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Art and Visual Anthropology, Blog

Anagha Anil: Portrait Populism: On the Communist Iconography of Kerala

Image 1: A portrait of the first chief minister of Kerala, E.M.S. Namboodiripad displayed at the
kolaya (a Ravi Varma painting could be observed on the adjacent right wall), photo by T.P. Bineesh

Communism continues to thrive both as a ubiquitous presence and a powerful electoral force in the south Indian state of Kerala. Established in 1940, the Communist Party of Kerala formed the first democratically elected government of the state in 1957. By organizing popular movements which demanded the abolition of feudalism, landlordism, and the transfer of land to its tillers, the Communist Party gained a strong foothold amongst the masses and built a solid base in rural areas from where it could not be dislodged (Fic, 1970). Today, the communist movement in Kerala, especially as represented by its dominant party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPI(M)], can be said to display tendencies of populist movements, including a cult of a leader-hero and the rhetoric of a ‘pure people’ versus the ‘corrupt elite’ (Mudde & Kaltwasser, 2017).

This blog looks at the perpetuation of the leader cult in Kerala through the use of commemorative portraits. Disseminated through domestic and digital spaces, these images reinforce a sense of collective identity among party workers while also invoking filial sentiments. I will be reading such negotiations utilising the idea of corpothetics or corporeal aesthetics which concerns the mobilisation of all senses for the appreciation of a text (Pinney, 2004). The concept is utilized appositely to understand the filial mode of reverence, effected by everyday embodied practices which enhance the affective potential and emotional capital of the Party. Such engagements, which are sensory/sentimental in character, play a key role in embedding the Party as an affective presence (rather than an abstract political programme) within the state of Kerala.

Portraits and Corpothetic Engagement

A discussion of the portraits of communist leaders hung in Kerala houses is necessary to properly situate the cultural context in which digital iconography is circulated and made meaningful. The part of the house which opens to the front yard is usually an open space (called kolaya or sit-out), which in many Kerala houses serves as a display area for objects such as family photographs, trophies, photos of Gods and ancestors, and other decor items, expecting public appreciation (see image 1).

The portraits of former Communist leaders are hung in the houses of party supporters in the kolaya. The kolaya thus functions as a private sphere communicating the family’s socio-cultural inclinations, ideologies, and aspirations. With their fixed frontal stance, these images can initiate an embodied interaction with the beholder, whose eye here functions not only as an organ of vision but also of touch. This notion could be explicated further by discussing how the mutuality of vision and its ensuing tactility was deployed in early mythological films. The devotee in such films would beseech the deity to interfere in moments of pain and distress. The dialogue that transpires between the two of them is cinematically represented through intermittent shots that show the eyes of the devotee and the deity. Sometimes even a ray would pass from the deity’s eye to that of the devotee, thereby liberating her/him from their suffering. Thus, within the Indian context, the eye is more than an organ of vision but also of touch (Pinney, 2004). The emotional resonance evoked by these portraits is to be contextualized in this corporeal visual culture.

Image 2: Portraits of International Communist leaders along with that of a family ancestor in former MLA (Member of Legislative Assembly) C.P Narayanan’s House, photo by author

In his study of family photographs in Kerala, Sujith Kumar Parayil (2014) demonstrates that apart from documenting the family, these photographs function as performances of the interpersonal and intimate relations between family members while also displaying their cultural capital (Parayil, 2014). He also notes how these families have a penchant for displaying the portraits of ancestors or deceased family members along with deities, thus enabling a corpothetic performance of commemoration (see image 2). Such a display is rendered corpothetic when the beholder engages with the photographs through everyday practices such as dusting, garlanding or lighting a lamp in front of the portrait.

In the Malabar region of north Kerala, where Communism emerged and continues to flourish as a formidable force, portraits, found in both Dalit and upper caste households, are often placed along with photos of Gods or ancestors, functioning as surrogates for what they represent. The portraits displayed include regional and international male leaders of the Communist movement such as E.M.S. Namboodiripad (the first chief minister of Kerala), P. Krishna Pillai, Joseph Stalin etc. along with other local leaders and ‘martyrs’ (images 1 and 2).

The reverence and admiration directed towards these portraits by the family members are performative in character, demonstrating their loyalty and affiliation towards the Party. . For instance, in image 1 the family members of the Communist family home are observed sitting in the kolaya to commemorate the ‘martyr’ Azhikodan Raghavan. A portrait of former chief minister E. M. S Namboodiripad could be seen in the background, as displayed in the kolaya. The choice of the family members to pose in the kolaya was not accidental but can be seen as a conscious decision to affirm the family’s affiliation as supporters of the Communist Party. Such transactions empower the images to exert a corrective moral eye while the visible presence of the ancestors coerces the family members to adhere to the norms and morals encoded within the family. Actions like placing the Communist portrait at a crucial spot (veranda, living room, and dining room) along with portraits of family elders (image 2) while ensuring adequate visibility, also guarantee the quotidian yet affective commemoration of the Communist movement.

Image 3: Screenshot of an Instagram post commemorating Vladimir Lenin’s death anniversary on January 21st, from the official Instagram page of CPI(M), Kerala

Communist Iconography in Social Media

Social media plays a crucial role in determining the arc of Indian politics. It played a pivotal role in facilitating the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) victory in the 2014 elections (Kanungo, 2015). A recent example would be Rahul Gandhi’s strategic choice to engage with social media vloggers and YouTubers instead of relying solely on mainstream media during his “Bharat Jodo Yatra” (Unite India March 2023).

The situation is no different with Communist parties in Kerala, with the Communist Party of India (CPI) and especially the Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPI(M)] that has been active on social media since 2016, following the example set by other political parties. The integration of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and WhatsApp into the official communication stream of government administrative institutions would be an example. However, Party officials also utilize social media to disseminate iconography in an attempt to cultivate a digital populist style. These iconographic artifacts include posters and reels which glorify the leader while foregrounding the participatory politics of the Party. An example is image 3, posted on Instagram, commemorating Vladimir Lenin by superimposing his image over a couple of other photographs where he is seen as addressing the masses or leading them on a strike. Circulated in the form of posts, tweets and stories, such expressions intensify the affective potential of left populism in Kerala while also validating its democratic appeal among the people.

Image 4: Screenshot of an Instagram post commemorating Cheemeni Massacre on 23rd of March; the Party Office of Cheemeni along with the portraits of martyrs could be seen at the top (from left: K. V Kunjikannan, P. Kunjappan, C. Koran, Aalavalathil Ambu, M. Koran), from official Instagram page of CPI(M), Kerala

These digital images also function as counterparts to the portraits discussed in the previous section. Digital posters of the Party are suffused with captions, images of a red sickle and hammer, red festoons, Party flags, etc. Image 4 is a poster commemorating the Cheemeni massacre, where five CPM members were killed by Congress workers on March 23rd1987, at the Cheemeni Party Office of Kasaragod district in Kerala. A notable aspect of this poster is how the Cheemeni Party Office, the site of the massacre, is foregrounded. With portraits of ‘martyrs’ placed on top, the image of the dilapidated Party office superimposed with a blood splash triggers associated memories of the massacre. Such a representation effectively tweaks the images’ affective value and ensuing ‘stickiness’ – that is the way in which emotions and feelings get attached to particular objects, situations, or people, influencing one’s perception and interactions over time (Ahmed 2004).

Portraits of leaders are also circulated in similar fashion after including certain extensions. An example would be an Instagram post (image 5) featuring the image of E. Balanandan, former MP, Politburo member, and secretary of the CITU (Centre of India Trade Unions). Commemorating the death anniversary of the veteran Communist leader, the poster bears a portrait of Balanandan with other iconographic artifacts in the background, such as the Communist flag and red festoons. Further, it is accompanied by a caption elaborating on the leader and his contributions to the Party. When added to the portrait, such stylizations become corpothetic as they are implemented through actual tactile engagement with the image which entails a mere swish of the finger.

Image 5: Screenshot of an Instagram post commemorating E. Balanandan’s death anniversary on January 19th, from the official Instagram page of CPI(M), Kerala

Such modifications could be read as digital articulations of corpothetic practices which until then were directed towards actual photographs. Such gestures are further amplified through actions such as commenting, sharing, and liking which has an ability to “strengthen the shared affective and political meaning-making in the community” (Hokka & Nellimarkka, 2020, 3).

The Party in everyday life

These novel forms of Communist iconography with their interactive features, invoke a new form of digital populism that requires to be performed online. Youngmi Kim (2008, 122) defines digital populism as a new type of political behaviour marked by the political use of the internet as a form of political participation as well as an instrument of mobilisation. Actuated through individualized engagements, this virtual replication of proximal empowerment (Pinney, 1997) comes across as a performance of self within the digital world. It is this performance that Schechner calls a form of public dreaming (qtd. In Papachirissi 2003, 98).

The participatory aspect of digital populism facilitates engagement of the people with the communist movement without being restricted by the constraints of formal Party lingo ridden by rigid theoretical diction. Udupa et al. (2019) highlight the significance of colloquialism in such digital interactions. Communist Parties in Kerala employ region specific and colloquial cultural references in social media. Such expressions of digital populism, which incorporate the rhetoric of the popular, facilitate the transcendence of the Party from the realm of the political to that of the affective. Nested in one’s day-to-day life, these artefacts found both in domestic spaces and social media, are crucial towards rendering the Party quotidian.

Anagha Anil is currently a PhD scholar in Cultural Studies at Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Karnataka, India. Her research focuses on the corpothetics of communist iconography in contemporary Kerala. Her research interests include visual studies, popular culture and film studies.

References

Ahmed, S. 2004. “Affective Economies.” Social Text 22, no. 2: 117-139.  

Fic, V. M. 1970. Kerala Yenan of India – Rise of Communist Power 1939-1969. Bombay: Nachiketa Publications.

Hokka, J. and Nelimarkka, M.. 2019 “Affective Economy of National-Populist Images: Investigating National and Transnational Online Networks through Visual Big Data.” New Media & Society, 1-23.

Kanungo, N. T. 2015 “India’s Digital Poll Battle: Political Parties and Social Media in the 16th Lok Sabha Elections.” Studies in Indian Politics 3, no. 2: 212–28,

Kim, Y. 2015 “Digital Populism in South Korea? Internet Culture and the Trouble with Direct Participation” in Digital Activism in Asia Reader, eds. N. Shah, P. Purayil Sneha and S. Chattapadhyay. Milton Keynes: Meson Press. Pp:13-126.

Mudde, C. and Kaltwasser, C. R. 2017 Populism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford; New York, Ny: Oxford University Press.

Parayil, S. 2014. “Family Photographs: Visual Mediation of the Social.” Critical Quarterly 56, no. 3 :1-20.

Pinney, C. 2004. Photos of the Gods: Printed Image and Political Struggle in India. London: Reaktion Books.

Pinney, C. 1997. Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Udupa, S., Venkatraman. S., and Khan, A. 2020. “‘Millennial India’: Global Digital Politics in Context.” Television & New Media 21, no. 4: 343-359

Cite as: Anil, Anagha 2024. “Portrait Populism: On the Communist Iconography of Kerala” Focaalblog 26 June. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/06/26/anagha-anil-portrait-populism-on-the-communist-iconography-of-kerala/

Blog

Júlia Fernandez: Outside of Humanity: Palestinian Children and the Value of Life

The algorithm swiftly gets it –yes, I am sucked in by news about Gaza- and collapses my social media platforms’ feeds into a monothematic thread that mirrors my recently (re)ignited preoccupation with the genocide of the Palestinian people. A Middle Eastern, female illustrator’s art work I started following on Tuesday shows up at the top of the screen. Her drawing of Wadie Al Fayoume – white eyeballs, embraced in an arch of red flowers, the same gesture and the same happy birthday hat he wears in the pictures that have circulated online after his killing – precedes the onset of my scrolling through the tawdry spectacle of death with an uncanny allusion to what it might have looked like to be alive.

Image 1: A mural artwork in a town in West Bank features a person wearing a keffiyeh and holding a Palestinian flag. The words ‘Resist to Exist’ can be read in English. Photo by Júlia Fernandez, August 2017.

After him, startled faces of terrified children, blood-dripping foreheads, cheeks covered in trails of tears and dust unfurl a grotesque witnessing of suffering; I am not immune to their affective power. ‘You Muslims must die’, the news says Wadie Al Fayoume’s murderer said before stabbing him to death in his house in Chicago. The pungent rawness of blurry video footages from Gazan hospitals revolts me, as they become, like Wadie, animated traces of lives that might soon be, if they are not yet, lost.

The narrative and visual dimensions of social media portraits of ‘what is going on in Gaza’ invert the effacing of the traces of the living that numbers on the news do, but they do so through a grammar of compassion for ‘all souls lost’ – the recognition of those as (former) living beings, and thus, Judit Butler would argue, the assertion of their grievability – with which a staggering surge of posts unreflectively registers a moral inflection toward neutrality. What I find more disturbing is not the invocation of a denial of what is in fact the very real differential distribution of grievability that is at work in such sites of violence, but how the ‘both-sides’ -or ‘no sides’- rhetoric, articulated by people who bestow themselves with the title of ambassadors of a common humanity, is oblivious to the fact that Palestinian children are not really apprehended as living until they are dead.

When the suffering of some is rendered accessible only when it can be equalized to that of others, the presumably uncomplicated language of a universal value of lives carries in fact the implicit recognition, by virtue of its omission, of what the battlefield makes evident: not all lives are counted as livable.  Representations of common suffering elicit in fact interrogations of what counts as humanity, for they mobilise the term as if it were an empty signifier, sliding into ethically unfixed questions of what –and when this what– is a livable and grievable life, and what -and when- it is not. In positing a fantasy of equivalences, they omit the fact that in denying them the social conditions that enable the persistence, sustainment and thriving of life, Israel deprives Palestinians of life even before they are killed, inevitably tapping from a moral economy of suffering in which Palestinian deathis historically normalized and socially reified.

In a sort of collective aphasia (Stoler, 2011), accounts of suffering and pain are measured against each other through a grammar of false equality between what the colonizer’s absolute right to kill differentiates in terms of valuable and non-valuable lives. The long-standing pervasiveness of colonialism, dispossession and killing power becomes muffled; its monopolization of an unlimited right to self-defense denied in historically illiterate proposals of peacebuilding rooted in Solomonic repartitions of the territory and allocations of quasi sovereignties. Framings of the violence that often accompany such accounts as a ‘war’, or a ‘conflict’, often uncritically registering the tensions at stake through the performative solidarity of posting two flags together, raise unsettling questions about how the equation of the suffering of ones to the suffering of others – or the recognition of their shared humanity – seems so often to acquire meaning alongside a conceptual erasure of the long-standing power imbalances between the sides. To talk of suffering in order to speak about domination, Didier Fassin argues, is to do morals and politics with new words (2008: 532); but what kind of morals and politics are done by the omission of colonial domination that the articulation of frameworks of universal suffering seem to convey?

At the forefront of many calls for action, reflections on grief and loss, and denunciations of the ongoing violence ‘in and around’ the Gaza Strip are children whose suffering bodies, like those of Wadi or the children in hospitals in Gaza, seem to convey a sort of humanitarian discourse of ‘antipolitical moralism’ (Ticktin, 2011: 64). Children occupy, of course, a key place in dominant imaginations of the human and of the ‘world community’ (Malkii 2011), and they do so, in the case that concerns us here, by condensing very particular forms of violence into a moral problematization.

‘It is not a political view but a human response’ declares a dance school in London in their Instagram stories, now gone, imbuing the devastation felt for ‘the loss of innocent lives, especially children’, with a sort of affective affordance that attempts to justify a denial of the politics that are layered in the attribution of differential value to the lives of ones and the lives of the others. A pretension of depoliticisation that invokes in fact a very particular politics, one that reproduces the effacing of the precise context in which violence takes place. In those posts, the continued allegiance to the alleviation of suffering and the condemnation of violence emerges through a language of crisis and urgency that reproduces a particular genealogy of violence and reparation in abstract terms: victims are dispossessed of perpetrators; suffering bodies imagined outside of history and politics; they require help only out of a moral obligation (see Ticktin, 2011).

‘Let these poor innocent children be’ a Bristol based printmaker writes as a concluding demand, posting from the same city where I am. To be what? I wonder; what were Palestinian children being targeted by Israel’s last offensive? What kind of lives, if lives at all, were they living?

The idea of a morally legitimate suffering body collapses again in the figure of children in the words of Arab Israeli politician and journalist Aida Touma-Sliman: ‘a child is a child’; for which she is reprimanded by Knesset member Meirav Ben-Ari with invocations of a lack of symmetry that goes in fact the other way around. Toulam-Sliman is right, but she is also not; a child might be a child within the frames of humanitarian values, but in the rationality of occupation, a Palestinian child is not the same child.

Image 2: Two young girls in a pro-Palestine protest hold banners that read ‘Bombing kids is not self defense’ and what appears as ‘To stand with Palestine is to stand with humanity’. Photo from Dania Shaeeb in Unsplash

In a public endorsement of the ongoing collective punishment against the Palestinian population, Meirav Ben-Ari declares that ‘the children of Gaza have brought this upon themselves’. In this rhetorical unravelling of a selective production and undoing of victims, Hamas’ attacks prove Gazan children’s culpability for their own victimization. Participants of war, children are a ‘category mistake’, Malkki (2010) would say, used in this case to deny the pretension of our shared humanity. Children are, in the colonizer’s rhetoric, perpetrators; they are Hamas’ human shields. They are, as Butler has argued, no children at all, ‘but rather bits of armament, military instruments and materiel’ (2016). The grammar of compassion with which the morally legitimate bodyof the child – and the fantasy of the equal grievability of its life in comparison to Israeli lives – is upheld fails to acknowledge that in the occupied territories, Palestinian children are not really alive as such. They are nothing but a threat against which an absolute power defends the lives of some and destroys the lives of others as it formulates itself. They are like rocks and steel, darkness in human form, a haunting specter of the pervasive threat of terrorism in its developing potentiality.

As highly politically charged sites, Palestinian children embody indeed the racial politics of reproduction that underpin Israel’s colonial settlement project. Perhaps because in the colonizer’s war on demographics Palestinian reproduction stands in the way of the continued success of colonization (Kanaaneh, 2002; Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2015), Palestinian children are produced through the inscription of colonial power in their mothers’ bodies not as made of flesh and bones, but as traces of an unruly destructive power. 

On October the 17th, the Israeli Prime Minister posts on Twitter: ‘this is a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle’. In the now deleted post, a divide operates through a narrative of impossible dichotomies between light and darkness, between humanity and savageness, mirroring the ubiquitous distortion of Palestinian people that articulates the same discourses that reproduce the frames of recognition in which their lives are considered nothing else but a threat to the survival of others. Perhaps in his post Benjamin Netanyahu uses Niebuhr’s novel’s title to refer to such an existential battle, yet the mention of children reinforces its emergence as a powerful signifier that seams together, even if in complicated ways, universalist understandings of humanity and the precise denials of it.

In what terms can this ‘poetics of our common humanity’ (Malkki, 2011) that permeates social media feeds not lose sight of the context in which such disturbing category mistakes – the, literally, ‘children’ of darkness – are produced? In what ways can such calls for compassion – which reify the moral authority with which children, presumably holders of an innocent, unadulterated, presociality (Malkki, 2011; see also Butler, 2016), are often indexed – be attentive to the everyday forms of criminal brutality that deny their mere existence as humans?

That there is no justification for the targeting of children, or any civilian of any age, is unquestionable. Yet, the way such claims for equidistance seem so often to compress the history of racialized and settler colonial domination into a ‘war against humanity’, obscure the frames in which Palestinian children’s lives are lives that are not only constrained and cut short, but that are ontologically already lost, placed ‘outside of humanity’, ‘dark matter’.

Júlia Fernandez is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. She specializes in reproduction, care and forced migration. She has conducted research in the West Bank before, focusing on gender and political resistance.

References

Butler, J. (2016): Frames of war: When is life grievable? Verso, London.

Fassin, D. (2008): The Humanitarian Politics of Testimony: Subjectification through Trauma in the Israeli: Palestinian Conflict. Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 531-558

Kanaaneh, R. (2002): Birthing the nation: Strategies of Palestinian women in Israel. University of California Press.

Malkki, L. (2010): ‘Children, Humanity, and the Infantilization of Peace’, in Ticktin and Feldman (eds): In the name of humanity: the government of threat and care. Durham, Duke University Press.

Shalhoub-Kevorkian, N. (2015): The politics of birth and the intimacies of violence against Palestinian women in occupied east Jerusalem. The British Journal of Criminology, Vol. 55, No. 6, THEMED ISSUE: In the Aftermath of Violence: What Constitutes a Responsive Response?  pp. 1187-1206

Stoler, A. (2011): Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France. Public Culture, Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 121-156

Ticktin, M. (2011): Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitaranism in France. Berkeley, University California Press.

Cite as: Fernandez, Júlia 2023 “Outside of Humanity: Palestinian Children and the Value of Life” Focaalblog 31 October. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/10/31/julia-fernandez-outside-of-humanity-palestinian-children-and-the-value-of-life/