The Hindu funeral pyre has been the focus of “lurid orientalism” for hundreds of years.
The Western fixation on Indian dead bodies is not new. Similarly absent were images of civil society actors like the women’s self-help groups that are the focus of my own research. There are far fewer images of living, breathing citizens such as doctors, scientists, public health experts, or pharmaceutical company executives working to combat Covid. The number of images of burning bodies quickly started to feel excessive. Recently, however, I started looking at the international coverage of India’s Covid crisis more carefully. So newsrooms that are framing stories with these images of mass immolation might just be doing their job. Getting better data from official sources is difficult (the recent World Press Freedom index places India at a rank of 142 out of 180 countries, below Afghanistan, South Sudan and Myanmar). Official government data, which is increasingly unreliable, obscures that reality. To me, these visuals conveyed the monumental scale of the crisis in India. It seemed grounded in confirmation bias, misinformation and xenophobia.
One recent tweet warns of “Anglo elites” who are “plotting and working to undermine India.” “The BBC never,” it alleges, “made a single video like this for COVID deaths in the UK”.Īs an economist, I was initially skeptical of this narrative. Their frustration can be gleaned from outbursts on social media and print platforms, where some Indians complain about a Western media bias. While the concern for reader sensitivities is commendable, many Indians wish that they were not shown at all.
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