[Reader-list] evisceration

[tarunksaint]

Listophiles,
 
Vocabulary exercise for the day--  Eviscerate, 1) to disembowel, as in 'xyz eviscerated bodies were found in Ahmedabad today'. 2) to deprive of essential or vital parts, as in the evisceration of feeling,  of the ability to respond to the suffering of others, after rounds of reporting/writing which reduce the plight of victims to a sensationalist story, thus dulling the mind, draining away psychic affect. 

The panahis/sharnarthis/refugees, numbed by the slaughter around them, had not even the solace of public trials of mass murderers, who were elevated to the status of heroes in their own community, as the demonology then constructed froze written history in a certain mould, pushing the 'villains' of Partition outside the community/nation.

 Amongst the survivors, the Sikhs targeted in 1984 learnt  a fresh lesson in endurance of such evisceration, as did the Meos of Bharatpur (subjected to genocidal violence during the Partition era) and the Muslims of Bombay in 1992/3 , not to mention the Hindus of Bangladesh in the same period. One can speculate about post-traumatic stress disorders, about the impact on the emplotment of life-histories and community histories. Evisceration. A word, a hesitation, a stammer, amidst the flood of visceral narratives which flow from perpetrator to victim, from producer to consumer, in the new consumption regime ushered in by the aesthetic of indifference.
Tarun 
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