Fiza (2000) looks at the transformation of a lower middle-class Muslim boy into a terrorist.

Aesthetics of Terror?

Even as he analyses the representations of the Muslim Other in popular Hindi cinema, Amit S. Rai examines the bio-political experience of terrorism and assesses the complex, new technology-enabled interface between propositions of violence, security, and corporeality.

     I

     THE RELATIONS BETWEEN AESTHETICS AND TERROR HAVE TAKEN ON A QUALITATIVELY new intensity since 9/11. Differently, this is as true for India as it is for Bush's supposedly secure Homeland. However, this is represented as if it was merely a final and long awaited confirmation of what (elite Hindu) India has known and suffered from - cross-border terrorism and the All India Muslim Personal Law Board, for example. At the highest levels of foreign policy discourse and domestic surveillance, indeed at the level of the everyday, India seems to have been justified by Bush's war against Islamic terrorists, in that America's counter-terrorism initiatives and the ways in which they have been legitimated in discourse, have confirmed some of the most virulent anti-Muslim sentiments and strategies of the Sangh Parivar. Thus, global counter-terror has only been a way of repeating the production of citizenship through the identification, abjection, and quarantining of the terrorist jihadist monster.

     This binary of citizen/terrorist (the normal/the teratological) implies an old strategy and is common to discourses that have accompanied the expanding regime of human security across liberal political economies globally. Not long after 9/11, I wrote, "Monsters gave birth to modernity: those unnamable figures of horror and fascination shadow civilization as its constitutive and abjected discontent. In Europe, from the late eighteenth century on, the term 'monstrosity'mobilized a set of discursive practices that tied racial and sexual deviancy to an overall apparatus of discipline, and later in the nineteenth century, to the emergence of biopolitics. The figures of the Hottentot Venus, the sexual invert, or the barbaric Oriental despot, name specific strategies of that changing apparatus. Today, the monster has re-emerged at the centre of an 'axis of evil,' as a masculine-effeminate 'subject' who embodies Western civilization's ultimate enemy: the Islamic terrorist. The figure produced through these practices - as both instrument and target of a diffuse power - has been taken as the ontological ground stabilizing the borders of nations, races, sexes, genders, classes, and humanity. A genealogy of monstrosity would, then, be situated at the very intersections of these borders." ¹

     Thus, one set of relations between aesthetics and terror can be situated here - in the production of a binary discourse of inhuman, antimodern, and parochial monsters in the Islamic world. This is a fully constituted discourse, and is legible in security policy studies from RAND to SAPRA India. Essentially, its terrain of intervention is the human psyche understood as a discrete field of potential volatility and docility: to know your enemy, his unconscious motivations, his perversions, his unreason, is to defeat him. A form of knowledge, but also now, an academic discipline that is quite explicitly tied to state (and increasingly multi-national capitalist) power. This knowledge, moreover, takes the psyche as its privileged site of investigation. As an article in RAND's Studies in Conflict and Terrorism put it, "Models based on psychological concerns typically hold that 'terrorist' violence is not so much a political instrument as an end in itself; it is not contingent on rational agency but is the result of compulsion or psychopathology. Over the years, scholars of this persuasion have suggested that 'terrorists' do what they do because of (variously and among other things) self-destructive urges, fantasies of cleanliness, disturbed emotions combined with problems with authority and the Self, and inconsistent mothering".

     Articulate attempts at presenting wider, vaguer, and (purportedly) generalizable psychological interpretations of terrorism have been made by, among others, Jerrold M. Post, who has proposed that " . . . political terrorists are driven to commit acts of violence as a consequence of psychological forces, and . . . their special psychologic is constructed to rationalize acts they are psychologicallycompelled to commit'" (Brannan et al, 2001). ­A very particular psyche under-girds such theories: a homogeneous, non-conscious, non-rational, non-intentional, and uniformly violent field of forces. The lines that criss-cross this field are themselves given through discourses of, for instance, normative heterosexual kinship - white mythologies such as "inconsistent mothering" (and hence the "bad" family structure apparently common in the East) are presented as psychological compulsions that effectively determine and fix the mind of the terrorist. In this way, psychologists working within Terrorism Studies have been able to determine and taxonomize the terrorist mind.

     Given the massive, paradoxical, and more or less consistent production of this discourse, in what way does it form an aesthetic? This aesthetic seeks to form conscious habituations at the level of social discipline, metaphorical condensation, and the liberal citizen. But, there is always also a displacement and disguise in its production. Take for instance, the 2004 Zee TV - Paan Parag Bollywood Movie Awards, a veritable love fest across communal lines set in the multicultural haven of the Middle East, Dubai. The on-going rapprochement between Pakistan and India seemed to take cultural form on the stage of the award show as the greats and the hangers-on of the Bollywood film industry came together with a few of their Pakistani (Lollywood) counterparts to express their undying love for one another, ad nauseam. It was a brilliant moment of forgetting and remaking. It was as if Bollywood was able to project itself into a post-Pokaran utopia of cross-border harmony through the simple device of a brightly lit stage, and the sheer will of its glitzy inhabitants. It begged a broader question however: What have been the recent representations of Pakistan, Islam, and communalism in Bollywood?

     Not surprisingly, Muslims, Islam, and international and domestic politics, have continued to form a central thematic of contemporary popular Hindi cinema. Recently (say between 2003 and early 2004), some very high-profile films have hit the domestic and international Bollywood markets: Escape from Taliban: A True Story (2003; dir. Ujjal Chattopadhyaya, starring Manisha Koirala), Pinjar (2003; dir. Chandra Prakash Dwivedi, starring Urmila Matondkar and Manoj Bajpai); Khakee (2004; dir. Rajkumar Santoshi, starring Amitabh Bachchan, Aishwarya Rai, Ajay Devgan); L.O.C.: Kargil (2003; dir. J.P. Dutta, starring Ajay Devgan, Sanjay Dutt, Saif Ali Khan).