The concept violence is often used and understood in terms of physical assault and injury, and this sense continues to be used widely. Restricting the term violence to physical violence and ignoring the other forms of violence often leads to the understanding that violence is eruptive and intermittent and otherwise the normal situation is peaceful. This view pays no attention to the violence that is enmeshed in the conditions that are constitutive of what has been understood as normal and peaceful times. Burdened with subjugated identities, individuals and communities are constantly met with both physical and non-physical forms of violence. In many cases, the existence of those identities is inseparable from the violence they face in everyday life. It is also possible to suggest that there is a constitutive violence involved in marking certain identities as more worthy than others; certain lives as more precious than others. Therefore, it is important not to think about violence as merely a phenomenon of intermittency in the otherwise peaceful/normal situation. This is possible by way of configuring violence as not just a physical phenomenon but as also present in situations where physical violence is completely absent. This would allow a broader understanding of the violence that is constitutive of normal and peaceful situations. In addition to physical violence, vulnerable social groups are faced with many other forms of violence reproduced and sustained by state and society.
In countries like ours, the state machinery, such as law, judiciary and police, often protect the relationships of subjugation and domination in the name of law and order. Society reproduces the subjugation by creating and maintaining norms, values and beliefs through various discourses, images, representations and ideologies. Subjugations and dominations are sustained on various axes such as sexuality, gender, caste, region and religion etc. Riddled with ideologies (not of mere ideas but of systematically cultivated, reinforced, reproduced and preserved material practices) of patriarchy, casteism, homophobia, elitism and islamophobia, our societies continue to demonstrate and ensure the subordination of specific sections of the society. All these ideologies sustain themselves and reproduce each other. In such a scenario, it is imperative to have an understanding of violence by which physical violence is part of a larger matrix of violence that operates in the level of discourses, images and representations on the one hand and the conditions that place some as privileged and others as vulnerable on the other hand. Violations of inegalitarian social norms and values by the subjugated communities are often treated as violence and state machinery is often put to work against those communities whenever they protest against or violate those social norms. In many ways state and society work hand in hand to perpetuate the violence and maintain the hierarchical orders that are inherently undemocratic. Draconian state policies and actions are often rationalized in the name of development and welfare of the society, while they displace, stigmatize and push the minority groups to unlivable conditions. An understanding proper of violence is possible by evolving mechanisms not only to grapple with the manifest physical violence, abuse, hatred etc. but also to seriously engage with the conditions, relationships, and institutions that are central and fundamental in producing such violences. Modern institutions of state and bureaucratic institutions often exercise violence not in physical form but in non-physical forms. Similarly, societal norms, governed by beliefs, values, and practices regarding everyday ways of conducting life or the ways one organizes life events often take non-physical form of violence. Nevertheless, there is no denial that often such forms of violence work on human bodies and discipline the ways in which human beings carry themselves to suit the acceptable norms both in private and public. Understanding and acknowledging this necessitates a move that does not restrict and reduce violence to physical actions.
Having noted the inadequacy of the restricted usage of the term violence as physical action, it is also important to see what is the rationality that governs and signifies meaning to such an understanding and what is the ideology that tries to establish violence as strictly physical act of assault, injury and damage etc. This is not to suggest that broader conceptions of violence are an attempt to escape the ideologies of meaning and signification. Indeed, every meaning of the term is inescapably mediated and determined by specific ideological and political persuasions. It is also possible to suggest that within the spectrum of understanding that considers only physical assault, there could be varied dispositions. While police killings, firing pellets and state repression are always presented as governmental mechanisms to maintain peace, law and order, the pelting of stones by students or minority communities is treated as violence. State violence is justified in the name of law and order and journalistic writings often assume that the state has the legitimate power to use force in the interest of whole society whereas other groups involving in resistance is condemned. What is implicit here is an understanding that there are certain violences that are legitimate and the others illegitimate. To put it precisely, it is the legitimacy that determines what is violence and what is not. Since the state institutions are understood to be legitimate agencies in using force and involving in violence, those actions are considered as not violence but legal actions against violence.
While this shows how the meaning of the term is ideologically determined, it also reveals that the same ideological acts determine what is also not violence.
In an interesting way, the identification of an alterity to violence is also taking place strictly within the realm of ideology. Condemnation of violence, without making distinction and the nexus between other kinds of violence and the violence one is condemning, is unproductive and often serves to legitimize the existing socio-political order. First step towards critiquing violence necessitates an understanding about different kinds of violence and their implications. These observations are crucial especially in India where non-violence is upheld both historically and intellectually as a viable alternative against violence as if the meaning of both violence and non-violence are self-explanatory. It is important to note that non-violence is another kind of violence and no imagination of politics exists, or even could exist outside the realm of violence. In many instances language—by extension, discussion and deliberation—is understood as an alternative to violence. This could be seen on arguments that often condemn violence (physical) and propose dialogue or discussion as an alternative to violence as if language, is free of violence. It does not need much effort to remember khap panchayats often produce cruelties that are often outcomes of discussion, deliberation, and talks. It should also be noted that there are conditions that structure the domain of rational discussions and deliberations in such a way that it excludes specific sections of the society though everyone is free to participate in the deliberations. While it may not be easy to suggest alterity to violence, one should be hopeful that violence could be confronted with certain kind of politics. Such politics, we might be aware, may not be free of any semblance of violence though.
Perhaps first step towards a politics against violence involves acts of naming. Naming something as violence is in many ways a dual act. On the one hand it is done against the authorities that are legitimized to name what is violence and what is not. It is against such authority and its refusal to acknowledge something as violence, that naming what has hitherto been unacknowledged as violence becomes a political act. On the other, a fortiori, naming something as violence also entails that a specific condition, relationship or a practice being named is something produced by history and not natural or normal. This act can only be done from an extraneous position whereby the one who names locates herself outside the logic that so far has governed and maintained something as normal, natural and acceptable—therefore non-violent. These acts are also in a way un-naming or re-naming — that these acts refuse to accept the names given and re-signify the meaning of those practices, conditions and relationships etc. These acts are political because they are contestations of (and are also always contested in return by) dominant practices of signification. While state invokes law and order to exercise and justify its brutalities, the dominant groups in any society invoke tradition and culture to cover up the violence. Practices of subjugation and domination are often executed and vindicated in the name of cultural practices. Often the underprivileged groups, particularly women become bearers of the values of tradition and culture of any society. It is always important to break the sanctity of those cultural and traditional practices exposing and naming the violence involved in those practices.
In this volume of the broadsheet, we bring together a set of essays and an interview to discuss significant issues of violence that are otherwise not given much importance in the discussions on violence. We also acknowledge that the issues discussed here do not completely exhaust the different forms of violence that are present in contemporary world. The scope of the broadsheet, in addition to many factors, has been limited by human sources. It nevertheless hopes to be a tentative step towards a broader understanding of violence.
Guest Editors
Parthasarathi teaches at the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad and can be reached at sharathisharathi@gmail.com.
Samata teaches at Bethune College, Kolkata and can be reached at bsamata@gmail.com