Images and Memory

Interesting presentation by Kunda Dixit today at ICES, jointly hosted with CEPA.

Of course, the Nepali conflict was very different to the Sri Lankan one: the duration was 10 years, it was primarily a class war, not an ethnic one, and most important, at the end of the war there were no winners and losers.   Hence the possibility of formation of government that included the rebels, and even the integration of the Maoist rebels into the Nepali army.

Dixit talked about taking the photo exhibition to the conflict areas as well as showing it in Kathmandu.  The main message seems to be that the Nepali reaction to the conflict has been 'never again', that the people involved in the conflict have moved on in their personal lives despite the ever present spectre of the violence and its impacts, and that at some level the exhibition has been an opportunity for catharsis. That, at the level of the individual, and especially the ordinary women, men and children involved in the conflict.

At a society level, however, I wonder how much images of violence can have a general healing effect.   Societies today are exposed to so many images of violence and destruction, in movies, in day to day reporting of disasters, accidents, war that I suspect that it needs a particular kind of political commitment to non-violence and a sensitivity to suffering to interpret these photos in a way that leads to healing. Kunda Dixit certainly has that, but do we all?

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