Dimapur snapshots

Lynchings in the American south were regularly photographed and, in some cases, even simulated through audio-visual media after the event was over. It was as if this public act of killing could not be complete without the images and mementos that proliferated afterwards. For lynching has never been about violence alone — as Amy Louise Wood observes in her book, Lynching and Spectacle, “even that violence and those deaths were representational”. Around the turn of the 20th century, Wood goes on to say, the most sensational lynchings took place in fast urbanising areas. These were the places where the old social order was most visibly threatened, as blacks and whites competed for jobs and emerging urban spaces threw them together in new ways. The social and political anxieties of the southern white population gave rise to the spectre of the “black brute rapist” who violated white women and by extension, the “purity” of white society. Lynchings enacted a triumph over these social fears and reinstated challenged hierarchies.

But what of the lynching crowd at Dimapur? What triumph did the photographs commemorate? Nagaland is the result of its own peculiar history and inhabits a very different context; the ethnic tensions of the hill state may not be comparable to the racial hatred of southern America, or the hierarchies it produced. But curious resonances surfaced in the lynching at Dimapur.

To begin with, the city has its own spectres. The most audible strain of Naga identity, at least, has long defined itself in terms of ethnic purity, which must be protected against “outsiders”. Over time, anxieties about outsiders have coalesced around the figure of the “illegal Bangladeshi immigrant”, a phrase often contracted to the clipped, impersonal acronym, “IBI”. Local lore frequently casts him as a predatory creature, stealthily making inroads in Naga society by taking over jobs and land, marrying local women. From the 1980s, there had been reports of how marriages between Naga women and IBIs had given rise to a new population of “Sumias”. Local newspapers continue to raise alarm about the “ballooning population of immigrants” being a “big threat to the survival of the local populace”. On Gandhi Jayanti in 2012, the Naga Council, Dimapur, introduced a pledge to “socially and economically boycott” IBIs. The stakes were high, no less than the “erosion” of Naga identity by a “tidal wave of alien culture”.

Many fears seem to converge in the person of the IBI — hybridity, economic dispossession and eventually, cultural extinction. In Syed Sharif Khan, a Bengali-speaking Muslim who had married a local woman and was accused of raping a Naga girl, Dimapur found the perfect focus for them. Did the crowd that bore down on him believe they were expelling these fears? If the spectators at Waco joked about being at a “barbecue”, this lynching had the fury of an exorcism. The procession that started at the central jail was bound for the clock tower, a city landmark, where the accused would be mounted on the rails. This was to be no ordinary killing; the images it left behind were important. There would also have to be proof that this ritual expulsion had taken place. To the cell phone wielders that day, the photographs may tell that story. But to horrified viewers who were not part of the crowd, certain social pathologies were played out and taken to their tragic conclusion in the Dimapur lynching. The photographs tell that story too.

ipsita.chakravarty@expressindia.com