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War and Representation in India

Récits et représentations de guerres en Inde
Subarno Chattarji et Swatie

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  • 1 Frederic Jameson, “War and Representation,” Special Topic War, PMLA, Vol. 124, No. 5, Oct. 20 (...)

1In his seminal essay titled “War and Representation”, Frederic Jameson writes about the realist and post-realist phase of European aesthetics related to war.1 In a discussion raising the issue of which of these two styles – realist or post/anti-realist – imbue a greater force of authenticity to the event of war, he mentions a few aspects regarding how war is usually represented (in the Anglo-European model). He states that there are eight templates for war representation in literature that either adhere to, through verisimilitude, or dismantle, through defamiliarisation, the atrocity of war. The eight styles that Jameson has in mind consist of the following:

  • 2 Ibid., 1533.

the existential experience of war, (2) the collective experience of war, (3) leaders, officers, and the institution of the army, (4) technology, (5) the enemy landscape, (6) atrocities, (7) attack on the homeland, and (8) foreign occupation.2

2The templates situate most tropes in war aesthetics to one of these eight modes and modalities of representation. Jameson’s point is to ask if post-realist texts help fetishize war representation where war is represented as the absence of peace time and wage labour. Jameson’s argument is based on the link between aesthetics and modes of economic production. Our focus lies elsewhere.

  • 3 See Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Stanford: Stanford (...)

3In highlighting these templates as dominant forms, Jameson, however, helps us realise that though war representation is based on the necessity to tell the tale, it uses select tropes and templates that form a cultural artefact that can be produced and reproduced regardless of which war, which country, which subject. Jameson shows that culture and the ‘culture industry’ are grounded in certain ‘dominant’ forms of figurative construct.3

4But does it matter who is speaking these tropes, the powerful, or the powerless? Do subject positions and determinants of caste, class, gender, race, ethnicity seem to change the way these tropes are used? In other words, how do subject positions inform the use of war tropes? A glance at media representations seems to suggest collusion with the dominant ideology of their contemporary times. In short, war representation is clearly a function of subject positions and discursive influence over the template that produces the narrative of war.

  • 4 Catherine Savage Brosman, “The Functions of War Literature,” South Central Review, vol. 9, (...)
  • 5 Shormishtha Panja (ed.), Many Indias, Many literatures: New Critical Essays, New Delhi: (...)
  • 6 Arjun Subramaniam, Full Spectrum: India’s Wars 1972-2020, New Delhi: HarperCollins, 202 (...)

5Further, it has been noted that, “the role played by the Trojan War in the whole of ancient Western literature is so central that it can be considered the single most important topic of the body of literature inherited from early Western civilization”.4 In Indian aesthetics too, the narrative of war is not a novelty. One of the oldest epics – The Mahabharata – is focussed on war. These have even been deployed in modern retellings of the epic in, for instance, the play Andhayug, referring to kalyug or apocalypse as a Second World War scenario. But in literature from India, already a vast umbrella term, as there are “many Indias, many literatures”,5 as well as in Indian art and culture, there are multiple types of representations that testify to many wars (international, regional, national, domestic) as well.6

Demanding representation, resisting representation

  • 7 Arjun Subramaniam, India’s Wars: A Military History 1947-1971, New Delhi: HarperCollins, 20 (...)
  • 8 See Navtej Purewal, “The Indo-Pak Border: Displacements, Aggressions and Transgress (...)

6The consolidation of an Indian Independent state has also been a narrative of war, from wars of Independence in an erstwhile colony, to the collective trauma of Partition. Yet, “India’s wars” go beyond just conflicts with Pakistan and China.7 The narrative of war is also inclusive of the othering of the ‘enemy state’, a fetishisation of the border, and portraying certain marginal citizens as others, to present the power of this narrative, and an insistence that those who have witnessed war possess an insider’s insight not otherwise possible.8

  • 9 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History, Baltimore: John (...)

7In modern independent India, war has been among the ways in which the nation state has consolidated itself and its narrative. With Partition forming “the traumatic wound” in Caruthian terms, subsequent wars with Pakistan can be said to have resulted in “a return of the repressed”.9 With China too, historically, the notions of self / home / nation are pitted in opposition to other / foreigner / enemy. Nationalism and patriotic narratives of this dichotomous tendency are found abundantly in the media. On the other hand, several alternative narratives have focussed on shared histories and cosmopolitanism torn apart by forces of communal strife. In all cases, regardless of the narrative emphasis, war necessitates representation.

  • 10 Kate McCloughin, Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq, (...)

8Kate McLoughlin warns that even as war “resists representation, [war] demands it”,10 which for the Indian context implies that the force of the trauma of war may deny representability to the traumatic core at the heart of it. Yet, it is a core that labours to be rendered visible and (re)presented. Modern combat has a force of atrocity and bloodshed that resists adequate representation. The human loss of war is also one that cannot be adequately represented, yet assumes that it must be represented. The unrepresentability of war and its traumas is a consistent line of argument in studies of war. However, as McLoughlin’s statement implies, wars can and are represented so that the hitherto unimaginable is expressed. Such expressions need new linguistic registers and forms and, in the face of hideous traumas such as the Holocaust or the Partition, writers and artists have forged these new modes of representation.

  • 11 Primo Levi, The Complete Works of Primo Levi, New York: Liveright, 2015. See also: (...)

9Similarly, studies on literature of war has shown how the theatre of war places its actors in a morally ambiguous zone. This has been the learning from the Holocaust, the invasion of Vietnam, among others.11 Placed in what are ‘choiceless choices’, the war discourse of the West tends to focus on ethical responses and failures therein in the face of war. Scholars of war in the West have felt the need to eschew representing war as a linear and unidimensional topic. Even in the Indian context, war has been a preoccupation of literature, cinema, art and culture post-Independence in India. Be it the graphic narratives in non-English dailies in Malayalam which use the Mahabharata as the starting point of an aesthetic framing of war, or Indian writing in English of the late 1980s which combines western aesthetic preoccupations with challenging grand narratives, representing war has been thought of as a multilayered and morally difficult area to broach.

  • 12 For example, Border, 1997, dir. J.P. Dutta, JP Dutta.

10However, in recent times, the jingoism of the media and tendency in cultural artefacts to fetishise the border, dismantle ethical dilemmas in favour of unthinking patriotism, speak of a larger shift in the aesthetics and politics of war. For instance, there is a dichotomous tendency of Indian military fiction in the last few decades to place its thriller setting in a nationalistic fervour, with the heroic mode and patriotism going hand in hand.12

  • 13 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, op. cit., 1955.
  • 14 Tarun K. Saint, Witnessing Partition, New Delhi: Routledge, 2010; Ravikant and Tarun K. (...)

11War, riot, and communal tensions are often depicted in cultural and aesthetic representations from India but these texts are usually connected to the Partition. While understanding the Partition as the traumatic core of communal tension and riot reverberating in modern times, as a “compulsion to repeat,”13 this journal issue does not discuss the Partition directly, owing to the scholarly work already published on the subject.14 Instead, it locates the pre-Partition and post-Partition turmoils as linked to divisive wounds already in social existence.

12Furthermore, the literary and cinematic history of engagement with war in India is a rich but hitherto understudied field. We hope this special issue highlights the diversity and plurality of this research area. In attuning to the theoretical problematics and histories on the subject, we hope to underline the novelty of our approach. From a historical point of view, we thus aim to decentre the First World War and the Second World War. The theoretical attempt is to posit a dialogue with European perspectives of the World Wars, as also having non-European reactions and histories while simultaneously provincialising the European versions of the World Wars. Geographically speaking, the focus of these articles ranges from the states of Punjab, West Bengal, India’s ‘troubled’ North East, and Kerala.

13Further, our approach is to expose the challenges of area studies that seem to label armed international conflict such as that between India and Pakistan as an impasse, by showing how art, memorialization, and other aspects of culture and cultural studies can, in fact, offer contrary perspectives. For this purpose, we have broadened the view of the text to include not just novels, short stories, and prose but also encompass cinematic texts, graphic narratives (cartoons), and museum collections. Moreover, this collection of articles also addresses and challenges various research fields intersecting with the experience of war: history from below, vernacular aspects to colonisation, cosmopolitanism, comedy, gender and genre, death studies, cinema, among others.

14While these texts are diverse in their engagement with the issues of war they also focus on some common points of aesthetic concerns. In each of these articles, the focus is on war, but with the emphasis that the experience of war is not a grand unified and unidimensional event which is out there, which has then to be represented. Rather, the insistence is on creating art, which at various levels, shapes, anticipates or reimagines the topic of war. Each of these articles begins with the assumption that war in the dominant form can have residual and emergent structures as well. That aesthetic engagement with war goes beyond nationalist depictions and unquestioning patriotic fervour. Our aim is to retain a sense of criticality, historicise and remain sensitive to local contexts.

15In the articles that follow in this special issue, Nassif Muhammed Ali engages with the representation of the two World Wars in cartoons in Malayalam dailies. He traces the vernacularisation of the two World Wars in cartoons in magazines like the Sanjayan, Vishwaroopam, and Naradar. He is interested in how each of these subjects is depicted in various parts of the Indian state of Kerala, and understands how each of these depictions also embodies a view of war as “glocal”. Yet his argument and history of these cartoons is one that questions the binaries of Western and vernacular events.

16Bhasha Mandal highlights the 1943 famine in Bengal during the Second World War and its representation in Bengali cinema. It posits a link between famine and war by arguing that the millions of deaths caused by starvation are a direct result of British imperialist policies in colonial India during the war period. The representation of the Bengal famine in Bengali Parallel Cinema of Independent India is highlighted as a discussion of the “collateral” violence of war.

17Meenakshi Bharat analyses the idea of humour as a potential representative tool in cinema to talk of the serious issue of war, through the Hindi war comedy. She traces the history of the war film as a serious business in Hindi cinema and the unusualness of using humour to talk of the India-Pakistan conflict. She discusses how the film War Chhod Na Yaar presents an alternative vision to the usual nationalist pride, leading to an examination of the binaries of us and them, friend and enemy, and so on.

18In her examination of the “disturbed” areas of Kashmir and Manipur, L. Gitarani Devi looks at the issue of violence against men. She highlights the discursive production of gender in these cases as it helps comprehend the sexualised violence on men which is presented in human rights discourse as “torture”. Devi uses the lens of gendered violence therefore to elaborate on texts from Manipur and Kashmir. The article also underlines civilian constructions of alternate, more humane masculinities compared with the violent articulations of it by state and non-state actors. 

19Swatie looks at Indian writing in English and the centrality of the Indo-China war and riots in Bengal in the 1960s as found in the writing of Amitav Ghosh. She finds alternate perspectives of war in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, which she labels as the photographic vision. Discussing the representation of the Tresawsen family photographs in the novel, she argues that the photographs of war highlight Ghosh’s writing style as contesting several grand narratives of the World Wars and so-called local histories of the 1960s Bengal riots.

20Finally, Radhika Chopra pays close attention to the memorialisation of war, especially of lives lost, through museum collections. She analyses the visual archive at the Central Sikh Museum in Amritsar, Punjab, to demonstrate an ethnographic framework in which pictures of the war dead are circulated and represented. Her understanding of language used in memorialisation, such as with the muh dekhai rituals of the dead and the visual semiotics that underline the wounded corpse also highlights the notion of linguistic representations of war.

21We hope the multiplicity of languages and archives in this journal issue will contribute to the ongoing necessary research on war and representation within what is a very rich cultural and linguistic Indian literary, cinematic, cultural and artistic tradition, but also one which (unfortunately) encompasses many wars, battles, and deaths in its history.

22This journal issue is the result of research initiated under the Institute of Eminence programme at the University of Delhi. The editors wish to express their gratitude to the University of Delhi for the Faculty Research Programme grant which enabled this research.

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Bibliographie

ADORNO Theodor W. and Max HORKHEIMER, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.

BHARAT Meenakshi, Shooting Terror: Terrorism in Hindi Films, New Delhi: Routledge, 2020.

BHARAT Meenakshi, Troubled Testimonies: Terrorism and the English Novel in India, New Delhi: Routledge, 2015.

BROSMAN Catherine Savage, “The Functions of War Literature,” South Central Review, vol. 9, no. 1, 1992, 85-98.

CARUTH Cathy, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1996.

DUTTA J.P., Border, JP Dutta, 1997.

FREUD Sigmund, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, London: The Hogarth Press, 1955.

JAMESON Frederic, “War and Representation,” Special Topic War, PMLA, Vol. 124, No. 5, Oct. 2009, 1532-47.

KAUL Suvir, Of Gardens and Graves, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017.

McLOUGHLIN, Kate, Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq, Cambridge University Press, 2011.

LEVI Primo, The Complete Works of Primo Levi, New York: Liveright, 2015.

O’BRIEN Tim, The Things They Carried, USA: Houghton Mifflin, 1990.

PANJA Shormishtha (ed.), Many Indias, Many literatures: New Critical Essays, New Delhi: Worldview, 2001.

PUREWAL Navtej, “The Indo-Pak Border: Displacements, Aggressions and Transgressions,” Contemporary South Asia, vol. 12, no. 4, 2003, 539-556.

RAVIKANT and SAINT Tarun K, Translating Partition, New Delhi: Katha, 2001.

SAINT Tarun K, Witnessing Partition, New Delhi: Routledge, 2010.

SUBRAMANIAM Arjun, India’s Wars: A Military History 1947-1971, HarperCollins, 2016.

SUBRAMANIAM Arjun, Full Spectrum: India’s Wars 1972-2020, New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2020.

YONG TAN Tai and Gyanesh KUDAISYA, Partition and Postcolonial South Asia: A Reader, New York: Routledge, 2008.

WILLIAMS Raymond, Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

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Notes

1 Frederic Jameson, “War and Representation,” Special Topic War, PMLA, Vol. 124, No. 5, Oct. 2009, 1532-1547.

2 Ibid., 1533.

3 See Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. See also Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

4 Catherine Savage Brosman, “The Functions of War Literature,” South Central Review, vol. 9, no. 1, 1992, 85-98.

5 Shormishtha Panja (ed.), Many Indias, Many literatures: New Critical Essays, New Delhi: Worldview, 2001.

6 Arjun Subramaniam, Full Spectrum: India’s Wars 1972-2020, New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2020.

7 Arjun Subramaniam, India’s Wars: A Military History 1947-1971, New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2016.

8 See Navtej Purewal, “The Indo-Pak Border: Displacements, Aggressions and Transgressions,” Contemporary South Asia, vol. 12, no. 4, 2003, 539-556; Suvir Kaul, Of Gardens and Graves, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017; Meenakshi Bharat, Shooting Terror: Terrorism in Hindi Films, New Delhi: Routledge, 2020; Meenakshi Bharat, Troubled Testimonies: Terrorism and the English Novel in India, New Delhi: Routledge, 2015.

9 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1996. See also Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, London: The Hogarth Press, 1955.

10 Kate McCloughin, Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq, Cambridge University Press, 2011.

11 Primo Levi, The Complete Works of Primo Levi, New York: Liveright, 2015. See also: Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried, USA: Houghton Mifflin, 1990.

12 For example, Border, 1997, dir. J.P. Dutta, JP Dutta.

13 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, op. cit., 1955.

14 Tarun K. Saint, Witnessing Partition, New Delhi: Routledge, 2010; Ravikant and Tarun K. Saint, Translating Partition, New Delhi: Katha, 2001: Tai Yong Tan and Gyanesh Kudaisya, Partition and Postcolonial South Asia: A Reader, Routledge, 2008.

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Subarno Chattarji et Swatie, « War and Representation in India »Revue LISA/LISA e-journal [En ligne], vol.23-n°59 | 2025, mis en ligne le 12 mai 2025, consulté le 12 juin 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/lisa/16792

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Auteurs

Subarno Chattarji



Subarno Chattarji is Professor in the Department of English at the University of Delhi, India. He has also taught in Japan and Wales. His teaching and research focus on the literature of the Vietnam War and Holocaust memoirs. He studied at the universities of Delhi and Oxford, and was a Fulbright Senior Research Fellow at La Salle University, Philadelphia (2004-2005); a Kluge Postdoctoral Fellow at the Library of Congress (2006); and was awarded an Academic Writing Residency at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, Italy (2017). He is Project Researcher for the International Program on Holocaust and Genocide Education (IPHGE) in India. His published works include Holocaust education in India: Fostering peaceful, resilient, and inclusive societies (lead author, 2024); The Distant Shores of Freedom: Vietnamese American Memoirs and Fiction (2019); Reconsidering English Studies in Indian Higher Education (co-author, 2015); and Memories of a Lost War: American Poetic Responses to the Vietnam War (2001).

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Swatie



Swatie is the author of The New Normal: Trauma, Biopolitics and Visuality after 9/11 and a PhD graduate from the University of Delhi. Her research interests include violence and trauma studies, literary theory, American literature, and war studies. She is also an alumna of The Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth College. She is Assistant Professor, Department of English and Cultural Studies, Panjab University.

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