november 1984 . memories of madness,.

Buried images of bigotry

They are not statistics. Not percentage points. They were people.

 People with faces. Faces that are today, framed in photographs and preserved for posterity by their families. Memories of an organized massacre.

Carefully framed,  garlanded and hung on walls, the photographs are of happy moments, ironically so.

They are portraits meant to mark memorable times and happy memories. Studio photographs- pleasant, gentle, mementos transformed by the addition of a date. The first two days of November 1984. Dates that add a sub-text of sudden death to the photographs.

No photograph can really convey the raw reality of those days. Few photographers even tried. The conventions of the front page, a self-imposed censorship, a respect for the reader's morning tea, made sure of that.

The photographs that were published were 'palatable' ones of mourning at Teen Murti House and a state-managed spectacular funeral. A few fires and firings found their way into print l, but the mass burials in Trilokpuri received a quieter burial in the media.

Photograpahers, especially  a flood of foreign cameramen, faced a hostile police – and people bent on preserving a proper image of their motherland – not a mass murderer, but just a little mad.

How could one face up to this madness? Even as an angry documentary photographer , one turned away. Refusing to be a part of the madness. Refusing, one justified to oneself, to add fuel to the communal fire. Angry, frustrated tears did not help in focusing one's mind and camera. Even two frames of a raw burnt body were too much. One turned to safe, symbolic pictures. Knowing fully, that few of even these images were for public consumption.

"Society," says Roland Barthes, "is concerned to tame the photograph, to temper the madness which keeps threatening  to explode in the face of whoever looks at it. "

Few, very few, have looked at photographs of that November madness.  Few will ever allow those photographs to assert their scandal and madness, or confront their intractable reality.

                                                                         Satish Sharma 

                           THE ECONOMIC TIMES, NEW DELHI- 28 NOVEMBER  1992

Satish Sharma's photographs, alongside, are a few among the many scaly scabs of a suppurating wound.  One can excavate the photographs, like an archaeologist  to eventually yield to us – not the perennially haunted faces of  victims , but the true nature of the illness afflicting us.

                                                                     Sadanand Menon