of essences and internal value. External appearance, which is associated with the body of Helen, the body of a female, in a particularly misogynistic manner, can only be destructive in this world view: it destroys both the Greeks who fight for Helen and the Trojans who are misled by the external appearance of Helen and the Trojan horse. Yet the Greeks are thought to surmount the external appearance of things and finally win. They are not the victims of a genocide.
The Iliad is from the 8th Century B.C.E. The Mahabharata is written in roughly the same period and I contend that it responds to the visual culture of the Greeks. The Mahabharata is not about conquering a people and subsequent genocide. It is about a family reclaiming what is rightfully theirs. The people that dispossess the princes in the epic are the sons of a blind king that greedily wish to hold onto their power. They represent the blind. Let us focus on the way that the war is won in the Mahabharata and how it is related to vision. I believe that there are two important scenes.
The first scene is the killing of the implacable enemy Duryodhana. Duryodhana’s mother had blessed him so that he was invincible. She was living a blindfolded life so that she could be the same as her husband. However, she took off her blindfold to grant her son invincibility with her vision which had lain dormant all those years it had not been used. Duryodhana, however, was ashamed to reveal his body to his mother and wore a loin cloth so that he would not appear fully naked before her. His nether regions were therefore not protected by vision but were invisible to his mother’s gaze, concealed. He therefore insisted on his mother’s partial blindness. Bhima killed Duryodhana because of this very insistence on the blindness of a mother. Bhima struck Duryodhana below the waist at his weak point. Thus, Bhima destroyed the way of the blind, the way of invisibility and concealment. It was where the world was concealed in the genitals of his opponent that he knew he could gain the victory and deliver the death stroke. The concealing of the body, world and nature is always wrong.
A prior scene reveals the ethic of the Mahabharata and its idea of vision and power, which is that war is to be fought openly, without concealment. This scene also reveals why Duryodhana’s inflicting of blindness on his mother is seen as a terrible sin and why the misogynistic Iliad, which castigates female beauty, is so wrong. This is because the Mahabharata celebrates the vision of the woman’s body. One of the other prominently invincible foes of the dispossessed princes was Bhishma. Bishma had once caused a woman to lose her lover and she had vowed to be reincarnated so as to kill him. She came back as a man, but Bishma knew that she was a woman. The man/woman Sihandhi was used as a shield so that Bhishma could not attack as it was against his warrior code of honour to attack a woman. So long as the vision of woman was before him, Bhishma was powerless and could not fight for the sons of the blind king, the party of the blind. Blindness was defeated by the sight and the form of a woman. Instead of hiding and concealing themselves, therefore, and attacking by cowardly stealth, the princes won the battle by putting themselves behind woman and using her as their shield and weapon of utmost power. It was the form of a woman which won the battle for them. The form of a woman did not cause destruction, but gave them back their kingdom. They immersed themselves in the vision and feeling of a woman to revenge herself on the man who wronged her. The princes’ fight against the wrong that has been done to them is therefore in parallel with the wrong that has been done to women. Their invincible enemies fall because they have wronged women and those who have been put into the position of women: in the weaker position. This is a direct response to the misogyny of the blind who can only see a woman’s body and vision in negative terms. It is a response to a Western culture in which women, like Helen are to be won as objects of status. In the Mahabharata, woman is not to be won. Woman is to win.
The vision and intuition of an Indian mother puts me firmly in the grounds of the Mahabharata. Yet my location in this Western society has aimed terribly to seduce me into the path of misogyny, concealment and blindness. In the past, I have truly made errors of judgement and of feeling but I wish to free myself of that horrible past. I put before my eyes the beautiful vision of a woman’s body and I remember the goddess. As I have very briefly noted here, the clash of visual cultures is thousands upon thousands of years old and it is fighting in my breast today. I am continuing the fight because I remember the day when my mother saw me as one of the great warriors in the Mahabharata. It is not easy. There is a new challenge every day. My basic Ancient Greek and ignorance of Sanskrit stand in my way, certainly. However, I continue the war in my analysis of the relationship between law and photography in English fiction from the mid-nineteenth century because the language of my thought has been in English. I have no platform, no network, very little audience. I am one son of Mother India in a world of foreigners and strangers. Yet I ask those that do read my writing to question their own place in this great and invisible war with an invisible enemy and ask themselves whether they would be the children of India or the children of the Ancient Greeks. That, I argue, is the essential question.
On this International Woman’s Day, I, a bad person, will talk about a woman that has inspired me. To me, she is a fictional woman, although Hindus revere her as a real person. I want to contrast her with the masked superhero. I want to show how she is both more valiant and powerful than the masked superhero. I will first set out my ideas about the mask of the superhero. I will then talk about Kali and her wonderful nakedness. I want to contrast two forms of power. The first power is masculine. In this power, identity is concealed. That is the strength of this power. The second power, that of Kali, is feminine. In this power, identity and the body are apparent. That is the strength of this power.
Let us start with the superhero. The superhero is typically male and typically masked. One notes the pattern not just in comics, but also in the recent superhero films which have been made and which have been popular. Why is the superhero masked? The mask conceals the identity of a man and the concealment of identity protects the superhero. The mask allows the superhero to live a “normal” life outside of the battlefield in incognito. The mask of the superhero is also said to protect his loved ones. The mask is therefore related to the making of the normal and normalcy. The mask is said to protect love and loved ones. It is presented as social rather than anti-social. The mask as seen as necessary in the make-up of society and social organisation. The mask separates the field of action from the field of normalcy.
The mask is also associated with law and the separation of the public sphere and the private sphere. The mask allows the superhero to move out of the identity of a single man and fight for a supposedly abstract and universal justice. The mask and the concealment of identity is the way that the individual man can move out of his own limited perspective and life into a field of battle which is much bigger than himself. The mask allows a man to fight as the champion of justice against injustice and evil.
The mask is therefore crucial to the concealment of identity and the fight for justice. It enables the fight for justice as it conceals identity and only as it conceals identity. It is only then that the hero can become an abstract and supposedly universal figure outside the limitations of what is human. If the mask is a symbol of power, it is of a power which attempts to divest itself of identity. If the power of the mask is associated with anything, it is associated with the justice of the West.
The mask of the superhero can be contrasted with the nakedness of Kali. Kali is the supreme Woman and the supreme Warrior. She is the Mother of the whole Universe and the supreme form of power. She is also the destroyer of evil. She is the protector and the liberator. Kali stands for a justice envisioned as female, not male. Her female body is emphasised, as is her nakedness. As Wikipedia states, Kali “is often shown naked or just wearing a skirt made of human arms and a garland of human heads”. Kali wears no disguise when she steps into battle, nor any armour. She is fearless. She assumes no other identity than her own. Indeed, it is not even possible for Kali to be clothed. As Wikipedia states, “[s]he is often depicted naked which symbolizes her being beyond the covering of Maya since she is pure (nirguna) being-consciousness-bliss and far above prakriti.” The explanation of a Hindu is more telling: “She is shown nude because no finite clothes can cover the infinite” (http://hinduism.stackexchange.com/questions/3412/why-is-goddess-kali-shown-topless).
If the bloodthirsty and invincible Kali is a fighter for justice, then she never stoops to conceal her identity. She betrays no weakness. She does not fear that others will know her or her loved ones. She does not need a mask to give her power. She is power herself. Her power is naked. Her power derives from her femininity and her association with nature. For where the male superhero needs clothes which are produced by humans, Kali stands at one with nature in her nakedness. She is nature herself and the mother of all. She is the supreme power of femininity and the female form. She is the beauty of the body.
These are the two opposed forms of the fighters for justice. The masked superhero and the naked Kali. The mask of the superhero hides his face, his features, his human expressions and his eyes. He stays in a state of calm repose, as no one can see or feel his emotions. He acts outside of vision and the limits of vision. The nakedness of Kali is an assault on the senses. She is a vision herself. One sees emotion and anger in her face. One feels her through sight as total fury and devastation. As Wikipedia states, “[h]er eyes are described as red with intoxication, and in absolute rage, her hair is shown disheveled, small fangs sometimes protrude out of her mouth, and her tongue is lolling.” Emotion, femininity, animalism, nature. These are all attributes of the vision of Kali. Her body highlights the bodily senses which are attuned to the material world: her eyes which see are red and more evidently visible and her tongue also to be seen, that tongue which tastes food and which is out to taste blood. Kali is beautiful because she is aggression and anger itself. Her hair is disordered and she is outside of any conventional depictions of beauty. Her power is her beauty, the power of fury unleashed.
Such is the mask of the superhero and the nakedness of Kali. This is the character of two fighters for justice. The masked superhero is Western and male. The naked Kali is from an ancient India and she is the supreme embodiment of Woman as the Mother of us all. The masked superhero hides his face and his emotions and expressions. He wears what is really a uniform for one person. Kali wears nothing. She is without shame and supremely confident in herself and her body. The masked superhero has a split personality: the unlimited fighter for a seemingly abstract and universal justice and the limited man. The masked superhero is a recent invention. Kali is beyond splitting. Kali is beyond the contemporary. Kali is beyond the limits of all: she is infinite. She is supreme form. She never dies. She comes in every age. She fights for justice in every historical period. This is why Kali is inspiration and the masked superhero is contemptible.
The Failure of Diversity: The First Indian Superhero Out of Love in Marvel’s ‘Eternals’
I was standing in a noisy, barely contained line of schoolboys outside a classroom, indulging in my usual habit of stand up comedy. It was the mid-90s. My routine consisted of an imaginary scenario where the top heroines of the time pestered me with phone calls and visits at my house. Suddenly, a teacher, a bespectacled white woman with a nasal voice, figuratively pulled me by the collar into a classroom where the sixth form girls – the only female students – were vegetating. The teacher asked the several white girls if they would ever go out with me on a date. Politely, looking down at the short ethnic minority man wearing his older brother’s cast off blazer, the girls declined.
The point of this bizarre ritual was to humiliate me, the ethnic minority man, to show that we were unworthy of romantic love. It was meant to destroy my confidence in myself. But the performance did not work. It failed. Even at the time, I knew that I had got the reaction from the girls because they were white. Everyone knew that white women thought we were undesirable. What do I mean by ‘we’? We call ourselves British Asians in England if we hail ethnically from the subcontinent. A brief quote about a male, British Asian character from Zadie Smith’s novel White Teeth in 2000 shows that the Western presumption is that we are not attractive:
Pulchritude – beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection. Beauty in a tall brown young man who should have been indistinguishable to Joyce from those she regularly bought milk and bread from, gave her accounts to for inspection, or passed her chequebook to from behind the thick glass of a bank till. (1)
British films like Bend it Like Beckham extend these conceptions when they represent sexual freedom and desire for British Asian woman as a release from coupling with British Asian men. America is hardly innocent of these characterisations. In The Big Bang Theory, the Indian Raj is the only one that cannot get a girlfriend, much to the amusement of the audience it would appear, who could not get enough of this running joke. In light of such racist, unspoken assumptions, the bizarre ritual that I was subjected to should not be seen as an isolated incident. As I will argue, it informs the representation of us on the screen. Ethnic minorities that have historically come from the subcontinent. Even when lip service is being paid to ideals of ‘diversity’, used as a tactic of selling movie tickets.
Kingo: The First Indian Superhero and Western ‘Diversity’
The Indian character in the Marvel Eternals team is Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani). This is a historical role, the first superhero from South Asia on a Western screen. In an interview, Nanjiani spoke of the grave responsibility of portraying Kingo in a representative way that accorded with ideals of diversity:
The responsibility is a real thing, because there haven’t been other South Asian superheroes in the MCU, or any other Hollywood mainstream movie for that matter… I can’t represent every South Asian person in the world, because we’re all completely different, right? So while there is that responsibility, I want to do a good job. (2)
Eternals itself has been marketed as a positive ‘diversity’ film. Salma Hayek (Ajak) says, “the Eternals film is a “huge” step forward for diversity and inclusivity in the film industry”, sentiments echoed by Gemma Chan (Sersi). (3) This marketing tactic has indeed influenced audience reactions. Oliver Jones of the Observersays that “one of the most impressive aspects of the Eternals is how the culturally representative team’s identities play into the theme and story in powerful and essential ways”. (4)
However, for all the talk, Kingo carries the racist, Western association of undesirability and failure at love. That is, Kingo is a failure in Western diversity, a continuous failure which is always represented, tragically enough, as a success. A short reflection on how Kingo is related to the other Eternals reveals that Kingo loves no one. Kingo is loved by no one. He is an Indian man completely out of love in all its variants, romantic and non-romantic.
Everyone else in the team of Eternals either loves a team mate, is loved by a team mate, or has a partner, as in the famous gay pairing between Phastos and his partner that showcases homosexual couples for the first time in a Marvel movie. Except, that is, for Kingo. Sersi and Ikaris love each other and have even been married at one point. Makkari and Druig are falling in love. Sprite secretly loves Ikaris. Thena (Angelina Jolie) is in a relationship of love and protection with Gilgamesh. Even Ajak, who appears to be solitary and celibate, has been described as a beacon of love by writer Chloé Zao, who comments, that the role called for “a woman with the heart the size of the ocean” and represents a powerful, maternal love. (5)
So this is Western ‘diversity’. Even when we are portrayed as superheroes, we are unattractive, out of society, unable to form not only romantic relationships, but other loving relationships. In fact, as we see when his film posters are shown, Kingo conceals his immortality by reproducing asexually in his Hindi film avatars where he is his own grandfather, father and self. He is like some virus outside of normal sexual reproduction. Ironically, one poster is for a Hindi film (‘Bollywood’) entitled ‘Yuva Prem’ (Young Love), where Kingo plays a romantic lead. It is only in another non-Western cinema and space of imagination that he can be recognised as a lover.
In contrast to Kingo (and the other ethnic minority men in the movie), the white man is constantly loved romantically by women. The main character, Sersi, only falls in love with white men. There is not only a love triangle between Sersi and two white men, but also a love triangle between Sersi, Sprite and Ikaris for the white man. The white man is repetitively, irresistibly desirable, the Indian man is supposedly not. Not only this, but in the ending of the movie, the white man’s love is the ultimate saviour of all humanity, in a reworking of the trope of the white saviour. Ikaris fails to stop Sersi’s plan to rescue humans which he believes is counter to the mission of the Eternals because he still has feelings for her. To add insult to the negative and racist depiction of an Indian man and white love supremacy, Sersi and Ikaris have an Indian wedding, attired in Indian costume. Emphasising the point that, even on the Indian’s own terrain, the white man is the victor in love.
Kingo is not absolutely, entirely excluded from the domain of love. In fact, he is the only one that can see the secret love that Sprite has for the white man, Ikaris. He is relegated to just looking at the field of love and not being a part of it. Like a sexually frustrated viewer who seeks solace in pornography, Kingo can only look at the love of others as an outsider. Also, Kingo dreams of being in the position of the desirable white man. While Ikaris steals Kingo’s sexual and romantic identity by having an Indian wedding, Kingo can only unsuccessfully play at being the desirable Ikaris on film. Thus, Kingo is introduced via the ‘Bollywood’ song sequence, for a film called “Shandaar Daastan-e-Ikarus” (The Splendid Story of Ikaris). Predictably enough, the dance performance is strained and comical.
Conclusion
The bizarre ritual that was played out in my youth, ‘proving’ my undesirability as a South Asian is a mainstay in British and American media, although it has received little critical attention. Because it is such a solidified set of implicit assumptions. When we were finally able to be seen as superheroes on a Western screen, all the old prejudices were added to our representation. The worst thing is that all of the female directors, authors and screenwriters that I have cited above all have something in common. Those that cast us as undesirable are mixed race or ethnic minority women themselves. Perhaps showing that racism against the self by such women is tactfully exploited by the Western system of representation.
Yet, Marvel has taken over the world and is celebrated for being ‘diverse’. So this is what diversity means in the modern world? In fact, Western ‘diversity’ is a continual and embarrassing failure of real representation and real inclusion. The on-screen portrayals of us in the West and their bizarre, racist rituals have always and will always fail in my eyes. Because I do not hate myself. I have been given love and status as a loving being in this world. At home, my nickname is ‘Sonu’ (‘handsome’).
1 Zadie Smith, White Teeth (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2000), 273
diary of a lone man 