Repressive Silences and Whispers of History: Lessons and Legacies of 1984

Abstract

The seemingly reformist ideology of forgetting the anti-Sikh violence of 1984 and moving on remains unconvincing to some, especially when social justice remains unavailable. While the acknowledgment of heinous violence reminds us of the dark history, it is also mostly replete with erasures, omissions and strategic avoidance or manipulations of the represented violence and hidden ideologies. This article addresses and articulates ethical concerns and theoretical arguments regarding deliberate, nuanced perceptions of violent history, especially in fictional and creative representations. Offering a Foucauldian analysis of Shonali Bose's film Amu (2007) as an example, I propose that the film's critical lens parallels the complexities and dilemmas in discursive formation of a passive subjectivity (be it of the victim or survivor of 1984 violence) that is unable to acquire viable agency after all. A similarly passive approach is encouraged in shaping popular perceptions about the discourse on 1984. The strategic scripting of the history of 1984 and its after-effects needs to be critically examined instead of assessing it only in terms of utility or lack thereof for future legacies.

Notes

1 The government-run TV channel showed Mrs Gandhi's body in state and faintly audible slogans heard in the background: ‘Khoon ka badla khoon sey leyngey’ meaning ‘we will avenge blood with blood’.

2 Such incidents have been accounted extensively in many works. Works like Who are the guilty?, When a tree shook Delhi, and The Delhi riots have extensively discussed the sociohistorical and political dynamics and/or ethnographic investigations and examinations of violence and resultant suffering; most accounts project the victims’ inhibitions and repressed silences. A more detailed and chilling account of the heinous crimes against the Sikh community can be read in Parvinder Singh's report, 1984 Sikhs’ Kristallnacht. Also see Baixas (2009). More recently, Singh's I Accuse (2009) reveals the narco-terrorist implications caused by isolation, lack of opportunities and drug addiction suffered by poorer sections of survivors. Scholars like Veena Das, Ashish Nandy, Dipesh Chakravarty, Gyanendra Pandey, among others, have offered ethnographic investigations and their perceptions about reviving violent history and past. See Das (1990).

3 Elsewhere I have discussed how as an ideology of progress, secularism seems to work fine in some contexts; however, the concept denotes different meanings for different communities (Mehta 2009, 183). See ‘Secular Interventions and Religious Otherness (Mehta 2009, 182 –184).

4 My neighbor who incited the mob to attack our house was also one such ‘willing executioner’.

5 My other neighbor who offered to hide us in his house if my father cut his hair was one such proponent of assimilation.

6 In Theft of an Idol, Paul Brass mentions the informal organizational networks of people who are ready to start a riot, the ‘conversion specialists, who know how to convert a moment of tension into a grander, riotous event’ (1997, 16).

7 The masked men in the mob that attacked our house, who probably knew us, were such ‘fire-tenders’.

8 The group of the students and colleagues of my parents who counteracted the mob were such secular humanists; they included many strangers that we did not know personally.

9 Also cited in my article, ‘Secular Interventions and Religious Otherness (Mehta 2009, 182 – 184).

10 A prolific Sikh writer, Khushwant Singh was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1974 by the president of India. He returned the award in 1984 in protest against the Indian army's attack on the Golden Temple in Amritsar.

11 Goswami's Assamese novel, Pages Stained with Blood (2002) and Rau Badami's novel, Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? (2006), Adiga's novel, Between the Assassinations, and Kumar's Two Mirrors at the Ashram also make references to the violence. More recently, Sandhu's Roll of Honour (2012) and Singh's Helium (2014) offer Sikh perspectives on the pogrom.

12 Badami's tackling of Punjab's violent history extending to Canadian diaspora reveals a strategic, ‘cause and effect’ approach. Her portrayal of the anguish and horror of violence suffered during the partition, in Amritsar during Operation Bluestar, the anti-Sikh pogrom, somehow implicitly culminates to the 1985 Air India crash in the end of the novel.

13 In citing some of the works that refer to the anti-Sikh pogrom, I do not intend to disregard other literary works in regional languages that might have been written about the massacre.

14 Oberoi's My Mother India (2002), Mann's Hawayein (2003), Kumar's Kaya Taran (2004), 1984 Sikhs’ Kristallnacht (2004), Kaur's The Widow Colony (2005), and Bose's Amu (2005) are some of the earlier examples. Also remarkable is Jassi Jasraj's powerful music video, ‘1984 Tezaab: Ik Ardas' (2012).

15 Thus, for example, blog sites such as www.sickchic.com initiated a year-long series, ‘1984 & I’, in 2009 to commemorate the 25 years anniversary that included introspective accounts of various writers about personal memories and nightmares, the impact on their lives in the aftermath and implications about Indian democracy. Some of the writers included I.J. Singh, Shekar Kapur, Ian Jack, Rahul Bedi, H.S. Phoolka, Khushwant Singh, Jarnail Singh, Rajender Puri and many others. A more recent community intervention is the ‘1984 Living History Project' geared toward building archives of personal, oral narratives about 1984 for current and future generations interested in this history.

16 Artists like Arpana Caur, The Singh Twins (Amrit and Rabindra K.D. Kaur Singh), Manjit Bawa, Kanwar Singh Dhillon, Devender Singh have all attempted to open a space to visualize and express the forgotten histories.

17 Eliot's modernist depiction of post-World War I history embodied as a deceptive woman that frustrates an old man in this poem written in 1920 relegates history in terms of distrust and conniving manipulations while at the same time also demanding knowledge.

18 Nietzsche’s detailed explanations of the monumental, antiquarian and critical modes of history offer a rich way to comprehend the burden of past and history. For understanding of history and its dialectical relation with forgetting, also see Ricoeur’s Memory, History, Forgetting (2004).

19 In ‘Belated narrating: ‘Grandmothers' telling stories of forced sexual servitude during World War II’, Sidonie Smith refers to Korean ‘grandmothers’ who were forced into sexual slavery in Japanese military ‘comfort stations’ during World War II. After the war ended, most documents pertaining to Japanese military's complicity in this sexual slavery were either destroyed or sealed in archives, thereby leading to a virtual silence. Even though a matter of common knowledge, Smith underscores how the historical subjugation of Korean women into forced prostitution entered public discourse only after 50 years or so through transnational feminist activism and human rights initiative. Smith calls this public acknowledgment of personal experiences of shame and suffering as a ‘belated narrating’ (2005, 122).

20 In metaphorical terms, a shadow is formed when light falls on an opaque object that further blocks a region. When we look at the shadow, our attention is driven away from the actual object. The shadow therefore protects the object and deviates attention from the real reference. Something similar happens in Amu. We look at shadows when the anti-Sikh pogrom is referred to in the film.

21 This is reminiscent of the desire to see ‘real India’ by Mrs Moore and Adela Quested in E.M. Foster's novel, A passage to India. Both women characters are unable to cope with the ‘real’ India that they experience.

22 The Indian censor board gave the film an A certificate (Adults only) because ‘why should young people know a history that is better buried and forgotten’. Certain lines of dialogue in the film showing Sikh women implicating the role of Indian government, bureaucracy and police were not approved and Bose decided to show the characters mute instead of deleting the scene and thus powerfully suggest their coerced silence. See Walsh's ‘An Interview with Shonali Bose, Director of Amu’ (2005).

23 While Foucault is referring to psychopathology and madness in the nineteenth-century context, I find his explanation of object formation meaningful in understanding Bose's imperatives with respect to the film's ending.

24 In one of the deleted scenes, Bose brings out the notion of repressive paradigms about 1984 violence when Kaju asks, ‘since when is hiding the best decision?’ However, the film's conclusion endorses a similar repressive paradigm.

25 I use the word imaginary in terms of Arjun Appadurai's definition in ‘Disjuncture and difference’. He articulates (Appadurai 1996, 31):

  The image, the imagined, the imaginary – these are all terms that direct us to something critical and new in global cultural processes: the imagination as a social practice. No longer mere fantasy [ … ] no longer simple escape [ … ] and no longer mere contemplation the imagination has become an organized field of social practices, [ … ] a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of possibility.

26 In Powers of Horror, Kristeva explains the concept of suffering via abjection that reveals a systemic experience of self undergoing breakdown of subjectivity leading to self-erasure and even surrender to the Other. In this destructive dynamic, the horror of abjection becomes a ‘massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which harries me as radically separate, loathsome. Not me. Not that [ … ] The repugnance, the retching that thrusts me to the side’ (Kristeva 1982, 3). Amu's departure in the end of the film reflects a similar sense of uncanniness and detachment from suffering and abjection.

27 The burden of remembrance lies not only with the Sikh community of artists, scholars and everyday members when they remember the victims in religious congregations year after year.

28 I again turn to Nietzsche's quote:

  For since we are the outcome of earlier generations, we are also the outcome of their aberrations, passions and errors, and indeed of their crimes; it is not possible to free oneself from this chain. If we condemn these aberrations and regard ourselves as free of them, this does not alter the fact that we originate in them. The best we can do is to confront our inherited and hereditary nature with our knowledge of it, and through a new stern discipline combat our inborn heritage and implant in ourselves a new habit, a new instinct, a second nature, so that our first nature withers away. It is an attempt to give oneself, as it were a posteriori, a past in which one would like to originate in opposition to that in which one did originate  … What happens all too often is that we know the good but we do not do it, because we also know the better but cannot do it. But here and there a victory is nonetheless achieved.

(Nietzsche 1997, 76, emphasis added)

29 E.M. Thompson remarked in The making of the English working class about his efforts in writing the book aimed to rescue the poor, obsolete working class from ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’(Thompson, 1963, 12).

30 Thus, in the spirit of humanitarian consciousness, initiatives like planting trees or donating blood to commemorate the massacre have been suggested by H.S. Phoolka and I.J. Singh. See H.S. Phoolka's ‘1984 & I: let's tackle hate with love’ at http://www.sikhchic.com/1984/1984_i_lets_tackle_hate_with_love and I.J. Singh's ‘1984 & I: moving forward’ at http://www.sikhchic.com/1984/1984_i_moving_forward.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Parvinder Mehta

Parvinder Mehta. Address: Department of English, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI 48202, USA. [Email: [email protected]]