lawkeeping

— “Secundra Bagh” operates as a historical trope in just this still-vital dialectical sense: for a frozen instant that it marks as such (recall the twitch of diachrony registered in the moving horse), this image puts into contact two apparently exclusive narratives—the stories of imperial lawkeeping and genocidal extermination, of a “Mutiny” and a “War for Independence,” of “our” peacekeeping and “their” unredeemed death—without enabling the matter to be settled into any (self-identical) thesis or meaning.