All rights reserved. Amritsar 1984 Amritsar 1984 A City Remembers Radhika Chopra Copyright © 2018. All rights reserved. LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London Chopra, Radhika.
Amritsar 1984 : A City Remembers, Lexington Books, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.com/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail. Created from nyulibrary-ebooks on 2020-07-15 08:22:22. Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
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Printed in the United States of America Chopra, Radhika. Amritsar 1984 : A City Remembers, Lexington Books, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.com/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail. Created from nyulibrary-ebooks on 2020-07-15 08:22:22.
To my parents, Pran and Sarojine Chopra Copyright © 2018. All rights reserved. Amritsar 1984 : A City Remembers, Lexington Books, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.com/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail.
Created from nyulibrary-ebooks on 2020-07-15 08:22:22. Contents Prefaceix Acknowledgmentsxi Introduction: Pasts We Cannot Forget xiii 1 Portrait of a Martyr 1 2 Seeing Off the Dead 27 3 Bazaar Divinity 47 4 Curating the Sacred 67 Bibliography91 Index97 Copyright © 2018. All rights reserved. About the Author 107 vii Chopra, Radhika.
Amritsar 1984 : A City Remembers, Lexington Books, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.com/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail. Created from nyulibrary-ebooks on 2020-07-15 08:22:22. Preface There’s a word in Punjabi which means disturbance or noise—raula.
It’s also metaphorically used to denote periods of trouble. The partition of India and the division of Punjab in 1947 are specifically spoken of as Raula: The Parti- tion Disturbances. Today, when we speak of partition, we know it as more than a single event, nested in myriad memories. Looking back has expanded the semantic range of raula.
Extended to June 1984, when the Indian army occupied the Darbar Sahib in Amritsar, raula indexes the troubles that pre- ceded and followed the army occupation of the sacred shrine. Over the course of time, 1984 has also been fleshed out as more and more people recount their memories of what happened. For many years, I remembered June 1984 as the year my parents made the journey down from the small hill town of Dalhousie that abuts Punjab. In the period immediately preceding their harrowing journey, the state of Punjab was under curfew.
News and mobility were severely restricted, if not prohib- Copyright © 2018. All rights reserved. Rumors about militants hiding out in the hills of Dalhousie tore through the little hill town. Entry to and exit from Dalhousie were bar- ricaded by the army.
Supplies were scarce, and people were scared. Staying on in Dalhousie was not considered a “safe” option. For me, June 1984 was about the heart-in-the-mouth fear that, in my mother’s words, felt dreadfully close to her family’s flight from Lahore to Amritsar in 1947. Ironically, in 1984, it was Amritsar that was the danger zone.
Later that same year, I was a volunteer with Nagrik Ekta Manch, a citizen’s initiative that came together to protest against the state sponsored riots in Delhi against Sikhs, following the assassination of Indira Gandhi, and to pro- vide relief to the traumatized Sikhs of Delhi. In fact, the riots were not con- fined to Delhi. Like the Partition, the violence spread over territory and time. But what remains deeply etched in my memories of 1984 is my mother’s ix Chopra, Radhika.
Amritsar 1984 : A City Remembers, Lexington Books, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.com/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail. Created from nyulibrary-ebooks on 2020-07-15 08:22:22. x Preface descriptions of their June journey and what happened in Delhi between Octo- ber and November 1984.
To write about Amritsar, the center of so much violence, was a slow-grow- ing idea. As I was researching and writing about political asylum seekers who fled Punjab, settling in migrant neighborhoods that gave them sanctuary, the question “what happened in Amritsar?” took root. Never having lived in Amritsar and with feeble connections to place in my family biography (my maternal grandfather’s mother’s family were traders in the city) I had little knowledge of the city. Despite my ignorance, it was clear to me that the momentous events of 1984 could never really be properly explored without mapping Amritsar and what people of Amritsar remembered of 1984.
Starting in 2005, I began my own journey into the past of a city dense with memory. Some residents of the city referred to the army action in the Darbar Sahib in 1984 as raula; some referred to the actions of militants in the period leading up to Operation Bluestar as raula. By 2015, raula denoted the unfold- ing politics of the pardon of Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh, head of a dera (establishment) accused of blasphemy. The pardon was fiercely condemned, followed by physical clashes within the Darbar Sahib.
Once again, residents of Amritsar witnessed security forces around the shrine and the surrounding bazaar. Shopkeepers said it looked and felt just like 1984. Links with the past emerged in the use of the term raula for all these events. Through language, the past came forward to shape the emotional landscape of the city in the present.
In this work, I’ve primarily chosen the visual as a strand to understand the remembrance of raula. The ocular register is by no means the only one through which we might know raula. But the visual filled my eye and imagi- nation, reaching out through portraiture, souvenirs, shop displays, even street realignments that sought to reshape remembrance. Together and separately, Copyright © 2018.
All rights reserved. all these objects showed me how raula as a transitive verb could map the city and how I could understand troubles of a past that cannot be forgotten. Amritsar 1984 : A City Remembers, Lexington Books, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.com/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail.
Created from nyulibrary-ebooks on 2020-07-15 08:22:22. Acknowledgments This book would not have been possible without the help and inputs of many different people. In Amritsar, I would like to thank Professor Paramjit Singh Judge, Profes- sor Gurpreet Bal, Professor Joginder Singh, Dr. Aziz Abbas, and other col- leagues at the Guru Nanak Dev University, for the discussions that enriched my understanding of Amritsar and its cultures.
I owe a deep debt of gratitude to Sardar Surinder Singh and Sardar Satpal Singh Danish, and members of their extended family, for their kindness in sharing material and the enthusi- asm with which they engaged with my work. I take this opportunity to thank the Norway Research Council for the generous grant under the project “Indian Cosmopolitan Alternatives” which enabled part of the fieldwork. I would particularly like to thank Professor Kathinka Froystad who headed the project for stimulating discussions in wonderful places, laced with wine and great food. I want to thank all the Copyright © 2018.
All rights reserved. members of the project team for questions that stirred things up in the best possible spirit. I owe a great deal to Professor Arvind-Pal Mandair at the University of Michigan and Professor Anne Murphy at the University of British Columbia for their insights into Sikhism and Punjabi language and culture. I also thank Dr.
Yogesh Snehi at Ambedkar University and Professor Ravinder Kaur at IIT Delhi, and others in Delhi whose reflections and knowledge of Punjab were critical at different stages of this research. I would like to thank Dr. Rosy Hastir and Shri Ramesh Ramachandran, Editor, Outlook, for permission to use some of the images published in this book. My thanks to Navjit Kaur Bhambra, Kamalpreet Singh Gill, and Swati Chawla for invaluable research assistance over these last few years.
xi Chopra, Radhika. Amritsar 1984 : A City Remembers, Lexington Books, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.com/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail. Created from nyulibrary-ebooks on 2020-07-15 08:22:22.
xii Acknowledgments To students interested in the study of Punjab at the Department of Sociol- ogy, University of Delhi, whose curiosity about the subject was exciting and deeply encouraging. Finally my thanks to Dr. Hari Sen, as always, for his immense clarity, invigorating discussion, refreshing skepticism, and unfailing good humor. All rights reserved.
Amritsar 1984 : A City Remembers, Lexington Books, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.com/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail. Created from nyulibrary-ebooks on 2020-07-15 08:22:22. Introduction Pasts We Cannot Forget Remembrance is hard.1 It’s harder still when everyone’s recollections don’t match.
We all hold on to memories of the past, of people and events who overturned or gave shape to our lives, but different people remember dif- ferent things. “What happened” is an account that changes shape over time and with every storyteller. An event is written and overwritten many times, though each telling is presented as coherent and complete. At the same time, each recounting might have a little omission, a small part that is overlooked, ignored, or sometimes laid to rest.
Memory has the quality of bringing the past forward, but with deletions that suit the present of the narrator and the audience. Traumatic events are harder to remember, harder to uncover, their memo- ries more difficult to repair. They linger in sleepless remembrance, in adjudi- cations based on conflicting accounts, in snippets remembered by successive Copyright © 2018. All rights reserved.
Dreadful events are sometimes deliberately remembered in commemorations of loss and in memorials that mark injury. Like memory, rituals of commemoration shift and slide across time and space, each a proxy performance of the event as people want to remember it at that moment. Who remembers is germane to the process of bringing the past into the pres- ent. The politics of the present actively intervenes in shaping what the past looks like at the time of its commemoration or the moment of its installation as memorial.
This book is an exploration of how a traumatic event is remembered, com- memorated, or cautiously erased. The “event remembered” is the orchestrated military assault on a sacred complex, the Sri Darbar Sahib in Amritsar, by the Indian army during “Operation Bluestar” in June 1984. It is most fre- quently spoken of as a deeply traumatic event evoking intense but uneasy remembrances. Different aspects of 1984 have been addressed by scholars, xiii Chopra, Radhika.
Amritsar 1984 : A City Remembers, Lexington Books, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.com/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail. Created from nyulibrary-ebooks on 2020-07-15 08:22:22. xiv Introduction deepening the understanding of “what happened.” Eyewitness accounts (Singh 1999) and informed journalism (Tully and Jacob 1985) captured the intensity and details of Operation Bluestar.
More recently, newspaper reports outlined the involvement of the special forces unit of the British army, the Special Air Service (SAS), in advising the Indian government on strategy to remove the militants from the Darbar Sahib (Doward, October 29, 2017). Scholars like Joyce Pettigrew (1995) and Cynthia Keppley Mahmood (1996) focused attention on ordinary men and women who lived through the troubled times, and those who fought for Khalistan. Their analysis, which is based on interviews, provides a compelling picture of the “everyman” perspective of dramatic upheavals. Scholars in Punjab were equally engaged with demonstrating the roots of insurgency.
The work of Puri, Judge, and Sekhon (1999) stands out; their detailed descriptive and statistical analysis of those who joined the movements strengthened the argument of Pettigrew and others (Deol 2000; Singh and Bhogal 2014) that the roots of violence lay in disruptions and dislocations within the agrarian economy. The ramifications of political unrest were not confined to Punjab. Migrant communities from Punjab who had settled across the globe were linked closely to the politics of their homeland (Axel 2001; Singh 2000). In my own work (Chopra 2011), I traced the biographies of families who sent their sons away to live among diasporic kin, fearing both militant and military violence against young men.