The Death of Ignorance: Y.S. Alone

Philosophy has its roots in the problems of life and whatever theories philosophy propounds must return to society as instruments of reconstructing society. It is not enough to know. Those who know must endeavour to fulfil.

– Dr. B. R. Ambedkar,
Riddles in Hinduism: the Annotated Critical Selection, 2016

Arun Vijai Mathavan, a Chennai based photographer, is a graduate from the National Institute of Design, India, and currently a member of the PEP Collective. He pursues photography in the documentary format and explores issues related to the spatiality, community, and the environment. His images envision the social existence of a community at work, as an invitation to enter darker territories that are otherwise concealed behind normative caste-based Hindu existences. He addresses the idea of how the normative can be treated as being multidimensional, one for which both the photographer and viewer may have separate parameters. This then, becomes a stumbling block for most mainstream documentary photography attempting to create a process to enter and dislodge accepted visual canons as well as social concerns.

Identifiably, there are certain repetitive frames through which practices in photography have functioned in post-independence India. The colonial lens bore the filter of exoticism regarding subjects such as the idyllic village and the spiritual, serene landscape. India post independence continued its romantic admiration for the villager, the exotic other, and natural surroundings, constructing tropes for image production by urban photographers. The visual archive of a new nation was full of images of accepted notions of modernity and a common understanding of the secular state and citizen public. These perceptions continued to thrive upon Gandhian notions of the rural idyll as home to the general masses of India. While poverty remained a concern, photographic images of destitution concealed the true claims of what was due to the subjects represented. Arun’s work interrogates the idea of the normative as an unfiltered lens used to create an enabling process for caste hierarchies to perpetuate. In a bid to be post-colonial or de-colonized are we thinking about our own standpoint as being normative and hierarchical?

In Arun Vijai’s work, questions regarding the fundamental idea of the veracity of photography as medium are not dealt with in a superficial manner. They are deeply engaged with as a given social process thickens with the very existence of the abject conditionality of the material reality of communities that are otherwise called the Scheduled Castes in India. His sensitization to Ambedkarite thought that challenges the meta-narratives of modernity in turn visualises the true nature of social existence, addressing the unethical realities of the modern nation.

Arun’s claim to the exploration of the concept of space as both cultural and environmental is demonstrated by the way in which he enters into what is otherwise socially invisible. His visual interrogation attempts to unpack the lives of the scheduled caste communities involved as assistants in the medical field, specifically as workers in mortuaries. He says that what we do with our dead, how we regard them, is an outcome of the specific conditions into which we are born – defined by beliefs, religion, language, place, sect, caste, gender and, in recent times, science. In India, those classified as untouchables or Dalits have been forced to handle the dead for centuries. The manner in which they are compelled to do this in modern, state-run hospitals has gone unnoticed and undocumented. Arun’s project proposes to shine a light on an unknown, shrouded world.

We live in times when unnatural deaths are subjects of investigation. Before a surgeon handles the cadaver, a team of trained staff prepares it. There are elaborate procedures relating to how the body should be handled and technicians are expected to be appropriately qualified. After the autopsy, highly skilled work is performed: the corpse is wrapped, the ventilators are removed, no visible incision is left to be seen, the viscera are carefully handled, and the body is reconstituted by sewing it back together. In all this, the coroner is assisted by a team of lab technicians. In India, the reality of this process is shockingly different from our perception. In almost all our hospitals, a range of tasks, sometimes even the opening of the torso with the Y-incision, is done by semi-literate, low-level staff. They belong to the Dalit communities. Official identity cards designate the men as Sanitary Workers, concealing their real profession. Much like other stigmatised work in a society organised by caste, such as handling all manner of waste (including human excreta), the cleaning of sewers, or the skinning of animal carcasses, this modern work too has become hereditary. The ill-equipped workers, with outmoded refrigerators and crude implements, perform heroic tasks in dismal conditions. They suffer from several occupational ailments and work-related infections from handling the decomposed, verminous bodies. Tasked with endowing dignity on the dead, they themselves face a social death. The untrained, underpaid Dalits cannot tell their friends and neighbours what they actually do for a living.

The reality of Arun Vijai’s photographs call for the interrogation of the public perception of caste from the conceptual framework of protected ignorance (Alone, 2017: 140). The camera’s lens can be regarded as an attempt to move away from narratives that perpetuate protected ignorance, alternatively presenting a non-Brahminical discourse that displaces earlier colonial, Brahminical, western and Marxist / socialist positions. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s reliance on deconstruction as the discursive practice for leading western philosophical discourse resulted in a constructive critique of what she calls “sanctioned ignorance” (Spivak, 1999). However, this critique does not investigate the inherent nature of ignorance, which remains embedded in society and social thought, perpetuated by a local hegemony in India. I argue that what is termed as rationality of thought is itself relative, its relativity depending on its objectives. “If the objective of rationality is to kill ignorance, then it becomes a righteous rationality, and if it is the opposite, it signifies an unrighteous rationality and, consequently, a protected ignorance. Protected ignorance is a conceptual means to interrogate knowledge formation-processes and their objectives. It is equally aimed at demystifying meta narratives of the claimed theoretical groundings of sanctioned ignorance.” (Alone, 2017: 141)

Arun Vijai’s work acts as a conduit for challenging centuries of protected ignorance that plagues our society, as victims have remained protected in ignorance of their own exploitation, and perpetrators prefer to continue to remain protected in ignorance of fundamental social realities. Spivak’s key concept of the subaltern hence remains problematic when read against an Ambedkarite understanding of caste, as the latter defined the divisiveness of caste not only as a division of labour but also the division of labourers themselves. Subaltern remains a largely class oriented concept, which does not engage with this division of labourers, their differences and conflicts within. It is the heterogenous caste-life narratives, accessed by the empathy in other textual, but also visual means such as the photography, that are truly critical of the protected ignorance which plagues our society. Caste-life narratives of mortuary workers depicted via Arun Vijai’s lens have the capacity to challenge the political project of homogenous traditions, and to shift focus from textual traditions of a Brahminical past. The oppressed hereby formulate a (visual) language of caste narratives distinct from conventional understandings of the hegemonic group. This language exists at a new register of what is regarded as rational, and is aimed at killing ignorance.

References

Alone, Y. S. “Caste Life Narratives, Visual Representation, And Protected Ignorance” in Biography, Volume 40, Number 1, Winter, University of Hawai’i Press, 2017, pp. 140 – 169

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Harvard University Press, 1999.

———. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, University of Illinois Press, 1988, pp. 271–313.

Photograph © Arun Vijay Mathavan

Photograph © Arun Vijay Mathavan

Photograph © Arun Vijay Mathavan

Photograph © Arun Vijay Mathavan

Photograph © Arun Vijay Mathavan

Photograph © Arun Vijay Mathavan

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