Spectres of Violence

IN THE OPENING sequence to his photo book 1528, Rohit Saha is quick to set the tone for the narrative that follows. It opens with a grainy black-and-white image of a man’s face, framed such that it cuts right under his eyes, his unflinching gaze directed at the viewer. This injects the work with a confrontational tone that resurfaces time and again over the course of the book.

The photograph on the following page shows a piece of cloth strewn on the ground, a chair in the middle of the frame and a single window on the far right. Two bars on the window ominously block the view to the outside. The scene is reminiscent of depictions—in cinema and other forms of visual culture—of interrogations in prison cells. Despite the absence of people in the photograph, it conjures up images of hostile questioning by authorities. Often in these scenes, such interrogations are followed by torture, possibly alluded to here by the piece of cloth on the ground.

Saha’s book, which has been in the making since 2016, was launched alongside an ongoing exhibition at Art Heritage, a gallery in Delhi, on 30 August 2019. When he was researching for his degree project at the National Institute of Design, he came across headlines about Irom Sharmila breaking a 16-year-long hunger strike by tasting honey. Force-fed during this period through a nasal tube, she had undertaken the strike in protest against the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, or AFSPA, in Manipur. In 2016, she decided to end the fast and join politics.

At the time, Saha knew about Manipur being a “disturbed state,” and was aware about the presence of AFSPA in the state, but not the extent of political turmoil that had culminated in Sharmila’s momentous decision. Despite his father’s attempts to dissuade him from going to Manipur because the state was “under curfew,” Saha was spurred on by the forcefulness of Sharmila’s resolve. He decided to begin a photographic work following her journey to the elections, starting on 18 October with Sharmila announcing her political party, the Peoples’ Resurgence and Justice Alliance, in Imphal.

When Saha began reporting, his research led him to the incident that prompted Sharmila’s fast—the Malom Massacre—a shooting of ten civilians by army troops, in retaliation against an attack on an Assam Rifles convoy in November 2000. The book traces Saha’s journey in informing himself about the political reality of an unfamiliar place—he was born and raised in Kolkata, and his association with Manipur began through this work. 1528 contains text that runs parallel to the images, in which Saha describes how his relationship with the state evolved over the course of his research and the making of this work. Early on in the book, he writes, “I came to Manipur thinking Malom Massacre was the worst that had happened here.” To see “what remains of the incident,” he set out to meet the families of the victims of the massacre, in order “to look at the present and compare it with the past.”

While attempting to locate the families of the victims of the Malom Massacre, Saha came across the work of the Extrajudicial Execution Victim Families Association of Manipur, an organisation formed in 2009 by the widows of men killed in alleged extrajudicial killings. The organisation has spearheaded the movement in Manipur to find justice for civilians who have died in what came to be known as “fake encounters,” suspected to be staged by the armed forces. It has also built a support group for the affected families. In one of their key interventions in 2012, EEVFAM—alongside another organisation called the Human Rights Alert, Manipur— petitioned the Supreme Court, demanding an investigation into 1,528 cases of alleged extrajudicial killings that had occurred between 1979 and 2012.

Researching the Malom Massacre in his bid to trace Sharmila’s journey, Saha stumbled upon a reality much more gruesome than he had anticipated: an immense repository of cases, which the EEVFAM had maintained records of at their office in Uripok, Imphal West. In October 2016, Saha began to volunteer at the EEVFAM, poring over files and digitising the recorded material, particularly the forms with details of the incident, victims and perpetrators, as well as notes about when they were last seen. He repeatedly recalled the cabinet in the EEVFAM office, which houses around eight hundred files for the 1,528 cases. The files also contained identification photographs of the victims, newspaper cuttings and post mortem reports. While remembering a pile of newspaper reports, Saha recalled, “All I could see were people protesting or blocking roads. Dead bodies wrapped in white and families crying. … My way of looking at Manipur started changing from the day I opened that cupboard.” After a day’s work, he would try and visit the places that found mention in the reports he had looked over. He admitted that this immersion into the work affected him deeply, and he began “having dreams where I started relating myself to the victims who lost their lives.”

Across the book’s pages is a looming spectre of violence—shown by a pool of blood on the ground or a body face down in the water—though one is never quite able to pin it down to a particular incident or victim. Saha’s version of events does not disguise itself as photo reportage, but presents a reading into the psyche of the author as much as of the place and its people. Various elements in the book—including the confrontational gaze that recurs in multiple images of tight-cropped faces staring back at the viewer—reflect this approach. Speaking of his time at the EEVFAM office, Saha said, “I often saw police vans bringing in prisoners with their faces covered. Just their eyes were visible.”

His book carries an imprint of the EEVFAM’s archive for the 33-year period over which the extrajudicial killings took place. Its physical appearance is made to resemble the case files: it is of a similar size, and has stamp-like markings on its cover that identify the case material inside. Using various kinds of archival material along with his own photographs, “the dialogue between image and text” forms the underpinning of Saha’s work. There is an image of a man with a gun strung across his shoulder, with a newspaper headline stating “India’s first adventure park inaugurated in Manipur” pasted on top of it. Another photograph, of a military check post with the phrase, “We are friends of hills/May I Help You,” is juxtaposed with an image of a form stating that no FIR has been filed and no inquiry conducted. These juxtapositions point towards the irony, or what Saha calls “mockery,” of a situation where “the army is supposed to save you, and you are scared of the army.” The narrative is one of dissonance—what one sees is offset by what is placed beside, on top or ahead of it.

At other points in the book, the images and words work in tandem to connect disparate aspects of the conflict. A photograph of a man with his hands clasped, his arms hanging limp in resignation, is placed next to an article with the headline, “Army authority rejects allegation.” Collectively, the narrative raises more questions than it resolves, a kind of “systematic chaos” that Saha refers to, in which “who is in control, who is to be blamed and whom to support remains a concern.”

Much reportage has shown that the killing of unarmed civilians in various parts of the country has been covered up by fake encounters. With the armed forces enjoying impunity under AFSPA, and the version communicated to the public being the state’s narrative, accounts of these encounters are often shrouded in uncertainty. Saha’s decision to intersperse his images with the EEVFAM’s material points towards this incongruity between the state’s version and the ground reality. Since Saha chose to keep his “visual language similar to the archive’s material,” it becomes difficult at times to gauge whether he has taken the high contrast black-and-white photographs, or whether they are pixelated and photocopied documents from the files. Saha, then, uses a visual medium that is often seen to have evidentiary value to draw attention to fake encounters that inherently lack accurate records. While the cases he refers to span a period of 33 years, his images from the present gesture to a reality that appears unchanged—as though, in Saha’s telling, time appears suspended.

In 2017, a Supreme Court bench directed the Central Bureau of Investigation to set up a special investigation team to probe into allegations of extrajudicial killings in Manipur. But not much has altered for the families of victims of extrajudicial killings, according to Saha. “The village of Malom, Heirangoithong Grounds, RIMS Hospital Parking, Oinam District are among the few out of the many which have been sites for bloodbaths and lead rains,” he said. “Memorials have been put up at these sites and every anniversary they have a flower tribute ceremony. That’s all what has been happening since then. Nothing apart from that has been done about the victims as they still wait for justice.”

As the book ends, the images become less visibly disturbing. One of them is of a man under an evening sky, in Ukhrul. Photographed from behind, he is staring at hills that are dotted by lights. But given Saha’s high-contrast aesthetic, it appears to be the sight of a city burning in the distance—alluding, as Saha says, to the feeling that “the air around these places is so damned.”

This book was published by the Alkazi Foundation, as part of the Alkazi Foundation Photobook grant.