In March this year, a video showing two African men being assaulted in a mall in Greater Noida was widely circulated on social media. Like in most visual documentation of real violence where physical bodies clash, I was drawn not to the victim’s plight but the perpetrators’ raw anger, vengeance and adrenaline on display. Most of us who are affected by such visuals spend days and maybe a lifetime trying to understand what transforms a casual bystander into a rage-filled savage. We go round in circles looking for the source of the hate. In January 2016, when photographer Mahesh Shantaram heard that a mob in Bengaluru had stripped a Tanzanian student and set her car on fire for a crime committed by a Sudanese student she didn’t even know, he went to the actual scene in search of clues. The result is a series titled ‘The African Portraits’, which was exhibited first in Bengaluru last year and ended its countrywide tour at Delhi’s Exhibit 320, Lado Sarai, last month.

The series consists of portraits of African expats and students living in India. Most of the photographs were shot in and around the subjects’ homes and there is very little attempt to show Africans’ actual vulnerability in public spaces in India. Further, many of the subjects, instead of looking at the camera, calmly gaze outside the frame. Shantaram’s series is not documentary in nature; the image itself does not give us a “slice of life”. Instead, the photographs seem aware of the legacy of their medium and appear generic, making little or no attempt to visually communicate their context. The narrative is created and controlled through the accompanying text, and both image and text work towards reinforcing the status of their subjects as good immigrants: people with dreams and aspirations, just like you and I. It’s a well-intentioned narrative and one that we are currently proliferating, with a different shade, to appeal to our better nature in these times of rampant communal violence.

A few photographs, however, offered a contrast, the most notable being ‘Done with college, Bangalore, 2016’. Here we see three young men posing on a roof. They are bare-chested, and their low-cut jeans prominently display the brands of their underwear. While one young man’s gaze is directed outside the frame, the other two look directly at us with defiance, their sexual energy and counterculture leanings pretty much being rubbed in our faces. It’s an image that forces us to confront who we are. Do we see these black bodies as we see any other youth — boys coming of age, challenging the status quo as a rite of passage? Or should we be offended by their unabashed assertiveness? Is there a part of us that wants the boys to lower their gaze, put on some clothes out of respect for our culture, and blend in? After all, it is only fair to expect an immigrant to respect and assimilate into our culture.

The more I look at the image, the more I realise how bigoted our good intentions can be. Why should it matter that Africans coming to India have dreams and aspirations just like Indians migrating abroad? Or that the murdered Junaid Khan preferred soya bean biryani to beef? Are we not trying to pretend that differences don’t exist and are we not conflating subservience with being a good immigrant or citizen?

Our bodies act as images that people around us read and interpret. Anything that does not conform — whether it is skin colour or a headgear — is noticed, assessed and a reaction formulated. We can choose to be intrigued by the unknown-ness of the image or be threatened by it. Unfortunately, history amply demonstrates that the latter reaction comes to us more readily.

Perhaps, it is time that we use our present era of unbridled image proliferation to learn to become more conscientious image readers. Our reaction to an image tells us more about who we are than about the subject of the image. Instead of seeking comfort in pretending that those unlike us are just like us, we need to allow the unfamiliar to challenge us till we truly begin to see that being different is the norm, that trying to fit in or making someone else fit into our familiar narrative is a misguided endeavour. A defiant gaze is a reminder that there exists another way of life, we need to learn to use it to define who we are and who we want to be, not just for the sake of Africans in India but also for our fellow citizens.

(This new monthly column approaches broader social concerns through the prism of art)

Blessy Augustineis an art critic based in New Delhi

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