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(iv) installment of Sannata: Murder in the Archive. If you google “1971 killing of bengali intellectuals” the following is likely to turn up. Within the Wikipedia entry there is a black and white photograph of the murdered bodies of Bengali intellectuals at the hands...(1) https://twitter.com/sannatarchive/status/1348898598583463936
the Pakistani military during Operation Searchlight. Looking at this photo, I’m reminded of a comment from the “Introduction” of Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America: (2)
"At issue here is the precariousness of empathy and the uncertain line between witness and spectator. Truly more obscene than the brutality…is the demand that this suffering be materialized and evidenced by the display of the tortured body..." (3)
...and its endless recitations of the ghastly and the terrible.” the context the Pakistani military’s policy of genocide in Bangladesh, I wonder if we/I/us/who? have begun reckoning with what transpired? What’s the difference between reckoning and titillation? (4)
What is the difference between a willfully erased record and an insistent image? Are the record (or lack thereof) and image both subject to the charge of manipulation? When does reckoning become self-flagellation? When does reproduction become spectacle? (5)
How to speak – if at all - about a photograph from “the Rayerbazar killing fields in Bangladesh, 1971” taken by Rashid Talukder for Ittefaq? (6)
There’s a separate Wikipedia entry for the file that contains the photograph, which indicates that the photograph appears in three separate Wikipedia entries: (i) “1971 Bangladesh genocide” (ii) Bangladesh Liberation War, and (iii) 1971 killing of Bengali intellectuals. (7)
Next to “Purpose of use” the following words are supplied by an anonymous user: “The horrors of the event is indescribable in language, and hence an image of the scenario serves an educational purpose.” (8)
How can one and indeed can one at all render bodies as people? What do we do, as Hartman asks, with the ghastly and terrible? Did Wajed Khalu see something ghastly and terrible? Remember the Hamoodur Rahman report I mentioned earlier? (9)
The Pakistani state’s attempt to reckon with its bloodlust appears in the form of a ghostly report. There are two versions of the Hamoodur Rahman Report. The first report – 1972 – was classified and portions of the second report –1974 – were declassified in 2000. (10)
Allegedly, there were twelve copies of the first report and all but one was destroyed. As the pages caught fire, so did memory concerning 1971, particularly between the months of March and May. (11)
A prophecy about the first version of the Hamoodur Rahman Report that was incinerated began to circulate: one day the twelve copies would emerge from different parts of Pakistan would coalesce into one large text that flaps like a bird in the sky and hovers over land (12)
This text would be visible to everyone in what was West Pakistan and now is merely Pakistan and then explode into tiny reports from which ink stains the land into witness. This hasn’t happened as of yet. How do I know this? I’m not sure. (13)
One can sketch a haphazard genealogy of this type of photograph that culminates in Rashid Taluqder’s photograph. This requires a walk all the way back in Felice Beato’s shoes to Sikandar Bagh in Lucknow and where we reanimate skulls and bones. (14)
The vultures here help us traverse nearly a century or so to then Calcutta and we swap shoes with Margaret Bourke-White and wonder who was responsible for this carnage. Hindus? Muslims? Both? Jinnah? The British? Both? Everyone? No one? Allah ki marzi? (15)
It’s the goras keeping record thus far. What does it mean for Rashid Taluqder to photograph the Pakistani military’s atrocities? What does it mean for the gaze to be of neither a waning nor waxing empire? Maybe I should ask Fernando Acosta. (16)
