There’s a sweet lilt in the name Soni Sori, a musicality that makes me think of nursery rhymes and happy trails. I remember saying the name under my breath again and again when I first read Sori’s name. It was an article on the horrific abuse she’d suffered while in custody. The ferocity of the violence the police had inflicted upon her jarred so frighteningly with the simple sweetness of her name.
No one should have to go through what Sori did, but it seemed all the more wrong because... well, just say it out loud. Soni Sori. Soft consonants, rounded vowels, the cadence of a neat rhyme scheme; now forever associated with custodial abuse and rape.
Then again, do Bilqees or Luingamla sound like communal violence or murder? Their stories are two of the eight stories film-maker and artist Amar Kanwar tells in The Lightning Testimonies , currently on display at Max Mueller Bhavan. The exhibition ends next week and with Sori bringing political violence back into the news, there was never a more perfect time to see this exhibition.
Filmed between 2003 and 2007, The Lightning Testimonies looks at political conflict in modern South Asia through the prism of sexual violence. Post-Partition riots, the veeranganas (a euphemistic title given to raped women) of the Bangladeshi war of independence, victims of military abuse in north-east India, the caste-scarred Khairlanji murders and the Godhra riots come together in this work. Kanwar offers no grisly images that can be considered evidence. What he exhibits instead are testimonies that are told against images that would seem almost mundane. Red flowers, a shawl being woven, the squiggly alphabets of a handwritten letter, a city street at night, an empty room. These innocuous objects become immeasurably painful because of the stories that are associated with them. Stories of women who were brutalised and sometimes killed by men who sought to establish their dominance over a terrain and a community. Some are well-known, others obscure. All of them have survived attempts at being suppressed.
Earlier this week, Sori brought political violence back into the news when she was attacked by two men who smeared a “corrosive substance” on her face. Apparently, doctors still don’t know what it was. All we have are images of her scorched face. Is visibly carrying this undeniable evidence of violence upon her body ‘better’ than her last experience, which the Chhattisgarh police deny? (The fact that stones, undetected when Sori was examined by doctors in Chhattisgarh but which miraculously appeared in her body when she was taken to a hospital in Kolkata, had to be surgically removed from Sori’s vagina and rectum are mere details to be dismissed, naturally.) Because this time, her story can’t be reduced to “allegedly”. There’s proof of it and yet, even the sight of her skin burnt to black isn’t enough to convince everyone.
The story of violence upon women is always fiction until proven as fact and, of course, facts in these stories are difficult to ascertain. Injured bodies heal, wounds can be explained, trauma doesn’t always leave scars. What a survivor has are her stories, her words. It’s tempting to deny them credibility. When you do, you're protecting yourself from the fact that we are capable of violence that is terrifying in its inventive cruelty.
The Lightning Testimonies is a difficult exhibition to watch, not because of its imagery but because of the searingly painful accounts and the multi-channel installation. You sit in a darkened room, surrounded by large screens that simultaneously play the eight stories. You can't follow all of them and even when you determinedly focus on just one screen at a time, the others clamour for your attention. There are some stories that are less disheartening than others, but what stays with you is the refrain that Kanwar has chosen. It's a snippet showing veteran Manipuri actress Sabitri Heisnam. You see her, full of magnificent, defiant rage, in scenes from the Draupadi. Every 32 minutes, Heisnam appears on screen and lets out a shout that's as much a wail as a war cry. It’s a reminder that evidence disintegrates, allegations fade, bodies heal and corpses disappear; but art remembers.
The writer is a critic and author
You sit in a darkened room, surrounded by large screens that simultaneously play the eight stories
