Cadaver Photo-Journalism and Macabre Pandemic Visuals

Daily we hear gut-wrenching accounts of some life being untimely snuffed out. Such is the extent of havoc in human terms that death itself has become quotidian, and a chilling foreboding isn't hypochondriac hype anymore but a stark necessity for survival.

While the second wave of Covid-19 pandemic rages in India, marked by a breakdown of medical facilities, oxygen shortage and world’s highest number of caseload, a few days back there was a heated Twitter controversy.

Washington Post correspondent and former India bureau chief, Annie Gowen, posted a picture showing dozens of blazing cinders, in close proximity to each other, arranged like a constellation, and emitting a luminous glow. She exclaimed stunning, as if awestruck by the lights and the flames.

But there’s one serious problem: the image was unnerving,not stunning. The radiance and sparkle was of dead human bodies incinerating on pyres, not of celestial oblongs or planetary objects flowing in the cosmos.

Colossal mayhem

Relatives of the dead are waiting long hours to cremate their kin. They make long commutes and implore everyone from the authorities to the undertakers.

Crematoriums not in use since over a decade are working round the clock. There’s a distraught and heaving crowd outside them, anxiously and patiently awaiting their turn.

Even the most soul-stirring and haunting tales with the theme of precarity of dismal life and absurdity of Kafka-esque cobwebs of endless waits and mystical obstructions, sound less poignant than queues to conduct last rites and conscious awareness that the spectre of death still looms large and skulks around. The uncertainty, helplessness and despair makes it more harrowing.

The way funeral pyres have been zoomed-on by camera lenses and the images plastered on the front-pages of leading dailies, shows something eerily sensational. A picture isn’t conveying a thousand words here, but holding a bizarre carnival of the macabre that’s shocking for its brazen numbness.

Dignified last rites

De Mortuis Nil Nisi Bonum generates contested takes ranging from sacrosanct piety to a needless ritualism best shunned. But there’s a unanimous consensus on dignified last rites, allowing the bereaved their space, and not turning a sombre, tearful event into a headline-worthy array of splendid fireworks or a grotesque sight inducing revulsion and horror.

Perverse fixation with the macabre, and picturing it to embody a hecatomb, has heightened with non-stop cameras flashing and the race against time to dish out the most mournful, evocative and spine-chilling tragedy.

Animation of deaths as hellish cinematic voyeurism and de-personalizing the departed as mere numbers that will grace flow charts and then used as either signposts or scarecrows in discourse, has become the practice.

"To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability", wrote Susan Sontag.

But by vicariously partaking in it – and broadcasting it to others to either partake in the tragic or view it as an oddity – the vulnerability is both overexposed and reduced to banality.

Colonial skin, postmodern mask

During the adventurist early phase of the British Raj and the colonial rivalries for supremacy in the subcontinent, evangelical morality was aghast at witnessing Hindu funerals and the dead being consigned to flames. It was something unfathomable to them and served as a vindication of their firmly held belief: the extreme savagery, ruthlessness and barbarism of the benighted natives.

It wasn’t the romantic myth of the noble savage, but affirmation of a wicked, immoral, corrupt and degenerate reprobate who has to be remoulded entirely into a newer genus.

The taboo against funerals wasn’t limited to just western colonialists, but among the Central Asians too. Marwari and Shikarpuri merchants who had trading outposts in Isfahan, Samarkand, Bokhara and all the way till Orenburg and Astrakhan, were allowed cremation strictly within their enclosures to not offend local sensibilities and garner hostility.

What was once a source of fear and loathing, of contempt and denigration, and a marker of cultural incompatibility, has apparently become a reverse oriental fetish of exoticism, with a similar subconscious tone of sheer insensitivity.