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ABSTRACT
Highly critical of the Indian government's cover up of the 1984 Sikh pogroms, Indian-Canadian author Jaspreet Singh offers a scathing expose of the anti-Sikh violence in his 2013 novel Helium. Singh experienced first-hand the ‘holocaust’ of 1984 in Delhi, and as a diasporic Indian since 1990, he is also intimately familiar with the burdens of postmemory among Sikhs in the west, many of whom sought asylum abroad in the wake of 1984. Influenced by Primo Levi and W.G. Sebald, Singh constructs a multi-generic ‘archive’ of the crimes of 1984 in Helium, which articulates the lingering trauma of the Sikhs and challenges the image of a unified, multiculturalist, secular-humanist postcolonial Indian state. Drawing on exhaustive research, Helium is a hybrid of fiction, survivor and relief worker testimonials, photographs, drawings, documentary, thriller, and inter-textual narrative—because the horror of 1984 cannot be recounted through a single medium or genre or voice. In considering its archival form and political intent, my article establishes Helium as a bold, ethical attempt to record the anti-Sikh violence of 1984 in order to bring justice to both the dead and the survivors.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 For information about the Sikh pogroms of 1984, see, among others, Uma Chakravarti and Nandita Haksar, The Delhi Riots: Three Days in the Life of a Nation (1987); Citizen’s Commission, Delhi, 31 October to 4 November, 1984: Report of the Citizen’s Commission (1984); Jyoti Grewal, Betrayed by the State: The Anti-Sikh Pogrom of 1984 (Citation2007); Jaskaran Kaur, Twenty Years of Impunity: The November 1984 Pogroms of Sikhs in India (2006); Smitu Kothari and Harsh Sethi, eds. Voices from a Scarred City: The Delhi Carnage in Perspective (1985); Manoj Mitta and H. S. Phoolka, When a Tree Shook Delhi: The 1984 Carnage and Its Aftermath (2007); People’s Union for Democratic Rights and People’s 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); Amiya Rao et al. Report to the Nation: Truth about Delhi Violence (1985); Jarnail Singh, I Accuse—The Anti-Sikh Violence of 1984 (2009); and Khushwant Singh, My bleeding Punjab (1992).
2 The government-led military attack on the Golden Temple in June 1984, codenamed Operation Blue Star, has been described as the third Sikh ghallughara (holocaust) by Darshan Singh Tatla, linking it to the first two ghallugharas, in 1746 and 1762 respectively, when tens of thousands of Sikhs were massacred by Diwan Lakhpat Rai and Ahmad Shah Durrani (Citation2006, 61). More recently, the November 1984 pogrom has been dubbed the Sikhs’ Kristallnacht by Parvinder Singh (Citation2009) of the UK-based National Union of Journalists’ 1984 Truth and Justice Campaign. Underlining the significance of nomenclature, Gyanendra Pandey points out astutely that ‘our very choice of terms determines not only the images we construct but also the questions we ask about historical (and contemporary) events’ (Citation2001, 15).
3 This recalls of course the use among Punjabi refugees generally of the therm Santali, ’47, the year of India’s ill-fated Partition in which the Sikhs bore the brunt of the violence and displacement. Jyoti Grewal, though, writes of a more pernicious use of the term ‘chaurisye’ by the government as well as by some Sikh elites to denote the most marginalized of the 1984 victims:
the numerical designation for a year now is a name capturing in it the entire meaning of a series of events, rendering people a new collective identity, one intended to separate the ghettoized transplanted Sikh widows and their children from the established Sikhs.
4 But even here Nandy adopts the Congress Party’s vocabulary of ‘riots’ to describe what was unambiguously a pogrom.
5 To those who would argue that the November 1984 Sikh massacres were the result of a spontaneous eruption of grief of the (Hindu) masses at Indira Gandhi’s murder, Jaspreet Singh responds indirectly but astutely that ‘[t]he party [Congress] conducted no pogrom when Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu zealot in 1948’ (Citation2012a, ‘8T4,’ 161).
6 The most recent example of the disavowal of complicity in 1984 by the Central Government – though it is the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and not the Congress at the helm of the country at present – through the magnified smoke-screen of Khalistan came during Canadian Defence Minister Harjit S. Sajjan’s visit to India in late April this year. Following on the heels of the Ontario Assembly’s 6 April 2017 passage of a motion terming the 1984 ‘riots’ a ‘genocide,’ Sajjan’s trip raised hackles among both the BJP in the Center and the Congress Party in Punjab. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, himself largely held responsible for the 2002 massacre of Muslims in Gujarat during his tenure as Chief Minister of the state, refused to receive the Canadian minister as evidence of his disapproval of the Ontario legislature’s move. But Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh of the Congress Party went further, condemning Sajjan as a ‘Khalistan sympathizer’ (Citation2017a, The Citizen). Beyond even the Punjab 1984 issue, what the BJP and Congress fear is that the motion moved by Canadian MPP Harinder Mallu – ‘to condemn all forms of communal violence, hatred, hostility, prejudice, racism and intolerance in India and anywhere else in the world, including 1984 Genocide perpetrated against Sikhs throughout India, and call on all sides to embrace truth, justice and reconciliation’ – could open up other such pogroms in India to similar condemnation and a wider questioning of India’s abysmal human rights record. (Citation2017b, The Citizen, April 7; April 19)
As Arundhati Roy recounts in her recent publication The End of Imagination, ‘There have been pogroms in India before [the 2002 Gujarat massacre of Muslims], equally heinous, equally unpardonable … the massacre of Muslims in Nellie, Assam, in 1983, under a Congress state government,’ ‘the massacre of … Sikhs following the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984, by Congress-led mobs in Delhi,’ the ‘massacre, in 1993, of … Muslims by the Shiv Sena in Mumbai, following the demolition of the Babri Masjid. In these pogroms too, the killers were protected and given complete impunity’ (Citation2016, 10). In addition, she points to a chilling fact about the continuing and very real threats to Indian citizens by its own government:
soldiers are not just deployed on the Siachen Glacier or on the borders of India … . there has not been a single day since Independence in 1947 when the Indian Army and other security forces have not been deployed within India’s borders against what are meant to be their “own” people – in Kashmir, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Assam, Junagadh, Hyderabad, Goa, Punjab, Telengana, West Bengal, and now Chhattisgarh, Orissa, and Jharkhand. (28)
7 Unsurprisingly, there was no public monument or memorial site in India to mark the horrific events until January of this year. Suffering many setbacks, exploited by politicians seeking office in Punjab, criticized for its potential to weaken the ostensibly ‘unified national fabric’ of India, the memorial faced resistance at the hands of the Congress Party as well as the Chief Minister of Delhi, Sheila Dikshit. It was only after Sajjan Kumar’s brazen acquittal in 2013 of this role in the 1984 massacre that the building of the memorial got off the ground. Funded notably not by the Indian government – which in fact put up as many obstacles as it could, legal and otherwise – or even the Punjab state government, but by the Delhi Sikh Gurudwara Management Committee, the 1984 memorial, built on the grounds of Rakabgunj Gurudwara near Parliament House in Central Delhi in plain sight of the halls of power, was finally inaugurated by the widows of 5 of the victims on January 15 this year. Called the Wall of Truth, the site pays tribute not only to those Sikhs who died in that murderous year of 1984, both in June and again in October–November, but also to those non-Sikhs who lost their lives trying to protect their Sikh neighbours, friends, and fellow citizens.
8 Following Foucault, Diana Taylor points out in her 2010 keynote address, ‘Save as … Knowledge and Transmission in the Age of Digital Technologies,’ that the archive – selected and preserved memory/text – is ‘imbued with power and authority … . cultural relevance, even “truth,”’ whereas
live, [e]mbodied practices … fail to provide hard evidence of the past. The impossibility of archiving the live came to equate absence and disappearance. Historical documents prove that the land belonged to the settlers, not to the Native populations, etc. The personal and political repercussions have been devastating.
9 Gyanendra Pandey summarizes the Sikh injustices post-1947 effectively
Their homeland, Punjab, split down the middle, with a large part of their property and pilgrim-sites left in West Pakistan, the Sikhs as a political community have never been allowed to forget what they suffered at Partition. This is summed up in the commonly encountered statement that while the Hindus got their Hindustan and the Muslims got their Pakistan, the Sikhs were like orphans, left with nothing. The Punjabi Suba movement of the 1950s and 1960s and the Khalistani movements of the 1970s and 1980s both derived a considerable part of their strength from such sentiments. On the state’s side, the question of ‘minorities’ in India … has continued to be handled in light of the ‘lessons’ of Partition,
10 While Anita Rau Badami’s 2006 novel Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? does deal with the Khalistan issue and the 1984 pogroms, it covers these within the much wider arc of the 60-year span of Sikh history post-Partition. In contrast, Jaspreet Singh’s novel focuses exclusively on 1984 and justice denied, underscoring thereby the momentousness, gravity, and urgency of the issue. And in this, it participates in that ‘collective address, agency and reclamation in terms other than exteriority, otherness or abject victimhood … through more enlightening, creative, intellectual interventions and albeit belated mourning and narration of the tragedy’ which Parvinder Mehta calls for in her personally inflected but also academically rigorous essay ‘Repressive Silences and Whispers of History: Lessons and Legacies of 1984’ (Citation2015, 20).
11 This quote is from Elie ’Weisels The Fifth Son (Citation1983). It is, of course, amply clear that there are significant parallels between the Jewish Holocaust and the Sikh pogroms, a fact that Jaspreet Singh acknowledges both directly and indirectly in Helium. Further, Singh’s novel also demonstrates many of the pathologies of trauma and the challenges of narrating traumatic histories that trauma studies scholars, among them Cathy Caruth, Dominick LaCapra, and Geoffrey Hartman, and also postcolonial trauma theorists Stef Craps, Michael Rothberg, and Irene Visser articulate. However, an extended analysis of these correspondences is beyond the purview of this paper.
12 Hirsch first used the term in an article on Art Spiegelman’s Maus in Citation1992–1993. Since then, she has theorized and written about the experience of postmemory extensively, most recently in The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (Citation2012b).
13 Whereas the reference to the Holocaust is unmistakable, Singh is also more directly referencing the burning of the Sikh sacred scripture the Adi Granth during the innumerable attacks and raids on gurudwaras in 1984 and into the late twentieth century. Further, while the June 1984 Operation Blue Star may be the most well known and infamous of the named military offensives against Sikhs, a list of major and continued assaults on the community from 1985 to 1995 follows: Operation Woodrose (June-September 1984), Operation Black Thunder I & II (1988), Operation Night Dominance (1992), Rakshak I & II (1991–1992), and the Final Assault (Citation1992–1993). Concomitantly, the Central Government set up the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act, TADA for short, in 1985, expressly to deal with the so-called Punjab ‘insurgency.’ Over the years, nearly 100,000 Sikhs were arrested under TADA, which was universally criticized by Human Rights organizations for widespread abuse and gross human rights violations.
14 The short story ‘Arjun’ is collected in Singh’s Seventeen Tomatoes: Tales from Kashmir (Citation2004). The character Arjun reappears, albeit with substantial modifications, as Nelly’s traumatized, runaway son in Helium.
15 Underlining the significance of the diaspora experience, Raj the narrator, standing in as spokesperson for Singh, notes cryptically in Helium that ‘[i]f I had stayed in India I would have dealt with the burden of the past differently’ (82). While lengthy consideration of the different experiences of diasporic versus India-resident Sikhs post-1984 is not my focus in this essay, other scholars like Parvinder Mehta (Citation2015) and Giorgio Shani (Citation2010) have addressed this issue in (varying degrees of) detail.
16 Chef, Jaspreet Singh’s first novel, belies its innocent-sounding title – as does Helium – its plot revolving around the tragedy of occupied Kashmir and evincing the author’s intense political interests as early as 2008 (and even earlier, as the title of his first book-length publication in Citation2004, the collection of stories entitled Seventeen Tomatoes: Tales from Kashmir reveals).
17 Regarding the paucity of materials documenting the horrors of the Punjab pogroms, Singh wrote in 2012,
For almost two decades if one inquired about “an ’84 book” in a bookstore in India, all one got was George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. But now the situation is slightly different. In addition to several human rights reports, a few books have appeared … [and] a couple of documentaries and feature films … .But many remain unaware of this tragedy. (‘8T4)
18 Most reviewers comment on this generic blend of the novel: Mark Jarman notes that ‘[i]t’s not an easy book to classify, and that’s a good thing’ (Citation2013); Bron Sibri describes the text as
a profoundly poetic novel that unfolds with the leisurely, meditative pace of a travelogue and the suggestive thrust of a thriller … . peppered with archival photographs and real-life names and utterances, along with the odd scientific image and artist’s sketch, that it is palpably suggestive of a documentary, a non-fiction expose
19 As Marianne Hirsch notes in interview,
[T]rauma cannot so easily be contained, it seeps out of bounds … . It is for this reason that I am particularly interested in tracing the workings of postmemory through a second- and now also third-generation aesthetics as manifested in literature, film, and visual arts … . The multi-faceted and multi-layered aesthetic that emerges from the mediations of postmemory best communicate the contradictory needs, desires, refusals and aversions—the proximity and the distance—characterizing this experience.
20 Similarly, and in very similar language, Singh tells interviewer Amandeep Sandhu that his
original plan was to allow this story [‘Arjun’] to grow into a novel. But I was still processing the traumatic events of 1984. Also, whenever I picked up the story, I felt a narrative crisis. Most known models – including my favourite writer of Partition stories, Manto – seemed inadequate to narrate November 1984. I had to figure out a new way to write. This book [Helium], among other things, was a resolution of my creative crisis. (2013)
21 In a clearly metanarratival, highly self-reflexive move, Jaspreet Singh also casts Raj as the fictional ‘author’ of the archival report about the 1984 Sikh pogroms that Raj has compiled to submit to the UN International Criminal Court in The Hague … in other words, of the novel Helium. (I discuss this issue in more detail a little later in the article.) But while there is also undoubtedly an autobiographical association between character and author, Jaspreet Singh’s response to Amandeep Sandhu’s question about such a parallel is characteristically elusive: ‘Helium is Raj’s story. Not mine,’ he says (2013).
22 The key question that remains here, of course, is whether the new (non-Sikh) generation is indeed (ready and capable to be) that ‘addressable Other’ that Dori Laub writes about (Citation1992, 68), or whether Helium is ‘heard’ tragically only by other Sikhs. In her influential essay ‘Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening,’ Laub cautions that ‘the absence of an empathic listener, or more radically, the absence of an addressable other, an other who can hear the anguish of one’s memories and thus affirm and recognize their realness, annihilates the story’ (68).
23 In his insightful essay, ‘The Memorialization of Ghallughara: Trauma, Nation, and Diaspora,’ Giorgio Shani points to the conflicted functioning of memory and forgetting vis-à-vis 1984 Punjab, even amongst Sikhs:
Central to the construction of a discourse of ‘victimhood’ is the selective use of memory by nationalists: how Sikhs in the diaspora ‘remember’ ‘Operation Blue Star’, and, what they, and more importantly Sikhs in the Punjab, choose to ‘forget’. Whilst for the [latter], ‘forgetting’ is a strategy used to cope with the trauma of being terrorized by their own government in their own homeland; for the [former], remembering is constitutive of community, a way of asserting their own identity as Sikhs.
24 This translation is provided in the novel by Nelly as she is recounting her life’s story to Raj in 2010.
25 Raj himself notes in the last few pages of Helium,
As the car rolled into the night I experienced a flood of thoughts, and I knew what I had to do next. The Hague, I knew that was the road I would take next, but before The Hague a lot of work. Work, and save the truth from extinction. (280)
26 In a book review, Walter Gordon discusses Singh’s debt to Sebald as follows: Helium ‘owes perhaps its most substantial stylistic debt to W.G. Sebald,’ he declares. His epigraph from Vertigo reveals Singh’s ‘distaste for patriotism, a passionate disdain of assent by inaction.’ And referencing another of Sebald’s works, he writes,
If Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn tackles the British post-colonial situation from the ‘inside out’ … Singh’s novel does the opposite. Helium looks closely at the post-colonial site itself, at the re-purposed ruins and the messy after-shadow of empire in India. Raj’s chosen academic field, rheology, also suggests a certain relationship to Sebald’s work: the word’s root, rhea, is Saturn’s second largest moon, complete with its own rings. (2013)
27 Robert Walser (1878–1956), who J.M. Coetzee regards as a ‘genius’ and a truly ‘great writer’ (Citation2000), was a German-speaking Swiss writer whose works are (unfortunately only years after his death) regarded as masterpieces of modernism.
28 Jaspreet Singh himself includes this quote from Sebald in his essay ‘Thomas Bernard in New Delhi’ (Citation2013c).
29 Reading Singh’s coterminous 2013 essay ‘Carbon,’ we find additional symbolic links between the ‘clouds of volcanic ash’ thrown up by the Icelandic volcano (Helium 3) and the ash, both literal and metaphoric, produced by the burning of humans as well as books in the seismic cataclysm of the Punjab pogrom. ‘Those who begin by burning books will end by burning people,’ Singh writes in an obvious reference to the Nazi Holocaust, but continues with reference to modern-day India:
The Indian capital is one of those rare cities where such wisdom gets completely inverted: those who begin by burning people will end by burning books./In November 1984 … . [a]fter burning humans, the thugs took meal breaks and then burned more humans and then burned copies of the Adi Granth in gurudwaras. Sometimes they burned books and humans simultaneously./The Adi Granth includes apparently 6,000 poetic compositions by 43 saints who lived in the vast Subcontinent. The work included in the book defies caste, creed, region or religion – work created over five centuries./In short, the men burned not only what was sacred to them, but they also burned the very idea of ‘coming together as equals.’ They also burned Memory [of secular India, of liberty, equality, fraternity, of our very humanity]./I was in Delhi in 1984. I saw the blackened remains of books. I saw ash particles floating in air.
30 The tragic irony of the daughter being named after Indira Gandhi, who even in death is responsible for Dr Singh’s brutal end, is deepened manifold when the child herself is killed in the pogrom. And her sibling Arjun, his name ironically referencing the legendary hero and archer of the Hindu epic The Mahabharata, as well as the fifth Sikh guru who was martyred in 1606 following his torture at the hands of the Mughal emperor Jahangir, ends up as a runaway after his father’s slaughter and after he witnesses the violence of 1984 Delhi, including the death of his sister. The murderous legacy of 1984 thus continues unabated into the new millennium.
31 In her lengthy and nuanced consideration of the ‘repressive silences’ surrounding 1984 Punjab, Parvinder Mehta notes astutely that the ‘seemingly reformist ideology of forgetting the anti-Sikh violence of 1984 … and moving on remains unconvincing … especially when social justice remains unavailable’ (Citation2015, 1).
32 The centrality of this scene – much like that of the Gare d’Austerlitz scene in Sebald’s novel Austerlitz and of railway stations generally in the Holocaust script – is underlined by Raj when he realizes that the kernel, the narrative as well as the political heart, of 1984 remains for him his mentor’s murder on the train platform:
[S]lowly I found that my notes acquired a real dimension, a tangent line, and it transformed into Professor Singh’s story, as if his life was a circle, and by delving into the fog of words I hoped to touch the circle at a single point, a tangent line … . For me the starting, crystallising image or the ‘decisive moment’ was the railway platform where Nelly had come to bid him farewell. (88)
33 We also hear in detail about Raj’s father’s guilt through Sharma Uncle’s narrative; and we are witness to the Sikh Raj Singh’s torture at the hands of the Punjab police through his embedded first person account.
34 Whereas one of Indira Gandhi’s assassins was shot dead in 1984 and the other as well as a co-conspirator was hanged in 1989, none of the major architects of the Sikh pogroms – HKL Bhagat, Sajjan Kumar, Jagdish Tytler, Lalit Maken, Dharam Lal Shastri, and others, MPs all, but also among them Rajiv Gandhi, who instigated and then turned a blind eye to the massacres, and who was to go on to become the Prime Minister – none has been prosecuted 32 plus years on. Instead, Bhagat, in whose constituency the most Sikhs were killed, was rewarded with the Ministry for Information and Broadcasting in Rajiv Gandhi’s new cabinet. Jagdish Tytler was made Civil Aviation Minster. Both Kumar and Tytler were given party nominations to fight the 2004 and 2009 elections by Congress President, Sonia Gandhi. The feeble apology offered by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in 2005 failed to acknowledge or confront the horror of the organized carnage and to accept that his party engineered the massacres.
35 It is important, though, to note that Levi regarded these ‘small differences’ as ‘life-giving,’ as Murray Baumgarten points out:
That the Jews, Jewishness, Judaism are fundamental elements of the structure of the civilization of the West becomes an implicit and sustained image and idea of The Periodic Table. That the Jew is ‘the grain of salt or mustard’ that generates flavor by its edge, by its life-giving difference – this is Primo Levi’s discovery in ‘Zinc’ that is generalized in ‘Potassium.’ In those episodes he begins to be initiated into the acknowledgement that he is ‘the impurity that makes the zinc react.’ That realization becomes the deep structure of this narrative.
36 Such is the success of Singh’s recreation of the trauma of 1984, of its ‘immediacy’ and ‘disturbing … extremity and detail,’ one ‘without critical distance, without a privileged vantage point,’ that even an outsider like Walter Gordon notes, ‘In Helium, to witness is to take part, and to remember an event is not to bring it into the present, but to realize that it has been with you all along’ (Citation2013).
37 This ‘archival’ list clearly imitates Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) in form, laying out declarative, (supposedly) self-evident, logical statements to establish the Indian government’s responsibility for the 1984 pogroms, and bears quoting at length:
The archive says:
38 A ‘gendered’ reading of Helium can be extended in other directions too, as I outline here. (1) The patronymic that underlies the title, Helium or HE, can also be problematized along religiopolitical lines, for the Hindu narrator Raj’s ‘real’ father turns out to have been the Sikh professor, who dies literally at the hands of his biological (Hindu) father (and by extension at Raj’s hands, who can do nothing to save the Professor). (2) The Raj-Professor Singh-Nelly triangle, in its unambiguously Oedipal base, signals as well the moral corruption and collapse of the conjugal, unitive national substratum of the modern Indian nation state. (3) Indira Gandhi’s claim to be ‘everybody’s mother’ turns out to be completely hollow for the Sikhs. And (4) Mother India displays only a murderous visage to her non-Hindu offspring, embodying literally the exclusive stance of Hindustan – the land, stan, of the Hindus – rather than the secular maternality befitting the progenitor of ‘the peoples of the Indus/Sindhu River,’ India.
39 I borrow this term from Scott McClintock in his Topologies of Fear in Contemporary Fiction to underscore the deep historical roots of Sikh oppression as well as the continuing trauma of 1984 into the new century and millennium. In his monograph, McClintock uses both the descriptors ‘long 20th century’ and ‘longer 20th century’ to study the impact of contemporary global terror networks and state-sponsored counter terrorism on world fiction and culture. Of his use of the chronological qualifiers he writes,
While the publication dates or periods of composition represented by the literary texts I consider do not comprehensively extend across the longer 20th century, the literary texts I analyze do cover this chronological range in their content, and they are therefore historiographical in their implication that even if the influence of terrorism on cultural history only became fully intelligible in the period after the Second World War, the longer 20th century has been pulled toward it as the motivating force of history.
40 See for example photojournalist Gauri Gill’s invaluable ‘1984 A Bibliography’ as well as Jaspreet Singh’s list of 1984-related materials on p. 257 of Helium and in his Acknowledgments pages (287–290).