Twenty years on, the film explores some of the ways in which the '92 riots in Bombay have been and continue to be represented - in the realms of art and photojournalism. It weaves in and out of...
The precursor to the violence of 1992-93 was an event that took place around 1500 km away from Mumbai. On 6 December, 1992 a large mob of Hindu karsevaks entirely destroyed the 16th century Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh. In the days following the demolition several places in the country found themselves descending in a spiral of mistrust and violence. Mumbai, then Bombay, was one such place.
Private 24X7 live media were still sometime away and most of the people came to know about the extent of the violence through broadsheets, magazines and state news agencies. The journalists and photographers on the streets of the city not only diligently reported the instances of violence and chronicled the injustices meted out to the poor and the hapless, they also emerged as a collective voice of reason that the city needed desperately in those days. They also played an important role in post-violence mobilisations for providing humanitarian relief and campaigns for justice, driven by human rights activists engaged in recording and publishing reports based on the testimonies of the victims. A closer reading of the journalistic accounts of those tumultuous days shows us how these efforts were as much a response to large-scale brutal violence as it was an elite reaction to the destruction of the mythic cosmopolitan spirit of the city. Also, with the benefit of hindsight we can see how their relative inability to see and articulate the violence as a larger process, rather than a self-contained event, has come to have a bearing on how we remember it. The violence of 1992-93 largely emerges, in journalistic and popular narratives, as a minor episode bracketed between the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the serial bomb-blasts in Mumbai in March 1993. The subsequent attention given to the Babri Masjid land title case and the bomb-blast trials by the state and their coverage by the mainstream media attest to this phenomenon. Works by journalists and their film adaptations like Black Friday also point towards this narrative framework which makes the bomb-blasts its main focus, rendering the violence of 1992-93 only through flashback device. It does not come as a surprise then that some of our respondents believed that the violent episodes of 1992-93 were a popular response to the bomb-blasts, even though the episodes of violence took place well before the Black Friday.
It is this violence of erasure that compelled us to work towards constructing a memory of the violence of 1992-93. Through this effort we hope to give an imaginative existence to a period of history that remains underrepresented and misrepresented to a large extent in available narratives. Facts of history dissolve from our unstable memories if not nurtured by narratives. Narratives make it possible for us to think about and relate better to our collective pasts that were previously unheard and unseen.
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