Violent elements: the impossible document of ‘1984’

ABSTRACT

Helium dramatizes a traumatized witness's attempt to write about India's 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom. Depicting his attempt to write an investigative confession of complicity, the novel discloses larger patterns of fantasy, sexual economy, and gender violence that make the pogrom and his own self-story possible. Through a complex narrative framework, Helium shows that unlike legal redress, justice is never present but haunts the present from a future anterior. Helium's literary representations question the idea that literature can document the facts of an historical event so as to raise public consciousness of it, confronting the reader with what remains unsusceptible to narrativization.

KEYWORDS:

• Delhi riots
• sexual violence
• narrative
• confession
• Indian emergency
• memory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Testimony translated and quoted in Kishwar, ‘Gangster Rule – The Massacre of the Sikhs’ (1984, 14).

2 Mitta and Phoolka (2007) give an extraordinary account of the constructed failures of the inquiries.

3 The future anterior becomes an increasingly insistent motif in Jacques Derrida's later writing. It is neither prediction nor reliable teleology. It is not what will happen according to a logic of reliable knowability or predictability, but what will have happened (whatever has the virtual possibility of being a past, for better or worse). It can be understood as the radically open possibilities of all futures as they exert their force on what we experience as the present in radically unknowable ways, excessive to every plan. This, incidentally, is far from arguing that because ‘the future’ is strictly unknowable in advance it is pointless to try and shape or influence it. That is a counsel of despair just as much as the notion that all outcomes are irrevocably programmed in advance. As Derrida tirelessly pointed out, the future anterior's predicament of incalculability is the very condition of calculation and therefore of ‘praxis, decision, action, and responsibility’ (Derrida, in Sprinker ed. 1999, 249).

4 (Anyaduba 2019; Uraizee 2010; Hitchcott 2015; Ganguly 2016). As these titles suggest, the 1994 Rwandan genocide is the example from which the critical category of ‘genocide literature’ emerges and is then retrospectively applied to Armenia, German Southwest Africa, the Holocaust. Jacket copy on the hardback first edition of Helium:

‘In this lyrical and haunting exploration of one of the most shocking moments in the history of the Indian nation … ’

5 It is arguable that the instrumentalization of anti-minority (here anti-Sikh) violence in terms of the construction of an ‘anti-National’ internal enemy for electoral and more broadly political purposes in 1984 was an important articulation point in the mapping of Hindutva or political Hinduism onto Indian nationalism; an important moment in the transformation of the Indian political system now being pushed to completion by Narendra Modi, the BJP, the RSS and the VHP. Ashish Banerjee has shown the extent to which Mrs. Gandhi mobilized the RSS and a majoritarian Hindu sensibility (including a Hindu sense of being victimized by minorities) in the 1980s after the Emergency (Banerjee 1990). In this period, the critical element was Punjab and the movement for Khalistan, which posed a challenge to the Indian state. Cynthia Keppley Mahmood contends, for example, that ‘Khalistan’ as political figure represents a symbolic possible alternative to ‘India’ as corrupted majoritarian democracy, and is as such part of a chain of ‘peripheral protests’ against the post-independence betrayal of a secular, egalitarian India (2014, 572). Sikhs took on a symbolic importance in the 1980s for other minority groups, who saw them as an example of struggle for representation or autonomy and for the necessity of coalition (and thus non-majoritarian) politics. Mahmood argues that this is what Operation Blue Star was (symbolically) about: on pain of death, do not attack the national construct. Banerjee writes that ‘[a]s a result of the threat from Punjab, political Hinduism has become almost synonymous with Indian nationalism’ (1990, 51). The full apparatus of mediatic propaganda was used in the 1984–1985 elections on the basis of a threat to the national body from a (Sikh) minority. How these tendencies have mutated, inflated, and changed their enemy objects (to Muslims in particular) under the BJP and Modi is well documented in Jaffrelot (2021).

6 It is noteworthy that this opening brings forward the ‘now’ that occurs in the first (faintly Proustian) sentence of Singh's previous novel, Chef (2008): ‘For a long time now I have stayed away from certain people’ (9). Although a detailed comparison is beyond my scope here, Chef also stages a compulsive return to a powerfully cathected scene following years of absence.

7 In Mieke Bal's terms the fabula is the ‘logically and chronologically connected events’ undergone by the narrative's actors that are presented in a particular way at the level of the narrative text. Hence, ‘the relationship between the primary text [the words on the pages] and the narrative subject lies in the relationship between the primary fabula and the embedded narrative act’ (Bal 1985, 5).

8 (Spitzer 1928, 386). All translations from Spitzer's German are mine.

9 (Spitzer 1928, 390). The parenthetic remark is Spitzer's, with the page number referring to Du coté de chez Swann in his edition. The quotation he cites is unattributed.

10 These signs would be unshaven facial hair and the wearing of a turban over uncut head hair, the non-cutting of hair (kesh) being one of the ‘Five Ks’ that mark and embody the covenant of the Sikh community and faith. For many Sikh men in particular, the full facial hair and turban make their affiliation immediately visible. These embodied signs were often the focus of physical attacks on Sikh men in 1984, e.g. calculated forms of humiliation such as enforced hair cutting, and perversion of the symbols by tying or strangulation with the turban fabric.

11 The quotation is from Helium, 21. This parenthetic aside to the reader (another ‘now’) points toward Raj's later revelation that he had a sexual relationship with Professor Singh's wife. It thus both solicits and prolongs the reader's (narrative) desire by a postponement that hints at lascivious anecdote, and stages the prolongation of a narrator's pleasure in postponing the delivery of this important information.

12 I owe much of my thinking on this question to Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man on guilt, excuses and confessions. A full discussion of the relevant writings is impossible here. A luminous overview may be found in Derrida's reading of de Man and Rousseau: ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’ (2002).

13 The staging of a stereotypic postcolonial (diasporically weighted) position is made almost typological in the novel's depiction of Raj. This current includes both his tracking back of the responsibility for the contemporary problems of India to colonial interventions and his contemptuous portrayal of his white American ex-wife in terms of an ignorant, benevolent mild inverted racism. There is an inverse variant of this position in dominant postcolonial theory, about which Slavoj Žižek has illuminatingly written: ‘The positive form of the White Man's Burden (responsibility for civilizing the colonized barbarians) is thus merely replaced by its negative form (the burden of white man's guilt): if we can no longer be the benevolent masters of the Third World, we can at least be the privileged source of evil, patronizingly depriving them of their responsibility for their fate (if a Third World country engages in terrible crimes, it is never their full responsibility, but always an after-effect of colonization: they merely imitate what the colonial masters were doing, etc.). This privilege is the Mehrlust earned by self-culpabilization’ (Žižek 2017, 13). Žižek connects confessional self-condemnation to the earning of surplus pleasure (Mehrlust).

14 Jensen, Gradiva; ein pompejanisches Phantasiestück, (1903, 57–58); Jensen, Gradiva: A Pompeiian Fantasy (1918, 46–47). Hanold's dream and quest are structured by his uncanny attraction to a Roman marble bas-relief of a woman seemingly captured in mid-step. It is her gait and foot that are especially compelling. He obtains a cast of this carving, which he supposes to be a Roman copy of a Greek original, and his characterological dreaming about who the subject was ultimately makes of her a denizen of Pompeii at the time of the Vesuvius eruption on August 24th, 79CE. In an illuminating chapter on Jensen, Freud and Derrida, Cathy Caruth clarifies that in Jensen's tale it is Gradiva's toeprints, not footprints, that are supposed by Hanold to deposit traces (2013, 120). It is likely that the German for toe, der Zeh or die Zehe, is connected to the verb zeigen (to indicate, show, point), possibly by transfer from the finger's indexical function. This connotation of shifter-like relays of reference and pointers that led Hanold to seek the very moment they made their tracks is analogous to the desire for ‘now’ in Helium. Perhaps not incidentally for Gradiva, it seems that the feminine Zehe is the older form in German.

15 (Derrida 1995a, 151, my translation). The English translation correctly renders this phrase as ‘deciphering of this interior desire to decipher,’ but loses the genitive possibility that decipherment itself carries or vehiculates a desire. (Derrida 1995b, 98).

16 This point about the register of confessional writing is elaborated in Derrida (2002, 71–160).

17 ‘When Father got his gallantry medal in ’85, she stayed home … She mailed me a letter saying she was unwell. She included a photo of herself submerged in the pool. I never saw it coming. Mother didn't see it coming either. She believed in passive resistance’ (262). The narration has already referred to earlier suicide attempts and the fact that Raj's mother takes antidepressant medication (101). The mother is dead in the ‘now’ that commences the novel.

18 For relevant discussion of marriage in terms of legalized rape, see Pateman (1988), MacKinnon (1991), and Dworkin (1987),

19 Another guest tells the humorous story of a triangular romantic dilemma from a fiction by Alberto Moravia at the dinner table (148). I hesitate to read the triangular patterning here in strictly Oedipal terms, though as I remarked earlier it invites decipherment in terms of a distorted or transposed Oedipal model.

20 Ravi Sundaram, Pirate Modernity (2010, 55). The early iterations of the plan, composed with guidance from the Ford Foundation, were an attempt to transpose American urban planning procedures onto the reality of an Indian city organized quite differently from those in the United States. Sundaram gives a vivid account of the vicissitudes of the planning process on p. 31–64.

21 (Sundaram 2010, 73; Tarlo 2003, 214; Jaffrelot and Anil 2020, 166). Jagmohan, the chief of the Delhi Development Association at the time, explicitly likened his vision to that of Haussmann.

22 Jaffrelot and Anil (2020, 125–183) have a fine summary of Sanjay's rise and consolidation of a ‘parallel power structure’ within the Emergency.

23 Tarlo (2003) remains the best account of this linkage.

24 See again Tarlo (2003). It was possible to pay others to be sterilized (a process called ‘motivation’) and utilize the sterilization certificate of another person or persons in order to obtain land in a settlement colony. The production of sterilization certificates became a minor commercial industry during the Emergency such that sterilization/fertility (mine or others’) became currency.

25 Prakash (2019, 286), and see chapter 7 as a whole for the connections between demolition and sterilization. On emasculation, see further Dayal and Bose (1977, 140 and 120––157) for a good overview of the sterilization campaign. Writing of the psychological effects of the sterilization campaign in a Maharashtra village, Lee Schlesinger underlines peasant perceptions of ‘its attenuation of virility. It is a radical violation of one's body and, for some, of a purpose in life’ (Schlesinger 1977, 641). It is notable that in Delhi and elsewhere the sterilization project disproportionately targeted Muslims, perceived as a demographic threat because they were held to have larger families. Scott (2018) offers a focused study of women's experiences of the sterilization program in a useful corrective to the prevailing understanding of it as a trauma for men and masculinity.

26 (2003, 173). The Hindi phrase was ख़सी कालोनी (khasi kaloni), using the term for a castrated goat (personal communication from Emma Tarlo, January 7, 2022). Again: ‘Both men and women tended to link vasectomy to the notion of impotence and, at times, castration: None of the men interviewed who underwent the operation during the Emergency claimed to have wanted it. The same is true of the women who underwent tubectomy. All felt pressured by forces which had nothing to do with family planning: saving jobs; getting children admitted in school; preventing evictions; obtaining plots; and so forth (Tarlo 2000, 267).

27 Peoples' Union for Democratic Rights and Peoples' Union for Civil Liberties, Who Are the Guilty? Report of a Joint Inquiry Into the Causes and Impact of the Riots in Delhi from 31 October to 10 November 1984 (1984, 11). Hereafter cited as “Guilty”.

28 Pav Singh writes that these Sikh groups ‘predominantly hailed from the working-class Labana Sikh community, from ‘two traditionally poor nomadic communities, the Labanas and Sikligars’ (2017, 122, 173). Baixas (2009) suggests that Congress organizers instrumentalized Dalit and underclass ‘hatred of the well-off Sikhs of Delhi's posh areas’ against poorer Sikhs (a perfect instance of identitarian crime). There is, finally, a significant body of work that suggests the pogrom against the Sikhs was timed and even planned for maximum electoral advantage on the part of Congress (which won a landslide victory in the December 1984 election): among others, Pav Singh (2017, 47–70); Kumar et al. (2003, 32–45); Khushwant Singh (1999, 377–387). A horrible irony in this regard is that the majority of Delhi Sikhs were Congress loyalists and great supporters of Mrs. Gandhi.

29 (Rose 2021, 345). Chakravarti (2016), part of an invaluable series on ‘Sexual Violence and Impunity in South Asia,’ is an excellent survey of systematic sexual violence as an instrument of national security and militarized collectivity. Franco (2013) offers a study of mass cruelty and violence in and as ‘modernity’ that illuminates the ways in which rituals and institutions of (typically male) violence are habituated and normalized for their agents.

30 Who Are the Guilty? (1984, 14–15). One can but admire the incredible courage and persistence of the members of the People's Union for Democratic Rights and the People's Union for Civil Liberties in creating and distributing this report in the face of state censorship and harassment. See for example the account of Nandita Haksar, one of the authors: ‘Memories of 1984’ (Haksar 2014).

31 (Das 1990a, 20 and passim; Chakravarti and Haksar 1987, 25–28; Pav Singh 2017, 48). As Slavoj Žižek generalizes about systematized acts of pogromatic (class, gender, ethnic) violence: ‘the crucial feature in all these cases is that these acts of criminal violence are not spontaneous outbursts of raw brutal energy that breaks the chains of civilized customs, but something learned, externally imposed, ritualized: part of the collective symbolic substance of a community. What is repressed for the ‘innocent’ public gaze is not the cruel brutality of the act, but precisely its ‘cultural’, ritualistic character of a symbolic custom’ Žižek (2017, 31).

32 ‘The children were on intimate terms with violence … steeped in a climate of poverty and crime … they assumed all problems ultimately led to violence.’ So writes Veena Das of the survivor children from the same neighborhoods and general social position as their assailants (1990b, 381).

33 (Guilty 1984, 14; Chakravarti and Haksar 1987, 26; Kumar et al. 2003, 42; Khushwant Singh 1999, 377; Kishwar 1984, 23).

34 This topic has received as yet little cultural and literary analysis to my knowledge. A dated but useful starting point for the British context is Scott (2005 [1938]), which states relevantly that ‘it was at the famous public schools of Britain that whipping was indulged in so ecumenically and so savagely as to earn for England the reputation to which I have alluded’ (98). Orwell (1994 [1952]) is a vivid first-person account of the systemic and normalized cruelty of the British ‘public’ (i.e., private) school environment in the colonial era. The extensive literature on caste oppression, starting with Ambedkar and continued by other Dalit authors in recent decades, is perhaps the first place to go to investigate the longue durée of physical and psychological cruelty in Indian culture and history.

35 A fuller discussion of this last point is beyond my scope here. A brief comment, to be followed up in future work: The recent globally publicized series of gang rapes in India, beginning with the horrific assault on Jyoti Singh in Delhi in 2012, called forth a virulently punitive current of moral outrage in part because of the class difference between the perpetrators and the victims. This involved widespread calls for the death penalty or castration for rapists depicted as animalistic predators from the underclass. After the gang rape and murder of a young veterinarian in Hyderabad in 2019, the four suspects (truck drivers) were extrajudicially murdered by the police before reaching trial. Among many others, a New York Times article from the time reports a disturbing wave of delirious public celebration and congratulation of the police (Gettleman and Kumar, Dec. 20, 2019). The photograph accompanying The Guardian's report on the same event shows a protest in which a young woman holding a picture of a hanging noose is in the foreground (Ellis-Petersen, Dec. 6, 2019). This anger and frustration is comprehensible in part because the legal system has been remarkably ineffective in investigating and prosecuting crimes of sexual violence; yet the possibility must be taken seriously that the carnival of murderous vengeance is the appearance of ritualized surplus-pleasure on the other side of a class divide (Žižek 1994, 54–85). Extrajudicial punishment enacts the false promise of immediate (and wild) ‘justice,’ such that the victim's mother claims justice has been served in the Times article. Among others, Indian women's rights lawyer Flavia Agnes has written critically of the radically class-differentiated approaches to and perceptions of sexual assault (Agnes 2013). Calls for the most aggressive responses to poor perpetrators come alongside understanding, leniency, and often acquittal for upper-class and upper-caste men accused of rape and sexual violence. For further analysis of differentials also concerning the class positions of the rape victims, see Agnes, D’Mello, and Sidhva (2014) and Agnes (2014).

36 There is a small but significant literature on children born of sexual violence, mostly focused on war. Helium offers Nelly's pronouncements on these questions: there is ‘silence and denial around sexual violence. Sikh men chose silence, Hindu men chose complete denial’ (168). ‘Men don't talk about sexual violence. Men use women to humiliate ‘other’ men’ (265). It seems clear from these quotations that the novel's figurative treatment is much more nuanced than its thematic treatment. Anshu Saluja (2015) discusses and presents material that speaks eloquently to these questions regarding the experiences of women survivors.

37 Ciphering, while colloquially meaning the expression of something in conventional signs, has an explicitly arithmetic significance concerning numeric calculation and encoding. Cipher stems from the Arabic word for zero, pertinent to the binary logic of the digital sphere.

38 Helium thematizes this structure in Raj's summary of what ‘a real scientist’ might have surmised once he realizes that Nelly had always known about his father and kept her knowledge secret: ‘A real scientist might say, ‘Raj himself knew about his father all along, but he was in search of another proof, and Nelly's work confirmed what he feared, what he already knew but was afraid to admit’ (282). This reiterates the question of what it is to know, prove, or be blind to, something; Helium explores what it is to know without knowing.

39 For solid coverage of India and the ICC, see Ramanathan (1998, 2001, 2002, 2003).

40 Carol Jacobs, Sebald’s Vision (2015) is the outstanding study of his oeuvre, focused as the title suggests on the enigma of ‘the purposeful uncertainty of what he places before our eyes’ (x). This epistemological crisis is not restricted to the images, but also to the angle of vision, the indirectness or obliquity, of the writing.

41 (Genette 1997, 5). Evidently, every literary text (even every text) is hypertextual (thus palimpsestic) to some degree, and Genette's approach is to focus on the matter of degree and explicitness of the grafting between hyper – and hypotext as a loose index of pastiche-ness in the literary work (9). To an extent, this relation depends on the recognition and assent of the reader, though Genette sidelines this question. See Hoesterey (2001) and Dyer (2007) for discussion of the origins of the term ‘pastiche’ and analysis of examples across media.

42 Jameson, Postmodernism (1991, 18, 17). It is significant here that Jameson associates this situation with a Debordian inflation and proliferation of the photographic image. For a comparable line of argument concerning the curatorial category of ‘world literature,’ see Emily Apter, Against World Literature (2013).

43 This is naturally not to claim that India was a bubble insulated from international currents before the 1990s. Extended discussion of the category of the ‘global novel’ is, once again, beyond the scope of this essay. In one influential account (Kirsch 2016) its herald is Orhan Pamuk, while other critics concur in a more general sense that the epoch of the ‘global novel’ as a critical or curatorial category begins with the ending of the Cold War and the dismantling of the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1992 (Ganguly 2016). On the inaugural financial scandal of economic liberalization (the 1992 stock market scam of Harshad Mehta) see Basu and Dalal (1993). For the deregulation of mass media and its acceleration of the power of Hindutva, see Rajagopal (2001).

44 We know this because Helium's image acknowledgements refer us to the Creative Commons Wikipedia entry from which the picture was used (a public and non-copyright archive). The very appearance of a bureaucratic acknowledgement apparatus is rather unlike Sebald, whose major works do not contain, so far as I am aware, a single acknowledgement as to the provenance of the images they contain. This is not a criticism. It is clearly an aesthetic choice crucial to the consistency of Sebald's works, which in a sense must leave such ‘information’ beyond their covers, just as it is a significant development that an inflated apparatus of acknowledgments, credits, ‘thanks,’ and other quasi-legal tributes, symbolic debt-payments and self-aggrandizements has become a ritual element of literary and academic production alike. (This essay's author is not exempt from that system).

45 The novel's numerological play is a topic that deserves separate treatment. The previous paragraph also contains a fragment of direct speech from a Delhi taxi driver who mentions ‘thirty extra rupees’ on a fare (5). We are left to guess at the coincidentality of these numbers. The differences of scale and substance of what is measured by the ‘same’ numbers (physical size, value, time) are an aspect of Helium's figurative apparatus. More numbers, with a very different effect: The IIT doctoral candidate, Raj's quasi-double, is ranked 48 in the All-India Joint Entrance Exam (21), and Raj, by ‘strange coincidence,’ stays in room 48 in his Shimla hotel (167). Both numbers here are mirror images of the ’84 the novel purports to commemorate. The mirror-effect of the ‘48’ ranking of the IIT student underlines the initially specular situation that sends Raj in search of Nelly.

46 According to some accounts and many conjectures, the pogrom was engineered to begin and end in a specific timeframe. ‘This will last for three days. It has started today; it will end on the third,’ a Congress politician was told, reports Hartosh Singh Bal (Hartosh Singh Bal [2014] quoted in P. Singh 2017, 103). The recurrence of the ‘three days’ phrase across reports of the pogrom is chilling. The longer-term process of laying the affective groundwork for the pogrom, and important elements of the planning process, are narratively synthesized in Pav Singh, 1984 (2017). The fact that the most intense acts of violence were committed during this period does not of course mitigate the effects of these events, which persist to this day. This does ask us to question the epistemological (and indeed ethical) framework in which such events are periodized and parcellated, an issue that Helium asks its readers to confront.

47 (Mann 2018, 51). If I understand her telegraphic note correctly here, this allows Mann to argue that read in terms of ‘religiopolitical’ divisions, the pronoun split between two ‘fathers’ makes it possible for Raj to symbolically kill his one (Sikh, surrogate) father through the agency of his other (Hindu, biological) father. Interesting as this point is, it is not sustainable by the text of Helium, especially as it cannot be demonstrated that in the narrative Mohan Singh ‘dies literally at the hands of’ Raj's supercop father (51). The ambiguity of the father(s) and the shiftiness of the he-pronoun figure something other than this.