Lecture: Rustom Bharucha

"Pandemic India: Seen through photographs, darkly," Rustom Bharucha.

Bharucha is a writer, director and dramaturg based in Kolkata, India. He retired as professor of theatre and performance studies from the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. He is the author of several books including Theatre and the World, The Question of Faith, In the Name of the Secular, The Politics of Cultural Practice, Rajasthan: An Oral History, Another Asia: Rabindranath Tagore and Okakura Tenshin, and Terror and Performance. The last publication was researched while he was a Fellow at the International Research Center/Interweaving Performance Cultures in Berlin, Germany, between 2010-2012. Very recently, he has published a new book titled Performing the Ramayana Tradition: Enactments, Interpretations, and Arguments, co-edited with Paula Richman.

A leading interlocutor in the area of intercultural performance, both at theoretical and practical levels, Bharucha has also worked as the Project Director of Arna-Jharna: The Desert Museum of Rajasthan devoted to the study of traditional knowledge systems and as the Festival Director of the Ramayana Festival at the Adishakti Laboratory for Theatre Research in Pondicherry, India. Last year he completed a nine-episode video lecture on "Theatre and the Coronavirus," which can be accessed here.

This lecture will offer a critical perspective on the pandemic in India through the lens of photography. At a time when there was an almost total shutdown of theatres, cinemas, museums, libraries, and universities, it was photography, mediatized through computers and smartphones, that enabled one to "see" what was happening in our own cities and beyond. This lecture will reflect on two sets of photographs beginning with three exemplary images focusing on the horror of hospitals, crematoria and abandoned dead bodies during the "second wave" between May and September 2021.

Against this breakdown of social infrastructure and the disruption of the rituals of mourning, the lecture will juxtapose a different body of photographs taken during the first phase of the pandemic when thousands of migrant workers and labourers walked back to their rural homes after a national lockdown was imposed. Apart from engaging with the affective registers of these photographs, the lecture will also throw out some critical observations on the larger distribution and ownership of these highly localized images by global media houses.

Inevitably, the globalization of the pandemic through images will be set against the growing censorship of the national media in India. In this context, questions relating to the ethics and politics of visualizing the media will be problematized, leading to speculations on the legal implications of using images to indict those in power whose mismanagement and dereliction of public duty have been covered up or silenced. What kind of "evidence can photographs provide in order to deepen our understanding of states of emergency, extending beyond aesthetic considerations to arrive at new forms of social solidarity, empathy, truth and justice?