Paper short abstract:

This paper argues that the management of the visuality of suffering and death in the context of the pandemic has demarcated privatised grief from the recognition of collective suffering. In doing so the Necronation in India has sought to reaffirm its monopoly over the politicisation of death.

Paper long abstract:

As a critical event (Das 1995), the COVID pandemic has generated new political modalities, questioned relationships of citizenship, and articulated as a crucial moment in the evolution of the nation-state. This paper argues that the management of the visuality of suffering and death in the context of the pandemic has demarcated privatised grief from the recognition of collective suffering. In doing so the state has sought to reaffirm its monopoly over the politicisation of death. In the decade prior to the COVID pandemic, India has seen the rise to power of ‘Erotic Nationalism’ (Nyeck 2013, khanna 2019) premised on passionate attachment to particular figures, templates and embodiments, which themselves constitute a matrix of relationships. Death being central to the erotic( Bataille 1957), the emergent ‘Necronation’ (khanna 2020) has been continually engaged with the production, consumption and signification of death. A crucial element of this is the management of the visuality of death through interventions in the mainstream and social media, like the wide circulation of brutal violence against those constituted as outside the Hindu nation. What happens when the mass suffering and death reference a failure of the nation-state itself? What happens when these deaths lie at the heart of the symbolic heart of the Hindu nation, the banks of the river Ganga? This paper looks at the images of suffering and of death and at their management through violence, incarceration, affective manipulation and the privatisation of grief as elements of the narrative of the reinforcement of Erotic Nationalism.