How to Read a Bomb: Scenes from Bombay’s Black Friday
Bombing Bombay
On March 12, 1993, ten bombs exploded across the city of Bombay within a period of about two hours. The timed explosions were caused by large quantities of an explosive known as RDX, a black soap – like substance, which was loaded onto several four- and two-wheelers. Planted strategically in and around important city buildings, crowded marketplaces, and hotels, each vehicle exploded within fifteen or thirty minutes of the previous one. Their itinerary not only was timed serially but also, perhaps accidentally, followed a northsouth geographic trajectory, beginning with a dramatic explosion in the basement of the Bombay Stock Exchange in the city’s historic, colonial Fort area and ending with a series of unexploded grenades hurled onto the runways of the airport in the northwest suburb of Santacruz.
These explosions followed nearly three months of tension and murderous riots in Bombay between Hindus and Muslims after the destruction of the Babri Masjid, a sixteenth-century mosque in northern India by a mob of Hindu nationalist youths. While the riots took place immediately after the mosque’s destruction on December 6, 1992, followed by a second round a month later, in January 1993, the blasts came after two months of uneasy calm, on the last Friday of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. More than two hundred people died in the blasts on that single day and hundreds were injured.
The event, simply referred to as the “bomb blasts” in Bombay (until the recent serial bombing of commuter trains), is treated as a singular event — the serial blasts — involving a vast conspiracy. Its singularity was self-evident even on the day of the blasts, when the city’s police commissioner suggested that the bombings had turned the entire city into a battlefield. Each bomb was evidently connected to the next as if in a chain reaction. And every link of the chain remained visible as people speculated on the significance of each target. As S. Hussain Zaidi, an investigative journalist and author of a recent book titled Black Friday: The True Story of the Bombay Bomb Blasts, writes, “It was the first time any city in the world was subject to serial blasts” (2002: 15).1
The serial explosions were, at that time, a unique form of attack, blurring the line between multiple and singular events because of the close temporal proximity of the bombs. This temporal proximity condensed and fused space into a unified field — that of the city. Yet despite the enormity and scale of this event, it quickly disappeared from the everyday life of the city into psychic registers rarely available on the surface except under carefully controlled judicial and journalistic conditions.
More than a decade after these bomb blasts, in July 2006, another series of explosions shook the city, which had been renamed Mumbai in 1996. At around six o’clock on a Tuesday evening, during the peak commuting hour, seven explosions ripped through the first-class compartments of commuter trains on the Western Railway lines, going off within minutes of each other. In the space of eleven minutes, seven train compartments had been destroyed and over a hundred commuters were dead, many of them waiting on platforms at the stations that the trains had just passed or were about to pull out from. Incessant, 24-7 news coverage showed gory scenes of dead passengers and injured commuters being carried away by police and local residents who rushed to the scene. Shocked spectators mutely witnessed the carnage with a sense of mounting outrage.
The 1993 blasts were recollected as an ancestor by a city still awaiting delivery of a final judgment against the perpetrators of those explosions. But this time, there was less skepticism and little doubt about the history in which this episode belonged. News media dutifully made the obvious connections to similar events in London and Madrid. Exactly one week after the blasts, at the precise moment of the first blast in the series, all traffic in Mumbai voluntarily stopped to observe “two minutes of silence” in memory of the victims of the blasts, on the appeal of a popular news channel. A chilling and eerie silence descended as the traffic ceased, a reenactment of the very scene of blockage that the bombs had achieved. Most media reports suggested that the chief victim of the blasts was the city itself, but that because peace had prevailed in the aftermath the “spirit of Mumbai” had triumphed after all.
The dispersed presence of the 1993 blasts, the lack of memorials to the victims or public remembrance, and the carefully controlled media coverage of the blasts contrasted sharply with the intense, mediatic coverage of the 2006 blasts. In 1993 the city, then already wounded severely by the riots of the preceding months and the seriously damaged relations between majority and minority communities, had chosen silence as a means of recuperating from the blasts. Yet the close kinship between the two events of serial attack, their focalization of a particular city within a particular region, subject to particular local causes for acts of terror, also haunted the coverage of what some newspapers began calling “7/11.” This essay is an ethnographic attempt to grasp the spectral presence and significance of Black Friday both in the landscape of Bombay-Mumbai and in the contemporary, global history of terrorism.2 It is not, however, a conventional history of the distance — conceptual or otherwise — between 7/11 and Black Friday but rather an attempt to grasp some of the mystery peculiar to the perceptions of Black Friday, how the denotation affects the contemporary and future life of the city, beyond the intentions of its perpetrators. It is therefore an attempt to read the City through the Bomb.
How to Read a Bomb
The bomb produces a non-sequential understanding of time and a fragmentation of space.
—Walid Raad / The Atlas Group
Since Black Friday, many similar events of coordinated serial attack — New York 2001, Madrid 2003, London 2005, and Mumbai 2006, to name only the more obvious ones — have taken place. These events target the physical, organizational structure of the city in a contained and highly symbolic fashion. Yet, despite being the site in which the technique of serial attack was pioneered, the Bombay blasts have remained a buried and underground episode not only in the history of the city but also in the contemporary, global history of terror. Despite the enormity of the destruction unleashed by those serial bomb blasts of 1993, the comprehensive geographic reach of the bombs across the city, and the number of people killed, injured, and missing, the blasts of Black Friday continue to have a shadowy, mysterious presence in the life of the city. While there have been periodic efforts at grasping the significance of the attacks, the Black Friday blasts remained, until the recent serial bombings on Mumbai’s commuter trains, in the shadow of the riots that shook Bombay for two months in December 1992 and January 1993. The life of the event in public memory, its affective significance, and its social effects remain highly complex even though, or perhaps because, the perpetrators have been discovered and a conspiracy case against them has been ongoing for the past twelve years in a court set up especially for this case.
The physical signs of the destruction caused by the bombs were quickly wiped away as the buildings severely damaged by the blasts were reconstructed, but the event itself was dispersed into the atmosphere of the city, particularly into its cinematic productions and in the offscreen traffic among global criminal networks, movie stars, and ordinary residents, each of which I explore in detail below. These dispersals make it clear that even though there is no memorial to Black Friday, it continues to live in unexpected places and to reappear in unpredictable ways. The significance of the blasts in transforming both the landscape of urban violence and the urban landscape itself is only now beginning to be grasped, in the light of yet another series of blasts.
The temporality of the blasts, the instantaneous denotations and their equally instantaneous dispersal into the city’s atmosphere, created a peculiar situation. The apparent lack of an identifiable perpetrator, given that unmanned, immobile vehicles had served as the agents of the detonations, and the lack of discrimination in choosing victims created a very estranged sense of “cityness” in the aftermath of the blasts. The city appeared without particularity or individuality, without boundaries, without the recognition of an inside and an outside, of an enemy or an other, but as a pure instance of victimhood. That moment of confusion led, as I argue, to a temporary lapse of memory about enemies and others, unifying the city in its sense of victimhood. It was, as well, a specifically global moment for the city as it joined what was then a very select group of cities thus targeted by acts of terrorist violence.3
But there followed a retrospective reconstitution of those specific boundaries that made for the particular character and ethos of the city. Consequently, this essay focuses on the production of the city’s locality in the aftermath of the Bomb while also tracking the specific ways in which it emerged within a global space constituted by terror. The Bomb and its aftermath served to rupture spatial history without appearing to do so on the surface of it.
By following the micronarratives surrounding the Bomb, one perceives the specter of a global struggle to reconstitute politics through acts of militancy and the deployment of space in that particular struggle. But one also finds a tendency to retell the tale in specifically local terms, to seize it and resituate it within a known universe, even while recognizing the loss of certainty in the existence of such a universe and the politics that constitute it. This essay therefore follows these micro-narratives not as a means of understanding terrorism — its philosophical or phenomenological meanings — but in order to foreground the sites at which the meanings of contemporary terror are being forged and generated. But before moving on to Black Friday, I briefly consider the genealogy of these acts of serial terror, which use the illusion of simultaneity to paralyze entire cities, abstractions of human collectives, made possible by the organizational space constituted by infrastructural networks.
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Notes
I thank Faisal Devji, Thomas Blom Hansen, and Claudio Lomnitz for their careful reading of an earlier, longer version of this piece. Their support and comments were invaluable in bringing this essay to its present state. Arjun Appadurai, Carol Breckenridge, and AbdouMaliq Simone also read earlier versions and provided encouragement to the overall project. Satya Pemmaraju remained steadfast in his belief in the value of the work and the argument from its very inception when we saw the film Black Friday together. In Bombay, Rachel Dwyer arranged a preview showing of the film for which I am grateful. Last, but not least, I thank Jesse Willard for his valuable assistance in research and editing and his thoughtful comments.
- Following Zaidi’s lead, I use the term “Black Friday” throughout this essay as a shorthand reference for the 1993 blasts. “Black Friday” is also the title of the film based on the book (dir., Anurag Kashyap, India, 2007), but the context of the usage herein makes clear when it is the event, the book, or the film that is being referred to.
- Here, ethnography is used in a special sense, because this work is largely an ethnography without witnesses or a testimonial dimension, one based on publicly available and circulating texts rather than on direct contact with subjects.
- Black Friday, as generally known, took place just a month after the first attempt to bomb the World Trade Center towers in New York. Paul Virilio, among others, has written about the significance of the Bombay blasts in relation to the first World Trade Center attack as inaugurating a new form of terror (see Virilio 2000).