The Partition of India into two countries – India and Pakistan – in 1947 remains a historical legacy of pain that continues to mark both nations. Each cricket match and border skirmish causes old wounds to resurface. For the post-partition generation, of Sikhs especially, 1984 has become another historical wound. It remains an unresolved issue awaiting the balm of justice but, in the meantime some thirty years later, many of the victims have died or are too old and tired to testify. And previous hearings have in any case demonstrated that the state is deaf and no one is listening.
For two young schoolgirls in the UK, this event then shattered their faith in the Indian nation. They were isolated in their predominantly Catholic school cut off from both news and people who could empathize and share their grief. The Singh Twins, now world renowned artists, reflect on their feelings on hearing the news. Their belief in the ability of art ‘to inform and change the world’ led them to paint Storming of the Golden Temple. It was their way of keeping the memory alive and to, in a small way, expose, ‘ … through paint and canvas, what the powers to be, had suppressed’. They describe it as a ‘snap shot in time, showing a bird’s eye view of pilgrims caught in the crossfire and trapped within the sacred complex by the relentless attack of heavy artillery and gunfire’. Their view from the diaspora seeks to suggest that in effect the Sikh story of 1984 is ultimately the story of all peoples, all places and all times. Their painting, essay and poems evoke other atrocities both local and transnational – Babur’s invasion of India (1526), Jalianwalabagh (1919) massacre and the suffering of Christ.
The Twins introduce their essay with an excerpt from Guru Nanak where he calls the kings ‘butchers’ and laments the flight of truth and righteousness.
Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh in her article Babarvani and the Call for Gender Justice also recalls Babur and she turns her lens on Nanak’s female-centered descriptions of Babur’s invasion. Nanak’s four hymns collectively known as Babuarvani (Babar Hymns) provide an invaluable account of a tragic historic account. In the Babarvani, Nanak described Babur as the bridegroom of death who came to wreak havoc on the city. The scenes of carnage, however, are depicted through wedding images of doli, baraats, wedding finery and symbols of unity like the vermillion and bangles women adorn themselves with. The ravages of war and despoiling of cities are described through the desecration of poignant womanly symbols of both Hindus and Muslims. Nanak’s descriptions offer a perspective into the customs and rituals of medieval north Indian life. Ivory bracelets, doli rituals, mirror work fans and the rest reveal a world of art and beauty in the cultural traditions of the Punjab. In both articles, Babur is synonymous with a world gone astray where the ruler is the criminal.
Operation Blue Star and the killing of the Sikh pilgrims within the precincts of their most sacred shrine the Golden Temple also radicalized some Sikhs and turned them into militants. We normally associate violence and militancy with men but in Sandip Kaur’s memoir, Bhikra Painda (The Broken Road) translated and introduced by Urvashi Butalia, we see how a young girl (around the same age as the Singh Twins at the time) is determined to take amrit and help her quam. Kaur is one of the few known women to join the militants in Punjab. She recounts,
Carrying the deep wound in his heart every Singh was in search of a way to register his protest at what had happened [the storming of Harmandir Sahib]. I was 12 years old and I too was searching for a way to express my anger and hurt.
Although history and especially violent history affects women – turning them overnight into widows, bereft mothers, daughters and sisters, their own stories, especially of resistance, are seldom told. These excerpts from Kaur’s memoir are, however, an insider’s view of what led her to ‘marry into the movement’ and to bring up her son while on the run. Butalia’s introduction raises many fascinating issues about the association of women with violence, agency, loyalty and the like.
While the first three articles explore how the psyche of a nation, a community and an individual are shaped by violent historical events, Navsharan Singh’s Writing Dalit Women in Political Economy of Agrarian Crisis and Resistance in Punjab raises the ever-present issue of women’s invisibility. She notes that Dalit women in Punjab have imperceptibly inserted themselves into both peasant movements and cultural fora, but that since ‘Scholarly writings on Punjab have not noticed these movements, and therefore they have “naturally” also not noticed dalit women in public spaces.’ Initially, peasant movements used to be largely male dominated. But now women and especially dalit women are playing an increasingly important role in these movements though still unnoticed by mainstream media. Singh provides specific examples to illustrate how the involvement of women has changed the nature of resistance.
If the presence of Punjabi Dalit women remains unnoticed in the overtly political arena, women’s invisibility is less an issue, Gurminder K. Bhogal argues in – Listening to Female Voices in Sikh Kirtan. She boldly asserts that ‘If there is a place we can go to hear traces of female voices and bodies otherwise missing from Punjabi history – that place is in Sikh kirtan.’ Bhogal traces female kirtanyea’s and their role in the past and now. The recordings of these kirtaniye reveal their very different styles and appeal. She observes that a unique feature of Sikh kirtan is that it is ‘not so much a performance of music as it is an enactment of identity’. But it is important to remember that the kirtan was performed very much as an interactive part of the physical sangat or community. She raises the fascinating question of how we can view the expansion of a cyber sangat with the increased accessibility via live streaming and YouTube; ‘the question arises as to whether the unity of a virtual community effectively extends the boundaries of the Gurudwara into cyberspace as it re-configures the physical space and spiritual connection cultivated between a kirtaniye and the sangat’.
Invisibility and loss are most poignantly evoked in Gauri Gill’s photo essay What Remains. The series of photos taken between 2007 and 2011 in Kabul and Delhi bear testimony to the displacement of Sikhs and Hindus from their homes in Kabul, Jalalabad and Kandahar largely as a result of the Talibans and later the allied invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. The photographs and the accompanying commentary by Preminder Singh examine questions of identity, home and belonging. ‘The final work’ Singh says ‘is a mélange of history, nostalgia, memory and loss. The loss of almost the entire community of Afghan Sikhs and the mini diaspora that they have formed in the gullis of Tilak Nagar in Delhi’.
The loss of a home and a homeland can be a violent wrenching or a gentle passing but the void it leaves is seldom filled. As Salman Rushdie said, the past can itself become a foreign country. Preeti Gill’s family memoir Ashiana and After is a bid to keep alive if not reclaim that past home that was a site of largely womanly bonding and a passing on of legacies. Set in a more recent past of 1972, the house Ashiana embodies a larger sense of a family space.
Safina Uberoi’s Portrait of My Biji evokes a similar sense of loss and remembrance as shared by the Afghan refugees captured in Gill’s photographs. The difference though is in the precise depiction of her indomitable paternal grandmother. A woman who at that time was brave enough to elope and marry the man she fell in love with and then subsequently after partition to divorce him. The hurt ran so deep that even on his deathbed, she neither forgave him nor visited him. This deeply personal and multi-layered portrait is like any good biography which is also an autobiography and gives us an insight into not only Biji but also into the formation of Safina.
In the art world, Gogi Saroj Pal is, like Safina’s Biji – a rebel. But she herself also drew inspiration from her grandmother who challenged conventions of appropriate behavior when she took on the administration of a women’s school after a devastating earthquake in Quetta in 1901. The spirit of rebellion also draws Saroj Pal to Guru Nanak. She says his being Sikh was not as important as his rootedness in Punjab and his daring to break religious conventions. Kathryn Myers sees this artist’s intentionally unsettling and contradictory work serving as a bridge between traditional, popular and contemporary art as she creates her own mythology. The lineage and inspiration of women underlie her work as they do that of many of the writers in this volume.
Descriptions of female connections and bonds are easily found in writings of all kinds – stories, poems, essays, novels and the rest. But depictions of male friendships are more rare. Kamla Kapur’s The Artist and the Saint is an original mapping of a male friendship. But this is not any ordinary friendship. She explores the nature of the friendship between Guru Nanak and Mardana – his companion and rabab player in his many journeys. Mardana is transformed by this contact and also acts as a foil to Nanak. His ordinary humanness replete with wants, desires and base emotions further highlight Nanak’s divinity, purity and essential goodness. Mardana’s transformation and proximity to Nanak elevate him to god-like status in Sikh tales.
The volume comes full circle with Taunalyn Rutherford’s Studying Sikhs and Meeting Mormons: A Comparative Study of Women in Two of the Newest World Religions. If the inspiration of the two poems of the Singh Twins (included here) was a theme specific to Christianity, the Via Dolorosa or ‘path of pain’ refers to the route that Jesus took in his final days through the streets of Jerusalem from the place of his trial to the place of his Crucifixion. We see in Rutherford’s study a similar broadening and drawing from other faiths. Her unusual comparison of Mormons and Sikhs begins with their relative minority status. She bases her study on the religions as they are practiced mainly in Utah. In both cases, women are the practitioners and disseminators of religious rituals and practices create communities where they find a home.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Geetanjali Singh Chanda
Geetanjali Singh Chanda. Address: Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA. [[email protected]; [email protected]]