Patience

Hate-fuelled violence reconfigures the social landscape in figurative and literal senses: both the emotive fabric of friendship, neighbourhood, love, and the material landscape of the city’s streets, alleys, shopfronts, cars, buses, burial grounds. Hate-violence thus reimagines and re-images the world; restructures it normatively and physically. This photo-essay presents the visual aftermath of the February 2020 communal violence in Delhi. The photographs are situated in a narrative of the author’s personal journey to the sites of violence, along with the history of communal tension in the city and its periodic eruption (usually with the sanction of the State) into large-scale pogroms. Word and image combine to give us a visceral sense of the destruction of a lifeworld and of the personal and political negotiations that follow, through which survivors must, somehow, attempt to channel their anger and grief.