Photojournalists have been attacked for taking pictures of mass cremations and capitalizing on “Hindu suffering,” foreign correspondents were harassed for commenting on them, and some accounts claimed that they are proof of Western media’s “cultural insensitivity” toward Indian deaths. For many of us, this feels familiar - to be Indian is to be always in a crowd, jostling for space in our populous nation - albeit with a macabre, tragic twist.īut even as these photographs call the world’s attention to the apocalyptic situation in India, they have triggered a backlash, one that has highlighted Western media’s past failings in covering the subcontinent and its people, framing them as poor and backward. Then there are the chilling ones, of endless queues of body bags waiting to be attended to. One feature all these photos have in common is the haunted eyes above masks, expressing the range of emotions humanity is capable of feeling, from listlessness to devastation. Sign up to receive our newsletter each Friday. Vox’s German Lopez is here to guide you through the Biden administration’s burst of policymaking. Now, I find myself at a loss for words, dwelling on banal details outside the frame - how did people get to the hospital, where are the homes they return to, how are cremation workers processing the sheer number of pyres they must light? As an art critic, my work revolves around seeing and responding to images through language. These smoky compositions, punctuated by PPE-adorned figures, will be the defining images of India’s coronavirus nightmare. Then there are the pictures of front-line workers performing final rites - lighting pyres and lowering bodies into graves - of those they don’t even know. Inside, photos capture patients preparing to face their fate even as health care workers go about the work of keeping them alive. On roads outside overflowing hospitals, desperate people await beds for relatives dying in their arms, and the bereaved break down. Cremations are an important Hindu funeral ritual, but Indian crematoria declared that they were out of wood for pyres, and burial grounds for the city’s Muslims and Christians reached capacity.Īs the current wave of India’s Covid-19 epidemic has claimed tens of thousands of lives and infected hundreds of thousands each day, aerial photographs of grounds strewn with burning logs and piles of ash have made their way to the front pages of international newspapers and spread across social media. New Delhi’s public parks and parking lots were converted into sites for mass cremations of Hindus, Sikhs, and Jains. Weeks ago, the Indian capital ran out of space for its dead.

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