Malavika Karleka: Visual
Histories: Photography in the Popular Imagination. New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2013 xix + 175pp., R. 795 (hb). ISBN 0-19-9809026-9
Malavika Karleka’s book with the promising title, Visual Histories:
Photography in the Popular Imagination enters the academic market place at
a time the ‘visual’ still has a long way to go to become a central object of
intellectual curiosity as well as a possible method in social research in
dominant disciplines such as sociology and social anthropology in India as well
as in South Asia. This sad state of affairs exists even after the lapse of over
two decades since the formal emergence of sub-disciplines such as visual
anthropology and sociology in the global scene. The absence of photography in
the two senses noted above however is not a peculiarly South Asian absence; the
situation in global social sciences is not much better despite the potential
photographs have as a source of information with multiple layers of meaning. As
such, any contribution that might add to our understanding of the history and
potential of photography beyond mere aesthetic sensibilities must necessarily
be considered an addition to knowledge. This is the context in which Karleka’s
book must be read. By her own admission, the book “focuses on the camera, its
initial locale, the studio; its owners, photographers; and growing number of
eager clients” (2013: xiii). In other
words, her attempt is to historically locate the history of photography in
India. The book is divided into two sections, ‘The Colonial Eye’ focusing on
the beginnings of photography in the colonial context and ‘Imaging India’ which
supposedly looks at how the act of image-making with the camera evolved in
post-Independence India. But this is not a significant or particularly useful division
as many of the essays in the second half also deals with situations much before
the emergence of postcolonial realities. Karleka’s presentation includes thirty-two
essays accompanied by a selection of black and white photographs.
As pointed out by Karleka, the
camera and the act of photography together were among the institutions,
innovations and styles that were introduced to the colonies as necessitated by
the mandate of the empire (2013: xiv). In this context, the camera and the
studio proceeded to record, classify and order the local peoples (2013: xiv)
even though this documenting at times were embedded in the common colonial
practices of exoticizing the locals within an orientalist discourse that has
also shaped the writing of histories over the years. At official and formal
levels, photography “assisted the imperial gaze” by becoming a part of “an
intricate system of surveillance and control” (2013: xiv). However, at unofficial
and more informal levels, the gaze of the camera ushered in “pleasure and
excitement as it satisfied the proclivities to record, document and
immortalize” (2013: xiv). However in both manifestations, photographs that have
survived over time have not narrated stories of ‘truth’ in the manner
commonsensical assumptions about photographs as typified by the adage
‘photographs don’t lie’ suggest. Photographs always have been and will continue
to be ‘partial truths’ awaiting multiple interpretations.
Among the book’s main
contributions are the descriptions on the emergence of specialized studios,
which affectively became a “performative arena” within which those photographed
were transformed into “unwitting actors” (2013: 19) placed among an array of
props that created a spectacle for posterity. In this world, photographers
effectively became quite similar to theater directors, in charge of a “fairly
complex production that involved tact and the art of persuasion – apart from
technical expertise and ideas of composition” (2013: 19). But as Karleka
explains in more than one essay, this kind of photography was a time-consuming
and often stressful process. The studio
also became an experimental social space: “the unsegregated photographic studio
clearly went against the principle of difference so carefully maintained in
railway compartments, clubs, and even parks” (2013: 23). The book also offers
glimpses into the work of early Indian photographers such as Deen Dayal who is
perhaps best known for documenting the glamour of the Nizam of Hyderabad as his
court photographer while being one of
the most successful studio photographers of his time (2013: 14- 18) . In
addition to the colonial and the local elite, photography in the early period
also expanded due to its intuitional appropriation by the military and the
police. For the colonial military, it was a matter of establishing its might
and stature (2013: 49-52) while for the police it was useful in cataloging
criminals. By 1857, initial ‘war photography’ made a presence in the context of
the 1857 rebellion as documented by Felice Beato (2013: 53-56). Karleka also
documents how a group of ‘photographic adventurers’ took the act of photography
from the confines of the studio into the open to document the ‘views of India,’
capturing the images of the Himalayas, its peaks, lakes and other spectacular
scenes as well as “cottages built by colonial masters to “evoke memories of
home” (2013: 40).
However, the promise that the
title of the book suggests is not fully realized due to a number of reasons. Some
essays though providing interesting historical information offers very little
or nothing about photography (2013: 3-8; 116-129). On the other hand, the photos
in the book, though accompanied by basic source information, do not offer essential
historical information and are not squarely engaged with. Instead, they remain
simple decorative elements accompanying the written text in most cases. If
Karleka told us where the photos were taken, when, by whom and interpreted
them, a much more nuanced narrative would have surely emerged. Much of the
information in the book is not carefully sourced, often with no page numbers and
sometimes with no clear indication of authors or the sources, making it somewhat
distressing for more engaged readers. It
appears that these lapses have emerged in the transition of a series of essays
originally written for mass consumption in a newspaper into a book, which
naturally is altogether a different product.
Nevertheless, Karleka’s essays
are easy-to-read snippets of Indian history of the 19th and early 20th
centuries that attempts to take as their major point of departure the camera
and its uses.
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Tamara Herath: Women in Terrorism:
The Case of the LTTE. New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 2012, xii + 242pp., R.
595 (hb). ISBN 978-81.-321-0695-1
Tamara Hearth’s book, with the
captivating title, Women in Terrorism: The Case of the LTTE offers much
promise in terms of the vast realm of possibilities such an area of exploration
offers as well as in the context that it is published merely three years after
the military defeat of the LTTE.
Unfortunately however, that promise is clearly liminal and
illusionary. The book is based on the
narratives of 15 women the author had interviewed between 2002 and 2003 (2012:
1, 3). She identifies them as combatant and civic women (2012: 11). One of the
immediate issues of the book is that it does not manage to go beyond the format
of a predictable and conventional dissertation. Much of the introductory
chapter titled ‘Entering the Tiger’s Lair’ is taken up by brief discussions sunder
subtitles such as ‘Role of the Researcher in Representing the Other’, ‘Outsider
inside the Kinship Formation: The Researcher’s Positionality within Combatant
Women’ etc which revisits quite superficially issues with regard to
ethnographic research, writing and representation already substantially addressed
by many other researchers. Unfortunately, Herath does not engage with any of these
positions with any degree of seriousness, but merely outlines some issues
briefly. On the other hand, she also briefly describes from published literature
the case of the Black Widows of Chechnya and the Palestine’s Army of Roses
(2012: 18-25) ostensibly as a background comparison for the combatant women of
the LTTE and the civic women that she had encountered in Jaffna. Again, she
fails to interrogate these comparative materials in a manner that might have provided
a nuanced foundation upon which to allow her own reading to be based.
Her second chapter titled ‘The
Lions and Tigers’ attempts to offer a historical overview of the politics in
Sri Lanka that lead to the military confrontation between the LTTE and the
armed forces of the Sri Lankan state. By any definition, it is a poorly written
chapter that betrays a very weak process of research, conceptualization and
writing. In a way, the serious lapses in these two foundational chapters poses
serious questions on the reliability Herath’s entire intellectual project,
including the information collected through her own field research. Referring
to the story of Prince Vijaya, the origin myth of the Sinhalas, the author
refers to the arrival of a ‘King’ in the island who engaged in a ‘mythical
union with a lioness’ (2012: 30) thereby getting all the basic components of
this very well-known story mixed-up. On the basis of this erroneous recounting,
she proceeds to ‘rationalize’ it by simply claiming that the reference to lions
was perhaps a reference to a local tribe called lions (2012: 30).
Similarly, Herath describes the 5th
century Pali text, the Mahawamsa as a text that “chronicled Sri Lanka
from the fourth century to the mid eighteenth century” (2012: 30) when in
actual fact Mahawamsa does not extend beyond the 5th century
AD while other similar texts such as Chulawamsa, Pujawaliya etc extends
beyond that period. She claims that Mahawamsa “does not mention the
existence of Tamil nationals in the island” (2012: 30). ‘Tamil national’ as a
category is of very recent origin. So it is hardly surprising that an ancient
text such as the Mahawamsa would not refer to such entities. But it does
quite liberally note of ‘damilas’ in
many chapters to refer to individuals who had invaded the island from South
India. In many popular reckonings of the Sri Lankan past this is considered a reference
to Tamils, and constitutes an important component of collective Sinhala
nationalist perception of the ancient past. Clearly, Herath is oblivious of the
very serious literature that deals with the peopling of Sri Lanka, and therefore
it is not surprising that the work of scholars such as R.A.L.H. Gunwardena,
K.N.O. Dharmadasa, W.I. Siriweera, Senake Bandrananayake etc are missing from her
bibliography. In fact, one of the crucial methodological lapses throughout in
the book is its relative lack of attention to important Sri Lankan material
that are readily available in English while important popular material in Sinhala
and Tamil is completely absent.
The book is also replete with
careless use of basic categories which further ads to the general sloppiness of
archival research in the crucial initial chapters. For instance, the term
‘Tamil nationals’ (2012: 39) appears
throughout the text without any explanation for the adage ‘nationals’ as
opposed to the regular usage ‘Tamils; the 1983 anti-Tamil riots are referred to
both as ‘Black July riots’ (2012: 41) as is often done as well as ‘anti-Tamil
insurgency of 1983’ (2012: 42), which it never was. Such
problems that one does not expect to see in a published work is abundant
throughout the first part of the text.
The author’s main contribution
constitutes of her interviews conducted in Jaffna between 2002 and 2003 presented
from Chapter 3 to 6. Unfortunately however, these merely become snippets of
narratives interspersed with existing published knowledge of the LTTE and Tamil
society, in the context of which a serious reading on the part of the author
never really emerges in her text. Effectively,
what she offers in the main chapters of the book are summaries of secondary
sources within which she places her own material.
Substandard research and writing
is an unfortunate reality of our times, and this text is merely a reflection of
this situation. What is more worrisome is how a text with so many factual
errors, conceptual disjunctures, stylistic and organizational issues could go
through a peer-review process and emerge as a publication of a well-known
publishing agency.
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S. Murari: The Prabhakaran
Saga: The Rise and Fall of an Eelam Warrior. New Delhi: SAGE Publications,
2012, xxiii + 362pp., R. 425 (pb). ISBN 978-81-321-0701-9
At a certain level, S. Murari’s
book, The Prabhakaran Saga: The Rise and Fall of an Eelam Warrior is a
captivating text that offers an account of recent Sri Lankan politics focused
on the emergence and the demise of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam from
about 1987 until the military decimation of the LTTE in May 2009. 1987 marks
the signing of the Indo-Sri Lanka agreement which was an important landmark in
the entrenchment of the military confrontations involving the LTTE and Sri
Lankan armed forces and Indian military personnel from the so called Indian
Peace Keeping Force; it also marked the beginning of the worst foreign policy
and military misadventure of post-independent India. The book belongs to a
particular genre of texts that has emerged in both India and Sri Lanka where
journalists have raced to write their accounts of the war and their
understandings of it before too much time had lapsed since the end of war. In
the case of Sri Lanka itself, such texts written in Sinhala and English have
necessarily become extremely simplistic accounts with rather obvious political
slants and based on poor research. Such popular accounts of the war have also
been published in India even prior to the conclusion of the war. In that
overall context, Murari’s book stands apart from many other similar recent
texts. It is a dispassionate and matter of fact account of a war that the
writer has seen and written about as a journalist over a period of about 25
years. He has met and talked with some of the figures involved in the conflict
while he has also watched it unfold via numerous stages, changing the fortunes
of the warring parties at different times.
In addition to a Foreword by V.
Suryanarayan and a preface and epilogue by the writer, the book consist of five
major sections: The Accord that Failed; Eelam War II; Chandrika Era; The Long
and Uneasy Truce; The Last Phase. Within these sections, the writer presents 66
brief chapters through which the he spins together the intricacies of one of
the most violent, costly and long-lasting conflicts in South Asia. In many
ways, for people such as myself who have lived through the entire period and
the events that the writer has placed in context, his narrative offers a
trajectory of events that we were very familiar with even though the passing of
time has allowed lapses of memory to take over. It reminds readers when significant
events took place and in what immediate contexts. If one wants a clinical
linear recent history of violent politics in Sri Lanka, this is one of the more
accessible books one could read. Particularly the sections titled ‘The Accord
that Failed’ and ‘The Long and Uneasy Truce’ offer information on two extended
events where external intervention in Sri Lanka became possible but with
disastrous consequences. The first deals with the entry and the exit of the
Indian Peace Keeping Force while the latter deals with the Norwegian-sponsored
truce that was also doomed to fail from the very beginning due to failures of
both design and lapses in implementation.
Even though the book offers a
great deal of essential information in an easy to read manner on the military
expansion of the LTTE post 1987 and its demise in 2009, it also contains many
lapses mostly as a result of its approach. In essence, this is a text in which the writer
is both a witness to history as well as its narrator as illustrated at many
junctures throughout the text such as his visit to the site a day after an assassination
attempt on President Chandrika Kumaratunga was made by the LTTE and being at
her official residence when she took oaths as the President after surviving the
attempt on her life (188-189). He was present in the LTTE heartland when the organization’s
leader V. Prabhakaran addressed the world media in April 2002 (213-217).
However, being a witness to history has clear limits. Literally and metaphorically,
one cannot be everywhere when history unfolds and personal recollection cannot be
the only source when writing as complex a history such as the violent epoch
that Murari has opted to comment upon. It appears that he has become a prisoner
of his own approach. Within the entire text, the book contains only 14
footnotes referring to external sources while some other such indications can
be found within the text itself. Obviously, much of what the writer says has
not come from his own personal contacts or interviews with individuals such as
speeches by Prabhakaran himself and Tamil Nadu Politician Jayalalita (220; 181).
One could find numerous other similar moments throughout the book. There are also
many other instances where the writer offers explanations and information such
as the reprimand India is supposed to have given to the LTTE not to enter
Jaffna after a siege (192). In most of these situations, no one knows what the sources
of all this information are almost as if the events and information presented have
been revealed to the author by divine inspiration. Even though this is clearly
a journalistic narrative and not a work of scholarship, it ought to have
followed some basic conventions in writing nonfiction. As it is, we have to
take the word of the writer for everything ranging from what he has actually seen
and what he may have read via secondary sources. In that context, the utility of
the book beyond a general reading becomes quite limited.
On the other hand, though it
offers a trajectory of events, often it becomes difficult to follow the
sequence of events within specific chapters as the writer has opted not to give
the year of certain events as opposed to the month and date forcing the more
serious readers to constantly go back to the beginning of a chapter or section
to work out the year of a particular event. Naturally, this is a state of
affairs that could have been easily avoided. At the same time, there are sections
that add little to the understanding of the overall context while many other
necessary contexts are missing. For instance, in the last section Murari talks
about the LTTE’s attempt to form an air wing in a brief chapter titled ‘LTTE
Takes to Wings.’ LTTE’s experimentation with airpower and also submarine
technology had no serious impact on the progression or the outcome of the war
in the context of which a chapter on it however brief is not of paramount
importance. On the other hand, the deep penetration units of the Sri Lanka Army
as well as the reorganization of offensive naval operations from about 2005 had
direct impact on the outcome of the war which the book does not deal with
despite the long overall narrative it presents.
In the final analysis, the book
offers a respite to remember a long and tragic recent history of Sri Lanka
through piecing together of a series of events over time. However, beyond an exercise of recollection,
It does not offer a nuanced reading of that history.
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