Shuddhabrata Sengupta on Tue, 22 May 2001 19:40:27 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> Delhi's first Cyborg |
Some Thoughts on the Monkey Man: Delhi's first Cyborg? (this is a slightly modified version of a posting that first appeared on the Sarai-Reader-List at http://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list) Parts of Delhi are beseiged by a strange fear.. For a couple of weeks now, sightings of a strange creature, have led to a climateof anxiety in many parts of East Delhi. The creature, who some say is a primate,some describe as humanoid, masked, hemeted or furry, not very big, (five feet or so) with flashing red and green eyes,and extraordinary powers of movement (the abilitiy to jump between buildings and fly) has been menacing eastern Delhi and adjoining industrial areas of Uttar Pradesh state in northern India. (for more on the 'Monkey Man' see the slightly condescending New York Times story at http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/19/world/19INDI.html) This figure, called 'Monkey Man' / 'Bandar Manav' (monkey man) or 'Naqabposh' (the masked one) appears at night and usually attacks people sleeping on rooftops. He/It is described as unusually strong and he leaves scratches on the skin with sharp metallic claws. In a renet tv interview ,a scared resident of east delhi, a young man, attributed the monkey man's powers to a 'computerized system' : flashing bulbs, and an array of buttons that he presses to help him fly away. Is the 'monkey man' or the 'masked one' Delhi's first cyborg? As of now three people (including a preganant woman) have died in night stampedes that occurred when someone raised an alarm in their vicinity. A mob of vigilantes, patrolling a crossroad, have attacked and seriously wounded a person driving a car late at night because he had a helmet in his back seat (they thought that he might be the 'helmeted' attacker), several people have turned up with scratch marks and other injuries at clinics and hospitals and quite a few people have been arrested on the charges of spreading rumours. 3000 armed policemen and 'Rapid Action Force' paramilitaries are patrolling large parts of East Delhi. Vigil is being maintained, not only in neighbourhoods, but apparently also on public telephone booths, where people make calls to police control rooms with news (hoaxes or apparently real reports) with news of 'Moneky Man' sightings. What I find amazing is that in the entire discussion about the Monkey Man in the media in India, no one seems to talk about this palpable sense of fear that many people feel in our city. The 'Monkey Man' may or may not be a real threat, but a strange combination of atavistic primate imagery, high tech gadgetry and the darkness that engulfs the city during power cuts, have created an image of the other powerful enough to have people stampeding to death and want intense police patrolling in their neighbourhoods. The character of violence in our city - bombs in the cinema, masked and mysterious terrorists in public spaces, sudden and unexplainable attacks by policemen - is so impersonal and yet so intimate, so routine and yet so endemic, that it seems to have demanded the existence of an embodied locus of fear. The twist of 'computerized technology' signals the deep roots that the technological imaginry has taken into the unconsious life of Delhi. And as Radhika Chopra, a sociologist has said, "this is one way in which the 'invisible parts of the city' " (those dark, power cut and mosquito laden swamps east of the river) ..."make themselves heard and known". Perhaps this is what the 'Monkey Man' is all about. The congealment of routine violence and the invisible making itself visible, picking strands frorm folklore, mythology, and a science fiction imaginary that percolates into the slums through television serials, b grade horror movies, comics and other forms of popular culture.That circulates through rumours and random anonymous calls made to harass the police from public phone booths. This is an urban contemporary form of cultural expression making sense of the violence of everyday life. I think it needs to be understood and treated with respect.The way in which the mainstream media has been treating the phenomenon, first with derision, then with condescension, and finally by asking for strict police measures only means that the elite are not the terrorised in the city. The 'Monkey Man' will never step into their barricaded colonies of South and Central New Delhi. Fear only belongs to the outer edge of Delhi. As I drive from Karkardooma crossing to Patparganj depot, (both in East Delhi) I see a forty foot high statue of an armed and vigilant Hanuman, the monkey god of hindu mythology.This popular and benign monkey divinity, whom one calls upon when confronted by ghosts and unknown terrors of the night, seems hardly a match for the diminutive humanoid simian wearing a helmet who has been terrorising Mandaoli - an urban village that nestles under the shadow of the Karkardooma Hanuman statue. I wonder what other terrors the city has in store for us, a ghostly car that mows down the people who sleep on pavements, androids who gas slums, telephone spirits who spread whispers of fear, vampire vigilantes in night shelters and cyborg terrorists battling it out with robo-cops in the old city. The nights of Delhi seem strangely portentious.Meanwhile the deployment of armed, helmeted and masked paramilitaries - the 'Monkey Men of the State' continue, as do the search orders and the raids. Incidentally, large parts of East Delhi have been spared lengthy power cuts in the last few days. This is so that the neighbourhoods are not entirely dark at night. Shuddhabrata Sengupta SARAI: The New Media Initiative Centre for the Study of Developing Societies 29, Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 052, India www.sarai.net # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net