“Lynchings”, Communal Violence, and Visuality in India

Inderpal Grewal

Abstract

This paper focuses on the images of killings of Muslim males (often termed “lynching”) that have appeared in newsmedia across India. Against a background of the visual history of what is called “communal” violence in postcolonial India, I examine the shift in visual culture that produces and supports Hindutva sovereignty, relegating its minorities to become non-citizens. In particular, I argue that crowd-sourced and cell phone images circulating in both social media and the “traditional” media platforms continue to produce what are called “iconic” images, but these images also destabilize Hindutva and the state structures that support it.

Biography

Inderpal Grewal is Professor in the Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. She is also Professor in the Ethnicity, Race and Migration Studies Program, the South Asian Studies Council, and affiliate faculty in the American Studies Program, in Anthropology and in Film and Media Studies. She is the author of Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire and the Cultures of Travel (Duke University Press, 1996), Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms (Duke University Press, 2005), and Saving the Security State: Exceptional Citizens in Twenty-First century America (Duke University Press, 2017). With Caren Kaplan, she has written and edited Gender in a Transnational World: Introduction to Women’s Studies (Mc-Graw Hill 2001, 2005) and Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational: Feminist Practices (University of Minnesota Press, 1994). With Victoria Bernal, she has edited Theorizing NGO’s: States, Feminism and Neoliberalism (Duke University Press, 2014). Currently she is working on projects addressing the resurgence of patriarchal authoritarian governments globally, the rise of gendered violence, and feminist movements resisting such violence.

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