11 - Violence after Violence: The Politics of Narratives over the Delhi Pogrom

Summary

It was not only human lives that were annihilated during the days of political violence unleashed in the northeastern localities of India's capital New Delhi in late February of 2020. Words, too, were/are being massacred in (mis)characterizing that violence. Analytically, at stake is this fundamental issue: without correct naming, we can understand neither the violence nor its past or future. It is not mere verbal gymnastics; naming is critical to the diagnosis of the problem as also to its prevention. Indeed on naming rests, in many ways, life as well as death. To safeguard the chastity of language, and my own ethical integrity, I will, therefore, not call the violence in Delhi a riot, as it was widely called then as well as subsequently. Let me name it what it truly is: a pogrom.

This essay anthropologically explores the crucial subject of the politics of naming over longue durée. In so doing, it puts forward an original argument (see later) that seldom has much of social science literature made, definitely not in the ways enunciated, executed, and demonstrated here. This argument is derived from as well as extends my larger monographic work on political violence (Ahmad forthcoming). Given the space limit and specific aims of this essay in the present volume, it is not feasible to lay bare full detail of my claim here. In part, this is also because the regnant doxa my argument is positioned against is not limited to a specific field of inquiry, discipline, or a set of authors. My contention instead pertains to the very ubiquitous nationalist epistemology to which almost every discipline, field, or most authors pledge their affiliation, albeit not identically (Ahmad 2011). This nationalist epistemology as a knowledge/power matrix with Hindu Orientalism as its lynchpin is, moreover, international. Academic knowledge in ‘post-colonial’ India is heavily indebted to and informed by what I call Hindu Orientalism, a set of practices and repertoires, which draws on, updates, and recasts historical European Orientalism (especially its branch of Indology) to organize intellectual production, circulation, and dissemination under the overarching banner of nationalism (Ahmad 2021a). Theoretically, nationalism is thus not an antithesis of Orientalism (Breckenridge and van der Veer 1993).