VIOLENCE IMPACTS AND TRANSFORMS FOR A LIFETIME ALL THOSE WHO EXPERIENCE IT, COMMIT IT AND WITNESS IT.

 VIOLENCE IMPACTS AND TRANSFORMS FOR A LIFETIME ALL THOSE WHO EXPERIENCE IT, COMMIT IT AND WITNESS IT.

The culture of punishment as spectacle runs deep in our society. The shocking news from a Mirzapur school last week of a child being dangled upside down from the first floor by his principal should trouble all of us.

Although the incident concerns an individual’s action, it is situated in a social life that views exemplary punishments and its public spectacle as a norm.

Physical punishment finds easy acceptance in societies that valorises cultures of violence – whether in public or domestic spaces.

The unfortunate and unending phenomenon of mob lynching gives life to these cultures of violence.

In India, the scope and scale of lynching have been expanding to include people associated with Dalit and Muslim identity, child-kidnappers, lovers, thieves and right-wing ideologues.

Further, police beating ordinary citizens for violations of law in public spaces are some other examples that routinise the spectacle of violence.

My point is that violence has found a socially legitimate space in our bedrooms, living rooms, classrooms, streets, cities and villages.

It also traverses through our marketplaces, worksites, police custody and public transport.

Not all these examples constitute the same type of violence and spectacle. Lynching has an accompanying element of public cheering and is usually directed against the social “other” in a given social space.

Police beating has an element of frustration and the show-off of unequal power dynamics. Here the public usually turns into a meek spectator.

Exemplary punishments of students by teachers have an element of constituting the authority of the teacher.

We all remember specific teachers from our school days who were known for their exemplary and peculiar forms of punishment.

In this case, the child-public could watch silently and simultaneously inhabit fear in their personality, as seems to be the case in the Mirzapur incident.

Running through all these forms of punishment, whether state-controlled or non-state violence, is the idea of torture, the cultivation of fear, and the disciplining of the body and social behaviour – all achieved via the exemplary performance of the spectacle.

French philosopher Michel Foucault in his classic work, Discipline and Punish, associated spectacled violence (guillotine, public beating) and excessive bodily torture with the pre-modern society.

According to him, the modern societies in the West hid the violence from the public and changed its nature in the 19th century.

First, the public ritual of torture/public execution was replaced by long-term reformative punishments comprising of jail sentences, forced labour, suspension of freedom and other rights.

The public punishment itself became a crime and a shameful activity for the state.

Second, a change in the method of punishment marked a shift in bodily torture from being a one-time activity to prolonged suffering.

Solitary confinements are extreme examples of this. Colonial and post-colonial India seem to have witnessed this transition in the methods of punishment only half-heartedly.

British officials used both the cellular jail of Andaman to punish Indians and shoot them at gunpoint.

Lathi-charge and public beating by the colonial police was a frequent phenomenon and has passed on to us as a colonial inheritance.

Besides, the spectacle of caste and community violence coexisted with the public ritual of state violence.

Colonial ethnographer official Edgar Thurston while touring the Madras region in the 1910s noted down an exemplary punishment given by Indian teachers.