Witch-Hunting in the Age of Media
A Feminist
By Rajesh Kumar Sharma
The following letter to the editor was sent to The Tribune and The Hindustan Times, both published from
But the police and the media had already done the harm, scarring
the girl’s psyche and ruining her reputation –a terrible thing in a society
that still cherishes the traditions of honour and
inviolate virginity. Neither the police nor the media has, however, attracted
any penalty, or for that matter even official condemnation, for violating a
young girl’s basic human rights.
If
you thought witch-hunting had become extinct, you should reboot your OS
(Opinion System). Witches are preternatural inventions and, for precisely that
reason, immortal. Immortal, though historical. Societies
reinvent them from the recyclable stuff of desire and fantasy.
In
spite of the feminist attempts at appropriating the witch as a sign of
extra-patriarchal or anti-patriarchal female power, real women continue to
suffer when branded as witches. They are hounded and stoned, quite often to
death. But even when they are not so branded, they may suffer similar
persecution because they embody the threat of mysterious overwhelming power.
The sexually attractive woman lives, thus, a double life in the theatre of
patriarchal projections: as half fairy and half witch. Pornography flourishes
in this twilight of double consciousness: before the sex object that stirs with
a sexuality of its own, the patriarchal defenses threaten to fall
defenselessly. From the primitive and the feudal to the modern and the
postmodern, nothing seems to change much. You are stoned, or shot with a
camera. The paparazzi replace the urchins.
In a
bizarre way, the archaic has returned in the strange case of Anara Gupta to
bewitch the Indian society in its moment of change. The post/modernizing Indian
society bares its cannibal teeth to tear the flesh off a living young woman. As
culture becomes the fastest growing sector of an economy that remains
essentially patriarchal, the female body becomes the most productive site of
cultural production.
It
all begins with the police ‘framing’ Anara as a porn beauty queen: they
‘register’ a criminal case against her without adequate preliminary
investigation and ‘represent’ her to the media as a porn starlet. And the media
succumb readily to the temptation. Here,
after all, is a news story that can stand against the lewdest advertisement
copy. After pornography has already
entered the mainstream in advertising, is it not time it did so in news too?
And if there is nothing to represent, something can be, well, simulated. It is
a moment of trial for the entrepreneurial genius, which has to prove that
The
logic of media under late capitalism, thus, fabricates an object that does not
have any ground in reality. The competitive grabbing for audience attention
allows room for no precaution because playing with an ordinary, small town
girl’s name involves no great risk.
Compare
this to what happened a few years ago in
Gender,
money and political power do make a difference, don’t they?
So a
young woman’s (re)invention as a gorgeous but evil seductress by the morally
ambivalent patriarchal media, which execrates her
conduct even as it pruriently exhibits frames of the porn CD allegedly
featuring her. The media would have the best of both worlds. And hand out the
double deal to the audiences too.
In
the competitive masculinist ecology of the globalizing market, the media has
come to invest its stakes almost exclusively in libidinal capital. And it uses
the ruse of impersonal technologies to let the sleeping dogs of conscience lie:
it is humanly impossible – the juridical argument goes – to subject the
cybernetic systems to surveillance. Like the CEO of baazee.com, the Chief
Editor cannot possibly ‘know’ all that goes online. Welcome to the world of
post-human technology, the technology that has not only gone way past human
control but has begun to demonize and consume human beings.
The
ostensible uncontrollability of technology, however, sits pretty with the interests
of global capital. The will to sell
unplugs strange new channels of creativity. Bodies and privacies can be put on
sale. And bodies can be substituted or fabricated to sell living people. The bottom line is the profit you can make,
and make innovatively. It matters little if that drives some to the verge of
suicide.
Impersonal capital. Impersonal
technologies. But are there really no actors in events of this kind? By
what stratagems is demand produced? Where do profits from these transactions land?
Deep
down in the space of images and simulation, the Anara episode is a replay of
that terrifying episode from the Mahabharata
in which Dushasana tries to disrobe Draupadi in the court of his blind father King Dhritarashtra. The epic archaic now returns in a postmodern
avatar. In the competitive game of one-upmanship, each playing his baazee, they put
a young woman at stake. Her human rights are abrogated. And she is turned into
a commodity of exchange.
Patriarchy, global capital, cybernetic technologies. The
nexus is becoming impenetrably dense against an object that is common and
clear: woman.
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Published
in www.yourblackeye.org
at http://www.yourblackeye.org/2Q05/Sharma_Witch-Hunting_in_the_age_of_Media_2Q05.html
Dr. Rajesh Kumar Sharma
Department of English
E mail: sharajesh@gmail.com