4B Project
Draft (Vyjayanthi Rao)
I’ve been following the flowering of a literature around the bomb recently. The Bomb is shorthand for inexplicable explosions, events that last mere seconds, that are spectacular and incendiary and highly media-friendly but paradoxically produce both enigmatic silences as well as visual stimulation for the remote viewer. There are bombs and there are bombs and not all bombs produce the same effects. Some produce more silence than others. Aerial bombardment during WWII, for example or the NATO bombing of Belgrade. These are considered acts of war and military strategy even though they re-write the rules of war. Then there are the intimate acts of terror – perpetrated by known enemies, enemies from within. The serial bombings of Bombay in 1993 masterminded by Muslim gangsters as revenge for the violent deaths of hundreds of Muslims in the Bombay riots of 1992-93 or the second serial bombings in Bombay a decade later in 2003, declared as revenge for the violent deaths of hundreds of Muslims in Gujarat the previous year. Or, the gas attacks in the Tokyo Underground system perpetrated by members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult group. Or the daily car bombs in Iraq targeting Shias or Sunnis as the case might be. These are but a few examples of the globalization of the bomb as a weapon, a statement, a form of efficacious speech.
A small literature is beginning to place these explosions at the centre of its meditations – whether on the nature of memory, on the boundaries of self and other, on the boundaries of public and private or on forms and concepts of time particular to our times. In the wake of these projects, the genealogy of the contemporary bomb might be traced to the aerial bombings of WWII. At the heart of questions that one might raise about the bomb is the question of the relationship between destruction, experience and memory. We find that in each of the situations of sustained bombings that we would like to examine here – bombings both from above the ground and below the ground – there are some startling similarities in the experience of the bomb and the recollections it produces or the silences it induces. Yet there are also particular ways in which the bomb’s effects are dispersed into everyday life, particular to each situation. By taking four bombarded cities – Bombay, Belgrade, Beirut and Baghdad – as our point of departure, we would like to explore the bomb as a phenomenological artefact, a node in a thicket of contingencies that then congeals into a history.
The nature of this history is not predictable in advance because, unlike a straightforward, nationalist history, the public that the bomb brings together is not entirely predictable in advance. It is an ephemeral public, accidentally constituted as spectators or bystanders, global in its reach and, at the same time, dispersed into the very air of the city. As one strand of literature and work points out, bombs are also agents of regeneration, seeds of change (Paolo Canevari) but their effects are achieved through a series of dispersals, that conceal the experience itself, turn it into the substance of a traumatic return or a return that works itself out indirectly. We are interested in exploring these returns in this project.
Bombay: the work would collect newspaper reports of Black Friday, clips from the films Deewar, Bombay, Company and Black Friday and also accounts of certain migrations to and from Bombay to the gulf and create a piece around dispersal and ephemerality. I feel this is the main theme of the Black Friday episode. It would emphasize moving back and forth in time between the contemporary city and the destroyed city in the wake of Black Friday but all the images have to come from the contemporary period…
