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By Aseem Shrivastava Amar Kanwar’s The Lightning Testimonies addresses the theme of public rape in the South Asian sub-continent, how it is recorded and how it is remembered, in an understated yet strongly haunting manner
Among the reigning delusions of humanity is the belief that reality is what meets the eyes when they are open. To see, it is felt, is to believe. Even (especially?) in the era of image management, when public figures, corporations and political parties pay astronomical sums to public relations managers to hide their unsavoury deeds and put before the public a duly sanitised and perfumed image (and we usually know this beforehand), we seem to maintain an unerring faith in what we see, not just in the three-dimensional world but also on television. Our very worldly sanity appears to rest disproportionately on the visual sense. It gives us our sense of “reality”. If it weren’t so, the billions spent on marketing and advertising would not concur with corporate rationality. The entire exercise is premised on the likelihood that most people have an insatiable appetite for “real” fantasies, to negotiate their lives in this world. But what if the unrealism of reality, or (what amounts to the same thing) the depth of our illusions is such that if perchance one gets to have a glance at “the real thing” one is shocked into disbelief? What if the reality of the real fails to register in the medium of our habitually deluded cognition, cluttered as it is with a billion falsehoods masquerading as truth? What if error (and not truth), to paraphrase a philosopher, has become the measure of truth? If for a minute one can summon the humility to acknowledge that the predominant bulk of happenings and events, not just in the universe but also in the man-made world, transpire behind our backs, one is straightaway led in the direction of scepticism and wonder. How could so ignorant a creature as a human being, with such an atrociously imprecise imagination, riddled with a thousand prejudices, living long at the expense of the truth, continue to survive? Matters are significantly compounded if what was hitherto hidden and what suddenly appears before us is base, cowardly or evil in some measure. And if these unpalatable features appear in a mirror that reflects “us”, one is all but ready to give up. Could we possibly be like that? Could the world be so astonishingly strange and incredible? Could it be that most of the time, when our eyes are open, we are merely dreaming, running hard from nightmares all too real? Could we ourselves be unacknowledged participants in evil whose reality can only be concealed through the self-deception of heroic moral appearances? Are we thus condemned like lost dreamers to endless posturing before each other? This broad theme is an ancient one. But Amar Kanwar’s treatment of it in The Lightning Testimonies is utterly original. The movie addresses the theme of public rape in the South Asian sub-continent, how it is recorded (or not), how it is remembered (or forgotten). One school of thought is firmly of the view that rape is an experience of such extraordinary horror that “you have to show violence the way it is. If you don’t show it realistically then that’s immoral and harmful”. (Polanski) Kanwar appears to take the alternative view in this film. An alert audience does not need to be drawn into explicit detail. “Even dogs and cats,” Tarkovsky once proposed, “do not like their faces to be blown into”. Kanwar’s film searches for an understated audio-visual language to speak about the unspeakable. There isn’t one explicit scene of sexual violence in the almost two hours that the film lasts. And yet the haunting music and the lingering footage of benign landscapes and beautiful flowers never let you wander too far from the scenes of crimes which are themselves conspicuous by their absence. They are always suggested. All the oral testimonies point towards them. The imagination of the audience is constantly challenged to visualise the unseen. Behind the film that is shown on the screen are many others which the audience is led to see in their imagination. And those films would be utterly unwatchable if they could be screened. The “lingering footage” is essential to the rhythm of the film. If those long punctuation marks were absent, and there was no space in which the audience could reflect on the events being depicted, the film would actually descend quickly to the level of one of our sensation-hawking TV channels. The recounting of awful crimes one after another would accumulate into a numbing blur of repetitive narration of human pain. This is indeed the “modern” world’s way of running away from the responsibilities of facing up to the crimes around us -- for a good many of which we have to answer for, as alert citizens if not as complicit bystanders. Acts of violence or terror -- when carried out by individuals or groups other than some wing of the State -- are “covered” by the media for their sensational value. Those carried out by the State are forbidden from view -- unless the media in enemy nations has an interest in telling the world about them. Kanwar’s film tackles the farcical character of sexual violence in our times using an entirely different method. While grappling with the systematic violence against Muslim women during the State-led Gujarat genocide in 2002, he dwells on the rape of just one woman. The camera slowly travels to the scene of the crime as the story is recalled by the narrator. It remains there for a long time, scrutinising every natural or man-made object in the vicinity with a searching eye. Could objects -- living or inert -- be seen as witnesses to deeds which elude human senses? The camera keeps returning to a set of surahis, assembled by tribals to commemorate the spot where the gang-rape happened. Could they be carriers of forbidden secrets? Is the truth so evanescent as to ride on those dry, brown leaves seen falling from and flying away from trees swaying in the breeze? The fact that this was not the only such incident that took place in those terrible days and nights of March 2002 is brought out euphemistically. From the right-hand bottom corner of the screen a sentence from a newspaper report scrolls out, telling of the incident. Just as you are beginning to grasp the significance of it, another sentence, carrying a similar story, emerges above the previous one. You start chasing it, but then another one appears above it… and then another… But just before the farce of our benumbed world takes over, the camera moves elsewhere and the scene changes. The tragedy survives its depiction. There are quietly provocative interrogations of sexual violence during the partition of the sub-continent in 1947 (in which the victims were not given a chance by the governments on either side to decide for themselves where they wanted to live). The mass rapes carried out by Pakistani soldiers in Bangladesh’s war of liberation in 1971 are brought up. The routine abuses perpetrated by the Indian army (and militants) in Kashmir and the northeast are studied. The remarkable form of protest adopted by people in Manipur a few years ago -- where women young and old stripped naked before the headquarters of the Assam Rifles, taunting them to act as they do when no one is watching (something which forced New Delhi to sit up) -- is shown in one of the most moving sequences in the film. The Maharashtrian village of Khairlanji appears, revealing the humiliation of dignified dalits. Multiple judicial cases go on across the sub-continent, without a shred of justice for the victims. In every case the film tells the story with the use of subtle images and evocative music. Or it takes recourse to the memories of elder witnesses. It steers clear of the rage that must inevitably lurk beneath serene surfaces. The audience is left feeling duly indignant. However, the film successfully resists the temptation of inviting anger. We all know of numerous instances in which anger, even when it is understandable and justified, clouds deeper emotions. By avoiding such a path the film opens the doors to emotions of empathy and compassion which would otherwise remain obscured by a welter of fury (which has often become the spur to vindictive violence in the real world). In this sense, this is an emotionally intelligent film. It reminds us of the urgency of remaining human. The “lightning” metaphor -- which also appears in images both at the beginning and at the end of the film -- is most telling in more ways than one. It brings home the terrible, evanescent intensity of the event that is rape. It also illustrates how difficult it is to find traces of some of the most important happenings of the past. One normally has to infer what one can from the ashes and the ruins.
The film succeeds in at least two profound respects. One, by examining the scars of human events often long past, it underscores what William Faulkner once pointed out in relation to American racism: “The past is not over, it is not even past.” It will return to haunt if not reckoned with today. Secondly, it drives home the immense philosophical message that what is not visible to the eyes actually exists and exercises a profound influence on what is before them. In either case, one is led to draw the lesson that there is no escape from the imperative of precise moral imagination, especially for a human condition as threatened by barbarism and self-destruction as ours is today. InfoChange News & Features, September 2007
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