Editors

Simi Malhotra, Sheikh Sana Assad, Farhana Tasnim, Somya Charan Pahadi and Sango Bidani

Trauma and Memory Studies: Responses from India and Beyond

Editors

Simi Malhotra

Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, Delhi, India

Sheikh Sana Assad

Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, Delhi, India

Farhana Tasnim

Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, Delhi, India

Somya Charan Pahadi

Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, Delhi, India

Sango Bidani

Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, Delhi, India

ISBN 978-981-96-6373-6e-ISBN 978-981-96-6374-3

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-6374-3

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2025

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“This illuminating collection marks a significant and timely intervention in the study of trauma and memory. It opens up important new pathways for understanding collective suffering, resistance, and resilience by foregrounding narratives from formerly colonised regions. Focusing on historical events such as the Bengal Famine, the Partition of British India, and the Bhopal gas tragedy, the contributors examine how trauma is experienced, processed, and remembered in communities still grappling with the legacies of colonial violence and structural oppression. From mourning rituals to resistance poetry and cinematic testimonies, these essays emphasise the power of art and culture as tools for healing and reclaiming agency. The volume makes a vital contribution to the decolonisation of Trauma and Memory studies, offering fresh insights into the complex ways in which marginalised communities from the Global South respond to historical and ongoing injustices.”

—Stef Craps, Professor of English Literature at Ghent University and author of Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds

“This volume is a vital addition to the field of Trauma and Memory Studies, exploring a range of cultural traumas suffered by marginalised peoples across the Global South. With chapters from both established and emergent scholars, it examines the traumatic legacies of colonial, neocolonial and postcolonial violence in locations as diverse as India and Palestine, Tibet and Kenya, Iran and the South Pacific. The nuanced attentiveness to how trauma is registered across a variety of genres—the novel, poetry, film, songs, museum exhibitions and journalism—is particularly impressive.”

—Sam Durrant, Associate Professor at School of English, University of Leeds and author of Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning: J.M Coetzee, Wilson Harris and Toni Morrison

To Remembrance

Acknowledgements

This edited volume would not have been possible without the support and collaboration of scholars and experts from different institutions across India and abroad. We are immensely grateful to the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia for providing us with a platform for brainstorming, critical thinking and collaboration. We organised the third Annual Young Researchers’ Conference titled Trauma and Memory Studies: Responses from the Global South (19th–21st January, 2024), the proceedings of which have developed into this volume.

We would like to express our immense gratitude to the invited keynote speakers for our conference: Prof. Roger Luckhurst, Prof. Stef Craps, Prof. Nadia Butt, Dr. Michela Borzaga, Dr. Sam Durrant, and Dr. Avishek Parui who generously brought their expertise and scholarship to our conference. The volume would be inconceivable without their scholarly inputs on Decolonising Trauma Theory, Animism, Transgenerational Trauma and theoretical concepts such as Remembering, Forgetting and Forgiving within the fields of Trauma and Memory Studies. These approaches, which were aimed at reconfiguring the bounds of the allied fields of Trauma and Memory Studies, were explored through paper presentations and discussions over various themed sessions at the three-day conference held in the virtual mode.

We are indebted to our contributors whose research, scholarly vigour and passion brought diverse perspectives and depth to our conversations around Trauma and Memory Studies. We would also like to extend our appreciation and acknowledgement towards all the attendees of our conference, who not only joined us from across time zones, but also shared invaluable inputs and insights. We would also like to thank the respective Chairs, Moderators and Rapporteurs for investing their time and effort to effectively manage several sessions in the conference. We are much obliged to the faculty members and scholars at the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, whose participation was indispensable to this undertaking.

Finally, we are grateful for the unwavering support and encouragement we have received from our family and friends; it was their faith in us that motivated us to bring this volume to its fruition.

About This Book

This book offers a comprehensive re-evaluation of Trauma and Memory Studies, foregrounding perspectives from India and other nations from the Global South. It critically interrogates the prevailing Euro-centric paradigm within the field, advocating for the amplification and contextualisation of voices originating from South Asian, African, Caribbean, and Middle Eastern spatial and temporal contexts. Departing from the conventional West/South centric narratives, this volume prioritises the narratives of historically marginalised survivor groups, encompassing individuals affected by pivotal events such as the 26/11 terror attacks in Mumbai, the Bengal famine, the dispersion of the Indian diaspora due to Partition and further ostracization, and the experiences of the incarcerated populations in Iran, Palestine, Bangladesh etc. Through an in-depth exploration of societal mechanisms for remembrance and coping strategies vis-a-vis traumatic episodes, such as the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, the book unveils the intricate interplay of political, cultural, and social dynamics. Exploring a diverse array of interdisciplinary methodologies, including analyses of artistic expressions, oral histories and digital media, it navigates the nuanced contours of post-colonial and post-conflict societies from India and beyond. Scholars and researchers will benefit from this critical discourse, which aims to enrich the field of Trauma and Memory Studies, particularly in its application to the Global South. This scholarly endeavour serves as an indispensable resource for academics, students, and researchers committed to the exploration of trauma and memory within non-western contexts.

Editors and Contributors

About the Editors

Simi Malhotra,

is Professor and Head, Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi. Her research areas are contemporary literary and cultural theory, including post theoretical developments, with research guidance, teaching and publications primarily concerning the same. Her latest publications are the edited books Globalization and Sense-Making Practices: Phenomenologies of the Global, Local and Glocal (Routledge, 2024), Affective World-Making: Routing Planetary Thought (Routledge, 2023), Globalization and Planetary Ethics: New Terrains of Consciousness (Routledge, 2024), Food Culture Studies in India: Consumption, Representation and Mediation (Springer, 2021) and Inhabiting Cyberspace in India: Theory, Perspectives and Challenges (Springer, 2021), and the co-authored books Terrains of Consciousness: Multilogical Perspectives on Globalization (Würzburg University Press, 2021), and Ocean as Method: Thinking With The Maritime (Routledge, 2022). She is a recipient of several grants and awards including the 2020 DUO-India Professor Fellowship Award and the grant under Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India sponsored ‘Scheme for Promotion of Academic and Research Collaborations’ (SPARC). Most recently, she has been awarded the University Grants Commission-Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (German Academic Exchange Service), UGC-DAAD Project Based Personnel Exchange Programme (PPP) 2021–22 to carry out a Project as Principal Investigator on “Mobile Feminisms: Gender, Social Media, Transnational Interactions” in collaboration with Prof.Dr. Mary Ann Snyder-Körber, English and American Studies, Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, Germany. She has visited several universities on fellowships, to deliver talks and presentations including University of Munster, Munster Germany (May 2023), Julius Maximilians Universität, Würzburg, Germany (May 2023) on UGC-DAAD Project Based Personnel Exchange Programme (PPP) and University of Colombo, Sri Lanka (2018).

Sheikh Sana Assad

is a Ph.D. Scholar at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Her doctoral work engages with Trauma and Memory Studies with a focus on transgeneration trauma, post-memory and prosthetic memory. Her work also focuses on affective politics, women's activism, and the role of literature in memory preservation. She has also presented her research at various national and international conferences across India and abroad. She has led several workshops at the University of Kashmir. She was Ministry of Education- SPARC fellow in Vernacular languages, in 2022, at the South Asian Institute, Heidelberg University, Germany.

Farhana Tasnim

is a Ph.D. Scholar at the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, and works in the field of Cultural Studies, Memory Studies and Trauma Studies. Her research centres on the literature of melancholia with a particular focus on the literary oeuvre of Orhan Pamuk. She has also participated in several seminars and workshops. She has also presented papers at national and international conferences.

Somya Charan Pahadi

is a Ph.D. Scholar at the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia. Her areas of study are Trauma Theory, Memory Studies and Contemporary Indian Literature. Her research is on the intersection of Trauma and Childhood in the Indian context. She has presented papers at several national and international conferences across the country. She has taught English and Communication Skills in colleges across New Delhi.

Dr. Sango Bidani

is a former faculty member of the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia. He was recently awarded his Ph.D. degree, for his thesis titled A Critical Study of the Cinematic Adaptations of Devdas in the Indian Subcontinent. His areas of research interest are in the fields of Adaptation Studies, Film Studies, Translation Studies, Partition Studies and Trauma and Memory Studies. He has three book chapter publications to his name, the latest being “The Trope of the Bastard Child: A Close Study of Children of War (2014)” published in a volume titled Articulating Childhood Trauma: In the Context of War, Sexual Abuse and Disability in 2024.

Contributors

Anwesha Adhikary

Banaras Hindus University, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India

Sheikh Sana Assad

Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India

Valentina Barnabei

Ca Foscari University of Venice, Venice, Italy

Aditi Bhardwaj

Nahan, India

Sango Bidani

Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India

Nadia Butt

University of Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Somya Charan Pahadi

Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India

Rinki Debnath

Department of English, Presidency University, Kolkata, West Bengal, India

Jerin Jacob

Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India

Farsanah Moossa Kappil

University of Calicut, Malappuram District, Kerala, India

Meghal Karki

Dr. B. R. Ambedkar University, Delhi, India

Revathy Krishnan

Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India

Justyna Kurowska

Chair of Indology, University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany

Simi Malhotra

Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India

Durba Mandal

Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India

Binod Mishra

Department of Humanities and Social Science, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Roorkee, Uttarakhand, India

Sania Muzamil

New Delhi, India

Natasha Negi

Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India

Lakshmi P.

Department of English and Cultural Studies, CHRIST (Deemed to Be University), Delhi, India

Pratishtha Pandey

Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai, India

Huzaifa Pandit

Government Degree College Pampore, Pampore, India

Avishek Parui

Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras, Chennai, India

Rohit Prasad

Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India

Roy  Sangjukta

Department of Humanities and Social Science, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Roorkee, Uttarakhand, India

Farhana Tasnim

Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India

Saumya Mani Tripathi

School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, India

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2025

S. Malhotra et al. (eds.)Trauma and Memory Studies: Responses from India and Beyondhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-6374-3_1

1. Introduction

Simi Malhotra1  , Sheikh Sana Assad1  , Farhana Tasnim1  , Somya Charan Pahadi1   and Sango Bidani1  

(1)

Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, Delhi, India

Simi Malhotra (Corresponding author)

Email: smalhotra@jmi.ac.in

Sheikh Sana Assad

Email: sanaassad20@gmail.com

Farhana Tasnim

Email: tasnimrima27@gmail.com

Somya Charan Pahadi

Email: somyacharanpahadi@gmail.com

Sango Bidani

Email: sangobidani@gmail.com

In the late twentieth century, the field of Humanities and Social Sciences witnessed the emergence of Trauma and Memory Studies, disciplines that, to begin with, developed at the intersection and convergence of psychoanalytic criticism and Holocaust literature. Trauma and Memory Studies consequently became an important point of departure in deconstructing traumatic narratives. These allied fields have since become increasingly crucial in understanding the aftermath of individual and collective suffering in the contemporary world, especially in the context of decolonisation. They have proved to be discernible tools in comprehending the complexities of the psyche, enabling a cognitive probe into the psychological trajectories of victims of war, genocides, Partition and migration.

However, the western exclusivity of these fields posits a challenge to the study of traumatic histories of contested postcolonial spaces. To accentuate this chronic crisis within the bounds of Global South, it is imperative to initiate a pedagogical undertaking of what Michael Rothberg terms as “decolonising trauma studies” [7]. This practice becomes important so as to minimise the risk of a homogenising history, a notion which quite problematically asserts that the suffering and trauma of humans almost always shares a common ground. This disavowal of a universal discourse necessitates a robust “de-colonisation” of Trauma and Memory Studies. It is thus important to carve out the entanglements, connections and conjunctions between these allied fields of Trauma and Memory Studies in the post-colonial and post-conflict societies of the Global South. Scholars today are attempting to bridge the interstices between these allied fields by decentring the focal point from the “western-white subject” to the “non-western other”. This line of research would further help broaden, expand and re-envision the predominant abstractions of Trauma and Memory Studies prevalent today.

Scholars like Gabriele Schwab and others have argued that there is a need to investigate the impact of colonialism and other historical traumas within communities which continue to experience the trauma long after the event has faded into history. Schwab’s book Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma, published in 2010, is an important theoretical intervention that interrogates the psychic impact of re-membering and re-telling traumatic historical events [8]. While the initial focus of Trauma and Memory Studies was on using psychoanalytical tools to examine how trauma gets transmitted from one generation to the next for western subjects, adequate attention was not given to how this transgenerational trauma was experienced by the post-colonised subjects who continue to experience the trauma of the past in their present. Recent trends contend that the shift in our understanding of the concept of trauma from a psychological domain to the domain of culture and society was crucial in realising the re-emergence of the violent past in the present. This aspect and the indirect ways in which one remembers the past and its impact on the present is of great significance in our understanding of transgenerational trauma, particularly in the Global South. The methods of coping with trauma and the affective responses to it, including fear, shame, guilt, anxiety, etc., are often explored with great vigour in the narratives that emerge from the Global South. They find expression in literary texts which emerge from traumas associated with historical events, such as the Sri Lankan Civil War (1983-2009), Palestinian Displacement and the Nakba (1948), The Biafran War in Nigeria (1967–1970) and The Rwandan Genocide (1994), etc. They are also observed in literary texts that emerge from the present day postcolonial societies, which continue to grapple with the traumas of colonial legacy and community tensions as also from diasporic contexts.

Acknowledging the foundational contribution of Franz Fanon, whose works offer critical insights into how colonial violence leaves lingering psychological scars on the colonised subject, trauma theory takes a de-colonising turn to attend to the suffering and sustained impact of systemic violence in non-western contexts [3]. Walter Mingnolo also rejects the Eurocentric framework of knowledge and vouches for a pluralistic approach to knowledge, which finds voices in local cultures, subaltern epistemologies and indigenous ways of living. Mingnolo calls this phenomenon “Epistemic Disobedience” [5]. As Mingnolo expostulates, the assumption that the knowing subject is transparent, disincorporated from what can be known, and untouched by the geopolitical configurations of the world, is no longer tenable. Thus, the critical need of the hour is to disobey these monocultural knowledge systems and reform epistemic knowledge structures in light of the above and make them more disobedient. Integrating this process in Trauma and Memory Studies can prove critical in de-colonising trauma theory, which does not only involve the shift in framework but also an acknowledgement, recognition and validation of all registers of local practices, narratives and the responses to suffering.

Decolonising Trauma Studies requires recognising that many communities, especially in the Global South, are traumatised not just by isolated events but by prolonged necropolitical conditions—structural violence, poverty, disposability, and invisibility. This phenomenon is further corroborated in what clinical psychologists Maria Root and Laura Brown categorise as “insidious trauma” [1]. Adding to the hermeneutics of Trauma Studies, insidious trauma refers to the convergence of the elements of race, class, gender or sex. It deviates from the monistic western framework and becomes a pragmatic tool to study the seemingly insignificant or not so insignificant acts of trauma of and in the everyday. Transgressing global peripheries, insidious trauma such as those arising from everyday traumatisations like humiliation, marginalisation and oppression become conspicuous in the decolonised context of the Indian subcontinent and beyond. Unlike trauma associated with specific events, insidious trauma accumulates over time, resulting in loss and grief, leading to a process of continuous and prolonged mourning.

Literature from formerly colonised regions often grapples with unresolved trauma and the complexities of mourning. Rituals of mourning in the non-western contexts are peculiar because of their geo-political location, cultural contexts and history of colonialism. In postcolonial contexts, “body” plays an important role in rituals of mourning, thus substantiating processes of decolonising trauma studies. The bodies that bear the weight of colonial violence, store memories of pain, anguish and agony. These embodied memories, brought into focus by music, ritualistic performances, etc., challenge the notion that trauma is merely a psychological phenomenon. In non-western contexts, mourning is thus ritualised in the performative embodied practices of rituals which stands in contrast to the western psychoanalytical models. Postcolonial societies of the Global South also provide case studies to look at trauma in juxtaposition with resistance. Resistance is thus performed to reclaim agency, highlighting the liberatory potential of violence. At this juncture drawing a connection between rituals and resistance, for instance, the performances of collective mourning during Muharram celebrations by Shia Muslims can be a powerful act. These performances are aimed at a cathartic release of pain and grief. Sigmund Freud in his [4] work Mourning and Melancholia states that through the process of mourning, an individual comes to terms with grief. This sense of mourning takes a collective form in the Global South. It is hence interesting to note that while the western impetus in Trauma and Memory Studies is often to create individualised exclusivity, the non-western impetus is to create inclusive practices of collective memorisation and healing. Resistance poetry by Palestinian author Mahmoud Darwish, which encapsulates the act of crying as an exercise in collective mourning, is also aimed at rendering the pain of “domicide” [6] visible. Another Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, in poems such as “If I must die” also focuses on themes of death and collective mourning caused by displacement. Sri Lankan poet Cheran, on the other hand, focuses on the violent aftermath of civil war and exile. The ruptured communities in non-western settings are thus united and consolidated, if not healed, by mourning. The Jallianwala Bagh memorial site in Amritsar and the Partition Museum in Delhi are other such examples of anti-colonial memorial sites, representing delayed mourning. These memorials and museums stand as powerful sites for processing cultural, colonial and imperial grief [2]. Butler also underscores the importance of the act of mourning as a political act which affirms the lives of the dehumanised and the erased. Mourning, like trauma, is thus not only an individual but also a collective process, and this process often converses with social disruption and political violence. This transition of rituals of mourning from the body to the text to temporal locations is in many ways unique to the geographical specificities of the Global South.

As an acknowledgement of these developments and concerns, the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi organised its third annual International Young Researcher’s conference on Trauma and Memory Studies: Responses from the Global South (19th-21st January, 2024), a three-day event which featured scholars from different universities across the world. It also featured keynote speeches by leading academics in the field of Trauma and Memory Studies namely Stef Craps, Roger Luckhurst, Avishek Parui, Michela Borzaga, Sam Durrant and Nadia Butt. These academicians focused on delinking coloniality and trauma by highlighting the Global South perspectives on Trauma and Memory Studies. The conference opened collaboration opportunities for scholars to delve deeper into the foundations of the field, particularly in questioning the Euro-centric bias inherent since the inception of Trauma and Memory Studies. Our volume titled Trauma and Memory Studies: Responses from India and Beyond records the proceedings of this conference. It is an endeavour to disseminate the concerns, debates and advancements in the field to a wider audience interested in responses from the Global South that help decolonise and thus diversify the field of Trauma and Memory Studies. It offers a new reading of Trauma and Memory Studies by focusing on the systemic forms of injustices, everyday traumatisations and challenges unique to the Global South, particularly in countries such as India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Kenya, etc. From war-torn regions and colonial legacies to personal narratives of grief and displacement, our volume offers critical insights into how de-colonised societies remember, process and respond to past atrocities.

This edited volume, divided into four thematic sections, provides a comprehensive revaluation of Trauma and Memory Studies, foregrounding perspectives from India and beyond. It critically interrogates the prevailing Euro-centric paradigms within the field, advocating for the amplification and contextualisation of voices originating from non-western spatial and temporal contexts, particularly the Global South. The volume intends to exercise the multidirectionality of Trauma and Memory Studies and move beyond the conflux of the history of Holocaust and trauma. Shifting away from a Euro-centric perspective, the chapters in this volume initiate a post-colonial, multicultural, and feminist line of argument within Trauma and Memory Studies. This volume is thus an attempt at articulating the grim memories of events such as the Bengal Famine, the Jallianwala Massacre, the 26/11 Terror Attacks, the Bhopal Gas Tragedy, the Tibetan Exodus and Displacement and the Sri Lankan Civil War among others. The sections feature polyphonic voices, allowing the “non-western other” to vocalise complexly experienced corporealities resulting from caste-based humiliation and ostracism in the spatial realms of the postcolonial nations, among several such similar registers. It also touches upon body trauma resulting from afflictions like cancer, negotiating the resultant re-configured post-trauma self of the victim/survivor. It attempts to analyse the marginalised voices from war-inflicted regions like Kashmir, Palestine, Kenya, etc. primarily through an engagement with their artistic expressions. Additionally, this volume attempts to focus on cinematic texts as markers of resistance and provides new ways of understanding the psychological impact of gendered trauma in the context of contested regions.

Part One: Anthropogenic Catastrophes: Spectres of Trauma/Memory

This section offers a comprehensive overview of post-traumatic cultures and uncategorised reconfigured memories of survivor groups, resulting from anthropogenic catastrophes in India and beyond, which are largely absent from western mainstream historical narratives. A recent turn in Trauma and Memory Studies reflects a shift from the emphasis on solitary events to a more collective approach to the phenomena. A study of the responses to anthropogenic catastrophes like war, terrorism, genocides, etc., along with the increased tension of climate crisis, has provided the branch of Trauma and Memory Studies with not only a global perspective, but increasingly a planetary point of view. The chapters in this section undertake a reading of such anthropogenic disasters within the purview of Trauma and Memory Studies, delineating the lived experiences and the complex geo-political realities of communities in India and other post-colonial nations.

The first chapter in this section “Towards an Aesthetics and Atmosphere of Remembrance: Memorialising the Trauma of Jallianwala Bagh”, is an exegesis on the aestheticisation of memorial sites, with a primary focus on the Jallianwala Bagh site in India. The chapter brings into light the stark contrast in the affective atmosphere of western memorial sites such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Piaszów Concentration camps, or Hiroshima Peace Memorial, in comparison to that of the recently “disney-fied” Jallianwala Bagh. The chapter raises and attends to questions related to the aesthetics of materiality, visuality and sound of memorial sites and their contribution in creating an atmosphere of mourning, remembrance and forgetting.

The second chapter “Secondary Trauma, Famine, and the Hindi Literati: Hindi Narrative of the Bengal Famine in Hams Literary Magazine” focuses on the Hindi Narratives of the Bengal Famine of 1943. Through a reading of a few dozen texts, including poems, short stories, reportages, songs, plays and editorials, both in the original Hindi and in translation from Bengali and Urdu, this chapter scrutinises their aesthetic bent and the ideology of trauma based on the demand of documentation and the limitations of representation. The chapter initiates a discussion around the “subject”, the “object”, and what Rothberg posits as the “implicated subject” of terror.

The third chapter in this section, “Telling the Untold: Persevering Memories and Quiet Amnesias of the Partition”, undertakes an archival study of the 1947 Partition of India. Archive is a popular medium of remembering in the field of Memory Studies. However, the method and objective of archiving is often uncritical and can open up long buried wounds, as delineated in this chapter, which uses the interviews of six families of Punjab Partition survivors as its primary research material. The chapter expands on the fault lines between necessary amnesias and the ethics of memory while addressing the epistemic violence inherent in Partition archival projects.

The fourth chapter “Climate Change and the Experiences of the Marginalised South Pacific Islanders: Tales of Fear, Suffering and Resistance in Literature”, deals with the power relations between the Global North and the Global South from the point of view of the climate crisis. It critiques the “so-called” inclusive narrative of anthropogenic climate change, which essentially conceals the inequity of the climate predicament. This chapter further recognises climate crisis as a global catastrophe and takes up the Marshallese poet, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s poems as its source material to further explicate upon it. Kijiner’s poems act as an archive of Oceania’s rich history, which additionally comments on the cultural implications of the climate crisis with particular reference to the Pacific Islanders.

The final chapter in this section “Witnessing, Trauma and Private Memories of Public Terror: Reading Selected Witness Narratives of the 26/11 Mumbai Attacks”, takes up two autobiographical memoirs: Praveen Kumar Teotia’s 26/11 Braveheart: My Encounters with Terrorists that Night (2020) and Ankur Chawla’s 14 Hours: An Insider’s account of the 26/11 Taj Attack (2012). Through a close reading of these narratives, centring on the 26/11 terror attacks in Mumbai, the author tries to read witness narratives as a mnemonic phenomenon, where emotions and psychosomatic sensations act as building factors of memory and how it stands out in contrast to the western setting. The chapter tries to assert the dissimilarity in the Indian way of responding to terror attacks, given its familiarity and recurrence in their context, as opposed to other accounts of the same, say in the West. The chapter further treats witness narratives as a genre, construing how witnesses recollect traumatic memories, its affective impact, and how they narrativise trauma caused by psycho-somatic damages, in their post-terror life.

Part Two: Rituals of Rebellion: The Narrative Aesthetics of Protest

This section probes into the resilience of communities, in the face of historical and ongoing injustices, emphasising the enduring power of art, ritual, and storytelling as acts of defiance and remembrance. Each chapter in this section offers a unique perspective on the power of performative acts. By exploring various artistic expressions, the chapters in this section look into feminist media and praxis, activist memory and documentation as an archive on protests, to counter cultural inheritances of religious and social conditioning. Through a rich blend of Trauma Studies, cultural analysis and performance theory, this section argues that acts of remembrance and resistance are not just responses to oppression but are also proactive means of reclaiming agency and rewriting history anew.

The first chapter in this section “Muharram in Kashmir: Historical Trauma, Performance and Resistance” analyses ritual performance of Muharram in Kashmir as a powerful act of mourning, resistance and healing. It foregrounds how in the Azadari rituals, the commemoration of the tragedy of Karbala is integrated with the ongoing conflict in Kashmir, highlighting the interconnectedness between trauma, memory and resistance. It expands on the role of pain in religious practices, moving beyond self-flagellation, often the only discussed dimension of these rituals; instead, it looks at the therapeutic aspects of the Azadari rituals and calls attention to seek a deeper understanding of the function of pain in relation to the human body and mind.

The second chapter “Harmonies of Subversion: Exploring Kashmiri Songs as Sonic Archives” investigates the evolving modes of dissent among Kashmiri youth, focusing on their use of music as a form of protest and a repository of collective trauma. It draws from Trauma and Affect Theory and employs an interdisciplinary lens that integrates ethnomusicology, Cultural Studies, and Critical Theory as its method to analyse these songs. The chapter deals with music as a hidden transcript and an infra-political mode of expression. It situates young musicians as political agents using their limited agency to produce a counter narrative to the dominant one.

The third chapter in this section, titled “Hand-crafted Memories: Remembering Voices from Shaheen Bagh and The Bhopal Gas Disaster through Avant-garde Feminist Media”, draws upon Judith Butler’s theory of performativity to explore how acts of remembering can subvert dominant narratives of history. By examining cultural productions such as Prarthna Singh’s Har Shaam Shaheen Bagh (2022), the chapter investigates how marginalised memories disrupt the hegemonised cultural memory crafted by ruling regimes. The chapter argues that performances of dissent, whether through artistic, literary, or performative means, hold the potential to challenge official histories and reassert alternative narratives. The act of re-calling and re-membering becomes a powerful tool of resistance, thus underscoring the importance of who gets to decide what is remembered and how.

The fourth chapter “Maps of Coffee: Diasporas of Trauma in Selected Poems of Mahmoud Darwish” analyses selected exilic poems by Mahmoud Darwish, focusing on how his work articulates the trauma of forced diaspora and the lived experiences of Palestinians. Through a detailed examination of fragmented and liminal spaces, such as refugee camps and hospitals, the chapter argues that Darwish’s poetry functions as a counter-discourse against “memoricide”—the erasure of subjugated histories. The chapter redefines Resistance Poetry as a form that transcends armed responses, emphasising its role in portraying the complex, multi-layered realities of marginalised communities.

The final chapter in this section “Storytelling as Protest: Counter-narratives from Kenya in Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s Dust” explores how story-telling becomes a mode of resisting collective amnesia in post-colonial Kenya. Through the exploration of the novel’s narrative, the chapter discusses how contemporary literature challenges homogenised representations of trauma, offering alternative ways for healing through the regenerative power of memory. This chapter asserts that the postcolonial imagination serves not only as a site of resistance but also as a means of negotiating the complexities of neo-colonialist discourses.

Part Three: Narratives of Resilience: Literary and Cinematic Testimonies

The chapters included in the third section of the book deal with texts that highlight the various combative and coping mechanisms employed by authors in their accounts and narratives. These literary and cinematic texts interrogate new concepts that have emerged in Trauma Studies which focus on aspects of intergenerational and transgenerational trauma. These are narratives where the trauma is being re-lived and re-experienced by those who belong to the second and third generation victims or survivors. The papers in this section also highlight the lack of focus on gendered trauma suffered by the characters in these texts, and how they find ways of overcoming traumas caused on multiple accounts.

The first chapter in this section “Revisioning Biblical Women: Retelling Memory in Jeet Thayil’s Names of the Women” explores the aspect of how traditionally in Biblical Studies and especially when it comes to a text like The New Testament, there has been a deliberate silencing of women and the role played by them historically. Trying to question this lack of focus on women in The New Testament, the chapter attempts to analyse how Jeet Thayil in his narrative, Names of the Women (2021), drawing upon Adrienne Rich’s idea of “revision”, questions this received history and attempts to give voice to the characters who have been silenced thus far.

The second chapter “Transgenerational Trauma: The Entanglement of Family Memories in 21st Century Diasporic Women’s Literatures from the Global South” focuses on the aspect of transgenerational trauma from a feminist perspective. The paper contends that there is a coming together of family histories with cataclysmic historical events in interesting ways. The author, through a close study of two texts written by twenty-first century diasporic women writers, explores how they find new ways of coping with historical traumas. The chapter also attempts to decolonise Trauma Studies and presents a critique of Euro-centric theories surrounding Trauma and Memory Studies.

The third chapter in this section “War and Memory: Remembering Women’s Bodies in War through a Reading of Brian De Palma’s Casualties of War”, continues the focus on the lack of representation of trauma from a gendered perspective. It, through a cinematic text, explores the way in which the filmmaker tries to bring to light the trauma suffered by women during the Vietnam War. The chapter attempts to decolonise Trauma Theory from the clutches of western point of view which has historically tended to undermine the consequences and implications of imperial designs and colonisation and is largely silent on the question of gendered trauma. Through a focus on cinematic techniques such as flashback, and giving voice to a battle that is fought by an American soldier who fights against the idea of military brotherhood, the cinematic text brings to light the troubling valorisation of war crimes and crimes against women.

The fourth chapter “From Delhi with (Co)Creativity: Literary Texts as Material Evidence of Urban Memories and Experiences” not only explores how the city is a complexly negotiated space, which silences the trauma and marginalises the lived experiences of those who are poor, but also explores how the process of co-creative writing might be a coping mechanism to overcome the trauma caused by displacement and relocation in a city.

The fifth chapter in this section “Remembering and Forgetting War Memory in Nayomi Munaweera’s Island of a Thousand Mirrors” focuses on aspects of remembering and forgetting the memory of the Sri Lankan Civil War. Focusing on a narrative that involves both the prominent communities in Sri Lankan society, namely the Tamil and Sinhala communities, the chapter presents a narrative which moves beyond looking at the two communities as altercative in nature. Rather, it brings together the two characters from the respective communities and explores how the two characters become victims and agents at the same time in the gruesome war. The chapter explores aspects of intergenerational and transgenerational trauma, the processes of memory formation, the ways in which traumatic memories are remembered and forgotten, and the impact of these on individual and collective identity formation.

The final chapter of this section “Unveiling Alterity: Exploring the Palestinian and Israeli Multifaceted Memories, Identities and Geopolitics through Select Children’s Films”, discusses a series of film texts, focusing on children, exploring the ways in which the conflict between Israel and Palestine has been represented on screen. The film texts that are considered for this study try to challenge homogenisation and institutionalisation of memory, and instead attempt to promote unlearning the indoctrinated national memory to relearn the nuances within the multidirectional Israeli/Palestinian community, promoting thereby the possibility of a peaceful coexistence.

Part Four: Afflicted Afterlives: Reconfiguring Experiential Trauma of Ostracism

This section delves into the experiences of migration, enforced exile and somatic and corporeal suffering such as humiliation and body trauma. The chapters in this section also forge a sense of reconciliation in the triangulation of forgiveness, forgetting and remembering. Museums, autobiographies and films provide a medium to get in close range with the experience of trauma in this section. Routine suffering and humiliation is exemplified in these texts. When trauma becomes a quotidian modus operandi, it becomes one’s duty to carve out the experiential and sensory nuances of suffering, so as to focus on the functionaries or agents of these vicarious traumatisations which perpetually cause experience, re-experience and de-experience. The chapters in this section address afflictions, humiliations and ostracisms through the lens of Trauma and Memory Studies in the quest to reclaim identity, restabilise community and ensure survival.

The first chapter in this section “Remembering, Forgetting, Forgiving: Perspectives from Philosophy, Psychology, and Manto’s spasmodic short stories on the 1947 Partition” offers a fresh take into the triangulation of Memory, Amnesty and Forgiving. This chapter throws light on the ethical concerns regarding Amnesty, or as Ricoeur calls it, “organised forgetting” by problematising the categories of forgetting, forgiving and unforgivability. It looks at the ontological dimension of the unforgiveable within the spectrum of forgiving. It discusses Sadat Hassan Manto’s spasmodic short stories on the 1947 Partition, examining their representations of corporeality, cognitive defamiliarisation, highlighting how such fiction foregrounds the entanglement of oblivion and the unforgivable. This chapter thus analyses sensory perceptions from a philosophical and psychological perspective to buttress its argument.

The second chapter “Articulating Humiliation: Trauma and Acousmatic Agency in Selected Life Writings of Harishankar Jaladas” focuses on everyday experiential traumatisation such as humiliation owing to caste discrimination in Bangladesh. Experiential trauma like humiliation challenges the traditional understanding of trauma which sets in after a period of aporia, characterised by set identifiers such as belatedness. This paper exemplifies acousmatic agency as a response to caste humiliation based trauma. As one loses access to appropriate linguistic response, when verbally subjected to humiliation, documenting mere sounds that surround one becomes a mode of retaining some sensory acousmatic agency for subjects under duress. As the chapter demonstrates, registering sonic details thus becomes akin to an acousmatic agency in this regard.

The third chapter “This is My Story: Role of Tibet Museum in Preserving Memory in Exile” underscores the difference between the role of museums in western countries and in post/decolonised countries. It delves into the symbolic importance of the Tibet museum which stands as a testament to the indelibility of experiential memory of a displaced community, who re-imagine their nationhood in the form of a museum, which then serves as a memoryscape in exile. This chapter posits that the experiential collective memories are literally removed from the mental world and placed in an affective physical world, which then becomes, what Pierre Nora hails as “sites of memory”. The situatedness of the museum in Dharamshala, a city which has gained spiritual significance as the seat of the Dalai Lama, allows people to experience the stories and the “transitional objects” placed in the museum, in a spiritually-charged environment. The museum thus embodies a crystallisation of the sensory memories from home, making the suffering of the Tibetans palpable and hyper-visible to the larger society.

The fourth chapter in this section “Unveiling Cancer, Trauma, and Recovery: A Study of Manisha Koirala and Lisa Ray’s Autobiographies” studies two cancer autobiographies dealing with the re-centring of one’s corporeality, experiences, and sensory perceptions, around the event of cancer, or what can be called the experiential embodiment of the post-trauma self. This includes relational trauma, wherein the family members of the sufferer become entangled in the life of the sufferer in a complex way. This chapter proposes that “a body bogged down by trauma requires storytelling”, thus creating meaning out of one’s disrupted existence. It further focuses on the elements of recovery; it studies the structure and trajectory of the cancer autobiographies as a study in acceptance of the reconfigured selves post illness.

The final chapter in this section “Understanding Intersections of Caste, Gender and Migration in Uttarakhand through Cinematic Representations of Trauma and Memory in Dev Bhoomi” looks at the intersection of caste, gender and environmental factors in the region of Uttarakhand by engaging with the cinematic text of Dev Bhoomi. Through a study of the film Dev Bhoomi, this chapter looks at the intersection of personal and collective memory in the social ostracisation of the protagonist. The traumatised self, at a personal level, marked by migration, loss of home and suffering, becomes a lens to view the traumatised community at large in Uttarakhand, afflicted with social and environmental sufferings such as discrimination, child marriage and the 2013 Kedarnath floods.

Through a refined study of literary and cinematic texts, this volume highlights the contribution of scholars who navigate the tensions between local histories and global theoretical frameworks. It identifies the current limitations of Euro-centric frameworks of Trauma and Memory Studies and attends to the problematics of the inconsistent documentation of contested traumatic histories from the Global South. The volume offers an argument on the necessity to decolonise Trauma and Memory Studies as a relevant response to the extant genocidal practices or the neo-colonial narratives. The collection aims to foreground voices and perspectives often overlooked in mainstream Trauma and Memory Studies, offering fresh insights into how marginalised communities reclaim agency over their histories and stories. As we navigate an increasingly fragmented world marked by geopolitical tensions, ecological crisis, and social upheavals, understanding trauma and memory remains an urgent endeavour, especially from less studied spaces. This collection therefore, serves not only as a scholarly resource, but also as a call to critically engage with the histories we inherit and the memories we construct, expanding the scope of the ever-evolving field of Trauma and Memory Studies in the non-western context.

References

1.

Brown, Laura S. 1991. Not Outside the Range: One Feminist Perspective on Psychic Trauma. American Imago 48 (1): 119–133.

2.

Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso.

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Fanon, Franz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Weidenfeld.

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Freud, Sigmund. 1917. Mourning and Melancholia, 48–63. New York University Press: Essential Papers on Depression. New York.

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Mignolo, Walter D. 2009. Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial Freedom. Theory, Culture & Society 26 (7–8): 159–181.

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Porteous, Douglas J., and Sandra E. Smith. 2001. Domicide: The Global Destruction of Home. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press-MQUP.

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Rothberg, Michael. 2008. Decolonizing Trauma Studies: A Response. Studies in the Novel 40 (1/2): 224–234.

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Schwab, Gabriele. 2010. Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma. New York: Columbia University Press.

Part IAnthropogenic Catastrophes: Spectres of Trauma/Memory

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2025

S. Malhotra et al. (eds.)Trauma and Memory Studies: Responses from India and Beyondhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-6374-3_2

2. Towards an Aesthetics and Atmosphere of Remembrance: Memorialising the Trauma of Jallianwala Bagh

Meghal Karki1  

(1)

Dr. B. R. Ambedkar University, Delhi, India

Meghal Karki

Email: meghal.karki@gmail.com

Abstract

This chapter aims to investigate the ways in which the recent renovation of the Jallianwala Bagh site aims to memorialise a violent and traumatic event, through a focus on the affective atmosphere created and highlight the need for the development of an aesthetics of remembrance. The atrocities of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre are well known and documented, and the memorial was designed and preserved in a way to remember the atrocities inflicted by the colonisers on protesting civilians. The recent renovation includes the installation of ornamental statues in the entrance passage, the enclosure of the Martyrs’s Well and the inauguration of a light and sound show that glorifies the martyrs. These changes have altered the very atmosphere of the place and it stands in stark contrast to other memorials such as Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Piaszów Concentration camps, Hiroshima Peace Memorial or the Partition Museum at Dara Shikoh Library. A question of atmosphere and aesthetics emerges: how do we memorialise sites of violence and traumatic memory, and what does the departure in aesthetics at the Jallianwala Bagh reveal? How does materiality, sound and visuality contribute towards the creation of an atmosphere of mourning and remembrance? This paper will make an attempt to answer the questions that have been proposed by referring to Gernot Bohme’s conception of atmospheres as a fundamental concept in aesthetics, and will be informed by Patrizia Violi’s concept of trauma sites.

Meghal Karki

is a PhD Scholar in English at the School of Letters, Ambedkar University, Delhi and is working on the emotions and atmospheres of Kumaoni Holi folk songs and baithaks, with a particular focus on Gender and Performance. An alumnus of Jamia Millia Islamia and University of Delhi, she has a keen interest in Folklore, Cultural Heritage, Affect Theory, Spatial Studies, Cultural Studies, Literary Theory and Postcolonial Literatures, and is a novice Angela Carter aficionado. She has been awarded the prestigious Meenakshi Mukherjee Memorial Prize, instituted by the Indian Association for Commonwealth Literatures and Language Studies (IACLALS) for her paper on street art.

On April 13, 1919, on the day of Baisakhi in Amritsar, India, a group of approximately twenty thousand people gathered to peacefully protest against the draconian Rowlatt Act, which gave the administration the power to arrest any citizen without trial. General Dyer, an officer in the British Indian army and his troops had been given the charge to curb protests in the city, and Dyer ordered that the only entrance of the Jallianwala Bagh, a narrow passage, be sealed, and indiscriminately began firing on the crowd without any warning. He ordered his troops to cease firing only when their ammunition was virtually exhausted and approximately 1650 rounds were fired [23]. The ensuing chaos and violence led to over a hundred protestors jumping into a well, now known as Martyrs’ Well. The violence unleashed what scholars agree to be the “first major anti-colonial nationalist Movement” in India [25]. While the British estimated that around 329 people perished in the massacre, the Indian National Congress reported the count to be over 1000 [25]. The atrocities of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre are well known and documented, and listing out examples of the atrocities committed by the troops and their material survival is beyond the scope of this chapter. The chapter will move forward assuming that the readers are informed about the scale of the violence unleashed and that the ensuing visuals will be sufficient to explore the materiality of the remnants of violence.

Post Independence, the site was developed into a memorial of national importance after the Jallianwala Bagh National Memorial Act, 1951 was passed, and active efforts were made to preserve the tangible markers and memories of the atrocities committed at the hands of the colonisers and the cost of freedom. Since then, it has been a site actively frequented by domestic and international tourists as well as students on trips curated by schools. In 2019, a twenty-crore renovation project was announced, to be overseen by Vama Communications of Ahmedabad, working in tandem with the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) and the NBCC (India) Limited (formerly National Buildings Construction Corporation Limited), to mark one hundred years of the massacre. The renovated site was inaugurated on August 28, 2021. It included several new features, such as the installation of ornamental statues in the entrance passage, the enclosure of the Martyrs’ Well, the inauguration of a light and sound show that glorifies the martyrs and the most curious of all, the inauguration of the exit. The renovation has been severely critiqued by historians, academics and activists, who have argued against the ‘Disneyfication’ and commodification of the memorial [26].

This chapter will delve into the recent renovation in detail and highlight how these changes have altered the very atmosphere of the place and how it stands in stark contrast to other memorials such as the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Piaszów Concentration camps, Hiroshima Peace Memorial or the Partition Museum at Dara Shikoh Library. The chapter will attempt to navigate questions surrounding atmosphere and aesthetics: how do we memorialise sites of violence and traumatic memory, and what does the departure in aesthetics at the Jallianwala Bagh reveal? Additionally, how do materiality, sound and visuality contribute towards creating an atmosphere of mourning and remembrance? This chapter will attempt to answer the questions that have been proposed by referring to Gernot Bohme’s conception of atmospheres as a fundamental concept in aesthetics, which will be informed by Patrizia Violi’s ideas about trauma sites. The chapter will also delve into a discussion surrounding how the atmosphere of memorials is constructed and consumed in the Indian context and offer alternative ways of remembrance.

Atmospheric Architecture and Aesthetics: Towards a Reorientation of the Senses

While the appearance of the term ‘atmosphere’ and its associated concepts such as vibe, mood and ambience may seem like recent additions to everyday discourse and the discourse of aesthetics, they have been around for centuries. All of us are familiar with the feeling of being subsumed in the atmosphere of a setting or being at odds with it, and the multiplicity of points of feeling and sensing in the middle, without being able to pinpoint the exact nature of what precisely affects us. Gernot Bohme, in his seminal essay “Atmosphere as a Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics” [1], points out that atmospheres are vague, slippery, evasive and indeterminate and adds that they “seem to fill the space with a certain tone of feeling like a haze” [1]. Atmospheres are located in the intermediary position of the phenomenon between subject and object and shift with changes in the plethora of subjects and objects that constitute them. They are quasi-objective in some senses, Bohme argues, as they are out there, and one can quickly enter into an atmosphere and be caught within it [3]. At the same time, atmospheres are not things in themselves and require a sentient subject to feel, apprehend and constitute them, and consequently exist intersubjectively [3].

Bohme asserts that since atmospheres lie between the subject and the object, the “aesthetics of atmosphere must also mediate between the aesthetics of reception and the aesthetics of the product or production” [2]. Atmosphere is thus not as Borch calls a “pure emergence” [5]. Instead, they are deliberately constructed in staging, films, architecture, interior design, urban planning, advertising and branding, to manufacture an aesthetic quality that is undoubtedly subjective [2] but draws on some commonplace assumptions, aesthetics, concepts and a shared cultural vocabulary. They also pertain to the “production of particular receptions, or types of reception by viewers or consumers that play a role in the production of the ‘work’ itself”. Consequently, they are an exercise of power [2].

While atmospheres are conceptually and ontologically vague, they still need to be studied with rigour. Western theoretical models have privileged the visual and its associated concepts in history, critique, and philosophy, and neglected the sensorial for significant periods of time. Borch argues that a similar tendency has been observed in studies of architecture [5]. The study of atmospheres in their vagueness and vagaries attempts to fill in the considerable gaps that have been exposed and arrive at a more nuanced understandings of the myriad ways in which power is exercised by “direct(ing) attention to the relation between the qualities of surroundings and dispositions” [2]. Bohme argues that architecture creates atmospheres in every facet of space, and atmospheres may not be equitably felt, noticed or experienced by everyone. A pertinent point that Borch makes sure to highlight is that architectural atmospheres amount to a form if we consider it in a Foucauldian sense to be a “conduct of conducts and a management of possibilities”, which foster quasi-objective feelings among people on a nonconscious level that can significantly impact behaviour and perception, but without the pressing presence of determinism at play [5]. While Borch acknowledges what Bohme has always emphasised, that there is never any guarantee that everyone is necessarily affected by the architectural atmosphere of space as intended and produced, the argument leans towards how experiences are conditioned [5]. By emphasising the multi-sensory nature of atmospheres and the openness of the concept, Bohme attempts to reorient the focus towards the myriad, overlapping and circular ways in which we are impacted by architecture and space and how atmosphere impacts and is impacted by them in turn.

Atmospheres, Trauma Sites and Memorials: Contextualising Memory and Remembrance

Throughout the history of human civilisation, acts of unconscionable violence have been committed by different groups on others, and they continue to persist even today. Commemorative actions and practices, such as building memorials, have become increasingly widespread and well-established parts of our cultural toolkits [20]. Sites such as the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Piaszów Concentration camps, Chernobyl in Ukraine, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, the Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA) in Argentina, the Robben Island Museum in South Africa and the Murambi Genocide Memorial in Rwanda are a few well-known examples. Memorials are constructed for a wide array of reasons but primarily mark sites of grief or trauma and seek to publicly address and acknowledge the violent histories of recent wars, genocides and systematic human rights abuses, and vindicate or attest to the dignity of victims-survivors and contribute to reconciliation. To simplify it even further, Jennifer K. Ladino categorises memorials to serve three concrete functions: provide healing, confront loss, trauma, or violence, and to promote justice for the victims [13]. Memorials have been growing in popularity, and Sørensen, Viejo-Rose and Filippucci attribute them to be a phenomenon unique to the twentieth century, wherein the rhetoric of sacrifice, debt, mourning and honour often evoke a robust emotive engagement [20]. They go on to argue that it is this very potency that also makes memorials the target of various forms of manipulation and control. By using the affective rhetoric of debt and sacrifice, any refusal to honour the debt to the heir of the martyrs, the nation-state in this case, becomes sacrilegious, and those who refuse to honour the martyrs appropriately become targets of the fury of communities [20]. Thus, it can be argued that memorials can become an efficient way to quell social mobilisation and critique of the state [20].

Thus, memorials engage with cultures of memory in myriad ways, and are not static but transform with time and are reinscribed with newer meanings in time. The Indian state has challenged the erstwhile Eurocentric historical narratives and commemorative practices by removing, relocating, reinscribing or reappropriating colonial commemorative monuments, trauma sites and public spaces while simultaneously erecting new memorials to their national heroes [6]. These deliberate attempts, Condos argues, are a repudiation of “humiliating colonial narratives of the past”, and by “replac(ing) them with patriotic assertions of postcolonial nationhood”, the narrative is shifted and those vilified by the British are now celebrated as heroes [6]. Condos refers to the infamous incident on 15 August 1947 when a large crowd defaced the statue of the “Angel of the Resurrection” at the erstwhile Cawnpore Memorial Well, which was built on the site of the final resting place of over 125 British women and children killed in Cawnpore, India on 15 July 1857, amidst the upheaval of the revolt of 1857. It was earlier barred to non-Europeans, and its eventual renaming of Nana Rao Park, in honour of Nana Sahib, the alleged mastermind behind the massacre, serves to highlight how colonial narratives of commemoration and sites of memory can be reinscribed, displaced by meanings and memories of revolt that went unacknowledged by the imperial state [6]. This process of reinscribing and reclaiming memory through changes in the architecture in the form of commemorative statues and revising policies surrounding admission not only creates and reinvents narratives of memory but also alters the atmosphere significantly and invites the visitors to reflect and remember differently if they are receptive to it.

However, another dimension to the categorisation of memorials needs to be addressed. While memorials do aim to commemorate the victims of a given circumstance, they are not necessarily located at the precise site where they perished. Memorials are, more often than not, sites wherein the victims, who have perished in a war, a genocide or any other violent circumstance, are catalogued, remembered and mentioned explicitly in a bid to acknowledge their sacrifice and bring them into public discourse. On the other hand, trauma sites, or sites of trauma, as Patrizia Violi prefers to call them, are the sites wherein violence was unleashed and the victims perished. They stand, Violi writes, as “material testimonies of the violence and horror that took place” [24]. Pierra Nora, a significant theorist in the field of Memory Studies, has also come up with the concept of “sites of memory” in his work, which he defines as “any significant entity, whether material or non-material in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community” [15]. Nora’s work is influential and impactful in the field of Memory Studies, and it can certainly be said that Violi draws on and builds on Nora’s work by developing a concept whose scope is limited to the site of the trauma rather than the broader implications of Nora’s work. Violi provides a robust conceptual framework whose focus helps us analyse the particularities of trauma sites in greater detail with a renewed focus on spatiality, which Nora does not develop.

This difference is critical to understanding the challenges that accompany designing and showcasing a site of trauma to the public, as trauma sites retain a “real spatial contiguity with the trauma itself”, which is absent in the case of memorials [24]. The visual and architectural ways in which the violence of the site is showcased need to be directed in a nuanced manner, as visitors to the site often rely on them to re-interpret the historical trauma of the site, particularly in the absence of first-hand experience of the trauma [11]. Violi further writes that trauma sites contain “an embodied memory of the actual agent that caused them” and are testimonies of the past themselves and bear the traces and imprints of that violence [24]. The process of designing the site, modifying and staging the myriad aspects of the site thus become significantly more complex and multifaceted. The architects have to make carefully considered decisions to facilitate the ways in which the visitors conceive of and imagine the violent past only through the visual and architectural elements of the site. Additionally, yet another layer is added to these sites of trauma when they also become sites of commemoration through the addition of a memorial monument and museums after the violence. These terms and categorisations are not set in stone; they shift and overlap constantly, but an essential point of contextualisation needs to be established through them.

Atmospheres grip us and stir us in a myriad of ways, and trauma sites that have been preserved and memorialised have their own atmospheres. Bohme has maintained that atmosphere is the subject matter of architecture [4], and examining architecture through the lens of atmosphere contributes to two major shifts in the study of aesthetics: a shift of the focus away from “what” something represents to “how” something is present, and a shift from the form or shape of things to the complex and constantly shifting ways in which they engage with the space of our bodily presence [4]. Atmospheric architectures thus present a deeply insightful theoretical framework through which we can unravel the myriad ways in which trauma sites and memorials affect us. These connections have been made before, as Borch has argued that the Holocaust Tower in Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin produces an “oppressing atmosphere that any visitor is likely to feel. As such, it assumes a quasi-objective – i.e. not subjectively bound – quality” and goes on to emphasise the fact that every encounter with architecture contains the possibility of being seized by an atmosphere, even though some may be felt more intensely than others [5]. Similarly, Sabina Tanović also argues that the New Guardhouse, Jewish Memorial Museum and the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin convey a “dark sacred atmosphere” as their “materiality, proportions and purpose are elements that, composed together, make us think of the religious sacred” [22]. These memorials offer a unique path through which we can attempt to understand the renovation of the Jallianwala Bagh site and its impact.

The Renovation of the Jallianwala Bagh: Restructured Architectural Atmospheres and Cultures of Public Memory

Ever since the renovated Jallianwala Bagh was inaugurated on 28 August 2021, it has received significant criticism from historians, academics, activists and the general public. The renovation has been critiqued as the additions “are not in conformity with what existed” and have played a significant role in “destroy(ing) the historical proof and authenticity of the memorial because the renovation hides the tragedy faced by martyrs, which was written all over the wall by bullets of General Dyer” [12]. These additions include golden murals to the infamous narrow entry passageway, four new galleries that display the history of the colonial violence of the day and its context, and statues and sculptures of Guru Nanak Dev, Banda Singh Bahadur, and Maharaja Ranjit Singh. Clear demarcations of the bullet holes have been added to the site's walls, an impenetrable glass covering has now surrounded the infamous Martyr’s Well, and the gardens have been carefully sculpted with clearly demarcated paths leading to the sandstone memorial. A Salvation Ground has also been constructed wherein visitors can observe silence and honour the martyrs. The renovations have also engaged the visual and the aural through the inauguration of a light and sound show on the central memorial and the addition of outdoor speakers that play music throughout the day. While all the renovations and changes play a significant role and merit discussion, the chapter will focus on the renovation of the entry passage, the covering up of the Martyr’s Well and the sonic inclusions in particular, and analyse the diverse ways in which the atmosphere of the trauma site has been altered.

The beige coloured narrow entry passage to the Jallianwala Bagh, with copper coloured statues of a large number of people moving in a single file towards the entrance.

The addition of human sculptures and statues that protrude from the walls and bright lighting to the narrow entrance of the Jalliawala Bagh is the feature that has been subjected to significant criticism (shown in Fig. 2.1) and has significantly altered the atmospheric dimensions of the site. The narrow passage played a historically significant role in the massacre as it was the only entrance and exit to the site, while the others were gates that led to small alleys and were locked that day [26]. As the British troops sealed the entrance and began firing indiscriminately, the entrapped protestors had nowhere to go, which magnified the violence of the attack. The hitherto untouched and unadorned narrow lane thus remained a haunting reminder of the horrors of the trauma of the site and a vital vestige of a violent colonial past. At a time when the traces and memories of colonialism have begun fading, the Jallianwala Bagh remained a material and tangible testimony to the horrors of the colonial endeavour that “communicate(d) important information about the political and social conditions associated with death and loss” [11]. As we attempt to reconstruct the past, we creatively reimagine the past and the future, and “a unique synthesis of present lived experience and reconstruction of past narratives and facts in that present experience” is constructed through the memorial and the trauma site. The passage, preserved as it was, evoked a sombre, unadorned, untouched atmosphere that enabled the visitors to interact with the violence of the bloody day as it was and experience “an almost unimaginable felt reality of the past” [24]. There is a pertinent need to reiterate that while it is not possible that every single perceiving subject has the same reaction to the space, atmospheres in architecture are constructed and oriented through spatial additions, obliterations, changes, and light and sound.

Fig. 2.1

The entrance to the Jallianwala Bagh (self-documented)

These additions alter the atmosphere of the place and infringe on the sanctity of the lane and the sacrifice of the martyrs. Earlier, the passage featured the doors and windows of the neighbouring structures, which melded as part of the urban landscape of the city and were situated in its urban context. However, they are now hidden under the statues, thus creating a rupture with the neighbourhood, and now stand apart as a site. There is also a rupture in the aesthetics of the site as the copper-coloured statues stand at odds with the sandstone walls of the alley that Gurmeet S. Rai asserts “evoke a certain behaviour among the visitors which undermines the spirit of the place” [16] and Khetrapal definitively calls it “a rupture in political aesthetics at the site of trauma” [11]. Rai also argues that the body language and the expressions of the statues are “that of joyousness and excitement as if the mood of the times was that of people going to a fair”, which is incongruent with the historical mood of the hour and demonstrates insensitivity to the cultural nuances by dressing an elderly man in a patka¹ [16].

Perhaps the most curious change to the structure of the trauma site is the addition of an exit. As discussed earlier, there were small exits, but those were locked on the fateful day, and the development and addition of a new exit point alters the experience of the trauma site and prevents the tourists from experiencing the site like the martyrs. Bohme, while building his ideas about the relationship between architecture and atmosphere, argues that “buildings accentuate and focus the sense of space, they entail movement suggestions, they convey experiences of narrowness or expansiveness, and they articulate space itself as an expanse” [4]. One of the most significant aspects that influence atmospheres include the ways in which the objects are oriented and the ways in which impressions and markings structure movement to create spatial concentrations, directions, and constellations. Bohme further argues that these articulations remain reliant on the experiencing subject, and consequently, “a space of bodily sensing – a sensing that reaches out into the indeterminate expanse – takes shape through such articulations” and redirects the orientation of the perceiving subject [4]. By altering the experience of the perceiving subject and differentiating them from the martyrs, a rupture in experience is created, which poses a challenge to spatially and experientially grasping the site and the extent of the violence through the redirection to a separate exit. The narrow passage no longer seems as significant to the perceiving subject, who can now exit peacefully without navigating the crowd of entering visitors and encountering any sense of chaos and suffocation, albeit on a safe scale.

The Martyrs’ Well has been a distinguishing feature of the Jallianwala Bagh and one of the most material and visceral remnants of the violence that was unleashed. Confined to the Bagh in a death trap with nowhere to hide, the victims fell and deliberately jumped into the deep well at the site to escape the bullets [26]. While accounts vary, it is believed that over a hundred dead bodies were found at the well. A superstructure was built around the well, and the visitors could gauge the depth of the well by peering into it and imagining and engaging with the memory of the victims who jumped into it. However, the renovations now include glass panels that encircle the well, which presents a visual and tactile barrier that prevents the visitors from engaging with the site. Now, if one tries to peer into the well through the barrier, Navdeep Suri sharply opines that one can see “the nicely backlit interior of the well, its walls painted an alluring pink” [19] (Fig 2.2).

Fig. 2.2

The Martyr’s well through the glass Barrier (self-documented)

The last addition that this chapter discusses perhaps plays a highly significant role in constituting the shifting atmospheric dynamics of the site, and they are not material but sonic. Outdoor speakers have been added to the site that plays patriotic songs such as ‘Aye Watan, Aye Watan, Hum Ko Teri Kasam’ and ‘Aao Baccho Tumhein Dikhaye’ throughout the day, with interludes for ‘Pagdi Sambhaal Jatta’.² Speakers have been installed throughout the site, even at the entrance and other vital areas for the site, such as the walls with bullet holes. Sound and music play a critical role in constituting atmosphere, and recent critical scholarship has focused significantly on music as atmosphere and provide “concrete, empirically observable instantiations” as they “exist in time, can be measured, and propagate through space” [8]. For Bohme, sound and music as the atmosphere is a “manipulation of space as it is experienced by the body” [3], and the constant music in the background at Jallianwala Bagh creates a multi-dimensional soundscape that plays a critical role in imbuing the space with a perceptual atmosphere of cheerful appreciation of sacrifice, rather than promoting a sense of reflection and trauma. Music as atmosphere is contagious and modifies our experience of being in a space felt by the body through its suggestive and ineffable power [8]. The cheerful, patriotic songs further contribute to creating an atmospheric aesthetic that is at odds with the trauma unleashed and perpetuates an atmospheric forgetting of the event.

These new additions, which are not a memorial structure in any form, alter the architectural dynamics of the site and may possibly be an attempt to shift the focus from commemoration and remembrance to glorifying the sacrifice of the martyrs. Atmospheres are the “invisible character that makes an environment unique and confers on that environment a specific place presence and ambience”, and through these additions, a shift in the aesthetics of remembrance is observed, which highlights a pertinent need to rethink and reconceive the ways in which we look at preserving trauma sites [17]. Neha Khetarpal draws on Kathleen Higgins’ paper titled “Distorted Space, Unmoving Time—Aesthetic Practices in Bereavement” [9] and opines that it is imperative that the martyrs’ relationships with the objects and places of the trauma site are maintained, as this remains a vital path towards filling the void by “re-situating the deceased within space and time” [11]. The incident happened over a hundred years ago, and as there have been no sustained and institutionalised efforts by the Memorial Trust to track down and record the experiences of the victims systematically and approach the experiences of second generations of the victims, the site becomes more critical than ever to understand and comprehend the extent of the violence, and preserve it over time.

Mandi Jamalian, Mihalis Kavaratzis and Mike Saren researched the consumption practices of tourists and visitors to the Jallianwala Bagh prior to the renovations, and their findings unveil pertinent matters. They interviewed people who had experienced other trauma sites, the House of Terror in Hungary in particular, wherein “every single part of it was like you’re sort of walking on pins and needles, and it’s like you can feel, you know, the feeling of suffering and you really feel like you’re where all of this happened. But if you didn’t know what happened here, this is just a nice park” [10]. Others drew parallels with memorials at Berlin “where when you see you feel really overwhelmed. That place was really sad. But here because of the garden, trees I don’t have that feeling” [10]. Another visitor drew parallels with Auschwitz and added.

everywhere else in the world this should be sublime, quiet and respectful. We’ve been to Auschwitz and no one was taking photos in Auschwitz, so it’s weird seeing people sitting and sleeping everywhere, taking photos and selfies with bullets on the walls. This seems quite jolly. It seems … I don’t know. [10]

This highlights the rupture in aesthetics and atmosphere from other memorials and trauma sites that had existed before, and have undoubtedly augmented further, mainly if we draw on the recent experiences of the visitors to the site after the renovations were formally inaugurated [26, 19]. Conducting a phenomenological study of the experiences of the visitors before and after the renovation is beyond the scope of the chapter at the moment, but certainly leaves space for further research and engagement with the site.

Shifting Meanings of Memorials and Trauma Sites in the Postcolonial Context

There is one pertinent aspect about the cultures of memory and the politics of commemoration that we must pay attention to, and that is the ways in which visitors to the site respond to it. Atmospheres, to reiterate Bohme’s arguments, are not reducible to objects or subjects, and are shaped by both the built environment and the natural environment. There is no atmosphere without perceiving subjects, and if we choose to focus simply on the renovation of the built environment and design plans, then the openness of the concept ofatmosphere is closed off. Just as literature cannot be reduced to the author’s intentions or the reader’s response, the affective intensities and atmospheres generated by the site of the memorial cannot be reduced to the built environment and the intentions of the architects alone. Atmosphere, Bohme has asserted throughout his oeuvre, is not produced for external observers here but for the actors themselves, who are the participants in urban life and co-produce urban atmospheres in their own activities. Pierra Nora has also argued that sites of memory exist only because of an absolute will and intention to remember [14], and because of “their capacity for metamorphosis, an endless recycling of their meaning and an unpredictable proliferation of their ramification” [14], and these intermingling identities push us to find “within the indefinite multiplicity of sites, a hierarchy, a set of limits, a repertoire of range” [14]. The Jallianwala Bagh has not remained a static memorial but has transformed as visitors and tourists have interacted with the site, who have drawn more visitors in turn. Jamalian, Kavaratzis and Saren came up with a fitting comparison that the site is a combination of a memorial and a garden and that their combination lends a fluidity to the site’s meanings, causing the aesthetic elements of the site to be in stark contradiction with its tragic past [10]. Rai also agrees with this point and opines that the Jallianwala Bagh has acquired, over time, “the atmosphere of a local park, an invaluable open space within a dense urban fabric” which has been a site for leisure and relaxation, a space used by locals and a part of their heritage that needs to be respected [16].

A similar phenomenon can be observed at the India Gate in New Delhi, initially conceived as the All India War Memorial, which was constructed to commemorate the over 74,000 personnel from undivided India who died in the First World War, in operations beyond the North-West Frontier and in the Third Afghan War in 1919 [7]. While researching the local collective memory of the India Gate and its history, M.S. Srinivas argues that the India Gate’s original purpose has generally become obscure and exists in public memory more as a national monument than a war memorial [21]. I would also contend that apart from that, the India Gate exists in popular memory as a park and a public space accessible to all. The site of picnics, leisure and occasionally protests, India Gate also lacks the sombre atmosphere of war memorials familiar to those in the West.

Chhina and Chhina argue that modern India has not developed a “unique culture or language of commemoration either in the period prior to independence or after it” [7]. However, a culture and practice of commemoration has become widespread in India, and that is the construction of memorial parks, a “ubiquitous conjunction of monuments and public gardens/parks in the memorial park”, which can be traced back to the colonial picturesque landscape tradition [18]. While researching commemorative practices through memorial parks in colonial and postcolonial Lucknow, Sinha argues that they are a departure from the regular municipal parks found in postcolonial Indian cities and have been vital exercises in nation-building [18]. Sinha proceeds to argue that instead of the gated, monumental enclave, a park model of memorialisation needs to develop that is more inviting and inclusive of all socio-economic groups while simultaneously inaugurating indigenous views about park design and by extension, practices of commemoration, that “do not focus solely on its decorative, ornamental element but also engage its productive aspect” [18]. While it is essential to return to the distinction between trauma sites and memorials that was created at the beginning of the chapter and that significantly impacts the ways in which we must conceive of the site aesthetically, they nevertheless share a recurrent trend in the practices of memorialisation in postcolonial India. A thread of similarity, in particular, exists through the ways in which the sites are experienced through the attached gardens and the development of a garden at both sites. Comparative threads like these raise pertinent questions about the development of aesthetics of commemoration and their contribution towards public and collective memories.

Conclusion

Most theoretical engagements with memorials and commemorative practices have been focused on the Global North, and there is a distinct gap in how these practices need to be conceived in the Global South. Do commemorative practices and cultures of aesthetics necessarily replicate the models of aesthetics and remembrance created in the West? How are memorials perceived and experienced in the Global South and in India in particular? How are sites of memory and violence reinscribed with meaning through the experiences of the visitors? How can we conceive of Indian cultures of commemoration that do not compromise with the aesthetics of remembrance? Neha Khetarpal highlights a way forward for the last question by referring to the floral arrangements of Khadi Marigold that were unveiled at the Partition Museum in Amritsar, the Manchester Museum, the Nehru Center in London, and the Birmingham Library in the UK in 2019 to commemorate one hundred years of the tragic and violent incident [11]. She argues that the Khadi Marigold, with its significance tailored to the Indian context and easy availability, can help blur the distinction between vernacular memorialisation and official narratives. She adds that with the “rise of transgressions that have the potential to rupture esthetics of memorial sites”, the Khadi Marigold also creates opportunities for “moving beyond the spatial confines of the ruptured esthetics at the Jallianwala Bagh” [11].

As the memories of colonialism fade with time, practices of commemoration in the form of memorials and trauma sites become even more critical, and this chapter has made a humble attempt to investigate and highlight the ways in which the atmosphere of the trauma site of the Jallianwala Bagh has shifted after the renovations and the rupture in aesthetics that is revealed. With the renovations, the remaining few traces of the event have been re-coded, rewritten and reinscribed by an aesthetics and narrativisation that remains at odds with the nature of the site, the loss of life and the position that the event carried in the struggle for Indian Independence. While the chapter closes off by offering more questions rather than concrete solutions, it opens up space for continuing discourse on a topic whose relevance remains unchanged, or perhaps even more urgent.

References

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Condos, Mike. 2003. The Ajnala Massacre of 1857 and the Politics of Colonial Violence and Commemoration in Contemporary India. Journal of Genocide Research 24 (4): 568–585.

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Chhina, R., and A. Chhina. 2018. Commemoration, Cult of the Fallen (India). International Encyclopedia of the First World War 1: 1–10.

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Eisenlohr, Patrick. 2018. Suggestions of Movement: Voice and Sonic Atmospheres in Mauritian Muslim Devotional Practices. Cultural Anthropology 33 (1): 32–57.

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Higgins, Kathleen. 2021. Distorted Space, Unmoving Time—Aesthetic Practices in Bereavement. In Cultural, Existential and Phenomenological Dimensions of Grief Experience, ed. Køster A, Kofod, 54–68. London: Routledge.

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Jamalian, M., M. Kavaratzis, and M. Saren. 2020. A Happy Experience of a Dark Place: Consuming and Performing the Jallianwala Bagh. Tourism Management 81: 104–168.

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Khetrapal, N. 2023. Khadi Marigolds for the Martyrs of Jallianwala Bagh (India). Peace Review 35 (2): 237–249. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1080/​10402659.​2023.​2188114.Crossref

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Kumar, G. T. K., and A. K. Singh. 2022. Intangible Cultural Heritage: Knowledge Classification and Management. Informatics Studies 9 (2): 9–24.

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Ladino, J. K. 2019. Memorials Matter: Emotion, Environment and Public Memory at American Historical Sites. Reno and Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press.

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Nora, Pierre. 1989. Between Memory and History: Les Lieux De Mémoire. Representations 26: 7–24.

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Nora, Pierre.1998. Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, New York: Columbia University Press.

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Rai, Gurmeet S. 2021. The Makeover of Jallianwala Bagh: A Lost Opportunity. Stirr World. www.​stirworld.​com/​think-opinions-the-makeover-of-jallianwala-bagh-a-lost-opportunity. Accessed on 25 December 2023.

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Seamon, David. 2022. Sense of Place. The International Encyclopedia of Geography: People, the Earth, Environment and Technology, ed. David A. Snow, 1–11. Wiley Blackwell.

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Sinhā, Amrita. 2010. Colonial and Post-colonial Memorial Parks in Lucknow, India: Shifting Ideologies and Changing Aesthetics. Journal of Landscape Architecture 5 (2): 60–71.

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Suri, Navdeep. 2021. How ‘Renovation’ Desecrated Jallianwala Bagh’s Gloomy Past. The Wire. https://​thewire.​in/​culture/​how-renovation-desecrated-jallianwala-baghs-gloomy-past.​ Accessed on 24 December 2023.

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Sørensen, M.L.S., Viejo-Rose D and Filippucci P. 2019. Memorials and Memorialisation: History, Forms, and Affects. In Memorials in the Aftermath of Armed Conflict, ed. M.L.S. Sørensen, D. Viejo-Rose, and P. Filippucci, 1–32. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Srinivas, M.S. 2021. Memory, Interventions, and the India Gate. Dissertation, School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi.

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Tanović, Sabina. 2022. The Mood of the Sacred: Agency and Appropriation in Memorial Architecture. Rassegna di Architettura e Urbanistica 166 (1): 25–30.

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Tuteja, K. L. 1997. Jallianwala Bagh: A Critical Juncture in the Indian National Movement. Social Scientist 25 (1/2): 25.

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Wagner, Kim. 2019. Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

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Wagner, Kim. 2019. “After the Massacre: What Happened at Jallianwala Bagh Then (and What Has Happened to It Now).” Scroll.in, https://​scroll.​in/​article/​912938/​after-the-massacre-what-happened-at-jallianwala-bagh-then-and-what-has-happened-to-it-now. Accessed on 20 December 2023.

Footnotes

1

A patka is a head cover that is worn by young Sikh children, and is tied differently from the turban worn by Sikh adults.

2

https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=​16fnT_​guXQM, https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=​XiiBsKU4z6c, https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=​PaKMq-ntsDA.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2025

S. Malhotra et al. (eds.)Trauma and Memory Studies: Responses from India and Beyondhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-6374-3_3

3. Secondary Trauma, Famine, and the Hindi Literati—Hindi Narrative of the Bengal Famine in Haṃs Literary Magazine

Justyna Kurowska1  

(1)

Chair of Indology, University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany

Justyna Kurowska

Email: justyna.kurowska@uni-wuerzburg.de

Abstract

Despite the substantial body of work on the Bengal famine of 1943 in Bengali and English, Hindi narratives have received limited scholarly attention, even though they were highly prolific during the famine years of 1943–46. This chapter aims to explore the secondary trauma experienced by bystanders—such as reporters, individuals deployed in Bengal, witnesses, and especially writers—by analysing the narratives published in Haṃs, the leading Hindi literary journal of the time. Through an examination of several dozen texts—including poems, short stories, reportages, songs, plays, and editorials, both original and translated from Bengali and Urdu—featured in the quarterly issues edited by Amrit Rai, this chapter investigates how these works contribute to the conceptual framework of “traumatic realism.” Drawing on 43 definition, “traumatic realism” reflects an aesthetic ideology that emphasises the need for documentation, engages with the limitations of representation, and demands active public involvement. Hindi literary responses to the Bengal famine focus on hunger and trauma—both primary and secondary—and reflect a progressive, often naturalistic and macabre aesthetic that captures the physical and psychological toll of the famine on the Bengali population. The authors present vivid, often grotesque images of human suffering, juxtaposing the oppressed masses with exploitative figures such as capitalists and landlords. Through their detailed realism, these texts serve as both testimony and activist literature, mobilising public awareness and advocating social change. They highlight famine as a class issue and illustrate the wider cultural, social and ethical ruptures that famine brought to India’s literary and national consciousness in the 1940s, situating these events within the concept of ‘traumatic realism’ and the evolving discourse on nationhood and humanity.

Justyna Kurowska

is a Lecturer in Hindi at the Department of Indology at the University of Würzburg, Germany. She earned her PhD in 2019 from the Institute of Oriental Studies at the University of Warsaw, where her dissertation explored the aesthetics of death and dying in modern Hindi literature. Prior to her current role, she served as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern South Asian Languages and Literatures at the South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg. Dr Kurowska has also lectured at the Department of Linguistics and Philology at Uppsala University and University of Bonn. Her scholarly interests include Prison Writing, Memory Studies, Food Cultures, and the Narratives—both written and oral—of convicts from the penal colony in the Andaman Islands. Her research engages critically with cultural memory, identity formation, and the intersections of literature and social history within South Asian contexts.

The Bengal Famine

This study analyses texts that portray the Bengal famine, which claimed nearly three million lives [5, 34, 46]) and is central to the history of twentieth-century India and the contemporary global framework. It should be regarded as a process rather than a singular event of 1943 [15]. Confiscation, hoarding, and a shortage of farm-labour resulted in an unprecedented increase in prices and a decline in marketable surpluses. Despite the existing food stock, thousands of people, especially peasants and the rural poor, died hungry when rice disappeared from the market [5, 34]. This was not the result of an accident but an accumulation of economic changes leading to a phenomenon that Sen called ‘boom famine’. There was enough rice to feed everyone, but few could afford to buy it [1, 17, 19, 34]. Other studies have identified additional factors contributing to the famine, such as the breakdown of social relations, colonial land policies, fascism, and imperialism.¹

The repercussions of the famine were not limited to the Bengal province. Journalists, writers, and members of the Communist Party travelled between regions and took interest in developments and events in neighbouring areas. The flow of ideas, such as the work of the Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA),² or the Indian People’s Theater Association (IPTA),³ was not geographically or linguistically restrained.

While the Bengal famine left its trail in the official and political literature of journalistic surveys and statistical records, in the domain of cultural representation it triggered radically new terms and dynamics of visuality and representation. By late 1943, hunger and destitution became shared content in the palpable cultural production that emerged around the famine, the image of the starving rural migrant appearing in literature, plays, painting, and sculpture. [49, p. 7]

Famine provided an impetus for the middle class and the Communist Party to engage and represent the people in the field of art, consolidating certain cultural groups and forms of expression. New motifs and genres emerged, including visual and activist reportage,⁴ expressionistic sketches, famine songs, and plays.

Trauma, Memory, and the Limits of Realism

This analysis will refer not only to the history and aesthetics of progressive art in India but also to Rothberg’s texts on trauma and the Holocaust [42, 43]. The focus will remain on his concepts of ‘traumatic realism’ and the limits of representation, and David Rousset’s ‘concentrationary universe’. I argue that the representation of the Bengal famine is subject to similar contradictions as the representation of any other trauma in a work of art. Both writers and readers face the challenge of understanding the uniqueness and typicality of the event.⁵ The progressive artists of India, regardless of their linguistic adherence, were firmly rooted in realism and the mimetic style. They understood this form as representing the ground reality and as a reaction to the current events in history. They aimed to return to their roots, rediscover human nature, and explore the struggles of humanity, with a focus on the marginalised, poor, and oppressed [14, 31]. ‘Traumatic realism’ is an attempt to present the traumatic event as an object of knowledge and to transform its readers by compelling them to acknowledge their relationship to post-traumatic culture. As such, the text has epistemological, educational, and political aims. Its purpose is to represent the real by highlighting the fictionality of the realist contract. This representation exposes the fact that the fictional world points to the real without being real [43, pp. 103–104]. In this context, Rothberg interprets Rousset’s concept of the ‘concentrationary universe’ as a borderland of extreme and everyday elements. This world continually redefines everything that is produced, experienced, represented, and maintained as an object of memory, discourse, and political struggle. The extreme and the everyday coexist and overlap, but they do not dissolve into a new unity [43, pp. 129]. Rothberg suggests that traumatic realism is a valuable tool for creating narratives about trauma. They often refer to witnessing and victimisation. To counter the politicisation, Rothberg introduces the ‘implicated subject’– neither a victim nor a perpetrator. According to him, individuals in positions of power and privilege may contribute to the perpetuation of victim and perpetrator roles, even if they are not directly causing harm. These individuals are less actively involved but not passive bystanders, and their actions and inactions play a role in producing and reproducing these positions [41].

Under the shadow of the famine, artists believed they could change reality by portraying it through a combination of realism and revolutionary motifs. This form of realism was not necessarily concerned with verisimilitude, and ‘documenting’ was often used as a form of agitation. The famine narratives in Hindi added to the collection of trauma experiences in Bengali and English. Instead of striving for the title of the ‘correct’ or ‘factual’ representation of history, they enhanced the creation of ‘multidirectional memory’ [42], where memories interact constructively as different experiences of various subjects.

Hindi Progressive Literature and the Bengal Famine

IPTA and PWA brought about new topics in literature and performance, reintroduced folk themes, and placed the people’s struggle at the forefront [3, 16, 20]). The suffering peasant became not only the subject but also the spectator. “By performing for the rural and non-literate public instead of a limited elite audience, the IPTA made political theatre available to those who previously had little or no access to it”, highlights Nandi [6, p. 93]. The artists turned towards the everyday, embracing the new aesthetic of ugliness, grime, and death, particularly in response to famine. Folklore gained momentum as a means of expressing anti-colonial and anti-imperial views.

Unlike significant works in Bengali and English [7, 8, 30] or even in Urdu, Hindi narratives of the Bengal famine of 1943 have not received much scholarly attention,⁶ yet they were very prolific at the time of their publication during the famine of 1943–46. Writers from outside Bengal who were active during this period often referred to a sense of guilt, obligation, and responsibility to address the tragedy that had befallen the province of Bengal. Amritlal Nagar (Amr̥tlāl Nāgar),⁷ author of one of the first ‘hunger’ novels in Hindi, Hunger (Bhūkh),⁸ and a frequent contributor to Hans (Haṃs)⁹ magazine, presented himself as an eyewitness and his story as an authentic first-hand account, testimony written during and immediately after the events in question. Nagar stressed that the stories he compiled came from survivors as well as from his own family members.¹⁰ In 1943, Nagar witnessed the famine on the streets of Calcutta and experienced the dissonance between the relative wealth of the city and the unimaginable poverty and suffering of the peasants and urban poor. Many authors reacted similarly, expressing a feeling of guilt, a desire to document the traumatic event, and a need to see and experience the famine. As a member of both PWA and IPTA, Nagar supported the ideas proclaimed in the movement’s manifesto which asserts that “art and literature can have a future only if they become the authentic expressions and inspirations of the people’s struggles for freedom and culture” (qtd. in [48, p. 20]. However, some authors, including Nagar, were unable to objectively distinguish between ‘famine as experienced’ and ‘famine as imagined’. This led to the creation of what Dass, following Berlant, calls ‘sentimental politics’. This occurs when “a relatively privileged national subjects are exposed to the suffering of their intimate Others, so that to be virtuous requires feeling the pain of flawed or denied citizenship as their own pain” (qtd. in [16, p. 230]. Progressive artists, who were often preoccupied with the rural as ‘authentically Indian’, had a tendency “to present an ethnographic spectacle of the suffering of disenfranchised others” [16, p. 230]. As in the case of Nagar, they represented elitist strategies and values and often created texts about the poor and hungry but not necessarily intended ‘for them’.

While talking about Krishan Chander (Kr̥śan Candra) and his short story cum novella The Giver of Grain (Andātā),¹¹ which was published in one of the famine issues of Hans, Jalil further elaborates on IPTA’s and its party involvement, revealing that “Krishan Chander’s ability to write on extremely topical events made him a poster boy for the progressives for he could be relied upon to churn out plays, novels, reportages, and short stories on the latest ‘cause’ adopted by either the party high command or the progressives” [31, p. 50]. From the sheer volume of literature produced on the topic between 1943 and 1946, it seems like many other authors did feel obliged to follow in his footsteps.

Hans Magazine

Hans is one of the oldest and most prestigious Hindi-language literary magazines founded by the father of Hindi realism, Premchand (Premcand), in early 1930 in Benares, the centre of Hindi literature in the 1920s and 30s [36, p. 36], with the modest aim of promoting Hindi in the Devanagari script. Hans “before it became a Progressive organ (…) invested heavily in translations from Indian languages, also experimenting with transliterated texts as well as translations” [37, p. 257]. Hans not only published the most important progressive and modernist writers but also engaged in contemporary literary debates, for example, by publishing the manifesto of PWA in Hans in October 1935, which promised to “give the dress of words and form to the existent changes in Indian life” and bring the literature ‘nearer (to) the people’ and to make them ‘reflect life and reality’. It also proclaimed that “the new literature of India must deal with the basic problems of our existence today–the problems of hunger and poverty, social backwardness and political subjugation, so that it may help us to understand these problems and through such understanding help us act” [14, pp. 10–11].¹²

The Hans magazine and the publishing house were never financially self-sufficient, and Premchand was soon forced to move temporarily to Bombay, where he began writing for the film industry. He, however, continued to fight for the magazine’s existence. He returned in 1936 due to a strike at the Saraswati Press but died shortly afterward. In 1940, his son Amrit graduated from Allahabad with a BA in Hindi Literature and went on to do an MA in English Literature at the same university. He returned to Banares in 1942 and took over as Hans’s editor. The editorship had previously been held by Jainendra Kumar (Jainendra Kumār),¹³ who suddenly resigned for personal reasons when he decided to move to Delhi. Premchand’s elder son, Śrīpat Rāy, then took over, followed by Shivdan Singh Chauhan (Śivdān Siṃh Cauhān). Amrit was only 21 when he began to lead Hans in 1942. At the beginning of the famine, as a staunch Gandhian, he quickly mobilised other writers and activists, especially the famous Mahadevi Varma (Mahādevī Varmā) , to agitate and collect funds for the famine victims. A collective volume called Baṅg-darśan (Varmā) was brought into being and widely circulated, and all the money collected went into a relief fund. Many of Amrit’s associates, friends, and authors he admired, as well as many debutants, contributed texts to various Hans issues to highlight the importance of this traumatic event. [44, pp. 9–14]. According to his biographer, Ranjit Saha (Raṇjīt Sāhā), Amrit Rai’s attitude was that “literature is a weapon, literature is propaganda, an ideological tool, our words are our equipment” [44, p. 81]. Initially a progressive journal, Hans published most writers of this persuasion. Chauhan and another member of the Communist Party from Lucknow, Ramvilas Sharma (Rāmvilās Śarmā), were acting as poetry editors. In the 50s and 60s, Amrit Rai established his role as a prolific writer of novels, stories, and literary criticism. He ran Hans until 1952, when the financial situation and debts forced him to discontinue the journal [44, p. 121]. It was re-launched in 1986 by Rajendra Yadav, one of contemporary Hindi literature’s most widely read novelists and short story writers. When Yadav died in 2013, his daughter Rachana took over as the manager of the magazine, and Sanjay Sahay as the editor.

Famine Issues

For the purpose of this study, I have identified and analysed issues of the Hans magazine published between 1943 and 1947.¹⁴ I was able to locate eight issues, published between October 1943 and March 1947, which contained single or multiple texts on the Bengal famine. These nearly 40 texts consist of short and long poems, songs, one-act plays, short stories, editorials, and essays. The editor was Amrit Rai, and in some cases issues were co-edited by Sharma and Chauhan. The editor is not explicitly mentioned in each copy. Unfortunately, the condition of the copies held at the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan in Prayag was in some cases, deplorable, and issues were missing pages, had damaged or misplaced covers. Interestingly, for the texts initially written in languages other than Hindi, the translators’ names or the source language are not mentioned, or at least not immediately above or below the text, and thus, due to binding, it is impossible to identify them. Texts by Rangey Raghav (Rāṅgey Rāghav), Prakash Gupta (Prakāś Gupta), and Vishnu (Viṣṇu) appeared in an anthology of famine texts in Hindi entitled Bhūkhā baṅgāl published in 1946 and edited by Brahmadatta Vidyārthī. Krishan Chander’s story was published in the form of a book in 1946. Rangey Raghav’s reportages took the shape of a book entitled Tufāno͂ ke bīc (Between storms) in 1946. Bijon Bhattacharya’s play, Jabanbandi, translated in Hindi as Antim Abhilāṣā (The Last Wish) and published in Hans in January–February 1944, is still performed and read in the original Bangla. It inspired the development and performance of the famous famine play Nabanna, written in 1944 [9]. Created at the height of the famine, both the texts and the related performances effectively raised awareness of the factors behind the famine and attracted funds for relief.¹⁵ They were to form part of a series of plays staged at specific venues under the aegis of the Cultural Squad of the Bengal People’s Relief Committee [9, p. 10].

Some of the literary responses to famine lack insight into the historical and social background, concentrating exclusively on the appearance and actions of the destitute, who commit despicable, immoral acts. The physicality of starving bodies, bones, hands, sunken eyes, medical symptoms, and the bestial behaviour of those affected often become the focus of texts that are almost pornographic in nature.¹⁶ Such images aim to construct the famine version of ‘concentrationary universe’, featuring a particular type of victimhood which does not necessarily mean the body being immediately gone, but to the contrary, being present and visible in a very physical appearance, being exposed. Progressive aesthetics introduced broader socialistic and class-based themes, but the famine highlighted the ontological differences between classes. As Basu emphasised, ‘hungry means not-quite-human’.

Aestheticized in an equally heterogeneous variety of ways, in the shape of the emaciated body, the obese body, the nutritionally balanced body, the body feeding off other bodies, the abject body surrounded by its own regurgitated waste, and the symbolic body politic, divided between those who can feed themselves and those who cannot, these many states of hunger our authors consider in relation to the matter of its banishment to realms of otherness, paying heed in particular to its visceral return, as it were, in the form of the repressed. [4, p. 3]

One of the other young authors contributing to the famine issues of Hans was Girijakumar Mathur, who debuted as a Braj poet and later slid into eminency by his 24 poems being included in the collection Tarsaptak, edited by Agyey (Ajñeya) in 1943. He translated many famous songs into Hindi and was active on All India Radio and Doordarshan, he authored a book-length interview with Amrit Rai in 1994 entitled An Intimate Conversation with Amrit (Ek antraṅg bātcīt Amr̥t se) [33].

Devendra Satyarthi (Devendra Satyārthī) was a famous folklorist and writer of Punjabi, Hindi, and Urdu. In his short story, Between Graves (Qabro͂ ke bīcobīc), published in January 1944, a group of student members of the Communist Party travels to remote villages to collect data about the number of deaths in Bengal. They hope that the publication of shocking statistics would motivate rapid transfer of grains from other states. One day, they visit a village in which only ten people survived. The survivors are so weak that they cannot bury the corpses and dispose of them in a nearby river. The expedition comes across an older woman who lost her children and has no strength to dig more graves. One of the students looks at her leaving the graveyard and sees all her dead sons following her.

Krishan Chander is the author of dozens of novels and collections of short stories in Hindi and Urdu, which were mostly romanticising, sentimental and lyrical, unlike his political inclination [47, p. 127]. One of his most famous works is the story Andātā, reprinted in the March–April 1944 issue of Hans in Devanagari transcription. The text takes up the form of thoughts of dying and dead victims of famine, letters, and satirical and shocking descriptions of the life of the elites consciously ignoring hungry individuals literally begging for food at their doors and just living their lavish lives regardless of the reality and ridiculing anyone pleading for action. The text brings familiar motifs that keep repeating in other works on famine—descriptions of piles of dead bodies being removed from the city for aesthetic reasons, children abandoned by their mothers or waiting next to their dead bodies, disbelief in the scale of the tragedy, and suspicion of manipulation. It features typical characters of migrating farmers, young, educated, and idealistic men trying to help the poor and persuade others to understand the severity of the situation, or young women being tricked into sex work.

Rangey Raghav met Rai during the famine when Raghav organised a group of medical staff from Agra to travel to Bengal with vaccinations and supplies. The fruit of this expedition was a collection of poetic reportages that came out in 1946 as Tūfāno͂ ke bīc, its chapter Shatter the Barrier (Bā̃dh bhā̃ge dāo)¹⁷ was included in the June 1944 issue of Hans. In the introduction to the book, Raghav claims that “the Bengal famine will not cease until our country gains independence” [38, p. 3].¹⁸ He observes people, not only farmers but also factory workers, and their utter mistrust of government initiatives. He tries to see and describe them as humans and concentrate on the emotions and strength of the survivors, to give them a voice. He often mentions how people he comes across are ashamed of their bodies and behaviour. He admires the spirit of villagers who are still surviving despite deaths and murders, madness of famine, and loss. One of his characters speaks of two types of man, ‘bhūkhe’ and ‘luṭere’—the hungry ones and the looters, which seems similar to the victim-perpetrator dichotomy mentioned in an earlier section of this chapter. The author himself is a witness and an active participant, fulfilling the role of the implicated subject. While documenting, Raghav extensively uses metaphors, describing a hostile nature saturated with death and darkness and the toll this work of witnessing puts on him. The title of his later collection indicates the tumultuous time and position of the people of Bengal in the fifth decade of the twentieth century. The title of the reportage, Shatter the [River] Barrier, is a song sung by the workers that empowers them in their double struggle–as victims of famine and of capitalism. It helps them remember the river of stories on famine and trauma, but on the other hand, also look forward to a more equal, socialist future.

Mahadevi Varma and Suryakant Tripathi Nirala (Sūryakānt Tripāṭhī Nirālā) were poets of the Hindi romanticism (chāyāvād), more than a decade senior to most of the youngsters publishing in Hans. Both were acquainted with Amrit Rai since his time of schooling in Allahabad. Nirala was born in Bengal and learned Hindi only later in life and thus had a special sentiment for and attachment to the Bengali language and culture. Both were close friends and even organised a shared trip to Bengal to evaluate the state of affairs on the ground. Their poems appeared in the same issue of Hans in January–February 1944. Nirala contributed the poem Quintet (Pā̃cak) and Varma Worship of Bengal (Baṅg-vandanā). She also wrote the editorial piece for the March–April 1944 issue, entitled Our Responsibility towards Bengal (Baṅgāl ke prati hamārā uttardāyitva). In the same issue, Andātā by Krishan Chander spreads over twenty pages, dominating the magazine.

Other prominent poets who contributed to the eight issues were Shivmangal Singh Suman, a Sahitya Akademi Award-winning poet and academician associated with the University of Ujjain who studied at Banaras Hindu University and published Kolkata Famine–1943 (Kalkatte kā akāl–1943); Kedarnath Agarwal with his poems From a Dreamer (Svapnadraṣṭā se) and In Bengal (Baṅgāl me͂ ), Girijakumar Mathur with Dawn of an Era (Yug-sā̃jh), Rameśvar Śukla An͂cal with To the Profiteers in Bengal (Baṅgal ke munāfākhoro͂ se), and many others. Short stories were supplied by Amrit Rai himself (Sahāg-bindī; The Sign of Marriage) and Devendra Sathiyarthi; and plays by Vishnu (Nidān; Diagnosis), Shivdan Singh Chauhan (Let Them Die; Marne do), Bijan Bhaṭṭācārya (The Last Wish) and a few other lesser-known authors. Not all the issues include editorial texts; only three have been recovered and offer valuable insight into the editors’ and contributors’ motivations and thoughts.

Dhanśyām Asthāna’s poem 1946 bids farewell to the passing year, a year of tragedy for the Indian nation, of war, bloodshed, and famine. The poet addresses 1946 directly, accusing it of adding tragic pages to the nation’s destiny and playing with human lives. It condemned the poet’s generation to the wrath of those who would come after him. The year 1946 is personified and seen as washing its hands of the blood of the poor, the helpless, and the destitute. The poem ends with agitation to keep the struggle awake and fight for independence. (Haṃs March 1947)

The poem Kolkata Famine—1943 by Shivmangal Singh Suman is quite descriptive and refers to destitute mothers and children on the streets of Calcutta, often by using metonymic expressions such as ‘wide eyes’, ‘dry hands’, ‘dried eyes’, ‘gates of the throats’, ‘dry chest’, ‘stomach turned back (bone)’ and metaphors like ‘a child sleeping without a shroud’ or ‘a child sucking the remaining blood of his mother’s life’. He resorts to reminding his readers that the dead were ordinary humans who loved and have been loved, the soil of this nation. Thus, most of the poem describes atrocities happening to the citizens of India at the hands of traders and capitalists but also due to the indifference of ordinary people. The poem features explicit images very typical for famine works, such as dogs and humans fighting for food, corpses on the streets or so-called living corpses (jīvit śav), jackals eating human remains, birds poking at the eyes of the dead, people rotting on streets, terrible cries of mothers and widows, human skeletons (manāv ke kaṅkāl), etc. In its second part, the poem appeals to the hearts and conscience of its readers while blaming them for their passivity and lack of commitment so far. The author appeals to the sense of shame and swears by the victims that he will act in their defence.

Nirala’s poem highlights the situation of ordinary people who cannot buy anything with the money they earned because of the machinations and speculation of sellers, distributors and hoarders. Varma’s two poems, Worship of Bengal and Hungry Bengal, utilise her usual romantic style of seeing the world through beauty, nature, and light. However, her most extended contribution is an essay Our Responsibility Towards Bengal, from the March–April 1944 issue. It is an excerpt from a longer text Baṅg-darśaṇ,¹⁹ which begins with a critique of the policy of all political parties in Bengal, only to blame each other for mistakes and use hunger as an advertisement for the misdeeds of their opponents. Such a situation makes improving people’s livelihoods and organising necessary relief efforts impossible. Close cooperation is essential in the current crisis. Varma calls for such measures, as well as for broad solidarity and brotherhood beyond state divisions. The poet refers to the unique role that artists can play in the upliftment of Bengal.

The reconstruction of Bengal requires the cooperation of every person. But for artists and writers, it is a test of their selfhood. Being away from the noise and controversy of political parties, they can clearly hear the shrill voice of humanity. Being devoid of narrow interests, they can experience its pain in its entirety. (Haṃs March–April 1944)

In the second part of her speech, Varma refers to Bengal’s rich history, philosophy, and culture, which does not stoop to begging for the help it deserves, but has failed to receive. It is the responsibility of the nation to provide it, says Varma.

Another text in prose highlighting the activities of writers is the anonymous report Poetry Reading in the Aid of Bengal (Baṅgal kī sahāytā me͂ kavi sammelan) from October 1943. The text describes the poetry evening accompanied by an exhibition of photographs of the Bengal famine organised at Allahabad University by Hindi and Urdu poets from the city, supported by the local PWA. Nirala graced the evening with his presence, and funds supporting the relief work were collected.

In the December 1943 issue, Prakashchandra Gupta published a piece entitled Bengal Famine, which took up an editorial role. Similar to Varma, he references Bengal’s history, invasions of different external forces, and the strength of the people of the region and its culture, which, however, “is now falling into the trap of history and becoming the prey of time, snatched away by manufactured famine and barbaric fascism. Its protection is the main duty of the Indian people!” (Haṃs December 1943). After the introduction, Gupta proceeds to the description of horrific daily atrocities on the streets of Bengal.

Bengal is sinking today. One lakh people die every week! Men and dogs rummage through garbage heaps together in search of food. The dog wins, and the man loses because his body has no strength left. Jackals drag away people from villages and eat them alive. Mothers sell children for a handful of food, and men sell women. Bengal is vanishing today, but man-eating businessmen are getting rich by turning the country into a burning ghat. Nothing can move the bureaucrats. National leaders are still in jail, and the division between fractions in Bengal is still intact! (Haṃs December 1943)

Gupta puts the entire responsibility for the breakout of famine on black-marketers and frauds and concludes with a call for mobilisation. “If there is some strength in the number of four hundred million [people], then it is needed today. (…) Only a combined force of four hundred million can rescue Bengal” (Haṃs December 1943).

The last and longest editorial text included in the January–February 1944 issue is Editorial Notes. Bengal and Us (Sampādakiy ṭippanī. Baṅgal aur ham) and is a transcription of a lecture delivered on the 15th of January 1944 by Shivdan Singh Chauhan at the occasion of the annual meeting of the Anti-Fascist Writers’ and Artists’ Association of Bengal.²⁰ The lecture does not have a clearly defined theme other than to comment on the current situation and activities of writers in Bengal, including Hindi writers who visit the region to get first-hand information about the famine, seeking inspiration and being driven by a sense of documentary duty. “Through poems, stories, and one-act plays, Hindi writers are awakening the Hindi-speaking public to their duty towards Bengal”, claims Chauhan thus highlighting the most important duties of a progressive writer–which are representation, agitation, and mobilisation. He addresses painful facts, citing examples of people who have become beggars, cases of assaults, and women selling their bodies while expressing solidarity with Bengalis without appropriating their trauma and pain. The author informs his colleagues about the delegations and expeditions of Hindi writers to the famine-stricken regions, to later tell “the true story of Bengal to the Hindi-speaking people through their seen and heard experiences” (Haṃs January–February 1944).

… only the famine-stricken people of Bengal can express this painful experience in real words. Even if their words are broken, or if there is no harmony in them, or even if the words are distorted in their dry throats and become mere sounds of moaning and groaning, only these words or sounds can express their pain, their real feelings. It can give a tangible sense of the agony and harshness of their struggle for life. No creation can depict this by mere reliance on imagination, for the difficulties the people of Bengal have faced have never been faced before in our memory. (…) Hindi creators should get to know the demonic people responsible for this tragedy without any crosscuts and be able to put these experiences on paper. (…) They will see everywhere the disgusting faces of those devils who conspired for the death of Bengal. (Haṃs January–February 1944)

In the second part of his speech, Chauhan assures that the people of Bengal will repay the wrongs done to them and that revenge will be justified. He also believes that Hindi literature can help instigate such revenge, which he sees as a positive thing that increases people’s self-confidence and self-awareness. However, the author admits that the number of anti-fascist, nationalist, and anti-imperialist books and works raising the issue of responsibility for the famine is far from satisfactory. He goes on to praise Hindi writers who reacted almost immediately to the Bengal famine with their literary responses. He notes a substantial discrepancy between the commitment of the two groups—Bengali and Hindi writers. Hindi writers seem to take a keen interest in Bengali literature and translate its most important works. Still, the flow of information is one-sided, as Bengali writers do not reciprocate with similar attention to the Hindi body of literature. For Chauhan, the exchange of ideas and beliefs seems indispensable. Chauhan was convinced that a significant change was taking place in Bengali and that a new artist was emerging daily from the groups that travel with local theatre troupes, from the organisers of cultural initiatives, and from associations interested in folklore and folk art. He believed that “the people who are alive today, despite all the conspiracies against them, are also grateful to their writers and artists who have kept the morale strong” (Haṃs January–February 1944).

The traumatic memories of their own or of others, real or fictional, collected on the pages of Hans not only embody a certain momentum in the history of Hindi literature but also present the Hindi responses, examples of secondary trauma to the broader audiences. At the same time, they play a mobilising role for readers and authors alike. As Banerjee and Ray argue, “the traumatic memory of hunger during the famine may not be limited to individual experience or exact recollection of the trauma. The memory of hunger is passed on collectively through generations in almost a ritualistic performance” [2, p. 279].

Conclusion

Of the authors who published on the Bengal famine in all the issues under analysis, most were Hindi authors under the age of 35, some of them debuting. Only a few established senior writers, such as Nirala and Varma, were well acquainted with the editor of Hans. Most of the issues featured short and long poems, and lyric poetry seems to play an essential role in giving a poetic, non-descriptive tone to the traumatic events in Bengal. Contrary to Hans’s usual repertoire, not many short stories find a place in the magazine, which this time concentrated on one-act plays and editorial texts, apart from the poems and songs. It is a striking feature of Hans under the editorship of the young writer, Amrit Rai, who took it over only in 1942 to devote so many pages, sometimes the majority of the issue, to the Bengal cause. It seems that he might have knowingly chosen to address the topic of hunger and trauma—including secondary trauma experienced by some of the authors observing, writing and re-living the famine—repeatedly, without reducing it to one limited ‘special issue’ and mobilised his friends, fellow writers, and seniors to contribute to the activist cause of agitation and mobilisation of funds and workforce to fight the results of this man-made disaster. This can be read as a declaration and foundational stone of the debuting editor who declared his magazine a stage for current topics and contemporary, progressive authors wanting to deliver a statement piece, literature opting for change and betterment, at the same time respecting differences and proclaiming ‘brotherhood’ and solidarity with the less fortunate, and the responsibility of literature and art.

The authors seem to present a shared vision of a world of hunger. The trauma experienced by Bengalis is mainly physical, but it has also affected the spirit of the region. The authors refer to feelings of shame and pain but devote most of their space to describing the physical and material signs of suffering. They do not spare descriptions of the excess of living corpses, human skeletons, and squalor, bodies being surrounded by animals–jackals, dogs, and birds of prey, voiceless if it wasn’t for begging or groans. While calling for an immediate end to the tragedy, the authors often juxtapose the figure of the victim–the peasant, the worker, idle, sick, passive, never separated from his flesh–and the oppressor–the capitalist, the landlord, the speculator–placing themselves in the position of witnesses, observers, and the conscience of the nation.

It is not difficult to see that hunger is a class issue for the authors. The suffering are the refugees, economically disadvantaged, and low on the social ladder, creating a problematic dynamic between a victim and a defender. All this is described in a progressive aesthetic, often naturalistic and macabre, but realistic in the sense of Rothberg’s ‘traumatic realism’, depicting human suffering, despair, and human carnage in a very detailed but matter-of-fact way. Those literary texts work as memories and testimonies, which build a repository of images of Bengal famine and wartime India. They document the struggle of the ‘real’ people, witnessed and reported by observing, sympathetic, and implicated authors. As Sunderason concludes:

The Bengal famine played a critical role in such destabilizations [in cultural debates]. Via its ruptures – sensorial, imaginational, and discursive – new negotiations between self and society, nation and locality, were identified. The famine ruptured the sensorial domain and attached new values to visualities and new vocabularies to the discourses on vision, the nation, and the modern. For cultural production in Bengal in the 1940s, aesthetics – in its spatial, sensorial, and ethical regimes – framed in the words of Reinhart Koselleck, the “space of experience,” and continued to cast shadows over the “horizons of expectations” that the region could envision in postcolonial times. [49, p. 11]

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Sunderason, Sanjukta. 2022. A Melancholic Archive: Chittaprosad and Socialist Art in Postcolonial India. In Forms of the Left in Postcolonial South Asia:Aesthetics, Networks and Connected Histories, ed. Lotte Hoek and Sanjukta Sunderason, 33–64. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

49.

Sunderason, Sanjukta. 2020. Partisan Aesthetics: Modern Art and India’s Long Decolonization. Redwood City: Stanford University Press.

50.

Tivārī, Rāmacandra. 1946. Sāgar, Saritā aur akāl. Banāras: Sarasvatī Press.

51.

Varmā, Mahādevī, ed. 1944. Baṅg-darśaṇ: 1943–44. Ilāhābād: Prayāg Mahilā Vidyāpīṭh.

52.

Vidyārthī, Brahmadatta. 2003. Bhūkhā baṅgāl. Prayāg: Kalyān Sāhitya Mandir.

Footnotes

1

The motif of restricted access to rice as the food staple of rural Bengal is a dominating one in many of the famine narratives, including [12, 35, 38, 39, 50].

2

Association established in 1935 in London first as All-India Progressive Writers’ Association by Sajjad Yahir and Mulk Raj Anand. See [14].

3

Indian People’s Theatre Association is a leftist cultural association founded in the early 1940’s and linked to the Progressive Writers’ Association and the Communist Party of India (CPI).

4

Amrit Rai claims that these texts were the first reportages in Hindi and as such introduced the genre to the Hindi readership [40].

5

On other famines in Bengal, see [18].

6

The recent work on Bengal famine in art includes [10, 29, 48, 49], and an upcoming anthology by Jalal.

7

In the course of this chapter Hindi names will be used in their common English equivalent and transliterated in brackets by their first use. After that only the English equivalent will be used. Terms and titles will be translated, and transliteration put in brackets.

8

See [32].

9

Throughout this paper, Hindi names and titles will be transliterated in brackets using the scientific transliteration for Devanagari (ISO 15919). In the main text, either a translation will be provided or a modified English transliteration will be used, under which an author or the title can be identified in existing English-language secondary literature.

10

This method of work is typical of Nāgar, who used to conduct interviews and research before starting to write.

11

German and English translations of these texts are available. See [12], [11].

12

This is a version different from the Hindi text from Hans and published in English in Left Review (London) in February 1936.

13

According to other sources it was Jainendra and Śivrānī Devī.

14

I am very grateful and obliged to the staff at Hindi Sahitya Sammelan at Prayag for their help and assistance in locating the relevant issues.

15

“In 1943, during the Bengal famine, artists from the Communist Party of India had toured the length and breadth of the country and collected two lakh rupees for relief work. Their theme song, Bhuka hai Bengal (Bengal is hungry), written by Wamiq Jaunpuri, became very well known throughout India” [31, p. 294].

16

By using the term pornographic I refer to ‘Holocaust pornographic’ used by Rothberg in the context of emotional kitsch, explicit and fundamental obscenity of the representation of Holocaust (2015).

17

The title refers to Rabindranath Tagore’s song of the same title, which is chanted as a revolutionary and mobilising anthem in the story.

18

All the translations from Hindi are by me, unless stated otherwise.

19

The title of this article directly refers to the Bengali literary magazine Bangadarshan edited by Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and later by Rabindranath Tagore published from 1872, and the collection of poetry commissioned by [51]. See also [45] pp. 269–270).

20

Between 1942 and 1945 the name of Pragati Lekhak Sangha or Progressive Writers’ Association of Dhaka was changed to Fascist-Birodhi Lekhak O Shilpi Sangha or Association of Anti-Fascist Writers and Artists.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2025

S. Malhotra et al. (eds.)Trauma and Memory Studies: Responses from India and Beyondhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-6374-3_4

4. Telling the Untold: Persevering Memories and Quiet Amnesias of the Partition

Aditi Bhardwaj1  

(1)

Himachal Pradesh, Nahan, India

Aditi Bhardwaj

Email: bhardwajaditi005@gmail.com

Abstract

This chapter looks back at the 1947 Partition of India through its mnemonic legacies scattered across family histories, curated archives and public discourses. It makes a case for ‘memory’ as an innately subversive category of history-writing while simultaneously foregrounding it in its synthesis with forgetting. Partition is a ‘geo-politicised memoryscape’: its pervasive traumas, negotiations between intergenerational remembrance and forgetting, and the interrelations between collective memory and politico-cultural identity make it a past which is porous and in synthesis with the present. Moreover, after over seventy-five years, the nuances of the ‘amnesias’ of Partition—personal or national, acquired or cultivated—resist any simplified binaries between remembering and forgetting. The Chapter draws on primary research: semi-structured interviews of six Survivors of The Punjab Partition, conducted more than seven decades after the Partition, and the existing research on Partition memory and ‘post-memory’. Using the theoretical interventions of Memory Studies, it engages with questions of the ethics of memory and the archivisation of Partition testimonies, the contours of necessary amnesias, and the fissures in cultural memories and national memorialisation of the Partition. It also addresses the epistemic violence inherent in Partition archival projects and emphasises on the ethics of remembrance in ethnographic cultural studies.

Introduction

One defining feature of mainstream history-writing has been to construct nations within teleological and progressive notions of civilisational evolution to produce coherent narratives of national histories. In imagining absolute and unwavering ideas of the nation, it also often forges a false singularity in the entity of the ‘national subject’ to “address the aporias in [its] experience of [a] linear time” [10, p. 29] of the nation. Restricted within the bounds of emplotment and interpretation,¹ both of which are as much ideological as methodological, these metanarratives are often outcomes of highly exclusionary processes of filtering out the interstitial personal voices which may threaten the chronos of the nation² and are, therefore, rendered “residual historical material” [27, p. 606]. To recover and reclaim those voices, then, is to fracture this chronos and command a re-thinking of not just the object but also the process of history writing.

The intervention of Memory Studies in historical and literary disciplines has sought to academically engage with memory as an analytical category and lift the shroud of silence from the lived experiences of people that contest the ‘fictions’ of national history. Rejecting the idea of the nation as a pre-given entity and understanding it as “a mnemonic community whose raison d’être derives from both remembering and forgetting” [26, p. 138] necessitates an inquiry into not just ‘what’ is remembered but also epistemic questions such as ‘who remembers’. Contesting black-and-white facts with heterogeneous memories retains the complex transactions between the past and the present which are otherwise flattened out in teleological binaries. Mainstream history, therefore, often becomes an instrument of asserting, in Foucault’s terms, ‘biopower’ over the people it represents or invisibilises. A ‘memory turn’³—by recuperating marginal voices through personal testimonies—can “undo history’s amnesias, repressions and distortions” [26, p. 23], overturn statist narratives and un-forget the obliterated vestiges of personal and public memories.

With this foundational understanding of memory, which Butalia [5] in the Indian context describes as “fallible, selective, affective, intuitive and corporeal” (p. 13) and encompassing immense archival potential, this chapter attempts to locate the event of the Indian Partition in its mnemonic legacies, incongruently sustained in the contemporary intimate and public spheres inhabited by those who were displaced during the Punjab Partition in 1947. Drawing on the theoretical framework of Memory and Trauma Studies, and indebted to the existing scholarship of oral historians of the Partition, it also seeks to engage with the fissures in the ‘geo-politicised national memoryscape’ of the Partition by including six semi-structured interviews of the survivors of the Punjab Partition,⁴ all between the ages of 70 and 103 at the time of the interviews, resettled in Nahan, Himachal Pradesh. Supplementing the testimonies with debates on intergenerational remembrances and amnesias, it attempts to locate, within the contours of the national memoryscape, the personal, fractured, repressed yet enduring memories of six people: Davinder Kaur (born 1949), Avtar Singh (born 1941), the late Shakuntala Devi (1937–2022), Amrit Singh Shah (born 1937), Pishori Lal (born 1935), and Kunti Devi (born 1920). Having experienced the thin and porous line between being ‘refugees’ and ‘citizens’, they unanimously admit, after more than seventy years of being ‘partitioned’, to have never been asked about ‘their’ story, even by their own children and grandchildren. The chapter also seeks to explore the relationship between memory and identity, given the mnemonic nature of the nation as a community, and how “what is not remembered in one generation and therefore not known in the next” [23, p. 31] impacts the intergenerational memory and official ‘memorialisation’ of the Partition. Finally, it engages with the growing concerns about the ethical problems of Partition archival projects and attempts to address the fault lines between necessary amnesias and the ‘duty of memory’,⁵ addressing, as Roy [26] notes, “the ethics and aesthetics of remembrance” (p. 2).

A ‘memory-turn’ in the archival and academic discourses on the Partitions of British India—primarily in the works of, inter alia, oral-historians like Urvashi Butalia [5], Kamla Bhasin and Ritu Menon [4], Dhooleka S. Raj [23] and Sukeshi Kamra [17]—has attempted to rescue memories from the clutches of history and simultaneously uncover the contours of gender, religion, class and caste in the experientiality of the Partition. Butalia’s [5] suspicion of the illusion of objectivity in histories where authors remain merely ‘vehicles’ (p. 16) for the histories to write themselves, and her insistence on the empowering investment of the ‘I’ and personal moral responsibilities in feminist oral-historiographies are significant contributions to bring forth the “underside of this history” (p. 347). More recently, scholars like Ananya Jahanara Kabir [16] and Anjali Gera Roy [26] have employed methodologies of oral-historiography to explore newer questions of diasporic consciousness, the intergenerational nexus of remembering, forgetting and ignorance, and what the legacies of the Partition entail now for questions of citizenship and belonging. Aanchal Malhotra [20], on the other hand, locates the lineage and ‘remnants’ of the Partition in material memory—the memory-objects that refugees carried with them across borders, and which have over time retained pre-Partition memories, acquired new symbolic meanings and evolved into generational emblems of the complex mnemonic tapestry of family histories before and after Partition. These cultural investigations appear to be a renewed attempt to locate the Partition in the contemporary memoryscapes of individuals, communities and nations.

These memoryscapes are laden with traumas, that, as the discussion on the interviews in my study shows, have largely remained as a weight that continues to bear on the subjectivities of the survivors, yet remains unspoken of. The theoretical underpinnings of memory and trauma by scholars of the fields have proven valuable in the exploration of persistent and evolving mnemonic vocabularies in postcolonial contexts, including the Indian Partition. Theorists of trauma, like Felman and Laub [12], Cathy Caruth [6] and Dominick LaCapra [19], trace latency in the experience and resistance to the articulation of trauma, insisting that trauma speaks to us like a wound through testimonies. Marianne Hirsch [14], among others, argues that trauma is trans-generationally transmitted as ‘post-memories’, and it alters the subjectivity of these ‘inheritors’ of ruptured identities. Though these interventions are primarily circumscribed by the context of the Holocaust, they also prove significant for an exploration of the traumas of the Partition, particularly in oral testimonies of the survivors. As Partition oral historiography shows, questions of repressed and delayed mourning, inarticulate manifestations of the trauma of violence, dislocation and loss of one’s home, and the imprints of those ruptured memories on the subsequent generations have been observed and studied. The body of work around the Holocaust—including the aforementioned scholars’ contributions—has been useful in deconstructing similar fractures in the people’s stories of the Partition as they experienced it.⁶ Additionally, the contribution of Jeffrey Alexander [2] and Ron Eyerman [11] to the theorisation of ‘cultural trauma’ extends the implications of trauma from individuals to communities and, hence, proves noteworthy for locating the traumas of the Partition in contexts of group consciousness and shared belongings.

Academic engagement with the mnemonics of the Partition entails an inquiry into the nature of memory and its associations with the socio-cultural axes of a time. Maurice Halbwachs’s conceptualisation of collective memory with the links between memory and social frames of references [13], and Olick and Robbin’s focus on histories obliterating memories [21] make a strong case for studying the counter-memorial landscapes of memories to challenge hegemonic metanarratives of history. Ricouer’s insistence on the ‘duty of memory’ [25] raises questions about the ethics of remembering and justice. At the same time, as Dhooleka Raj [23] notes, remembrance is interspersed with amnesias and often the ‘necessity’ of amnesia complicates simplistic notions of justice. Simultaneous inquiries into an uncritical insistence on remembering and archiving, by Javeed Alam and Suresh Sharma [1], and recently by Anindya Raychaudhuri [24], make the subject of Partition memorialisation nuanced and expose the fault lines in the methods and objectives of memory archives. These interventions of locating memories and amnesias in the contexts of cultures and changing social frames allow for a rigorous engagement with the relevance of the remembrance of Partition in contemporary times.

Remembering can be personal or collective, consolidating or contesting official narratives, enduring changes in milieus or evolving with changing social frames; it is, however, in all its ambiguities and inconsistencies, a political act. Werbner [28] calls for a “theoretically informed anthropology of memory and the making of political subjectivities” (p. 2) which are seen as “in the making through nostalgia, through buried, suppressed or textualized… memory, through remembering the present, and through the memory-work of rupture with the past” (p. 15). After over seventy-five years of the event of the Partition, its continuing legacies and the sustained interest of scholars of ethnographic history and contemporary cultures in studying its pervasion in the present point to an unceasing and ever-evolving significance of the Partition in personal and public rituals of identity-making and belonging. From the initial “pact of secrecy” [26, p. 2] of the national (and inherently nationalistic) history⁷ with respect to the testimonies of those who became collateral casualties of the birth of the newly independent nation-state, to the ‘memory-turn’ with the onset of Partition oral-historiography and transnational memory archival projects blooming since the 1990s—the evolving relevance of the legacies of the Partition needs to be explored. In its scale of brutal physical and sexual violence, mass displacement and loss of homes and homelands, Partition remains an enduring traumatic memory in both individual and collective consciousness across borders. Abruptly and violently displaced, cruelly dispossessed, and “historically disenfranchised” [23, p. 30], millions became ‘refugees’ from ‘citizens’ overnight, and despite gradual assimilation, the journey back from being ‘refugees’ to ‘citizens’ still continues. The implications of this traumatic rupture in the chronos of the nation engulf not just the generation that suffered the event as well as the aftermath of the Partition but the entire national memoryscape—a memoryscape that remains ruptured and continually geo politicised.

The Duty to Remember

To recognise the Partition as a memoryscape is to foreground its relevance in the metaphysical questions of remembering and forgetting. Paul Ricouer [25] asserts that “if trauma refers to the past, its exemplary value is directed towards the future” (p. 86). Stating three ‘abuses’ of memory—‘blocked memory’, which takes place at the pathological level, ‘manipulated memory’, which works at the ideological level, and ‘duty memory’, which functions at the ethico-political level (p. 69)—he underpins the twofold tension of forgetting and remembering within the political and moral significance of memory for a society. Arguing that the imperative mood in ‘duty memory’, that is, the obligation to remember, contradicts the essentially spontaneous nature of memory, Ricouer calls for an interrogation of the relation of ‘duty memory’ to the idea of justice (p. 89). Remembering, then, becomes an ethical and political problem, because in holding on to its concern for the past, it often embodies a concern for the transmission of the meaning of the past to the next generation. The ‘duty to tell’, therefore, is pedagogic in the sense of helping to prevent the past from repeating itself in the future [25, p. 70]. In case of the Indian Partition, unlike what Roy [26] calls the ‘Holocaust model’ (p. 1) of archiving, memorialising and monumentalising traumatic humanitarian crises, which makes it “a universal trope for historical trauma” [15, p. 23], there was a resistance to memorialise the Partition, both on the part of the newly formed secular state and the private spheres of family and community.⁸ In the absence of enough overt institutionalised signifiers of the Partition trauma in public memory,⁹ how have communities, and the nation at large, held on to the ‘duty memory’ of ‘partitioned’ subjectivities? What does ‘justice’ look like for families that have undergone the long road of dislocation, trauma and subsequent amnesia with resettlement?

The answers to these questions are complex, for there is no singular ‘partitioned’ subject. The Partition displaced, inter alia, several distinct communities like the Punjabis, Sindhis, Bengalis, Biharis, Assamese and Muhajirs across India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and their ‘cultural traumas’¹⁰ of the Partition continue to shape their discrete group consciousness and rituals of remembrance. The ‘duty of memory’, therefore, varies for these communities, foregrounding that Partition, neither in its historical experientiality nor in its mnemonic inheritances, is a monolith. The labyrinth of suddenly broken ties and gradually forged communities, the nexus of pre-Partition parochial belongings and the acquired security in the new nation, the lack of the privilege of lamenting loss and a cultivated mnemonic distance from the Partition within families—grappling with these issues, communities remember and un-remember the Partition differently, making it a counter-memorial landscape of fragmented identities and belongings.

Right from the familial level, one observes a prolonged silence on the personal inheritances of the Partition across generations. Avtar Singh, born in Chakwal and currently the owner of a shop for clocks, recalls witnessing trains full of corpses when he was just a seven-year-old, and Shakuntala Devi, born in Mingora, recalls threats for conversion, stone-pelting and burnt homes, and remarks if ten-year-olds, like she was at the time, would even understand the gravity of such traumas. On being asked whether their children ask about their family’s experience of the Partition, Avtar Singh remarks, ‘bachche sochte hi nahin hain’ (that is, ‘children don’t think about these things’), and Shakuntala Devi laments, ‘kisi ne kabhi poochha hi nahin’ (‘nobody ever asked’). She also poignantly adds, after a curious pause, that this is perhaps the first time someone has asked her about the Partition—“not even my children asked…never….but telling [my story to] you feels like telling my children. You’re like my grand-daughter, so I am happy to talk” (translated from Hindi). One wonders why such stories have remained unshared, tucked away in untouched corners for decades. Raj’s [23] observation may prove pertinent to explore this:

The memories [of Partition] are not straightforward remembrances, but are interspersed with forgetting: individuals do not want to remember, families do not want to recall bad times, people attempt to avoid the stigma of being a refugee and the nation-state wants to focus on the newly established independent nation. (p. 36)

Such an active forgetting breeds a subsequent ignorance in the generations that follow, which lingers on like the presence of an absence, or like a phantom presence of the consciousness of having lost part of one’s familial roots. It is perhaps this cultivated ignorance which leads to the formation of peculiar ‘partitioned’ subjectivities across generations that constantly negotiate between, as Butalia [5] notes, “Silence and Speech. Memory and forgetting. Pain and healing” (p. 356). The complexity of this transgenerational ‘partitioned subjectivity’ manifests in the conflation of the loss of his mother and with her, their family’s story across borders for late Shakuntala Devi’s son,¹¹ who—months after his mother’s demise—reached out to me, requesting a copy of his mother’s testimony, and noted, “this [interview] is the one of the few things left of hers [my mother’s]…and the only memory of my family, of Partition…I will watch it and show it to my children as well”. It was his mother’s (who was the only remaining member of the family who had experienced the Partition and its aftermath) demise which triggered the desire to hold on to the remnants of the Partition, and his and his family’s roots—and share them with his family. On the other hand, for Davinder Kaur (born in Patiala in 1959), despite not having experienced the event of the Partition, it still constitutes a part of her identity—“dil toh sab ka karta hai” (“everyone desires [to return]”), she says, and at another instance, when asked about her association with Pakistan as a woman born in India, she says, “Pakistan? Lagta toh vo bhi apna hi hai…mera bahut mann karta hai” (“Pakistan? It too feels like my own…I really wish [to go there]”). The generations for whom the Partition is a distant history are, thus, perhaps not always able to amputate that phantom part of their identities—the ever-present absence—and families and communities at large continue to embody such complex belongings marked by cultural trauma and personal losses, as well as chosen and cultivated amnesias.

“Ab Kya Yaad Karna?” (Why Remember It Now?): The Contours of Amnesia

As remembering takes on new meanings in changing times, the amnesias of communities and nations acquire new meanings too. Born in the Shamozai village of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region, Pishori Lal’s first memory of the event of the Partition is the cancellation of his Moral Science exam in class 6th because of a sudden eruption of violence, and the gehun (wheat) that his father had cleaned and stored for when they would return home. He then laughs and says, “koi wapis nahin gaya…gehun wahin reh gayi” (“nobody ever returned…the wheat remained there only”). An excavation of stories buried away—of trauma, violence, and loss—also often begets a resistance to opening the doors to the past which one has taken decades to leave behind. On being asked if he still remembers the old days, he says, ‘ab kya yaad karna?’ (‘why remember it now?’); on being asked if he brought any memories with himself across the border, Avtar Singh remarks, ‘aahista aahista bhool gaye’ (‘slowly, we forgot’) and laughs. The insistence on not-remembering is common in Partition testimonies and signals to the problematisation of a superficial notion of justice for which holding on to traumatic memories appears to be a panacea to the questions of belonging and identity. At the same time, it must be remembered that forgetting as a choice—especially in traumatic events—is never simplistic. Recollections of events that happened over seventy-five years ago are bound to be faded—when admittedly outlets for community-remembering and memorialising were non-existent, when personal and collective traumas were repressed for the sake of immediate survival, and when the subsequent generations often remained oblivious to their family histories of violent dislocations and their stories gradually faded from their collective memories. These gradual (‘aahista’) amnesias within the intimate spaces of the family and community and the reluctance to recall the trauma of the Partition—as Amrit Singh Shah asserts, “there’s no need to tell our children about the pain and the suffering that we saw… we should protect them from all this”—point to not just the personal exigencies of survival and resettlement but also to the national amnesia towards the Partition. Born in Kahuta, Rawalpindi, Amrit Singh Shah recounts the initial resistance towards the ‘refugees’ in the people and the necessity of assimilation, for which forgetting was a need more than a desire. Javeed Alam and Suresh Sharma [1] reiterate this need to forget the Partition violence in the interests of national unity and the ethos of pluralism, which Sharma calls “the distinctive nature of our civilizational ground from which the blurred demography, the blurring of the Partition line itself… has happened” (qtd. in [22, p. 60]). If that is true, and if there is a ‘duty to remember’, there also exists, simultaneously, a ‘duty to forget’.

In the light of these nuances, a critical engagement with what the “currently fashionable projects” [22, p. 61] of Partition memory archives do to the inheritances of memories and the deliberately chosen amnesias becomes important. Memories are central to the construction of identities, but there also exist distinct social forms of forgetting that contribute to forming a collective identity.¹² As Keszei [18] notes, “the desire to belong somewhere makes the individual participate in an identity mediated by collective memory” (p. 808), but this collective memory is often interspersed with forgetting that can be strategic or unintentional. Therefore, in the ‘historian’s history’ of memories, to borrow the phrase from Pandey [22], as archives become central to the projects of re-membering Partition in public discourses, the ethical burden of not building scholarship at the cost of individuals and families reliving their traumas increases manifold. Ultimately, as the question ‘what is remembered?’ becomes a subject of inquiry for Memory Studies, the problematics of ‘who remembers?’ become equally serious.

Archives: An Orderly World of Disorderly Voices

The Partition oral-historiography has served as a link between the orderly macro-history of violence and the disorderly micro-histories of personal losses and traumas by recording the experientiality of the myriad lasting impacts of the Partition. Multiple transnational oral-history projects of Partition memories¹³ have attempted to decentre the traditional analytical categories of history-writing by placing personal testimonies at the centre of their engagement with the Partition. However, as the archive gains prominence in historical and cultural scholarships, recognising it as a concept that exists “at the disposition of a legitimate hermeneutic authority”¹⁴ [9, p. 10] becomes necessary. The oral history archive is an institution for “determining, codifying, controlling and representing the past” [7, p. 3] on terms which are defined not by the interviewee, but by the interviewer. Arguing that personal testimonies become ‘disorderly’ as trauma acts upon the limits of language and articulation, thereby breaking its narrativity, Raychaudhuri [24] recognises a kind of epistemic violence in the ‘orderly’ processes of archivisation (p. 71). Javeed Alam [1] traces, in the contemporary archival projects of Partition memories, the return of “colonialism’s passive victims” (qtd. in [22, p. 61]), devoid of a will of their own, “who have to be given ‘history’—by the state, by other ‘large organisations’ and by us; and who must be allowed to forget so that they can return to their normal, everyday lives” [22, p. 62; emphasis added]. If the ordering of the disorderly memories in archives flattens out their peculiar distortions and silences, does it not also disempower and alienate the interviewee from their own testimony? What does oral-history owe to the people from whose testimonies it derives its legitimacy?

The ethical burden of ethnographic research lies in never rendering the individual voices as “pieces of sociological evidence” [24, p. 77]. All the six interviewees in my study recall incidents of bloodshed, violence and displacement, as well as joyous reminiscences of their childhood homes and cognitive mapping of their neighbourhoods. Kunti Devi (born in Mardan and 101 years old at the time of the interview, my oldest interviewee) recalls her childhood in images of handful of dried-fruits; Pishori Lal gives a detailed cognitive map of his daily passage to the school as a child, through the mohalla and the sabzi mandi; Shakuntala Devi’s eyes twinkle as she introduces herself with her childhood nickname Kundala, explaining that her curly hair prompted her family to give her that nickname. These intimate memories intersperse with their traumas of displacement and violence: Kunti Devi, on being asked if she brought and cherished anything from the ‘other side’, says, ‘aaj ki baat thhodi hai… mere paas kya hai? Bachche hain Pakistan ke do… vo bhi nahin hai, vo bhi gaya’ (‘It did not happen today… what do I have? [I] have two children from Pakistan…not even them, I have lost [one of them] too’), as she mourns the loss of the only thing she claims to have brought from across the border- her son. Similar stories of delayed mourning and repressed griefs, interrupted with silences and accompanied with fragments of joys that remain, comprise the personal testimonies of Partition survivors beyond any tidy precincts of an archive. To recognise the violence of ironing out the ambiguities of meaning, voice, authorship and authority in these voices by putting them in archives is a burden of every oral-historian of Partition memories.

The Memoryscape Where Past and Present Converge

If the micro-histories of traumatic events ‘live on’ in the psyches of the survivors¹⁵ and as postmemories¹⁶ in the subconscious inheritance of their subsequent generations, the mnemonic vestiges of the Partition in testimonies of the survivors suggest something even more nuanced. Halbwachs [13] insists that collective memory is shaped by social frames of references, for “it is in society that [people] recall, recognize and localise their memories” (p. 38). Parallelly, Werbner’s [28] idea of ‘anti-memory’ draws attention to a simultaneous process of ‘memory making’, which he defines as a requirement to “remember as forgotten things…. [that] have actually never [been] known in the past” (p. 13). Therefore, it becomes imperative to investigate the everyday processes of memory-making and their nexus with active forgetting and cultivated ignorance with respect to the intergenerational legacies of the Partition.

The Partition—in its inheritors, their communities, and the nation at large—lives on in rituals of remembrance and forgetting, and also in the parallel personal and public processes of memory-making. In this, memory and identity, and past and present, intertwine and synthesise each other. Therefore, as official, written historiographies attempt to create stable metanarratives that suit the socio-political indices of a time; fiction, film, oral testimonies and art can simultaneously become stabilisers of collective memory. Connerton [8] argues that whatever is written down demonstrates “a will to be remembered” (p. 102). Attempts to memorialise the Partition in unofficial counter-cultures emphasise on this ‘will’ to protect its memories against epistemological and ideological attacks. Ankersmit [3] argues that the absence of the past makes representations all the more necessary, and a historical representation becomes “a textual substitute for the actual, but absent past” (p. 81) through which communities construct narratives of self interpretation.¹⁷ Therefore, as the metanarratives of the Partition change with the changes in the understanding of nationhood and citizenship, the role of representations of collective memory becomes all the more essential to challenge the ‘objective’ history that glosses over the multiplicity of Partition experiences. These counter-memorial cultures not only preserve the Partition in public memory but also re-construct its meanings and legacies for individuals and communities.

Beyond oral testimonies, material objects also appear to be a prominent reservoir of Partition’s counter-memories. Upon investigation, it was found that despite having lost most of their possessions amidst sudden dislocations and loss of homes, people carried and have continued to treasure the relics of their pre-Partition lives. Shakuntala Devi recalls having saved a blanket from her childhood home in Mingora, though she hardly ever told her children about its history. Davinder Kaur shows a neatly packed box of old brass utensils that her mother brought, and though she believes they must have been carried for their utility and not their emotional value, she holds on to them as the remnants of her mother’s memories. Avtar Singh also recalls a painting of Guru Nanak with his disciples, the only remaining memory of his pre-Partition home. Aanchal Malhotra’s [20] study of Material Memory in the South Asian context—particularly the Partition—can be helpful in deconstructing the vitality of such memory-objects in the memoryscape of the Partition. She notes, “the notion that where one is from can be understood using what remains of that place, opens up a highly sensitive and rich terrain that can help unpack belonging, especially if that place has now been rendered inaccessible by national borders” (p. 13). In Remnants of a Separation [20], she traces family histories and social ethnography through heirlooms, their value determined not by antiquity or price but by the vulnerable act of unfolding a painful past and the intimate nature of this experience. An excavation of memory from extraverbal sites like objects opens up a new domain of ethnographic research in which tangible relics of treasured yet ruptured pasts come to embody family histories that otherwise often remain unsaid, for ‘memory dilutes, but the object remains Unaltered’ [20]. At the same time, the lack of any tangible reminders of the past that is now lost does not indicate its complete absence—Amrit Singh Shah, on being asked if he brought anything from, as Malhotra also notes, sarhad ke uss paar (the other side of the border), says, “only faith”. The Partition continues to be a part of the national memory—albeit in small pockets of family treasures of heirlooms, paintings, utensils and other ageing souvenirs, or intangible but enduring anchors of faith.

Conclusion: Beyond the Binary of Memory and Amnesia

The contours of official and unofficial memories, remembrances and amnesias, make the memoryscape of the Partition a heterogenous yet enduring national inheritance. To recover and reclaim the voices that are marginalised and systematically erased from mainstream discourses is to fracture the validity of empirical history-writing and devise more ethical ways of engaging with histories that are made up of not events but people. Collective memory plays a key role in the symbolic discourse of politics, in the legitimation of political structures and action, and in the justification of collective behaviour. Therefore, as social frames of references change, memories acquire newer meanings and transform socio-political identities of individuals and communities. At the same time, amnesias—chosen or forced—both at the level of intergenerational memories and official memorialisation of the Partition, complicate the questions of the ‘duty of memory’ and justice.

As the institutionalised engagement of scholars of history with memories culminates in Partition memory archival projects, the questions of the ‘ethics and aesthetics’ of remembrance¹⁸ become even more important. Though the Punjabi experience forms a major portion of the scholarly interventions on the Partition, the interviews taken for this study point towards mnemonic and geopolitical questions that remain yet to be explored. Three out of the six people interviewed for this study trace their pre-Partition roots to Mingora, Shamozai and Mardan in the then North-West Frontier Province, now known as the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in Pakistan, and they hint at the possibility of the migration of many more families from that area to parts of Himachal Pradesh. Examining their migration patterns and sustained or diffused group consciousness as ‘refugees’—a label that many displaced groups continue to bear—can further expose the crevices in the existing scholarship on Partition.

As the six oral testimonies show, memories often defy simplistic epistemological conclusions. This can be ascertained by Pishori Lal’s recollection of communal violence and also from the Urdu nazm he learnt in his childhood and still remembers- “ae do jahaan ke waali, ae gulshanon ke maali…. mazjid mein shaan teri, mandir mein aan teri…” (“Oh, the protector of both worlds, oh, the grower of flower gardens…in the mosque lies your glory, in the temple lies your grace…”). It is also certain in Avtar Singh’s account of watching Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims beheading each other, as a six-year-old child, and upon being asked if he still owns something from his pre-Partition home, his gesture towards a painting made in the early 1920s of Guru Nanak with Bhai Bala and Bhai Mardana, his Hindu and Muslim disciples, who together stood for communal harmony and love. To remember the Partition, therefore, is to remember the heterogeneous, overlapping and contesting interstitial memories and amnesias that make it a presence, fissured and (un)remembered in the national collective psyche.

Ultimately, an ethical archival engagement with the remnants of the Partition in intimate and collective memories reveals that memory and amnesia do not exist in a binary; they synthesise each other, acquire new meanings and become equally significant in both personal and national rituals of remembrance. As more memory archival projects come to light, the necessity of ethical ethnographic research becomes more crucial than ever. Finally, as interventions of Memory Studies fracture the dominant historiographies of the Partition, the distinct and evolving meanings of the Partition for different communities become essential to explore.

References

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Alam, Javeed, and Suresh Sharma. 1998. Remembering Partition. Seminar 461: 98–103.

2.

Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2004. Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma. Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity 76 (4): 620–639.

3.

Ankersmit, Frank. 2012. Meaning, Truth and Reference in Historical Representation. Cornell University Press.

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Bhasin, Kamla, and Ritu Menon. 1998. Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition. New Delhi: Kali for Women.

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Butalia, Urvashi. 1998. The Other Side of Silence. Viking.

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Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. US: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Cohn, Bernard S. 1996. Colonialism and its forms of knowledge: The British in India. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Connerton, Paul. 1996. How Societies Remember. Cambridge University Press.

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Derrida, Jacques. 1996. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. University of Chicago Press.

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Duara, Prasenjit. 1996. Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Eyerman, Ron. 2001. Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. 1991. In an Era of Testimony: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. Yale French Studies, Literature and the Ethical Question 79: 39–81.

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Halbwachs, Maurice. 1992. On Collective Memory. Trans. Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Hirsch, Marianne. 2008. The Generation of Postmemory. Poetics Today 1 (29): 103–128.

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Huyssen, Andreas. 2000. Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia. Public Culture 12 (1): 21–38.

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Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. 2013. Partition’s Post-Amnesias: 1947, 1971 and Modern South Asia. New Delhi: Women Unlimited.

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Kamra, Sukeshi. 2002. Bearing Witness: Partition, Independence, End of the Raj. Calgary: University of Calgary Press.

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Keszei, András. 2017. Memory and the Contemporary Relevance of the Past. The Hungarian Historical Review 6 (4): 804–824.

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LaCapra, Dominick. 2016. Trauma, History, Memory, Identity: What Remains? History and Theory 55 (3): 375–400.

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Malhotra, Aanchal. 2017. Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory. HarperCollins India.

21.

Olick, Jeffrey K., and Joyce Robbins. 1998. Social Memory Studies: From “Collective Memory” to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices. Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1): 105–140.

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Pandey, Gyanendra. 2003. Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India. Cambridge University Press.

23.

Raj, Dhooleka. 2000. Ignorance, Forgetting, and Family Nostalgia: Partition, the Nation State, and Refugees in Delhi. Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice 44 (2): 30–55.

24.

Raychaudhuri, Anindya. 2021. ‘This, Too, Is History’: Oral History, the 1947 India-Pakistan Partition and the Risks of Archival Re-Ordering. Oral History 49 (2): 69–80.

25.

Ricoeur, Paul. 2006. Memory, History, Forgetting. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

26.

Roy, A.G. 2019. Memories and Postmemories of the Partition of India. Oxon: Routledge Studies in South Asian Studies.

27.

Väyrynen, Tarja. 2016. Rethinking National Temporal Orders: The Subaltern Presence and Enactment of the Political. Review of International Studies 42 (4): 597–612.

28.

Werbner, Richard. 1998. Beyond Oblivion: Confronting Memory Crisis. In Memory and the Postcolony, ed. Richard Werbner, 1–20. England: Zed Books.

Footnotes

1

Anjali Gera Roy talks in detail about emplotment and interpretation in historical narratologies in Memories and Postmemories of the Partition of India (2019), 9–12.

2

Väyrynen notes that this ‘chronos’ is “linear temporality…the measurement of time [which] seeks to produce a coherent and causal origin and a straightforward historical path of development for the nation.” (p. 605) This forged homogeneity and linearity of the ‘national time’ (Bhabha 1990) glosses over the contesting histories that make the national teleology a complicated, non-uniform terrain.

3

For memory-turn, see Olick and Robins, ‘Social Memory Studies: From Collective Memory to the historical sociology of mnemonic practices’ (1998) and Huyssen, ‘Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia’ (2000).

4

Link for the interviews: https://​drive.​google.​com/​drive/​folders/​1BqbnmU2RFWAXkat​CSlab49t4LWYZgLb​u?​usp=​sharing.

5

Ricouer elaborates on the ‘duty of memory’ as one of the three abuses of memory in Memory, History, Forgetting (2006), where he links duty-memory with the question of justice. More on that in the section, ‘The Duty of Memory’ of this chapter. Werbner also deals with the ethics of ‘memory-work’ in ‘Introduction: Beyond Oblivion: Confronting Memory Crisis’, in Memory and the Postcolony (1998).

6

However, scholars have also warned against an uncritical over-dependence on the Holocaust Trauma framework for studying trauma narratives across cultural contexts.

7

Gyanendra Pandey, in Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (2003), points to two characteristics of nationalist history writing in India. First, its development has been consciously in opposition to colonialism, yet in an ambivalent relationship with it; secondly, its desire not only to show antiquity and “manliness of the Indians in the past” (p. 48) but also to demonstrate its unity, singularity and greatness. Omitting a study of the flipside of the glorious birth of the nation, that is, the Partition, in the national(ist) history has, therefore, been a deliberate political and moral choice.

8

Huyssen points out that “while Holocaust comparisons may rhetorically energise some discourses of traumatic memory, they may also work as screen memories or simply block insight into specific local histories” (p. 24). Ananya Jahanara Kabir, in ‘Affect, Body, Place: Trauma Theory in the World’ (2014), admits to have found herself “struggling with what we may term (cautiously) a ‘Holocaust-centric’ apparatus grounded in a Euro-American experiential space” in her examinations of Partition’s traumatic legacies. Therefore, a decentering of the Holocaust model to engage with the postcolonial histories of trauma in their own right is both challenging and important.

9

With some recent exceptions, like The Partition Museum, Amritsar, established in 2017, and The Partition Museum, Delhi, established in 2023.

10

For more on ‘cultural trauma’, see Alexander, ‘Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma’, and Eyerman, ‘Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity’, in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (2004).

11

Mr Yogesh Chawla (the author has been authorised by Mr Chawla to quote this conversation in this chapter).

12

For further reading on the role of long-term cultural memories and the relationship between social groups, memory, and identity, see Assmann, ‘Globalisation, Universalism, and the Erosion of Cultural Memory’ (2010).

13

Like the 1947 Partition Archive, The Mittal Institute’s 1947 Partition Project, The Citizens Archive of Pakistan, Bangla Stories and The Partition Museum, etc.

14

For Derrida’s critical elucidation of the institution of the archive, see Derrida, ‘Archive fever: a Freudian impression’ (1996). Similarly, Stuart Hall, in ‘Constituting an Archive’ (2001), argues that an archive ‘does not consist of simply opening the flood-gates to any kind of production in any context, without any ordering or internal regularity of principle’. LaCapra [31] also states his suspicions of the archive, as “rather than being seen as the bedrock of certainty in history or even as the invariably more reliable source of documentary evidence… an inscription system whose contents and processes may, to a greater or lesser extent, be worked over by forces, including affective and ideological forces” (p. 385).

15

Caruth [6] associates traumatic experiences with cognitive chaos and possible division of consciousness, and suggests that traumatic experience is contagious; that is, trauma “is never simply one's own… [but] precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s traumas” (p. 24). Traumatic experience is, therefore, trans-historically passed across generations.

16

Hirsch [14] gives the notion of ‘postmemory’ as “the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right” (p. 103), and extends the witness’s authority to those with no direct experience of the traumatising violence they narrate.

17

For community, emotions and identity, see Keszei, ‘Memory and the Contemporary Relevance of the Past’ (2017).

18

For more on the ethics and aesthetics of remembrance, see Roy, Memories and Postmemories of the Partition of India (2020).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2025

S. Malhotra et al. (eds.)Trauma and Memory Studies: Responses from India and Beyondhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-6374-3_5

5. Climate Change, the Experiences of the Marginalised South Pacific Islanders: Tales of Fear, Suffering, Resistance in Literature

Rinki Debnath1  

(1)

Department of English, Presidency University, Kolkata, West Bengal, India

Rinki Debnath

Email: rinkidebnath5@gmail.com

Abstract

The dominant western perspective has often tried to project the climate crisis as a global catastrophe. This tends to obscure the reality of climate injustice as the marginalised population of the Global South are much more exposed to the deleterious effects of global warming than the privileged and the powerful Global North. The tragic irony lies in the fact that even with the smallest contribution in the emission of greenhouse gases, the “vulnerable” Pacific Island countries are the worst sufferers of climate change. The vulnerability trope thrives on the policy of victim-blaming which perpetuates the injustice of malrecognition and the crude reality of oppression. The chapter highlights the condition of pretrauma as experienced by the South Pacific Islanders arising from an impending threat of their world coming to an end, a world intrinsically related to their sense of identity. It delves deeper into the notion of place attachment to show how the devastation posed by the fear of displacement interrupts the basic pattern of the islanders’ existence. Any threat to the land is perceived as a threat to the self and the community at large because the place holds immense cultural significance as the repository of their past memories which unite them across generations. The chapter also focuses on the constant fear and anxiety of the islanders grappling against the incessant operation of the forces of exploitation or climate violence. As a response to the dominant western discourse of vulnerability and passivity, the Marshallese poet Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner creates her own discourse of active resistance against the climate crisis in poems like “Tell Them”, “Dear Matafele Pienam” and “Two Degrees”. In her works, the hitherto marginalised voices of the Pacific climate warriors find a strong medium of expression which urges the entire world to reconsider the prevailing western perspective of the universal nature of climate catastrophe.

Climate crisis is often considered a global catastrophe affecting everyone alike. But it is the dominant western perspective which tries to conceal the reality of climate injustice, the fact that the marginalised population of the Global South are much more exposed to the harmful effects of global warming than the privileged and powerful Global North. The terms ‘Global North’ and ‘Global South’ are not just indicators of geographical locations of the nations but have political connotations which explain the power relations between the two categories of nations. Despite being one of the lowest emitters of greenhouse gases, the low-lying South Pacific islands top the list of the worst sufferers of climate change. The atoll nations experience constant threats of inundation from rising sea levels, tropical storms, saltwater intrusion into their limited fresh water sources and ecological decline. This questions the assumed universal nature of the climate catastrophe as its responsibility is not equally shared by all. Climate crisis affects the place-attachment of the islanders to their valued environment of belonging and has cultural implications as it shatters all senses of personal and collective identities. It points to the environmental injustice inherent in the superficial use of the ‘vulnerability’ trope in justifying the environmental degradation of the island-nations. The climate crisis threatens to obliterate their living archives, the stories which had connected the islanders across many generations. The Marshallese poet, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, creates an archive of the Oceania’s rich history through her writings which aim at passing on the cultural legacy of the Pacific Islanders in the form of memories to the future generations so that they never lose their connection with the people and the place they consider home. This is also a powerful act of resistance in literature as it voices the trauma and unheard protests of the marginalised island populations and confirms the preservation of their sense of cultural rootedness against the menaces of cultural effacement.

The entire world is perturbed by an unprecedented change in the climatic patterns which explains the rising universal concern for Global Warming. The upheaval brought about by climate change is massive and insidious. Since the eighteenth century, the industrial revolution has accelerated the process of carbon loading of the atmosphere chiefly through practices like large scale burning of fossil fuels and deforestation which have contributed largely to the warming of Earth’s atmosphere. The most dangerous effects befall the small island developing states especially the South Pacific Island nations as their sensitive ecosystem is extremely susceptible to the detrimental consequences of climate change. In the book Climate Change and Small Island States [1], Jon Barnett and John Campbell point to the fact that the economically weaker people and societies of the Pacific Islands are at greater risk from the devastating effects of climate change as is apparent in the increased rates of precipitation, droughts, tropical cyclones and rise in sea level than the wealthier societies of the world. The harmful impacts of climate change are not confined within the borders of the countries mostly responsible for the large-scale emission of greenhouse gases. The effects are not experienced equally by all the countries; climate change inequity is predominantly felt in the distinction between the free rider and the forced rider countries. The free riders are the highest emitters of greenhouse gases but are the least affected sufferers of climate change because their resilience is confirmed by the wealth they have amassed mostly through environmental exploitation. The forced riders are those minor contributors in the emission of greenhouse gases which are inordinately exposed to the severity of the climate crisis. Between 1950 and 2000, the contribution in carbon emission of the 10% of the wealthiest sections in the developed countries remained 155 times more than that of the 10% of the poorest population in developing countries [1]. The highest contributor was the United States with its emission ranging up to 30.3% between 1990 and 1999 and the next in line were the European countries with their share of 22.1% of emissions for the same period [1]. Even with the smallest contribution in the emission of greenhouse gases, the Pacific Island countries are most vulnerable to the effects of global warming. The database on national emission of the World Resources Institute, 2008 showed the emission from eleven independent Pacific Island countries remained very low, “around 0.04per cent of the global total, and they comprise(d) 7 of the lowest 12 emitters in the dataset” [1, p. 10].

The word ‘vulnerable’ is often used to describe the inherent weakness and incapability of the South Pacific Islands to combat the external threats of climate change. It completely overlooks the active role played by the external agents in rendering the places and their people vulnerable. The vulnerability trope is actually a fabrication which tends to normalise the environmental degradation caused by the privileged Global North by assuming the innate instability of the Global South. It enables the real drivers of climate change to shake off their responsibility in affecting the climate crisis and pose as guiltless by resorting to an age-old practice of blaming the victim. The concept of vulnerability thrives on this strategy of victim- blaming by holding the “smallness, isolation and fragmentation” of the Pacific Islands responsible for their serious environmental condition [1, p. 166]. Therefore, the proposed solutions aim at superficial improvement of the prevailing conditions on the islands. For example, projects like Pacific Ecosystem-based Adaptation to Climate Change (PEBACC) which is funded by the European Union mostly focus on adaptive strategies like conservation and sustainable management of environmental resources and not on the reduction of the emission of greenhouse gases by the powerful nations of the world. This game of ‘blaming the victim’ is aptly summarised as follows:

The trope of island vulnerability – which describes it as an internal syndrome – places the blame with the islands and their peoples. In this way attention is averted from the drivers that create global warming that the communities have to cope with. In turn, this implies that action to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases may be delayed in favour of the development of adaptive strategies – the costs of adjustments to the externalities of the North’s pollution are therefore expected to be borne first and foremost by countries like those in the South Pacific, who are expected to adjust themselves first. Moreover, if vulnerability is constructed as being largely an internal characteristic of islands, then arguably there is little more imperative to reduce emission (as those who are likely to suffer were vulnerable anyway). [1, pp. 166–67]

Injustice is meted out to the South Pacific Islands in the misrecognition of their condition as inherently vulnerable. This institutionalises the power relations of domination and oppression which attempt to justify the inequity of exposure to the forces of environmental degradation. It originates from a deliberate will of the power holders who are comparatively in a better situation to not recognise the differences of the islands’ life and environment. The injustice of misrecognition in blindly assuming vulnerability as the primary cause of the sufferings of the islanders not only aggravates the condition of environmental decline, but also their positive self and group image. In his book Multiculturalism [14], Charles Taylor highlights the effects of misrecognition in creating a falsified and distorted idea of self-identity:

Our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others, and so a person or a group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves. Nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being. [14, p. 25]

The injustice of nonrecognition or malrecognition becomes a precondition for participatory exclusion whereby decisions regarding the alleviation of environmental stress are taken vicariously, while the actual victims denied of a voice helplessly settle for mere pleas of adjustment. This questions the pattern of justice as it points to the non-negotiable significance of democratic participation where people must experience the freedom of speaking on their behalf. It is only through highlighting the injustice of misrecognition that the justice of recognition may be guaranteed in order to ensure an inclusive format of participation which eliminates the crude reality of oppression.

In her poem “Two Degrees” from Iep Jaltok [8], Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner highlights the assumed vulnerability of the Marshall Islands owing to their small size which is compared with “just crumbs you/ dust off the table, wipe/ your hands clean off” [8, p. 77]. The estimated increase in two degrees in temperature would prove fatal for the low-lying South Pacific Islands. So, their leaders plead to settle for 1.5. The slight difference of 0.5 degree might be a negligible value for the countries which are not under serious threats of inundation from rising sea levels, but it has major implications for the islanders who live with a constant fear of losing their home. Their vulnerability is not an inherent weakness as it can be altered with adjustments in the global carbon emission. The chapter has already discussed how the Pacific Islands despite being the lowest contributors in greenhouse gas emission face the highest threats of environmental degradation. It is perfectly depicted in the following lines:

At a climate conference a colleague tells me 2 degrees is just a benchmark for negotiations I tell him for my islands 2 degrees is a gamble at 2 degrees my islands will already be under water this is why our leaders push for 1.5. [8, p. 77]

Jetñil-Kijiner confirms the responsibility of the external agents in rendering the islands vulnerable as she hints at the repetitive nature of the mistakes made by the privileged world. She also mentions the indifference of the power-holders to the sufferings of the Pacific Islanders:

they must be stained rusted our people creaking brackish from salt spray and radiation blasts so so tired, wandering wondering if the world will wheel us out to rest in the sun will they just dust their hands of us, wipe them clean… [8, p. 78]

In the face of the continuing threats of obliteration, Jetñil-Kijiner urges the world to find a balance and realise its responsibility towards people constantly fighting against the deleterious effects of climate change in another part of the world which is exposed disproportionately to the climate catastrophe. She wants people to remember

that beyond the discussions numbers and statistics there are faces all the way out here there is toddler stomping squeaky yellow light up shoes across the edge of a reef not yet under water… [8, pp. 78-9]

The Pacific Island nations are dangerously exposed to the extreme consequences of global warming as the constant rise in sea-level threatens to make their future uncertain. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) anticipates the rise in sea level in the Pacific region by 15 to 95 cm within the year 2100 [2, p. 235]. It justifies the fear of the islanders regarding the permanent loss of land surface particularly in the low-lying nations like Tuvalu, Marshall Islands, Kiribati, Nauru and Tokelau. The situation is aggravated by the rise in ocean temperature which increases the intensity of tropical storms causing death, injury and large-scale financial losses. Moreover, changes in the temperature of the sea-surface adversely affect the coral reefs leading to their bleaching. Coral reefs are an important part of the coastal ecosystem as the reefs serve as habitat to multiple marine species, protect the coastal areas from erosion and storm and act as a carbon sink by reducing the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere [2, p. 237]. Climate change affects the frequency of volcanic eruptions. The island of Ambae, in Vanuatu, has experienced two major explosive volcanic eruptions between the years 2017 and 2018 which have caused serious health hazards, affected the availability of food crops and drinking-water and led to forced evacuation [7].

Besides the trauma from witnessing the past events of gradual degradation of their ecological habitat, the South Pacific Islanders also experience an acute “pretrauma” [9, p. 1]. It is a trauma of imagining a more dreadful future catastrophe. It is the shock of imagining the menaces of the future that ultimately makes them paranoid and depressed. The warnings constantly perturb their thought processes as they visualise an unavoidable encounter with the irreparable damages to the only place they identify as home. Global warming defies any linear attempt at deciphering its magnitude because it is a complex conglomerate of multiple considerations. The trauma arises from an impending threat of their world coming to an end, a world which cannot simply be defined as a monolithic construct of an ecological habitat, but a world which adds meaning to their human identity. A threat to this world becomes equivalent to a threat upon their very existence. Thus, global warming becomes a “hyper object” as something “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” [11, p. 1]. It helps to explain the scale of the problem which extends beyond the concern of cataclysmic impact on ecological stability. Thus, the trauma of climate change incorporates a current realisation of the consequences of past events and an apprehension of the threats of a catastrophic future which perpetuates the fear of total annihilation.

The poem “Dear Matafele Pienam” from Iep Jaltok which Jetñil-Kijiner addresses to her daughter is an acute expression of the fear of future catastrophe in terms of the permanent loss of home to the rising sea level. The devastation posed by global warming is well reflected in the following lines:

Men say that one day that lagoon will devour you

They say it will gnaw at the shoreline chew at the roots of your breadfruit trees gulp down rows of your seawalls

and crunch your island’s shattered bones They say you, your daughter

And your granddaughter, too will wander

rootless with only a passport

to call home…

[8, p. 70]

The feeling of connectedness offered by the ocean adored as the mother proves to be an essential condition for developing a sense of identity which hints at the inseparable bond between the islanders and their island-home. The whole idea of belongingness is like a legacy handed down through the generations, which inculcates values in the entire community. Thus, the threat to their land is perceived as a threat to the culture which the Pacific Islanders celebrate as an integral part of their past, present and future. This enables them to act out in resistance to the impending doom of climate change as the last attempt to preserve their home and to make the world realise the unjust burden of environmental injustice hurled upon the islanders. “Dear Matafele Pienam” which was originally performed at the 2014 Opening Ceremony of the United Nations Secretary-General’s Climate Summit, voices a protest against the deleterious effects of global warming as it calls for an active global resistance against climate change and sea-level rise.

In this context, it is important to discuss the place attachment of the South Pacific Islanders in some detail. It is a strong affective bond with their environment that guides the Islanders’ sense of connection with their island-home. This connection is cognitive in nature as it “include(s) the knowledge, memories, and beliefs that make (the) place meaningful” [12, p. 275]. The place attachment fosters a coherent notion of self-identity. In their paper “Place and Identity Processes” [15], Twigger-Ross and Uzzell elaborate on the place-related implications of all aspects of identity. They specifically refer to Breakwell’s identity process model to emphasise the four basic principles of identity: distinctiveness, continuity, self-esteem and self-efficacy [15, p. 206]. A firmly established connection with the physical environment promotes a strong realisation of the personal or group uniqueness. Therefore, in securing the emotional ties with their place of origin, the Pacific Islanders preserve their distinct identity. Identity is also intrinsically related to the place’s history that continues to maintain its significance over time and saves the past from oblivion by linking its memories to the present. The self-environment relationship is upheld by the place-referent continuity whereby the place offers a pertinent backdrop for creating a coherent and continuous concept of the self [15, p. 207]. The islands become a repository of the past memories which ensure an uninterrupted process of perceiving the continuity of the self. Another form of continuity which deserves mention is the place-congruent continuity which lies in the values the residents associate with the place [15, p. 207]. For the South Pacific Islanders, the island is the only place embedded in the richness of their cultural heritage. It articulates the profundity of their historical ties and constantly assuages the apparent hardships of their lives with the security of belonging to a larger family. This is also realised in terms of the ancestral bonds which strengthen the Islanders’ feeling of acceptance and involvement in their own community and finally add to the significance the place holds for them. The place attachment also helps in maintaining self-esteem referred to as “a positive evaluation of oneself or the group with which one identifies” [15, p. 208]. An affective connection with their environment encourages positive self-perception of the Islanders that ultimately adds to their sense of self-worth and value. It also enhances their self-efficacy by boosting their confidence and adding to the factor of self-reliance. Therefore, any harm inflicted upon the place of origin is perceived as a potential threat to the self-identity as well as the basic framework of a community-oriented existence. The devastation posed by the fear of displacement disrupts the fundamental pattern of the Islanders’ lives as it threatens to shatter all connections to the place which gives meaning to their existence.

In the poem “Tell Them” from Iep Jaltok, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner refers to a sense of attachment to the Marshall Islands as she speaks proudly of their origin and their forefathers, “the finest navigators in the world” [8, p. 64]. The cultural link with the community is strongly expressed in terms of their exclusive patterns of living and the shared experience of belonging to a particular landscape. She writes,

Tell them we are the hollow hulls of canoes as fast as the wind slicing through the pacific sea We are wood shavings

and drying pandanus leaves and sticky bwiros at kemems

Tell them we are sweet harmonies

of grandmothers mothers aunties sisters-

songs late into night….

[8, p. 65]

The significance of their existence as the Marshall Islanders is derived from this feeling of attachment as they identify themselves with the ocean. This foregrounds a collective sense of loss resulting from the climate violence as the rise in sea-level constantly threatens to wipe off the identity of the islanders which is intrinsically linked with their homeland. Jetñil-Kijiner emphasises the feelings of fear and anxiety experienced by the island population as their benevolent ocean has suddenly turned malicious by the selfish machinations of the privileged world and attempts to engulf the only place they call home:

tell them about the water how we have seen it rising flooding across our cemeteries gushing over the sea walls

and crashing against our homes Tell them what it’s like

to see the entire ocean_level_with the land Tell them

we are afraid….

[8, p. 66]

Even when the fear of annihilation appears unavoidable, the poetess is reluctant to let go of the last traces of hope for any improvement in the condition. She expresses a strong desire to hold on to their cherished homeland as it is the only place which confers a stability on their existence,

we don’t want to leave

we’ve never wanted to leave and that we

are nothing

without our island.

[8, pp. 66‒7]

It is impossible to deny the active role played by human beings in the degradation of the Earth’s environment. Dipesh Chakrabarty elaborates on the idea of anthropogenic climate change since the human beings have ceased to be merely biological agents and acquired the status of geological agents as “we have reached numbers and invented technologies that are on a scale large enough to have an impact on the planet itself” [3, pp. 206-07]. The Industrial Revolution has largely contributed to this whole process of destruction. There are certain stable parametric conditions on earth which make it possible for life to continue on the planet. The new geological era of the Anthropocene is one where the decisions and actions of human beings affect every aspect of the planet’s environment. Human activities as geological agents significantly disturb the parametric conditions necessary for survival on Earth and this is very much triggered by the forces of capitalism and modernisation as “Anthropocene would not have been possible, even as a theory, without the history of industrialization” [3, pp. 218–19]. The geological era of the Anthropocene brings in the notion of shared responsibility as it highlights the environmental consequences of the actions of human beings as a unified category. But this is not always the case as everyone does not share an equal responsibility in causing climate change. Jeremy Williams refuses to abide by the anthropogenic view of climate change which highlights the global responsibility in affecting the climate crisis. He refutes the universalist assumption of the Anthropocene because it conceals the truth of the climate dilemma:

The language of environmentalism often reaches for inclusive terms in a well-meaning attempt at solidarity, aiming to create a global consciousness or unity of purpose. But campaigners should take care not to accidentally rewrite history in ways that serve a privileged minority. Unity and solidarity are vital, but they are impossible without recognising that some parts of the world bear much greater responsibility for the climate emergency than others. [16]

It is essential to analyse the cultural factors responsible for climate change. The modern capitalist society imbued with materialistic culture creates human yearnings for physical comfort and conveniences which in the long run contribute much to the carbon loading of our atmosphere. In his book The Great Derangement [4], Amitav Ghosh focuses on the inefficiency of contemporary culture to overcome the difficulties posed by climate change and he relates the present climate crisis with cultural crisis. But Ghosh does not hold capitalism to be solely responsible for climate change, he considers an equal contribution of the empire in the story of carbon emission. The concept of empire is based on an unequal power distribution in the world which bears a direct relation with the process of carbon emission. The powerful nations enjoy their economic privilege at the cost of the sacrifices made by the poorer nations. Ghosh cites a pertinent example on the use of coal:

Take the use of coal. Much concern has been expressed in the West about coal plants in India. Yet, analysts have calculated that ‘in 2014 the average Indian accounted for around 20 per cent of the average American’s coal consumption and around 34 per cent of those from the OECD’. The logical and equitable response then might be for the United States or the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development to shut down a coal plant every time a new plant is commissioned in India, until a converge occurs. But this is, of course, highly unlikely to happen. [4]

Climate change has deeper roots into the history of slavery and colonialism which boosted the process of industrialisation, the strongest pillar of western development. Since slavery and colonialism are predominantly racial policies of the Global North emphasising its superiority over the Global South, the climate crisis has intrinsic connections with racism. At this juncture it is important to look into the colonial history of the South Pacific Islands. The European nations started their colonising ventures in the Pacific Islands in the nineteenth century—the British annexed Vanuatu, Fiji Islands, Solomon Islands and the Pitcairn Group; France extended her colonial rule upon New Caledonia, Marquesas, the Society Islands, Uvea and Futuna; New Guinea and Norfolk Islands became Australian territories and Cook Islands and Samoa came under the rule of New Zealand; Hawaiian Islands and American Samoa were annexed by USA in the twentieth century [13]. As the European and American colonies, the Pacific Islands became the sites for the establishment of the colonial plantations like sugar, cotton and copra [13]. These plantations generated economic benefits for the white colonisers in terms of abundant raw materials which strengthened the industrial bases of the European and American nations. Moreover, abundant production from the plantations required a continuous supply of cheap labour which led to the flourishing practice of slave trading in the South Pacific Islands under the name of blackbirding. It had devastating impacts upon the entire island society. The destitution caused by the stolen manpower from the Pacific Islands became a marker of profit for the white colonisers. The plentiful production from the plantations was guaranteed by the incessant toil of the slaves or blackbirds deemed fit for animalistic hard work on the fields. This ensured a continuous flow of finances into colonial nations which funded the industrial bases responsible for their development. Therefore, the Pacific Islands provided the colonisers with two of their basic requirements for widening their scheme of industrialisation- free land and labour. In return for the economic advancement, the Global North caused irreversible damage to the world’s atmosphere and severely threatened the very existence of the low-lying Pacific atoll nations. Jeremy Williams stresses on the links between the racial schemes of slavery and empire leading to the growth of industrialisation and the climate crisis in the following lines:

Colonialism captured the productive capacity of overseas lands. For a small country such as Britain, the Empire massively expanded its reach, with all resources flowing home to the centre. Slavery harnessed human labour for the benefit of the home country. These two factors – free land and free labour – acted as a huge subsidy to Western development. They provided the capital for industrialisation and account for a large part of global inequality today. [16]

It would be unjust to entirely trace the genesis of climate change in the Industrial Revolution as the source of the problem lies in the exploitative outlook of the White people. Industrialisation in the western society was never a self-sponsored means of development because the financial reinforcement came from the practice of slavery.

An incessant operation of the forces of exploitation underscores an unequal exposure to environmental hazards which is actually a manifestation of climate violence, a form of structural violence perpetuating the inequality of suffering. The structural violence is embedded in cultural violence which makes the hierarchy of cultural superiority and inferiority permanent. This in turn determines which people are to be protected and which are to be exposed to the whip lashes of climate change. This kind of violence usually “goes unnoticed because it is de-personified and diffused across many people and many different acts” [16]. Its causes and effects are wide apart- the developed countries excessively emit greenhouse gases in certain parts of the world but manage to avoid the most dangerous effects of climate change while the poorer nations are disproportionately exposed to the extreme consequences of global warming.

The effect of climate change is not just biophysical as it impacts the culture of a place inflicted with climate crisis. Coastal inundation resulting from rising sea-levels causes displacement of people from their valued places of belonging, thereby severing the ties of attachment. The constant fear and anxiety resulting from the loss of home and separation from one’s community affects one’s sense of identity, pride and well-being ultimately leading to grief and feelings of social and cultural detachment. The island as a site of memory becomes the cultural repository which helps to define the individual and collective identities of its inhabitants. The common physical space shared by the Islanders is the site of the cultural memory which adds coherence to their collective narrative transmitted across generations. The non-material aspects of this culture find expression in the valued preservation of the oral narratives, rituals and celebrations which ultimately contribute in connecting the place and its people. It is also an affective domain as the place transcends its physicality to become a site of memory invested with personal and collective meaning. Therefore, “destruction of the sites of memory means to influence directly the collective and cultural identity of a community” [10]. The threats of annihilation are actually manifestations of the coercive principles of oblivion unfairly hurled upon the Pacific Islanders to disregard their cultural identity. The island as a site of memory represents “the core of the national and cultural identity, and their destruction represents a traumatic event for the related community or nation” [10, p. 3].

The organisational structure of the Pacific Island society has strong roots in its oral traditions which help in maintaining the intergenerational relationships and carrying the cultural legacy forward. The oral tradition in the Pacific Islands is integral to an understanding of the cultural affinity of the island populations and their collective response to the severe threats of environmental damage. Jetñil-Kijiner’s poems were initially published in the newspapers of the Marshall Islands, and later she posted videos of her reciting the same poems on YouTube. The performance poetry emphasises the value of oral culture in the Pacific Island society where the spoken words prove to be more effective in generating responses from the people than the written ones. In her essay “Poet’s Body as Archive Amidst a Rising Ocean,” Kuhelika Ghosh writes, “orality becomes a way of engaging with a wide audience on the internet, while resisting dominant modes of literacy and previous assumptions about passivity” [5]. The Islanders had always believed in the verbal transmission of their history without a conscious attempt at recording it. So, the history of Pacific Islanders is a living archive of stories concerning Oceania which connects these people across many generations. Jetñil-Kijiner writes and recites her poems in English due to the global appeal of the language as she wants more people from all over the world to support the Pacific Islanders in their fight against climate change. Kuhelika Ghosh shows how Jetñil-Kijiner aims at creating an archive of the “Oceania’s imperial and climate history” through her performance poetry:

Jetñil-Kijiner’s performance poetry creates an embodied archive that ensures cultural preservation regardless of destruction caused by rising tides. This movement of the archive away from paper to human embodiment becomes a way to ensure Marshallese culture passes on to the next generation. It also allows the Marshallese to retain their relationship to the land without requiring a place-based archive. [5]

With the climate change protests spreading worldwide, Jetñil-Kijiner assures her daughter, “no one’s losing their homeland/ no one’s gonna become/ a climate change refugee” [8, p. 71]. She lays emphasis on the collective act of resistance as thousands of people have actively participated in the protest movements against the serious threats of climate change. She writes,

hands reaching out fists raising up banners unfurling megaphones booming and we are

canoes blocking coal ships the radiance of solar villages

the rich clean soil of the farmer’s past petitions blooming from teenage fingertips families biking, recycling, reusing, engineers dreaming, designing, building, artists painting, dancing, writing,

and we are spreading the word and there are thousands

out on the street marching with signs hand in hand

chanting for change NOW.

[8, p. 72]

Dominant perspectives about the smallness and isolated location of the Pacific Islands justify the grand narrative of climate injustice which constantly tries to push the islands into the dark depths of oblivion. Epeli Hau’ofa calls such derogatory ideas “geographic deterministic view of a very narrow kind” and posits the concept of smallness as “relative” [6, p. 30]. He finds it to be a calculated mental state which practically thrives on the principles of inclusion and exclusion. He uses the term “Oceania” for the region as he believes in the “grand perspective” of Oceania as a more holistic approach “in which things are seen in the totality of their relationships” [6, p. 31]. It denotes the vast expanse of the “sea of islands” along with their inhabitants who are connected with each other and the rest of the world defying the forces of segregation [6, p. 32]. Hau’ofa’s notion of regional solidarity has given impetus to environmental activism directed against the inequity of climate disaster. The Climate Justice Action (CJA) emphasises the differences in the impacts of climate change, extending its scope beyond the immediate environmental concerns to incorporate social justice and attempts at widening participation. The climate campaigners’ group formed in 2019 under the name of Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change (PISFCC) has taken the issue of climate catastrophe to the International Court of Justice, thereby claiming the basic human right to live with dignity without any fear of climate change. The regional solidarity is apparent in the approaches of the Pacific Climate Warriors who are dedicated to protecting the Pacific environment as well their indigenous cultural network. Theirs is a grassroot movement which invites more people to participate in their endeavour of protecting their home and community against the threats of obliteration. Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner herself is a climate envoy for the Republic of Marshall Islands and also the director of Jo-Jikum, a Majuro based nonprofit organisation which encourages the youth to join the environmental activism. As a response to the dominant western discourse of vulnerability and passivity, Jetñil- Kijiner creates her own poetic discourse of active resistance against the climate crisis. In her poems and videos, the hitherto marginalised voices of the Pacific climate warriors find a strong medium of expression, which urge the entire world to question the dominant western perspective of climate change projected as a phenomenon affecting everyone alike. Her unmasked expression of the fear and anxiety of the Pacific Islanders debunks the generalised concept of suffering which tends to put everyone on an equal plane by highlighting climate change as a global catastrophe. Another predominant misconception is that climate change is often thought of as something that is likely to affect the future generation only. But the practical realities from around the world show that the present is as much at risk as is the future. While our concern for the future generations is justified, it is equally important to understand and recognise the immediate consequences of climate change on places like the low-lying South Pacific atoll nations.

References

1.

Barnett, Jon, and John Campbell. 2010. Climate Change and Small Island States: Power, Knowledge and South Pacific. London: Earthscan.

2.

Burns, William C.G. 2003. The Impact of Climate Change on Pacific Island Developing Countries in the 21st Century. In Climate Change in the South Pacific: Impacts and Responses in Australia, New Zealand, and Small Island States, eds. Alexander Gillespie and William C.G. Burns, 233–250. New York: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

3.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2019. The Climate of History: Four Theses. Critical Inquiry 35 (2): 197–222.

4.

Ghosh, Amitav. 2016. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

5.

Ghosh, Kuhelika. 2020. Poet’s Body as Archive Amidst a Rising Ocean. Edge Effects. https://​edgeeffects.​net/​kathy-jetnil-kijiner/​. Accessed 13 August 2024.

6.

Hau’ofa, Epeli. 2008. We are the Ocean: Selected Works. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

7.

Hawaiian Volcano Observatory. 2021. Volcano Watch- Observations and impacts of 2017‒2018 Ambae, Vanuatu Eruption. https://​www.​usgs.​gov/​observatories/​hvo/​news/​volcano-watch-observations-and-impacts-2017-2018-ambae-vanuatu. Accessed 13 August 2024

8.

Jetñil-Kijiner, Kathy. 2017. Iep Jāltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

9.

Kaplan, E. Ann. 2016. Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

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Mitroiu, Simona. 2014. Sites of Memory: An Urban Perspective. Acta Scientiarum Human and Social Sciences 36 (1): 1–7.

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Morton, Timothy. 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Scannell, Lella, and Robert Gifford. 2014. The Psychology of Place Attachment. In Environmental Psychology: Principles and Practice, ed. Robert Gifford, 5th ed., 272–300. Colville: Optimal Books.

13.

Smith, Anita, and Kevin L. Jones. 2007. Cultural Landscapes of the Pacific Islands. https://​openarchive.​icomos.​org/​2654/​1/​cultural-landscapes-pacific.​pdf. Accessed 12 October 2024.

14.

Taylor, Charles. 1994. Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, eds. Amy Gutmann, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Jürgen Habermas, Stephen C. Rockefeller, Michael Walzer, Susan Wolf. Jersey: Princeton University Press.

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Twigger-Ross, C. L., and D. L. Uzzell. 1996. Place and Identity Processes. Journal of Environmental Psychology 16 (3): 205–220.

16.

Williams, Jeremy. 2021. Climate Change Is Racist: Race, Privilege and the Struggle for Climate Justice. London: Icon Books Ltd.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2025

S. Malhotra et al. (eds.)Trauma and Memory Studies: Responses from India and Beyondhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-6374-3_6

6. Private Memories of Public Terror: Reading Selected Witness Narratives of the 26/11 Mumbai Attacks

Revathy Krishnan1  

(1)

Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India

Revathy Krishnan

Email: hs22d015@smail.iitm.ac.in

Abstract

The intersections of private memories and public commemorations of terrorist attacks in the Global South can offer a fresh understanding of the long-lasting impact of such events on suffering subjects in a non-Western setting. The chapter studies the mnemonic impact of the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks which were executed in November 2008 by ten Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists. For theoretical clarity, this chapter uses the term witness to refer to the ground zero survivor groups that experienced the traumatic event. The chapter proposes that witness narratives (Julie Rak) as a genre play a vital role in understanding what Ashis Nandy calls the memory work associated with terrorist attacks. They emplot and narrativise the private, autobiographical and affective memories of survivor groups, which are often left uncategorised in the mainstream historiography The primary texts in discussion, Praveen Teotia’s (2020) 26/11 Brave Heart: My Encounters with Terrorists that Night and Ankur Chawla’s (2012) 14 Hours An Insider’s Account of the 26/11 Taj Attack are witness narratives of two individuals who encountered the 2008 Mumbai 26/11 attacks in the same space (Hotel Taj Mumbai) in different capacities, one as a rescue personnel and another as a staff respectively. Using conceptual affordances of memory studies and narrative theory, the chapter offers a close reading of affective and embodied witnessing, individual patterns of remembering, altered spatial perceptions and material memories of the 26/11 terrorist attacks in the given texts to decipher intersections of collective and subjective recollections of the public terror event.

Introduction

Events of terrorism have historically (re)configured the memories, lived experiences, and complex geopolitical realities of people in South Asia, specifically in India. According to Alex Tickell [19], terrorism as a discourse has been familiar to the Indian subcontinent since the time of imperialist invasions [21, p. 6]. Post-independence, terrorism grew as an institutionalised form in India, predominantly functioning as a subsidiary product of extremist ideologies and cross-border conflicts [15, p. 9]. Terrorism today, in its etymological, practical and symbolic sense, configures the experiences, life and memories of the people in India. The intersections of private memories and public commemorations of terror attacks in the Global South can offer a fresh understanding of the long-lasting effects of trauma generated by such events in suffering subjects, specifically in a non-western setting. Ashis Nandy [14], in his contemplations on memory work, noted that the constant mnemonocultural configurations related to traumatic pasts or events like terror attacks induce the possibility of “alternative histories of emotions” (p. 599) that refute “official invitations to forget” (p. 599) and give insights on the multi-layered processes involved in the memory work associated with them. This chapter identifies the literary genre witness narratives (Julie Rak) to be crucial in understanding this memory work associated with terror attacks as they emplot autobiographical, private and subjective experiences of survivor groups and act as building blocks to the collective memory (Maurice Halbwachs) surrounding such events. Praveen Teotia’s [20] 26/11 Brave Heart: My Encounters with Terrorists that Night and Ankur Chawla’s [4] 14 Hours: An Insider’s Account of the 26/11 Taj Attack are witness narratives that recollect authors’ memories of encountering the 26/11 Mumbai attacks at The Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, Mumbai. By using the witness narratives as points of reference, the research attempts to deconstruct the subjective ways in which survivors witness, remember and narrativise terror attacks in India, the patterns reflected in their memory recollections and how these “autobiographical”, “living”, and “embodied” memories are situated within the “collected memories’’ surrounding the 2008 Mumbai attacks. These private memories are often not included in mainstream historiography and exist in people’s everyday realities. Witness narratives record these memories based on “affective ties” and contribute towards an alternative history rooted in subjectivity, witnessing and emotions. Through a close reading of the texts in the discussion, this chapter attempts to understand the linkages between terrorist attacks, private memories of these attacks in witnesses (read survivors) and representations of these memories in their autobiographical recollections.

The case study in discussion, the 26/11 attacks, was executed in November 2008 by ten Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists in Mumbai, where terrorists held influential parts of the city under siege for four days. The 26/11 Mumbai attacks are considered one of the country’s most significant globally recognised terror attacks. This could be precisely because of two reasons; firstly, the event fell into the conventionally popular definitions of a terrorist attack (similar to 9/11). Secondly, as it was highly mediated, broadcasted and documented in the form of television coverages, digital and social media output and journalistic accounts during and after its occurrence. Several literary research clusters have been formed around trauma narratives associated with terror situations in Jammu and Kashmir, North-eastern militancy and Maoist insurgency. However, a very few have attempted to study the structure of subjective witnessing and memory recollections of the 26/11 attacks by examining narratives that throw light on the affect surrounding the event, the impact of the attack on private memory, sustaining impacts of the attacks on everyday life, changes in habitual memories and the perceptions of the site of terror in survivors pre and post the terror attacks.

Life writing over the years has evolved into a collective term for all forms of narrative documentation. Mita Banerjee [1] defined life writing as “a wider continuum of all ego-documents” (p. 130) written or composed in various media that allows us to express the “story of our selves” (p. 130) as and how we remember it. From the eighteenth century to the late twentieth century, biography, autobiography, memoirs, diaries, and letters constituted the “limited or limiting genre” [10, p. 3]. However, Craig Howes [8] noted that the increasing interest of cultural studies scholars in “everyday practices of self-narration(ing)” in textual, verbal and mixed modes” (p. 5) opened up new critical attention towards textual and oral accounts of ordinary people (often not established biographers) and their articulations of witnessing events, changed everyday realities and subjectivities. These life accounts, while trying to recollect and project the resilience and chance encounter that spared the witnesses from death, also magnify the long-lasting effects of the event memories and the irreplaceable void and fragmentation of perceived identities in the survivor or witness groups.

Julie Rak [17] introduced the term witness narrative as a new form of autobiographical life writing where “the subjectivity of the narrator is built around an event, quite often a traumatic event” (p. 228). Unlike other prominent forms of self-writing where the actual causality of events constructs the narrative structure of the text, Rak categorises witness narratives as a form of writing structured on the narrator’s ability to “recount the event” or “how they witnessed it” (p. 223). The narratives record the personal, individual and communicative memories (Jan Assmann) of witnesses and survivors of an event and their affective responses to them in the post-event scenario. The plot and narrative persona in witness narratives are constructed around their experience of witnessing, how they remember it and how these memories and experiences shape their later life. Specifically, the genre engages in the recollection and representation of communicative, episodic and collective memories held by individuals and communities in literary formats. The word witness is carefully used to engage with witnessing and experiencing as an active/passive, subjective, positional and mnemonic phenomenon. Susan Sontag [18] in her work Regarding the Pain of Others observed that all collective memory mechanisms are born out of “individual, unreproducible” (p. 86) memories that die with each person. She emphasises the primacy of individual private memories of politically charged events and how they result in forged identities [18, p. 86]. Following Sontag’s propositions, Amy L. Hubbell [9] also suggests that despite the primacy of personal memories, they are often neglected and are systematically backgrounded into the annals of collective memory without being foregrounded. She notes that public sharing or narrativising of survivor experiences minimises the effects of suffering and ensures an inclusive historical representation of the event [9, p. 50]. Thus, witness narratives focus on the private memories of such “memory makers” and their role in recollecting a public event like a terrorist attack or infiltration.

Praveen Kumar Teotia’s [20] 26/11 Braveheart: My Encounters with Terrorists that Night and Ankur Chawla’s [4] 14 Hours: An Insider’s account of the 26/11 Taj Attack are witness accounts of two individuals who encountered the Mumbai 26/11 attacks in the same place (The Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, Mumbai) in different capacities, one as rescue personnel and another as a staff member, respectively. Praveen Teotia was a marine commando (MARCOS) in the Western Naval Command in Mumbai and a part of one of the first teams to be deployed in the hotel for rescue operations. His prompt action during their operation inside the hotel saved about hundred and fifty people held hostage. However, he was injured badly in the combat and had to leave the force after his recovery. He is a Shaurya Chakra awardee who works as a fitness trainer and life coach and runs marathons. Ankur Chawla is one among the hotel staff contingent of The Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, Mumbai, who first saw the terrorists approaching and actively took part in rescuing the guests safely out of the hotel through the staff corridors.

This chapter predominantly studies the primary texts under three broader themes. Firstly, it analyses how the 26/11 terror attacks influenced the existing memory mechanisms in witnesses, how the day of the attacks transformed from a mundane to a monumental memory and how the specific event memory is built around psychosomatic sensations and emotions. Secondly, the chapter analyses how past memories of terror shaped the initial responses of witnesses to the attack and how the memories of the terror attacks shape the living realities and future of witnesses in the post-terror scenario. Thirdly, the chapter reads the changing configurations of space and space perceptions of witnesses before and after the terror event as reflected in 26/11 Brave Heart: My Encounters with Terrorists that Night [20] and 14 Hours: An Insider’s Account of the 26/11 Taj Attack [4].

From Mundane to Monumental

Terrorist events are emotionally charged incidents that re-categorise the narrative coherence of autobiographical memory. While narrating the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, specific memory patterns are visible in the recollections of both authors in the discussion, where they recount ordinary instances before the event, which would have otherwise gone into obscurity. Whenever a life-altering event occurs, seemingly mundane life experiences become monumental episodes in the autobiographical memory. Psychosomatic sensations such as horror, fright, and shock transform ordinary memories into a realm of heightened significance, aiding their reproducibility in later memory reinstations [5, p. 1]. In 26/11 Brave Heart: My Encounters with Terrorists that Night, the author tacitly signals this transformative quality of the memory (from mundane to monumental) in the prologue, where he recounts the evening of 26th November 2008. He writes how he had gone to the city to collect train tickets to travel home the next day, right before the terrorist attacks. He elaborates how he casually whiled away time observing the locale that housed the luxurious hotel The Taj Mahal Palace, Mumbai, Leopold café, and other places that became terror sites in a matter of a few hours. However, the author’s descriptions of “a usual Mumbai evening” where “the sea looked calm” and “life looked picturesque and undisturbed” [20, p. 7] quickly give way to phrases like “who would have known death would spread its dirty tentacles choking the life out of this picture” and “hardly would have I imagined that I would be facing these Fidayeen, inside the Taj, eye to eye, and my life would change forever” [20, p. 7]. The shifting tones of description and the fluctuating ways of “seeing”, “looking”, and “picturing” the site of memory (here, the Taj Mahal Palace and its locale) signal the volatile nature of the event. The uncanny calmness with which the author draws the landscape of the memory and the shifting emotions predict the gravity of the prospective calamity ahead. The visceral language of the prologue builds up the spectral nature of the memory. It signals the horror that shapes it, whereby the pleasant memories associated with the place now also carry the burden of a ghostly future of death and destruction. The title of the following chapter, “Just Another Day, Was It?” [20] enumerates the ambiguity of the memory, hinged on vulnerability pre- and post-the terror attacks.

Teotia also explicates details of how he received the news about the terror attacks in The Taj (as mentioned in the narrative). The narrator recounts that he was watching the cricket match between India and the English cricket team touring India that day, and soon after, he was assigned an unprecedented mission to combat the terrorists attacking the hotel. In another instance, Teotia recollects the conversations between the marine commandos before entering the hotel, where they underestimated the magnitude of the terror attacks as a usual combat mission. He notes that the commandos had made comments like “Ye Kya Choohe marne ke liye Hanuman ji ka gaada de rahe hein” (why would they give heavy weapons like those in the hands of Lord Hanuman to kill rats in the house) [20, p. 24] and hilariously called themselves “brides sitting in palanquins” [20, p. 24] while going for the mission, indicating their assumption of the mission as one well within their control. Being a marine commando, Praveen Teotia was familiar with precarious situations and was trained to handle them light-heartedly. While these instances could have been easily dismissed from his memory, Teotia’s mention of these instances in the narration is distinctively peculiar.

Similarly, Ankur Chawla [4] in 14 Hours: An Insider’s Account of the 26/11 Taj Attack recounts 26 November 2008, with microscopic details. For instance, he had been working in the bar since the afternoon, and as he was nearing the completion of his tenure, he was asked to submit an assignment about all the alcohol brands available in the bar that day. He recounts an interaction with a regular customer Mr Kirloskar from that day, who used to share gossip about the bigshots in the city with him. He recollects conversations where they discussed the selection of malts and the rare collection of other liquor at the bar, the history of the bar, the most popular cocktails and even the personal lives of the bartenders. However, the following transformative event changed the ordinariness of the day and its occurrences into a heightened mnemonic significance.

To elucidate, both the texts in discussion began the narrative by portraying the ordinary course of life of the narrators and their mundane everyday experiences. However, it would be reductive to read the mundane happenings recalled by the witnesses in both texts as mere prologues to contextualise the memory. They indicate larger mnemonic patterns at play. As noted by Gillian Cohen [5], short-term/everyday memories of this kind are often not consciously remembered or commemorated. However, Bessel A.Van Der Kolk [23] notes that while memories of ordinary events disintegrate in clarity over time, “terrifying experiences may be remembered with extreme vividness” (p. 52) and “appear to get fixed in mind, unaltered by the passage of time or by the intervention of subsequent experiences” (p. 52). In the narratives of Ankur Chawla and Praveen Teotia, these vivid private memories of precursory events to the terrorist encounter indicate the functioning of the 26/11 as a flashbulb memory.

Flashbulb memories act as a flashbulb that illuminates the events surrounding the time the individual learnt about the emotionally charged event, including information about where they were, what they were doing, what was the immediate aftermath, and how they felt about it [3]. Theoreticians propose that flashbulb memories acquire a new stature of significance based on their emotional valency and surprise factor. The degree of recollection of such ordinary memories is solid and vivid depending on the emotional significance and shock factor of the event in the individual’s personal life [3]. In the case of Ankur Chawla, encountering the terrorists and witnessing the horrendous killings of guests by the terrorists brought a monumental significance to the mundane happenings that took place before and after the encounter. On the other hand, Praveen Teotia was gravely injured during his combat with the terrorists, and the experience of getting shot changed the realities of his life and hence functions as a flashbulb memory.

In both texts, the authors engage in an extensive narrative reconstruction of the traumatic event through thick descriptions of embodied memories. The psychosomatic experiences and emotions are recollected vividly from memory and are transcribed with clarity in a testimonial fashion. Ankur Chawla [4] reports vivid descriptions of the bleeding victim, such as “the blood oozing out” of the white shirt, the fear of death and the multitude of emotions in his eyes (p. 32). He also gives elaborate descriptions of the appearance and stature of the terrorist. In 26/11 Brave Heart: My Encounters with Terrorists that Night, Praveen Teotia [20] writes about waking up after being shot by a terrorist, in “acute pain and agony” (p. 53), the “burning sensation of his skin being ripped apart” and “the fire of hell” (p. 53) engulfing his neck. He elaborates that it took him some time to realise that he was shot in the head, and it felt like “a thousand hammers were being pounded on his skull” and “molten lava was poured inside his ears” [20, p. 54]. He recalls trying to touch his ear only to realise that no ear was left except a few hanging tissues. Teotia also gives sensory descriptions of his experience after getting shot by the terrorists, such as the smells of gunpowder, the “ferric smell of blood” and antiseptics [20, p. 79]. Teotia also bears evidence of visible trauma in his body, like his mutilated ear and lead pieces in his lungs that remain as material reminders of the terror event that are not susceptible to forgetting. By providing chunks of metaphorically coded sense memories in his narration, Teotia relays the gravity of embodied violence in terror attacks.

The rich sensory information in the narratives proves that sense memories associated with strong emotions continue to linger years after the traumatic terror event. Cretien Van Campen [22] in his work The Proust Effect: The Senses as Doorways to Lost Memories, elaborates on this close association between the composition of sensory impressions, emotions and physical feelings to an episode from an individual’s past. Certain sounds, smells, and images get stored in the implicit memory system along with explicit semantic information like what, when and how of an event. These memories of senses remain intact and are recalled with minor triggers [22]. Observations on the memory patterns in witnesses thus reveal that ordinary events before the terror attack and memories of sensory experiences during the event are better recollected and more vividly remembered based on the emotional valency attached to them.

While many contest the factual precision of these post-terror narrations, elaborate descriptions of these events by the witnesses prove that the emotional quotient of the event decides the clarity, recollection and representation of memories. Scholars like Qasim et al. [16] reaffirm the assertion that emotional events like terror attacks often evade traumatic erasures and are recalled with precision due to their emotional valency. In particular, the memories of shock and fear are better remembered, which becomes the case for events like 26/11. This efficiency stems from the brain prioritising emotional memories, primarily invoking terror, fear, and shock.

Praveen Teotia recounts the detonation failure of the grenade that he had thrown at the terrorists, which made him an easy target for the terrorists. The anger and frustration stemming from this failure, a product of bureaucratic negligence, is palpable in his memories. Teotia was hospitalised for a long time with internal bullet injuries before he returned to a healthy life. Post the terrorist attacks, Teotia confesses about having bouts of depression, haunting images of the terrorist attack in dreams, anxiety and other psychological issues related to his post-traumatic stress disorder. He shares memories of being mocked, humiliated, and disrespected by his colleagues for being physically disadvantaged in a force that demanded a healthy and robust body. Getting shot by the terrorists changed the course of his life from a physically able commando officer to a sidelined, injured armed forces staff. The pain caused by physiological wounds and the cascading emotions of despair, anger and humiliation surrounding them become the pivot around which the event is constructed and represented in memory. According to LeDoux and Brown [11], emotional memories of events of this kind are not exposed to erasure even if they stay dormant for a long period.

Chawla writes about being terrified by the sight of the guest being killed. He recollects that he had started “imagining the impending danger to his life” and the possibility of becoming “just like the dead man on the floor” [4, p. 10]. In a brief moment of separation between reality and possibility, the dead and undead come into a singular plane of fear. This is reflected in the paratactic style of writing that Chawla adopts. He writes:

I could not believe I was not hallucinating. I was in complete shock, and for a few seconds, I just stood there, completely numb and dazed. I had never seen a person dying or being shot. The man was shivering, trying his best to get up, move his mouth and ask for help, and I could not do anything. His eyes were clouded by the fear of death—something that would haunt me, too, for the next many hours. [4, p. 15]

Even though the injury of the man, who got shot, is twice removed from Ankur, he compares his fear of death and helplessness to that of the dead man. Both the dead subject and the witnessing subject are engulfed by the same emotion- fear of death. The “eyes that were clouded by the fear of death” attain a ghostly stature and transcend to become the ghostware memory of the event [4, p. 10]. Ankur Chawla writes how he still relives hearing the continuous ring of gunshots and seeing the morbid expressions of fright on the faces of guests during the terrorist attack. In this instance, fear becomes the pivotal emotion around which the memory of witnessing is constructed and remembered. The ghostly memories of the dead and memories of experiencing the fear of death in the living survivor converge in the narrative and construct the haunted elements of memory. Alexander Etkinds [6] calls them ghostware memory or the spectres. These ghostware memories are “iconic, ephemeral and their re-livable quality” enhances the vividness of the memory [6, p. 195]. Ankur Chawla’s memories of the ghostly experience strengthen the claim that unlike the hardware memories (monuments) and software memories (texts) of the event, ghostware memories are almost inseparable from the witness and evade forgetting.

Past Memories of Terror and Future Imaginations

Michael C. Frank [7] notes in his seminal work, The Cultural Imaginary of Terrorism in Public Discourse, Literature, and Film: Narrating Terror, that terrorist acts tend to trigger a proliferation of “what if scenarios” (p. 2) in individuals. The ground zero site in discussion—Mumbai had witnessed multiple terror attacks before the 26/11 attacks. Bomb blasts like the 1993 Mumbai serial bombings, the 2003 twin bomb blasts in Ghatkopar and Gateway of India, 2006 local train blasts, 2006 blasts in Malegaon mosque and numerous armed conflicts between local underworld gangsters over the years have shaped the city’s contemporary realities [15]. These prior memories of terror attacks have created a picture of what could go wrong or what possibly could happen in terms of contingency situations in the imaginations of people in Mumbai. This trend is reflected in how people respond to the initial chaos created by the 26/11 attacks in the texts in discussion.

Ankur Chawla [4] recalls how the gunshot took aback the elites in The Taj Mahal Palace, who were “speculating” and “debating” about the possible sources of the sound (p. 14). He remembers that while the foreigners in the bar panicked, the other Indian guests tried to make the situation lighter by saying, “Do not worry, Sir. This is quite common. The security guys know how to tackle it” [4, p. 14]. These instances are critical in understanding how earlier memories calibrate emotional responses in people. The commonness of the situation and the familiarity of the Mumbai crowd with gunshots design their early responses to the attack. People in Mumbai often witnessed or received news about tiffs between gangster groups and the police. The past memories of these instances led people to conclude that the armed commotion they had heard could have been nothing but an ordinary occurrence. They underestimated the gravity of such violence and believed that the security system in exclusive spaces like The Taj Mahal Palace, Mumbai, was already equipped to handle such commotions. Ankur remembers snippets of memories that he holds about the conversations he had with the chefs in the kitchen quickly after realising the presence of terrorists in the hotel. He notes that almost everyone, unaware of the terrorist infiltration, speculated the gunshots to be the result of some “minor skirmish between guests” and were joking about the possibilities like a “gang war” [4, p. 14]. He also remembers hearing statements like “Do you think that Dawood Ibrahim is back?”, “But why here in Mumbai?” and “They should have gone to Delhi. They should have bombed the Parliament instead” among others [4, p. 26]. These recollections prove that initial responses to the acts of terror in 26/11 witnesses were highly shaped by their prior memories of terror attacks, as well as popular narratives of terrorism in the country. The metonymies that witnesses refer to indicate what the nation knows and remembers about terrorist attacks. One cannot also evade the staunch faith held by the hotel's inhabitants that places of an elite and luxurious stature like Taj Mumbai would be untouched by such activities. This is also indicative of the fact that our past memories of terror carve a cartography of vulnerable spaces based on its possibility and exposure to terror attacks, the dynamics of which are determined by the presence or absence of communities belonging to different economic orders.

The narrative structure of events in witness narratives is typical for their recounting, which defies the causality string. The storytelling mechanisms of the human brain constantly reorganise its semantic information following its susceptibility to forgetting and additions to the existing repository. Ankur Chawla [4], while writing about hiding from the terrorists, mentions how he had thought about the possibility of TV channels airing the news of the hotel being attacked and called his parents to reassure them about his safety. The excessive media coverage had backfired tremendously in the rescue operations. The terrorists in the hotel benefited from the live telecasting of the movements of the rescue forces, which in turn facilitated casualties. Ankur's staunch criticism of TV news channels reporting the attacks live to increase their TRPs could have been a later addition to his memories. In the chapters in 26/11 Brave Heart: My Encounters with Terrorists that Night titled, “Gun flash, Camera flash” and “Click, Click”, Praveen Teotia [20] suggests how the flash and click of the gun, as well as the flash and click of the camera, became two crucial elements that changed the course of his life. Semantic information like these featured in witness narratives is not what they visually witnessed during the attacks but the information they received after it. Mnemonic information of this kind in the narrative reveals the porous nature of memory organisation and the non-causal structure of memory recollections in witness narratives. These organisational differences in the chunking of memory information indicate the constant (re)narrativisation process in the brain to ensure a beginning, middle and end.

Newer Cartographies of Terror and Spatial Memories

While the discussion so far focused on the remembrance patterns of terror in witness narratives, one cannot miss but notice the relationality of these memories with space. Witness narratives, while portraying the ghastly experiences of the terror event, also project the reconfigurations of the spaces where the terror act occurred. Violent acts like terror attacks transform organised landscapes and reconfigure the space into a chronotope of terror. The witness narratives, along with embodying scenes of traumatic realism present before the reader a spectacle of dichotomy and spatiotemporal distortions, which are coded in “spatial paradoxes and the language of the fantastic” [12, p. 105].

As Malabou [13] notes in The Ontology of the Accident, the memories associated with a known/familiar space are defamiliarised in the backdrop of a disruptive event like a terrorist attack and transform seemingly familiar spaces into a destabilised zone. Additionally, with new subjectivities (that of terrorists or individuals imparting violence) entering the space, the cartography of the place is (de)(re)constructed. The chronotropic qualities of these spaces are not just built around their physicality but are deeply controlled by the emotions associated with them. Ankur Chawla remembers that the first time he heard the sound of gunshots, his initial reactions were rooted in the bar's familiar setting. He recollects that upon hearing an unusually loud bang, his first speculation was that it would be the sound of the breaking of a bottle of Dom Perignon, the exquisite champagne on display outside the bar. He elaborates that “a loss of 28,000 on the bottle” was the first thought that came to his mind [4, p. 9]. Until the entry of terrorists, the luxuries of the hotel, its expensive goods, the affluent customers and their happy emotions framed the chronotopic qualities of the bar. However, with the terror attacks, the luxurious and recreational stature of the place was soon replaced with the morbidity of death and destruction. After the terrorist intrusion, the materiality of the bar, its expensive alcohol and the daily chores that defined Ankur’s relationship with the space turned insignificant. Chawla [4] writes about the “rare and shocking sight” (p. 20) of fear and insecurity in the eyes of the big shots of Mumbai that day. These autobiographical memories prove that events like terror attacks and the resultant violence are not merely instances of spatial decapitations, where the look and essence of a place are altered beyond recognition. They also cause a sudden and complex overturn of emotions floating around a space.

Praveen Teotia and Ankur Chawla trace the changed materiality of elements to draw an uncanny landscape of the Taj Mahal Palace. Thing Theory is seminal in understanding this phenomenon. In his concept of thing theory, Brown [2] differentiates object and thing as two entities, where human attention and interpretation change the latter’s essentiality. Thingness, in his opinion, is a “changed subject-object relation” (p. 4). According to him, the ‘thingness’ of the space and its organisation is determined based on the body or the subject (here, terrorist, hotel staff or rescue personnel) occupying the space. In the event of a terror attack, the interior map of the hotel, determined by functional spatial markers like the kitchen, dining room, bedroom, reception or lift, is replaced by a cartography determined by safety. The narratives suggest that during the terror attacks, areas inhabited by terrorists become non-accessible points, and places away from them become safer havens. Ankur Chawla writes that his memories of the hotel's floor plan helped him save his life and the lives of the guests. He recollects how people rushed from the Chinese restaurant to the bar and later moved to the back of the kitchen in a frenzy to rescue themselves from the terrorists. He also recounts how exclusive staff corridors that connected almost the whole property became channels through which many people were rescued. The access to the kitchen and staff corridors was earlier limited to the employees. However, they became lifeline corridors through which survivors were rescued. In this case, the essentiality of the kitchen and staff corridors was replaced by new materialities (that of a safe zone on a battlefield).

Similarly, objects of everyday life, such as tables, pillars, and lifts, transcended their functionalities and became hiding spaces for survivors. Mobile phones also became crucial in disseminating live information about the status inside the hotel during the terror attacks. However, certain entities which failed its functionality became reasons for fatalities and attained a spectral stature. Teotia remembers that the grenades he threw at the terrorists turned out to be inactive or blind, which caused a massive backlash for the rescue mission. He follows up this memory with information from later periods about how the Indian Army and defence organisations compiled a report about the faulty grenades in the ammunition reserve. He claims that the report found out that one out of every three grenades given to the rescue missions in the 26/11 attacks proved to be faulty [20, p. 59]. Teotia puts this out through his narrative, as the reports never came out officially. This failure led the terrorists to shoot bullets at Teotia and caused him grave injuries. He laments how circumstances would have changed for the better if the grenade had worked. The military equipment that was supposed to facilitate protection became a reason for Teotia’s near-death experience. Thus, as Stein [21] notes, the subjectivity of the owner and the circumstances in which the individual encounters the objects construct its thingness.

Zooming into the authors’ private memories supplies critical evidence about changes in the way The Taj Mahal Palace, Mumbai, was perceived before and after the event. In his initial perceptions of the hotel, Chawla [4] writes that on his first day before entering the staff gate, he “stood still for a couple of seconds, staring at the walls, relishing the sight of every brick of the hotel” (p. 3). He writes how ecstatic he was about joining “The Taj—a prominent landmark for the upwardly mobile” [4, p. 3]. The Taj, for him, was not just a place of work but a space that elevated his social positioning. However, later, this exclusively elite space transforms into the ground zero of a terror attack and bestows altered identities on the author: of a witness and a survivor.

Likewise, Teotia [20] recalls his initial reaction to the sight of The Taj Mahal Palace, in Mumbai, as “an architectural marvel, a piece of beauty where people led luxurious lives” (p. 7). Being an iconic stature occupying the skylines of Mumbai, the hotel formed the identity of a prototypical Mumbai landscape. Contrastingly while narrating his memories of combat, he notes how “the lazy opulence” of the hotel had been replaced by a “shaken” “inferno” where he had to walk over bullet-ridden bodies, pulling out survivors underneath dead victims [20, p. 48]. These stark differences in the memories associated with a place indicate the volatile nature of human-space relations, particularly in terror attacks. In a later chapter, Teotia recounts the day he saw the hotel on his way back home from the hospital while still recovering from his grave injuries. He notes that the same place that had terror written over its landscape a month before has now returned to normalcy and “everyone was moving around me, and nobody cared” [20, p. 125]. The perceived reality of the locale before and after the attacks had changed considerably. At first, Teotia was an able-bodied man who looked at the infrastructure with fascination. However, after the terror attacks, the spectral nature of memories of the place replaced the author's initial fascination for the hotel. Teotia also recollects that while he struggled to cross the road in front of the hotel with his injured body, the city and its people had gone back to a normal life. Reconstruction activities were already underway in The Taj, while the injuries caused by the terror attacks in his body would continue to haunt him for many years ahead. It can be observed that both Ankur’s and Teotia’s perceptions of The Taj Mahal Palace, Mumbai, held until the day of the terror attack, were re-transcripted by the grim nature of their experiences during the terror attacks. Reconstruction of infrastructures helped places like The Taj and Leopold Café to recover quickly from the spatial damages of a horrendous instance of terrorism. However, a close study of the primary texts proves that remnants of the attacks, like traumatic memories, physical wounds and splinters inside the bodies of survivors, do not allow such erasures and (re)constructions, and continue to be “alive” in the lives of witnesses.

Conclusion

Historically, scholarly discourses in humanities disciplines, such as international relations, sociology, and anthropology, have continuously investigated the socio-political and invasive forces that induce terrorism. Terrorist attacks alter the law and order of the state and are recognised for the ‘public nature’ of its impact in multiple areas of state functioning. However, reading terrorist attacks singularly as a public event is reductive and often evades the looming impact of such events on private memory and the affective realm. The first United Nations Global Congress of Victims of Terrorism, as part of their policy initiatives for counterterrorism activities, championed that narrations of victims and publicising their stories can be a “powerful way of preventing terror attacks as well as changing the “society’s mindset, behaviour and attitude towards victims”. The chapter identifies that witness narratives while sitting at the intersection of the public and the private (the memory and history, the recorded and the unrecorded), publicise, visibilise and give voice to these private memories. They record and archive the first-hand memories of victims and are seminal in understanding the affective, spatial and mnemonic impact caused by the terror attacks. Unlike the Western world, terror was something closer in reality for India. In the process of decoding memory patterns in 26/11 Brave Heart: My Encounters with Terrorists that Night [20] and 14 Hours: An Insider’s Account of the 26/11 Taj Attack [4], the chapter identified that the 26/11 Mumbai attacks feature as a critical memory event in the life writing of these survivors. It proves that Indian responses to terror attacks are quite distinct in quality primarily due to their familiarity with earlier terror events and the memories that shape their imaginations of terror. Even as the shock value of events like the 26/11 metamorphose at different points in time, the violence caused by traumatic memories and psychosomatic damages continues to transform the everyday realities of survivor groups. The chapter analyses how witnesses remember 26/11, the stylistic nuances of narrating their memories and the politics of space reflected in these recollections. Most importantly, insights from the chapter prove how witness narratives as a genre function as an alternative medium for archiving private memories of a public event. By foregrounding private memories of terror reflected in autobiographical narratives of the Mumbai 26/11 witnesses, the chapter recentres discussions on terror attacks from the vantage points of public history to a plane of individual experiences of survival and resilience in witness groups.

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Part IIRituals of Rebellion: The Narrative Aesthetics of Protest

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2025

S. Malhotra et al. (eds.)Trauma and Memory Studies: Responses from India and Beyondhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-6374-3_7

7. Muharram in Kashmir: Historical Trauma, Performance and Resistance

Saumya Mani Tripathi1  

(1)

School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, India

Saumya Mani Tripathi

Email: redrebs@gmail.com

Abstract

This chapter proposes and bases the human body as a central object where politics, violence, memory, history, traumatic experiences and acts of resistance are experienced, archived, and embodied. By delving into the processual understanding of Muharram rituals of Kashmir practised by Shi’a Muslims, it examines performance as a site of witnessing and creating testimonials about the historical injustice through culture, ritual, and political resistance. Through interdisciplinary methodologies of understanding pathologies of Trauma and Memory, it aims to seek modes of historical healing, cultural justice and collective catharsis.

Trauma, according to Cathy Caruth, is defined as “a response, sometimes delayed, to an overwhelming event or set of events, which takes the form of repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviour”¹ [2, 3]. Trauma is thus more than a wounded psyche,in culture, it represents a wound that cries out through silences and pauses. The story of trauma thus, is a narrative of belated experiences caught between affect and memory which is manifested through physical and sensory enactments. Performance Studies attempt to constitute a new mode of reading and listening to trauma and the silence of its mute repetition of suffering, which it profoundly and imperatively demands. The trauma-driven performance does make visible the individual, collective, intergenerational, and even national repercussions of human rights violations over the long term. Staging trauma-driven performances in the public sphere highlights the necessary role of creating witnesses. This research is based on a study of performative practices of Muharram juloos (processions), rituals of collective Azadari (mourning), artistic expressions, and varied expressions of Muharram protests. The chapter explores Azadari ritual practices in Kashmir as a site of witnessing, a celebration of martyrdom, and an act of alternate history writing. The chapter uses theories of trauma, memorial culture, and performance as tools of research analysis to explore debates on mourning, resistance, ritual healing, and effects of trauma in the context of war and terror in Kashmir metaphorically embodied by the tragedy of Karbala. The chapter is divided into three sections. The first section elucidates the ritual practices of Azadari over ten days till Ashura (meaning the Tenth day of Muharram). Second, talks about mourning as an act of resistance in Kashmir. The third section talks about the therapeutic and healing aspects of Azadari illustrated through theorisation of lullament.

Muharram in Kashmir: Ritual Practices of Azadari

Ashura (meaning the Tenth day) of the first Islamic month of Muharram is the day that marks the death anniversary of Hussain Ibn Ali (born in 620 AD), the grandson of Prophet Muhammad (the last prophet of Islam). This is the day Imam Hussain was brutally killed in the battle of Karbala (a place in present day Iraq) and is thus remembered as the day of Ashura where Hussain’s ideals of humanity, standing for truth, faith, justice, and sacrifice for his beliefs are memorialised through various embodied religious and ritual practices collectively known as Azadari (mourning). This chapter shall analyse the Azadari rituals observed during the sacred month of Muharram in the Zadibal area in Srinagar which is historically and religiously the most significant site of the Shia belief system in Kashmir. Some of the most prominent sites for Kashmiri Shia Muslims during the month of Muharram are Zadibal, Hassanabad, Maagam, and Budgam. The reasons for their historicity, political impact, and social hierarchy are marked by the intensity and nature of Muharram rituals. Across Kashmir, the incoming visibility of Muharram is marked by flags, banners, slogans, and posters hoisted at various public places (market, roads, bridges and alleys). Although district Budgam is the most Shia dominant district according to the population index, Zadibal claims its supremacy by hosting two most important sites of Shia worship. The first is the Shrine of Mir Shamsuddin Araki (the Iraqi), also known as Mir Syed Muhammad Musavi Isfahani, an Iranian Sufi Shia missionary saint who was also the greatest influencer of Shi’ism and Sufism in the Valley. The second is the site of the grand Zadibal Imambara which is the ground of political dominance of Shia political leaders. Every Daayra (a circle/group of mourners from the same locality) of every mohalla (community area) performs choral chest-beating and self-flagellation on the rhythm of Noha recited by their Daayra² at both these sites most intensely. There is a rhythmic dance, a shifting balance between two extremes, dual polarities of everything involved in Azadari. This rhythm is ingrained in every aspect of Azadari rituals and their design and performance. Every year Muharram processions are hosted alternately by the Araki Sufi Shrine and the Zadibal Imambara, alternating the two extreme worlds of political power and spiritual power, materiality and transcendence, protest and surrender, past and present, Kashmir and Karbala, religion and mysticism. The visibility of these contradictions is highlighted on the day of Ashura. It is an overwhelming and extraordinary day where everything turns to Black and Red and sends one into a state of trance whether through blood, sweat, tears, pain, or shock. This is the day when thresholds are broken, and primal emotions of the human heart spill out in guttural cries, rapturous screams, mourning whispers, and splintering blood. The line between life and performance is blurred and the body transmutes in a liminal state to achieve cathartic cleansing. It is a very haptic, affective, and visceral experience that is in excess to be processed by the mind since every act involved in Ashura has a direct and intense effect on one’s body, mind, heart, and soul. The way to salute, respect, bless, be blessed, or modes of communication among the Azadars, involves a lot of hand gestures and touch. The hand first and foremost touches the self during Dodh/Dogh (chest beating) and mourning, it touches every sacred object involved in the process, it touches metal and blood and textile and water, it touches other humans who are seen as warriors and martyrs of this day. All of this sensory memory and energetic exchange is not categorised by the mind but is rather archived in the body. As part of a welcoming tradition in Kashmiri Culture, Gulab Arak (rosewater) is sprayed on Azadars who enter the procession. The olfactory sensation of smell during Muharram is overpowering, nauseating, and addictive at the same time. The smell of blood, ash, water cannons, rosewater, sherbet, and pepper shells is archived in the bodily memory and forms the sensorium of collective experience of Azadari (Fig 7.1).

Fig. 7.1

Ta’ziya and Alam carried out during Muharram (juloos) processions at Srinagar, 2021 (self-recorded)

Until the Fifth Muharram, the Muharram committee, volunteers, and Azadars (mourners) visit Zakirs (the bards of Karbala poetry) and ask them to write Nohay (lyrical poetry). This aesthetic process involves composing the metre, length, words, and melodies of these Nohay. Once the Nohays are written, the script (songs) rehearsed by a group of Azadars who act as a chorus to Zakir’s recitation and lead the rhythms and songs one after the other accompanied by percussive chest-beating which is the only sound base that beats to the rhythm of Nohay. These Nohays are first rehearsed by the chorus in private non-religious spaces (mostly homes). This parallels the process of Majhilis (ritual congregation where events of Karbala are recited and mourned). Majhilis are conducted in homes, Imambaras, and mohallas of each locality and are exclusive to the residents of the same neighbourhood. Entry is strictly through invitation. Majhilis are the most intimate space of all mourning activities where only believers and Shia Muslims of each locality come together as an intimate community of mourners. There are all women Majhilis (in homes) and collective Majhilis (men, women, and children in Imambaras).

From the Seventh Muharram onwards, the rehearsed Marsiya (elegiac poetry) and Nohay are performed by each Daayra (group/circle of Noha performers from each locality) publicly with rhythmic chest beating (dodh/dogh), and zanjeer zani (flagellation and bloodletting with sharp pieces of equipment). Acts of bloodletting in public begins from this day and a variety of public assimilates, records and participates in the juloos.

On the Eighth Muharram, Azadari juloos in Srinagar are carried out from Dal Gate to Lal Chowk (city centre) where history and myth merge to make Karbala and Kashmir synonymous with each other. This is where the political elements of Azadari and the message of Karbala are rendered visible in the present moment in context of present day oppression in Kashmir. The processions of this day always have a history of clashes as the site of Lal Chowk is the heart of the State’s assertion of territorial control and performance of nationalism for the global audience. The State machinery views it as a potential threat to allow mourning, protesting, and passionate bodies to occupy that space and give room for contingent action. It is said that Kashmir’s great leader Sheikh Abdullah himself used to carry the Kashmiri flag at one of these juloos and lead it to Lal Chowk to perform the right to self-determination of the Kashmiri public. It has become customary to shout Azadi (freedom) slogans for free Kashmir on this day in processions. Hence, this particular juloos is loaded with political slogans, protest banners, flags of Palestine, and voices in favour of all protestors who are globally resisting oppression along with messages from Karbala that assert ideas of justice, protest against oppression, truth and ideals of humanism on which the entire existence of Shia population stands. Dal Gate and Lal Chowk are also the two most important places that are occupied by tourists and hence these voices getting out of Kashmir are a constant threat to local and national administration. It is evident through the heavy deployment of the arsenal, censorship methods, and weapons used by the Jammu and Kashmir Police and other military forces to curb Muharram processions.

The Ninth Muharram processions in Srinagar are intricately connected to the landscape of Kashmir and hence are a unique Muharram performance unlike anywhere else in the Islamic world. These processions are carried out in floating Shikaras (small boats) surrounding villages near Dal Lake. Shia believers from across villages surrounding the Dal Lake, houseboats, and floating villages gather at Gaw Kadal Imambara, take out a procession in their locality, then in Shikaras across the Dal Lake and reach the banks of the river to join a bigger gathering at Hassanabad Imambara. This provides a much-needed slowing down and unwinding after a day of a traumatising, fast-paced Eighth Muharram protest. The body of Azadars also needs to heal before Ashura, the Tenth day which demands’ pushing oneself to the very threshold of one’s being. The surrounding effect of beautiful mountains, water bodies, flora, and fauna, and the minimal collective movement that is necessary to navigate through water makes the rhythm of collective bodies to slow down, rest, and recuperate for what awaits the next day. Here, the landscape is used to heal and to strengthen the resistance against foreign bodies by utilising the power contained in the water body of Kashmir. The form of Kashmir’s struggle for freedom is intrinsic to its geographical, social-moral, cultural, and political landscape. It not only shapes their modes of perception and resistance to these traumatic experiences but also defines their methods of reconciliation and healing from the same.

Tenth Muharram (Ashura): The highlights of this concluding day of Azadari ritual are described in various sections as follows -

Zuljinah—Along with Alam (sigil), Ta’ziya (replica of Imam hussain’s tomb), Talwar (sword), flags, bands, and other ritual objects that feature themselves from the seventh Muharram itself, the highlight of Ashura is Zuljinah, the famed horse of Imam Hussain. Zuljinah (also known as Imamgur) was slaughtered in the battle of Karbala and is thus considered as one of the warrior martyrs of the battle of Karbala. He is decorated with various ornaments and religious icons, a chhatri (umbrella) is mounted above him to signify his divine status and he is paraded around the entire site with grandiosity, creating an atmosphere of homecoming of one of the greatest warriors of the battle of Karbala. Believers go to lengths to be able to touch him, give him salutations, seeking to gain an ounce of that divinity and courage within themselves. The entry of Zuljinah is also a signifier heralding the day Kashmir will embody and perform Karbala. It is believed that Badshah (Emperor) Hussain and all the slain martyrs of Karbala shall be present to witness how their community remembers, mourns, and fights for their values. It is the test of Kashmiri Shia Muslims through the ritual enactment of Karbala to see how they respond to the same forces of evil in the present times. Everything, every living and non-living being that aided, supported, and sacrificed themselves to fight evil and preserve good in the epic of Karbala is deemed sacred and is celebrated, ornated, saluted, and remembered again and again on this day. Khakh-e-shifa (healing dust), Mashk-e-Sakina (the water carrier of Sakina), and Asghar ka Jhoola (Asghar’s cradle) are all examples of similar sacred objects that are associated with various characters and events of Karbala that are carried out in processions to assert the memory, values, and interpretation of their response to the tragedy of Karbala.

Zanjeer Zani/Zanjeer Maatam—The embodied practice of Zanjeer Zani/ Zanjeer Matam is an act of mourning where Azadars indulge in self-flagellation and bloodletting through repetitive hitting of sharp metallic objects on body like knife, zanjeer (chains) and talwar (sword). This is one of the most controversial and debated embodied practices involved in Azadari rituals. The attempts to understand this action are mostly understood through tenets of Sharia (Islamic sacred law), Hadeeth (corpus of the sayings or traditions of the Prophet Muhammad), and Fatwa (an edict or ruling by a recognised religious authority on a point of Islamic law) released by the spiritual leader of Shia Muslims condemning the act of Tatbir (lit. Self-hurt, also known as Qama Zani or Talwar Zani), which is practised among the South Asian Shia Muslims as a ritual bloodletting and self-flagellation to mourn the martyrs of Karbala). Imam Ayatollah Khamenei (the spiritual leader of Shi’ism), in a statement issued to the press regarding Tatbir, says -

It is wrongful that some people hit themselves on the head with daggers to break blood. What are they in search of? How can this be considered an act of mourning? Of course, light drumming on the head with one’s hand is a distinctive sign of mourning. You have seen it several times when people are stricken by grief, they hit their chests or heads. This is a typical symbol of distress in mourning. But when have you ever seen a person, who is grief-stricken by the loss of a dear loved one, take a dagger to their head to draw blood? How can this be a form of mourning? Tatbir [Qame Zani] is also a fabricated tradition. It is among issues that do not belong to the Islamic religion and undoubtedly God is not pleased with such a practice. Scholars in the last few centuries did not have the opportunity to speak out and declare it as an unlawful or wrongful act. However, today is the day of Islamic establishment and the day for the manifestation of Islam. We should not go along with actions that may introduce a small group of irrational, superstitious individuals to Muslims and non-Muslims alike, to be represented as the bulwark of the noble Islamic society that loves the progeny of the prophet (pbuh) and has the honour to carry the names of the Imam of our Time (may our souls be sacrificed for him), Imam Hussain Ibn Ali (as) and Imam Ali Ibn Abi Talib (as). [8]

This caused a major rift in the opinions surrounding the acceptability and representation of Muharram mourning rituals among the Azadars. Individuals based on their understanding and interpretation of pain and mourning diverge into various embodied practices this day. Once a mourner enters a sacred space and decides to do Tatbir instead of just chest-beating, they cannot be stopped. Every expression of the journey to experience pain and mourning is allowed and respected on Ashura. Once the warrior believer enters the arena/sacred sites, ready to surrender to pain and death and the process of transformation that entails this, they cannot be stopped. They enter the pain and darkness in testimony to their truth and surrender their body, mind, life, and death to their God. This proves the overarching presence of resistance and experiencing one’s truth despite all kinds of figures of authority and control presiding over them. Resistance to the status quo and pursuit of one’s truth is thus at the core of Azadari practices. At the core of this act, lies a surrender to one’s belief (that even defies religious sanctions and dogmas) and for that belief to be testified and validated only by God. As a community, there are compassionate Azadar volunteers carrying bandages, water, and emergency aid to assist mourners in sustaining this intense and painful process. The institution of mourning established by Lady Zaynab was aimed at the eternal condemnation of the oppression and pain suffered by the Prophet Muhammad’s household.

Shaam-e-Ghariban—The phrase literally translates to “the evening of the oppressed” and is the penultimate ritual performed on the evening of the Tenth and Eleventh Muharram leading to the culmination of Ashura. On this night, Kashmiri Shia mourners lament the death of Imam Hussain and the members of his family. The key events of Karbala that are performed and mourned on this day include the martyrdom of Imam Hussain, the sacrifice and courage of Lady Zainab, the burning of tents of Imam Hussain’s Ahl al-Bayt (Arabic: Meaning members of household or family), and the death and suffering of Imam Hussain’s children and family members. At the very end of Sham-e-Gharibhan, a huge cradle is brought inside the Imambara and paraded across its perimeter. This marks the mourning and remembrance of Imam Hussain’s youngest child Ali Asghar, who was brutally killed by the forces of Yazid. A howling guttural cry of Shia women takes over the entire arena at the sight of this cradle. The death of the most innocent, soft, pure life tears the heart open evoking the maternal pain buried in the hearts of Kashmiris. This cradle is accompanied by young female children holding candles and singing songs of hope and life. The sudden appearance and arrival of candlelights amidst the complete darkness of the night, mood, and visuality of the space create an effect of magical realism in the collective. After putting bodies through extensive sound and movement patterns for ten days, this moment creates an aura of stillness, hope, and resilience to continue this next year. It is through the curation of intelligently designed pauses, silences, sounds, and movements that the Azadari process is sustained by performing bodies every year.

Performing Resistance: Pain and Mourning in Muharram

The aspect of physical mourning and self-flagellation opens a brief theoretical discussion on the role of pain in religious practice. In my individual experience of sharing my research on Shiite mourning rituals in conferences and academic spaces, my audiences were often shocked, and perhaps even appalled, by the pain the mourners were causing themselves. This has also been misinformed by the popular representation of Azadari in new media and journalism where Khooni matam/Zanjeer zani is the only aspect that is represented and highlighted about Muharram juloos, ignoring the therapeutic and resistive facets of the Azadari. The veneration of Hussain and the martyrs itself was not an issue. Instead, it was the mourning of these figures through painful rituals that raised much ire. This discussion is less an endeavour to seek justification for the rituals but more a call to attention to seek deeper understanding of the function of pain on the human mind and body. Ali Abbas Mehboob Hijri’s doctoral work on Ethnography of the Mourning of Shiites argues that

The capacity to experience and express pain is at the core of what makes the human active and formulates much of what is considered religious devotion. This experience was often expressed by elders in the community in which I was raised – to feel the pain of the Shiite patron saints was rooted in the idea of being “at one” with their personalities and standing in solidarity with them. Numerous salutations that are recited in honour of the Imams reference the desire of the Shiites to have been with their Imams through their trials and difficulties. The pain through mourning is, in some way, an attempt to feel some of that bygone pain. [4]

Trauma, pain, purgation, overcoming fear, spiritual belief, and passion play—everything involved in the embodied practice of Tatbir breaks the codes of normative and permissible behaviour of everyday human conduct. The mourner’s participation in the exhaustive and long duration of passion play and mourning allows them to enter the realm of extraordinary, trance, madness, metaphysical, and spectral dimensions. In utter darkness and trance-like state of pain and passion, repressed memories of past traumas come to the surface, extreme emotions are given a safe space to dance to death, and the rhythm of a Noha becomes a guiding light to create a collective body of protest, mourning, and purgation. Whether the event of death and historical trauma transforms these bodies to seek violent revenge or a long-term strive for justice depends on how mourning is processed, allowed, and experienced. Mourning is ritualised to facilitate bodies to cross boundaries of permissibility within an arena of performance constructed through religious views of life and death, cultural and folkloric myths, and the performance of grief by mourners. Rituals facilitate bodies to enter the realm of trance by experiencing the entire range of emotions that is uncontrollable and releasing them within the paradigm of embodied performative acts. It is interesting to note that the process followed by these mourners is very similar to the methods and processes used by method actors to wear the mask of the character they are playing. Everything has an affective role in putting these bodies into the mood to enter a psychological dimension through the physical process. The costume, sound, smell, audience, collective choral chest beating percussion, storytelling through various forms, and ritualistic rehearsed behaviour are all designed in perfect synchronistic space and time to aid this transportation. It is an extraordinary site to witness how continuously rehearsed performance rituals and the power of spiritual belief can trigger and train bodily mechanisms to heal themselves. None of these mourners go to a hospital or die or take any medical care to heal the bloodied wounds after the ritual. They apply Khak-e-Shifa (healing dust) all over their body and the belief in the act more than the sacred object itself, actually leads the body to heal its wounds. It is a kind of soil, claimed to be brought from Karbala which is believed to have sacred magical healing properties contained in it. The story of Karbala features the dust that Imam Hussain kept applying on his head when his head was split by the forces of Yazid while he was performing namaz (worship). According to a Zakir of Srinagar—Hussain kept uttering these words while pouring sand over his split head repeatedly—“I came from the dust and I will go back to it”. Hence the belief that through the sacrifice of Imam Hussain, the elixir to life itself is contained in this dust and mourners who stand true to him shall be protected by him.

Men and women perform dodh (rhythmic chest beating) differently. Women strictly do not perform Zanjeer zani, young men perform this bare-chested—on streets, at Imambarah, and in Muharram protests. Shia men beat it in a primal guerrilla like way to showcase their strength and protest while women do it as a lament for the loss of a dear one. The act itself, however, is an enactment of loss of breath, inability to inhale and exhale normally, a pulmonary suffocation that defines the very nature of trauma as a seizure, a breathlessness often described by the expression—“I cannot breathe”. Trauma is a seizure of history, of sense of self, of narrative, of continuity of past to future. This seizure is experienced in the body as a pulmonary disorder—a nervous failure of cognition and inability to breathe. It chokes you through all your senses. People who experience any form of long-term trauma would list the same symptom to define it—they felt like they couldn’t breathe. Here, there was a literal choking through a direct assault on senses, historical trauma thus, is a period in which people are choked from all corners, their speech is censored, minds blocked, bodies are assaulted. This is then pushed down one’s throat through brutal naked force, and this is what causes them to feel trauma as the suffocation of breath, of living, and of being.

At the sight of being choked out of breath by the state machinery, Kashmiri Shia bodies in Azadari rituals engage in acts of extensive breathing and maximum breathing by putting bodies to limits of movement and pain. These mourning rituals emerge as a breathing space of assertion, expression, and resistance for the Shia Muslims of Kashmir. It is not surprising that this idea of breathing is craved by the majority of Kashmiris and it unites them to resist the oppressor together, as witnessed in Shia-Sunni solidarity on the Eighth Muharram juloos protests in Kashmir. There is a popular saying among the Hussaini beleivers that “Don’t terrorise someone so much that the fear of fear itself vanishes”. Azadari rituals of Kashmir exemplify that pain becomes a mirroring scale reflecting the state’s grotesque violence towards its citizens to themselves. The suffering caused by the occupation and repression of Kashmir is embodied, performed, and exhibited by Kashmiri bodies as the ultimate act of resistance enacting the oppressor and oppressed on the same body and making the audience of this pain morally accountable to face the extent of trauma that they have caused Kashmiri bodies. Some believers also use self flagellation as a counter-resistive move to defend against police oppression during Eight Muharram processions. In protests, this performance of bloodletting (Zanjeer zani) in the face of the brutal assault on the senses by the oppressor serves as a revolutionary move by sheer display of grotesque violence conducted by the state onto the bodies of mourners. It is speaking through inflicting self-hurt on one’s own body that the Azadaars speak “Witness my pain, witness how my Hussainiyat is braver than your Yazidiyat, watch how much pain can I inflict on myself, smell the oozing blood and answer your conscience and morality on the cruel nature of violence you inflict on my body”. Hence the slogan ‘Labbaik Ya Hussain’ (I am here, Bear Witness to me, oh Hussain!) is a sigil for witnessing the intensity and truth of this pain and mourning, converting the entire experiential landscape of Kashmir into Karbala, and proving one’s courage and faith in the face of cruelty and violence. This act causes a moral defeat of the oppressive enemy by purgation through sacrifice for one’s faith and values. Despite the nature of extraordinary creation, purgation, and revolt contained in this act, it risks being appropriated as a method of glorification of pain in the name of sacrifice, asserting and celebrating alpha masculine violence in the face of emasculation, affecting all kinds of acts the body undertakes since its fundamental relationship to pain has shifted, encouraging and reaping the reward for this pain to self-affirm one’s hurt identity and causes other mental issues like distortion in cognitive behaviour surrounding pain and pleasure. Being a Shia mourner is being perpetually present at the receiving end of State’s violent oppression. As a result, Shia bodies become the carriers of paramount violence and repression and hence enact the most intense ritual of self-flagellation for cathartic release of this suffocating pain. Ritual Pain as a trance experience of the body observed in various performative practices in India has been studied by scientists to conclude that

As it appears that perceptions of pain are significantly altered during these trance-like states, practitioners seem able to affect a mind-body disconnect, a sort of duality that allows them to continue their ritual demonstrations, even through exhaustion, hunger, and bodily trauma. At a physiological level, a combination of factors likely allows the participants to deal with the physical pain that would normally be associated with such rituals. The hyperarousal experienced by the participants’ likely results in an increased release of adrenaline, which is known to result in elevated tolerance to pain by interfering with pain signalling at the spinal level. This behaviour is rooted in the ‘fight or flight’ response – a physiological reaction, in both humans and animals, to impending danger.³ [1, p. 194]

Trauma, therefore, is not limited to a psychic condition of the mind but translates into a collective body of a community on which politics is affected. These ritual ceremonies and cultural practices are often used for political mobilisation as reflected through the increasing use of funerals as a site of resistance in contemporary Kashmir. The occasion of Muharram processions thus becomes a testimonial ground where resistance, mourning, and memory all play out at once through performative aspects of the body to create a community with a shared sensibility.

Lullament: A Musical Pill for Healing

Lullabies and lament have universally coexisted to provide care and catharsis to navigate human emotional transitions from grief to peace, from nightmarish wakefulness to dreamy sleepiness. Lament, however, is a genre whose assertion and expression are found most strongly and socially expressed by communities that are victims of long-term historical trauma and violence. In Kashmir, laments are most strongly seen at funeral processions, Muharram Azadari rituals, and memorial ritualistic events of mourning the dead and the disappeared. Increasingly, we also observe gyawun (song or singing) and wanwun (traditional song and dance by women) performances at weddings spontaneously turning into a lamentation by women of missing members of the family. Lament threatens to destabilise the status quo due to its extremely moving qualities, hence often rendering this cry into a protest to bring about a transformation in the energy of the audience.

The category of lullament, I propose, is a musical rendition of the psychological palette of historical trauma and the bodies that experience it. It gives us an insight into the range and extent of loss, separation, and grief (lament) as well as the resistance to these through love, hope, and dreams (lullaby). Across the globe, we see communities under siege and living under repression asserting performative practices that either resemble a lament or a lullaby. Kurdish lament, Israeli lament, and Palestinian lament are incorporated within cultural practices for their cathartic and resistant purposes. Holocaust lullaby research indicates that lullabies can sustain the spirit, support psychological structure, and integrate traumatic loss when one is threatened with psychic disorganisation. The lullaby is thus probably universally applicable to grief response, either anticipated or actual. Their qualities can be accessed to communicate [or] comfort in a setting of vulnerability. Lullabies are used to lull children to sleep. It can soothe fears, inspire dreams, and train the brain to feel calm over repeated exposure to the same melody. Hence, it can effectively be used as a method of indoctrination as well. From early on, lullabies have become one of the easiest tools employed by families to introduce religious, gendered, and other doctrines to the child’s subconscious.

Applied Research in music therapy to cure Trauma related pathologies concludes that

In sessions of music therapy with people whose lives are threatened, and their significant others are dead or disappeared, lullabies and laments are evident in music-contextualised expressions of attachment and detachment, sadness/tears and happiness/laughter, privilege and loss, nurturance and grief, and deterioration, stasis, and moving forward. These seemingly paradoxical phenomena are often witnessed as juxtaposed and transitional (one moves in and out of them) and are evident in the “lullament,” that is, when one’s personal, socio-historical, and possibly archetypal relationship with lullabies and laments is actualized, either imagined or articulated, and perhaps creatively furthered, enabling resilience when vulnerable. [9]

Dreams and nightmares are both negotiated in the range of lullaby and lament, thus making it important to understand the effect of trauma and its response through their study. Lullament forms one of the core themes of Noha and Marsiya recitation in Azadari ritual practices. It serves a dual purpose of release of pain through chest beating and at the same time restoration of sensitivity by embodying lullabies for children of Karbala. An illustration of this can be seen in the Noha “Dukhtey Hai Mere Kaan” by Kazmi Brothers [7]⁴ where Sakina is asking her elder brother Zainul-Abidin to sing her a lullaby as her ears hurt from the surrounding war cry and mourning, and the darkness brings back the fearful memories of murder of her father and dear ones in the battle of Karbala. This feminine voice when embodied by the male psyche serves the purposes of a lullament where sacrifice, protection, faith, bravery, care and love all resonate through musical metaphors merging wounds of Kashmir and Karbala. Long-term exposure to violence and trauma creates an alpha-ness of masculinity as a coping mechanism for survival and as an embodiment of violence and its release within bodies. This leads to the powerlessness of anything considered soft, weak, and feminine. Men have been alienated further away from accessing their feminine side. Effeminate men in Kashmir are bullied, ridiculed and if they are sexually queer, they are further censured and othered by all hegemonic social systems in Kashmir. The realm of art, culture, and performance remains the only site and practice that enables them to experience their femininity. Similarly, Shia men access their feminine side and engage in weeping and cathartic cries by reciting Noha through figures like Zainab and Sakina during Azadari rituals. These embodied practices enable male-bodied Azaadars to get in touch with their femininity, and maternity, find space for their emotional expression and release, and at the same time are assured of non-vulnerability and return to the status quo of performing their masculinity to appease dominant morality and norms after ritual performances end.

By acts of collective chest beating and choral singing of lullaments by human microphones forming a collective voice, the mourners gain strength to passionately release pain and protest to preserve the righteous, the innocent, thus forging a stronger movement forward towards a better personal and social reality. Thus, these shared experiences have become a foundation of self-identification, construction, and negotiation of memories and modes of articulation and resistance. Participation and investment in Azadari rituals have been socially productive and emotionally healing. Performing Lullament as Nohay becomes a therapeutic experience that gives space to act out pain, express collective mourning, and achieve healing through the cathartic release of pain and grief.

Conclusion

This chapter was a fusion of various disciplines like Trauma and Memory Studies, Performance Studies, Psychology, Religion Studies, Cultural Anthropology and Music Therapy. The understanding of performance as a methodology not only allows us to understand the making of history but also allows us to explore how ideas of violence, terror, trauma, mourning, and resistance are activated and enforced politically in a landscape of continuous and ongoing war, occupation and conflict.

Throughout this chapter, we encountered the complexities of the body’s encounter with violence, mourning and historical memory resulting in understanding the phenomenology of terror, violence and abject as being a highly volatile and mutant phenomenon that is deeply lived, experienced, and performed within the cultures of everyday life in Kashmir. We also examined the dynamics of how Azadaari performances can function as a site of witnessing and creating testimonials about the historical injustice through culture, ritual, and political resistance. The Muharram juloos processions, Majhilis, sacred and secular rituals, literary, sonic, embodied and political sites of performances were my primary sources to understand this phenomenon. Through the ritual of Muharram, this chapter explored performative practices as a site of mourning, witnessing, celebrating martyrdom and creating counter-cultural narratives. The future scope of this work lies in the interdisciplinary methodologies to approach and understand Trauma. The ultimate aim of my academic works is to develop research techniques to seek for historical healing through performative modes of memorialisation.

References

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Appelbaum, Robert. 2013. Notes Toward an Aesthetics of Violence. Studia Neophilologica 85 (2): 119–132. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1080/​00393274.​2013.​820035Crossref

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Caruth, Cathy. 1995. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.

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Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.

4.

Hirji, Ali Abbas Mehboob. 2015. Hearing the Voice From the Veil. An Ethnographic Inquiry Into the Mourning for Lady Zainab by Toronto Shiites. YorkSpace. 10–100. https://​ys.​library.​yorku.​ca/​statistics/​items/​49c3fec5-db43-49f8-b033-bbe10ef9255c.

5.

Housen, Tambri, et al. 2019. Trauma in the Kashmir Valley and the Mediating Effect of Stressors of Daily Life on Symptoms of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Depression and Anxiety. Conflict and Health 13 (1): 1–9. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1186/​s13031-019-0245-6Crossref

6.

Houser, Dan E., and Gerald W. Zamponi. 2011. Perceiving Pain: Health, Culture and Ritual.

7.

Kazmi Brothers 110. 2021, September 17. Dukhty hein mery Kaan Sula do mujhy bhaiya, 8 Safar Imambargah Darbar e Hussaini Abad, KB110 Video. YouTube. https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=​tX6iAHxWKs4.

8.

Khamene. 1994, June 07. “Tatbir Is a Wrongful and Fabricated Tradition: Imam Khamenei.” Khamenei.ir, September 11, 2019. https://​english.​khamenei.​ir/​news/​4209/​Tatbir-is-a-wrongful-and-fabricated-tradition-Imam-Khamenei.

9.

Ocallaghan, Clare. 2008. Lullament: Lullaby and Lament Therapeutic Qualities Actualized Through Music Therapy. American Journal of Hospice and Palliative Medicine 25 (2): 93–99.

Footnotes

1

Traumatic experiences in relations to history precisely refer to “psychic disorders that appear to reflect the unavoidable and overwhelming imposition of historical events on the psyche” (“Trauma: Explorations in Memory”, Caruth, p. 5).

2

Daayra- Lit. means the circle. Every Shia mohalla in Kashmir has a circle of friends, relatives, performers and poets. In Muharram processions, mourning is performed in circular formation (daayra) of each locality.

3

[5, pp. 3–5].

4

Dukhtey hein mere Kaan Sula do mujhe bhaiya, 8 Safar, Imambargah Darbar e Hussaini Abad, 2022.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2025

S. Malhotra et al. (eds.)Trauma and Memory Studies: Responses from India and Beyondhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-6374-3_8

8. Harmonies of Subversion: Exploring Kashmiri Songs as Sonic Archives

Sheikh Sana Assad1  

(1)

PhD Scholar at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India

Sheikh Sana Assad

Email: sanaassad20@gmail.com

Abstract

Music, characterised by its emotive and communicative potential, has served as a dynamic tool for articulating dissent, fostering unity, and preserving collective memories in numerous world movements. As a narrative form, music encapsulates the spirit of protest, conveying the aspirations and grievances of marginalised communities. As an archival medium, it contributes to the construction of historical narratives. In this light, the proposed chapter aims to scrutinise the socio-cultural dimensions of Kashmiri musical resistance, considering how these harmonies transcend the auditory realm to shape collective identities and evoke collective memories. Musical compositions such as “I Protest” by the Kashmiri rap artist MC Kash, “Inquilab” by Ali Saifuddin, and the Kashmiri rendition of the renowned Italian song “Bella Ciao” performed by a women’s collective Zanaan Wanaan (Women Speak) serve not only as effective sonic archives but also extend their influence to the younger demographic, thereby presenting nuanced expressions of trauma in an accessible and relatable form. The chapter delves into the profound impact of such Kashmiri musical renditions as not only sites of resistance but also as repositories of trauma within the socio-political milieu of Kashmir. Drawing from the frameworks of trauma and affect, the chapter employs an interdisciplinary lens that integrates ethnomusicology, cultural studies, and critical theory. By scrutinising select Kashmiri Songs, the chapter illuminates how the affective dimensions of music serve as powerful conduits for the expression and transmission of collective trauma, offering a unique lens through which to understand the enduring impact of political unrest on Kashmiri society. The chapter also looks at the new age Kashmiri musicians as not only mere performers but as Kay Kaufman Shelemay, Professor of Music at Harvard University, posits about musicians in general, as transcending the confines of performance by engaging in acts that address grievances, evoke dormant memories, and contribute to the imaginative reconstruction of our understanding of the world.

I await you /

All the fallen /

In the garden of remembrance /

Like a Sufi

            -MC Kash

Ensnared in the geopolitical disputes between postcolonial nation states, notably India and Pakistan, Kashmir has become a focal point within the socio-political discourses of South Asia. Over the past two decades, the region has witnessed a surge in violence and unrest, rooted in historical tensions and territorial disputes surrounding the region. This tumultuous backdrop has had profound psychological ramifications on the populace, creating a complex landscape that extends beyond the geopolitical arena. During this era, mental health professionals have encountered an unprecedented rise in individuals displaying identifiable symptoms of trauma. In her anthropological study titled The Occupied Clinic, Saiba Varma examines the psychological repercussions of the conflict in Kashmir, characterising the resulting impact as an ‘epidemic of trauma’ [26, p. 1]. Other studies indicate a substantial escalation in psychiatric morbidity attributable to the prolonged conflict in Kashmir over the past 18 years. A survey by MSF (Medicine Sans Frontier) reveals that half the population of Kashmir suffers from some kind of mental illness, with 50 percent of women and 37 percent of men suffering from depressive disorder [21].

Consequently, the last two decades have also witnessed the maturation of a generation that has grown up amidst perpetual conflict, thereby manifesting distinctive characteristics in their lifestyles and a notably heightened political consciousness. This “new political generation” [22, pp. 1–31] in Kashmir has not merely inherited but also adapted a new language of resistance wherein they juxtapose their memories with those of the previous generation and create a new vocabulary of dissent. This generation not only bears the weight of its own fresh traumas but is also affected by the enduring legacy of transgenerational trauma. This trauma finds varied expressions, with a particularly intriguing manifestation in the cultural production of the youth. Alongside political debate and historical analysis, acknowledging and carving out a space for the evidence present in such cultural production becomes imperative to comprehend the complex situation in Kashmir. Following the unrest in 2008, Kashmir witnessed a conspicuous upsurge in literary works authored by the youth, articulating their experiences of residing in a conflict-ridden zone, especially through fictional narratives. The year 2008 saw the publication of the major memoir, The Curfewed Night, by author and journalist Basharat Peer, which marked the arrival of the Kashmiri youth on the narrative scene. Although such literary endeavours persist with heightened vigour, with many such narratives, such as Farah Bashir’s Rumours of Spring [6], winning debut AutHer award 2022, various other forms of cultural production have gained prominence over time. Poetry, graffiti, graphic art, paintings, and music have all assumed central roles in providing outlets for the expression of the prevailing trauma. These expressions charged with heightened emotions surpass the constraints of traditional political discussions and historical examinations.

This chapter aims to scrutinise a specific manifestation of this trauma expression—namely, through the medium of music production in the context of Kashmir. The chapter delves into the profound impact of Kashmiri musical renditions as not only sites of resistance but also as repositories of trauma within the socio-political milieu of Kashmir. It traces Kashmir’s musical history and scrutinises the spaces in which this music is performed. By analysing select Kashmiri songs, the chapter illuminates how the affective dimensions of music serve as powerful conduits for the expression and transmission of collective trauma, offering a unique lens through which to understand the enduring impact of political unrest on Kashmiri society. It derives from Scott’s understanding of hidden transcripts and infra-political resistance to understand the subtle ways of resistance employed by the youth via their artistic expressions, laden with metaphors, with an aim to preserve the collective memories. It also looks at the category of the “sentinel musician” as proposed by Kay Kaufman Shelemey [25] to analyse the role of the contemporary musicians in Kashmir. In this light, it seeks to focus on the transformative agency and societal responsibilities assumed by musicians operating within the region as well as their role as the important archival stakeholders.

Music, characterised by its evocative and communicative potential, has served as a dynamic tool for articulating dissent, fostering unity, and preserving collective memories in numerous world movements. Ranging from the Civil Rights Movement in the United States to the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, and more contemporarily, in movements advocating for social justice and human rights, music has had a pivotal role to play. As a narrative form, music encapsulates the spirit of protest, conveying the aspirations and grievances of marginalised communities. Musical compositions such as “I Protest” by the Kashmiri rap artist MC Kash, the Kashmiri rendition of the renowned Italian song “Bella Ciao” performed by a women’s collective Zanaan Wanaan (Women Speak) serve not only as effective sonic archives but also extend their influence to the younger demographic, thereby presenting refined expressions of trauma in an accessible and relatable form. Through music, artists weave stories of resilience and resistance, reflecting the lived experiences of a community marked by conflict. As an archival medium, music contributes to the construction of historical narratives, offering an emotive lens through which to understand the multifaceted dimensions of societal movements, thereby enriching our comprehension of the human experience in the face of adversity.

Music as Archive

Music shares a complex relationship with the time and the context that it is produced in. Whereas certain compositions may elicit recollection of the past, others serve as mnemonic devices for present experiences to be recalled in the future. In the context of Chinese Cultural Revolution, for example, specific songs called Zhandi Xinge (New Songs of the Battlefield)¹ engender a nostalgic sentiment that take its listeners to a time in the past. Conversely, in contemporary conflict zones such as Kashmir, where the impact of traumatic events persists and medical conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are pertinent,² songs assume an archival role rather than generating a sense of nostalgia. The archival essence embedded in songs becomes evident through the creations of contemporary musicians contributing to the new age music scene in Kashmir.

Historically, Hip Hop has functioned as a medium for dissent. Considering the genre’s historical trajectory, it is unsurprising that Hip Hop serves as an analogous platform for Kashmiris endeavouring to articulate their experiences of suffering and trauma. New age Kashmiri musicians harness the power of Hip Hop to illuminate the quotidian challenges associated with leading an existence fraught with uncertainty. They thus become what Shelemey refers to, although with respect to the diasporic communities, as “sentinel musicians”. The concept of the “sentinel musician” posits that musicians are not merely performers but active participants with an elevated awareness of societal dynamics. While Shelemey posits the role of a musician in society as that of the moral leader, Atali refers to the musician as a prophet. Among these various roles that a musician is expected to perform, a musician moves well beyond the act of performance to exercising both initiative and agency within the society. Shelemey writes, “I propose a neologism- sentinel musician- and will use this expression to designate a musician who has served his/her society with vigilance- drawn on heightened powers of perception and performance” [25]. These musicians thus perform their sentinel as well archival functions by encapsulating collective memories of the community in their art. As Shelemey writes, “A sentinel musician watches and listens with care and at pivotal moments may offer warnings through his/her music and its performances” [25]. Music, in this context, emerges not merely as a creative outlet but as a potent vehicle for constructing a shared understanding of the past. By lending voice to the unspeakable, these songs play a crucial role in preserving the historical record and resisting the erasure of painful episodes from collective consciousness. They serve as a dynamic medium to articulate memory into the historical narrative and hence create an essential repository of the past.

Kashmiri musician Roshan Illahi, known as MC Kash, started his journey into rap songwriting in the aftermath of the turbulent events of 2010. In his musical composition, “I Protest” (qtd. In Kak), MC Kash pays homage to the dead by individually commemorating each person:

Inayat Khan, Wamiq Farooq, Zahid Farooq, Zubair Ahmed Bhat, Tufail Ahmed Mattoo, Rafiq Ahmed Bhangroo, Javaid Ahmed Malla, Shakeel Ganai, Firdous Khan… [15].

This combination of remembrance infused with protest is a “powerful testimonial to the Kashmiri suffering that shapes its politics today” [16, p. 103]

I Protest, Against The Things You Done!

I Protest, For A Mother Who Lost Her Son!

Another of Kash’s songs, “Remember 13th July” (qtd. In Kak), delves into historical narratives, constructing a musical archive that reflects on the twenty-two individuals shot dead during the Dogra rule while peacefully reciting the call for prayers. The historical sale of Kashmir, along with its land and people, to the Dogras is also well recorded in the song. Kash narrates the whole story in a hip hop rap style:

Our History Will Remind Us, Our History Will Inspire Us

Our History Will Define Us and Our history will Guide us

It’s not a simple story when it comes from the heart

It’s about Abdul Qadeer and him approaching the dark

Word on the streets Kashmiris had to play their part

The beginning to the end of oppression had to start

With the cry of revolution they assembled near the jail

Knowing Abdul Qadeer was with the hangman and the veil

They cried for more people and they ran and they came

Death came too, leaving a few to tell the tale

The army of the Maharaja had no guts, had no soul

They fired at the people, left them dead, left them cold

They’re fighting for their rights, a simple prose must be told

Kashmir was so cheaply, so cheaply was it sold

Remember, remember the thirteenth of July [13]

The rap intends to etch the events of that particular day into the memory of the community especially when the state’s focus is on ensuring an erasure of past atrocities. On that fateful day in 1930, a congregation of people assembled outside the Srinagar Central Jail to protest the arrest of Abdul Qadeer, a sympathiser of Kashmir’s separatist movement. As one of the protesters began to recite the call for prayer, he was shot down. Another protester continued from where the previous one had left it. The shots continued and so did the recitation. It took 22 dead people to complete the call. Marked as an important day, religiously and politically, 13th July began to be commemorated as Youm-e-Shuhahda or Martyrs’ day in Kashmir. The State’s order of revoking 13th of July as a state holiday or restrictions on its commemoration as Youm-e-Shuhada exposes the mesh of organised forgetting thrown at public memory. Kash’s insistence on remembering these events through his rap is a fundamental sentinel duty performed to counter the state erasure at play. In addition to MC Kash, Ahmer Javed, SXR, SOS, Qafilah and numerous other rap artists, encapsulate their emotional distress within the fabric of their artistic expressions.

The local Kashmiri version of the Italian Partisan song, “Bella Ciao” by a kashmiri feminist collective, Zannan Wannan (Woman Speak), is yet another example through which we can understand the archival duties that these sentinel musicians and their songs perform. This Kashmiri rendition, conceived and recorded shortly following the revocation of Article 370 by the Government of India, encapsulates the affective response of the populace to the governmental measures. The collective strategically utilises the power of songs to evoke remembrance of places where horrific incidents, such as mass rape and civilian shootings, unfolded. Through these musical expressions, the profound trauma endured by Kashmiri women is vocalised, providing a poignant narrative. Rather than allowing the atrocities to fade into obscurity, the collective purposefully incorporates them into the fabric of memory through song.

Sopar ti Machil, Kunan te Poshpor

Chi ni mashmith, sanyan zehnan menz che yaad yaad yaad

Yim tohi rawnaewukh,

Wapas ne anuwukh

Subhan shaaman diwan timan aes naad

Saen phoulwin goulaab

Zoon te aftaab

Qabran manz travikh, wounukh yim che namoulum afraad

Aes ne ye maanaan,

Har doh chi wouthan

Alam hyath chi pakaan kaeshir shahsawar[28]

Sopre and Machil, Kunan and Poshpora

Haven’t been forgotten

In our consciousness, they are remembered

The ones you forcefully took, disappeared³

Never to be returned

From morning till evening

We keep calling their names

Our budding roses

Our moons and our suns

Were put in mass graves as unidentified people

We do not accept this

Every day, we get up

Holding flags of remembrance, Kashmiris are marching on

The lyrics of this composition serve as indelible imprints on the collective memory, reminding one of the tragic events of the Sopore massacre and the fake encounter in Machil. Additionally, they evoke poignant recollections of the mass rape in the twin villages of Kunan and Poshpora in the year 1991. The lyrical narrative, woven with the threads of historical injustices and human suffering, becomes a powerful medium through which the artist commemorates and brings to the forefront these significant and often painful chapters of the region’s past. The group of women who composed this rendition are not professionals musicians but they take the archival and sentinel duties upon themselves to process the communal grief and record an alternate repository of memory that stands tall against the state erasure in process.

Joan Schwartz and Terry Cook posit that archives, functioning as records, exert influence over the contours and trajectories of historical scholarship, collective memory, and national identity. They assert that archives hold sway over our understanding of ourselves as individuals, groups, and societies. They posit that ‘Memory, like history, is rooted in archives.… Archives are our memories’ [23, p. 18]. By transforming cultural productions, especially songs into archives, the artists try to define their identity, a concept central to the current political atmosphere in Kashmir. Rap artist Ahmer writes:

Tu hi grenade phenka kya?

Tu hume dikhta hai unn jaisa

Iss gaadi mein akhir kya hai?

Tera ID kahan hai? [3]

Did you throw that grenade?

Cuz you all look the same to us

What’s in this car? What are you carrying?

What’s your name? Where’s your ID?⁴ [sic]

The notion of identity, highlighted by Ahmer, continues to haunt a generation of Kashmiris. The constant negotiation by Kashmiris between multiple identities—cultural, national and religious—makes Kashmiri lives precarious. Ahmer and the other artists try to navigate this precarity through their art. These artistic productions that ensued in the aftermath of the 2008 civilian uprising characterise the perspective of the youth who came of age in a notably perilous socio-historical milieu, battling the questions of identity. A substantial portion of the archival music and other cultural productions emerged post-2008, a pivotal year marking the contemporary generation’s initial exposure to street violence. The eruption of violence in Kashmir during the Amarnath Land Row, involving the allocation of extensive land (99 acres) to the Amarnath Shrine Board, underscores a critical juncture in this context. This period denoted by certain political commentators as the Second Intifada,⁵ witnessed a transformative manifestation of resistance through these artistic endeavours. This art has evolved into a repository of significant events, serving as an unparalleled archival mechanism. “The forms of cultural production emerging through Kashmir’s second revolution are doing the active work of producing everyday sites of conscience that spatialize memory and memorialize space in ways that are consistent with the decades-long struggle for freedom” [10]. These productions have not stayed confined to traditional performative stages only but permeated all facets of daily life.

All Spaces Included

Kashmiris have sought to redefine their longstanding modes of dissent through the lens of ‘affective politics’ [29, p. 66]. Various acts of dissent, ranging from the monthly sit-ins by relatives of those ‘disappeared’ from Kashmir over the last three decades, to the songs under consideration, all constitute forms of resistance enacted as counter-spectacles, and possess just enough agency to contest prevailing narratives. These counter-narratives are designed to disrupt the dominant narratives imposed by the mainstream media and the state.

Anthropologist Ather Zia, in her analysis of women’s activism in Kashmir, attributes this agency to a seemingly apolitical stance, which she characterises as “the most political of stances” [29, p. 104]. This notion underscores the idea that what appears apolitical on the surface can be deeply political in its implications and effects. Songs, a vital element in weddings worldwide, also play a significant role in Kashmiri weddings. Zia, while accompanying an Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP)⁶ member to a local wedding in Kashmir, observes how the customary song wanwun gradually transforms into mujahid baeth,⁷ a song dedicated to the remembrance of the disappeared. This exemplifies an instance of “memory gushing out of the unlikeliest of places,” as noted by Zia. Traditional Kashmiri songs, like wanwun, thus transcend their conventional role as sources of enjoyment and entertainment, assuming the responsibility of memory preservation. Personal joy and communal grief intersect and the simple act of singing becomes a sentinel act of defiance and remembrance.

Given that these spaces are predominantly occupied by women, the task of memorialisation within such contexts falls on their shoulders. This demonstrates the unique role played by women in preserving and transmitting collective memory within the socio-cultural fabric of Kashmir. Blurring the boundaries between celebration and mourning, these songs acquire the stature of the “hidden transcript” attempting to subvert domination [24, p. 4]. The idea of the hidden transcript operates in contrast to what Scot calls the “public transcripts” [24, p. 5]. While the public transcript consists of the open, public interactions between two parties in case of any domination, the hidden transcript operates beneath the surface of overt public compliance, providing a space where grievances, memories, and oppositional ideas can safely be expressed and preserved. The transformation of celebratory songs into lamentations for the disappeared functions as a hidden transcript and subtly challenges the state’s narrative and authority. Scott also describes the sites where the hidden transcripts perform their functions the best. He writes:

The social sites of the hidden transcripts are those locations in which the unspoken riposte, stifled anger, and bitten tongues created by relations of domination find a vehement, full-throated expression. It follows that the hidden transcript will be least inhibited when two conditions are fulfilled: first, when it is voiced in a sequestered social site where the control, surveillance and repression of the dominant are least able to reach, and second, when this sequestered social milieu is composed entirely of close confidants who share similar experiences of domination. The initial condition is what allows subordinates to talk freely at all, while the second ensures that they have, in their common subordination, something to talk about. [24, p. 120]

Since weddings are not state-monitored spaces, and thus comprise “a space free of the ‘Panopticon,’” [29] as well as “a sequestered social site,” [24], the inhibitions are less and the expression freer. The women at the social site of weddings assume the role of sentinel musicians freely, performing their task of commemoration via their hidden transcripts in a sequestered social site.

While wanwun continues to hold a dominant position as the primary form of songs performed at weddings in Kashmir, there is a notable trend among middle and upper-middle-class families opting for “modernized music” during wedding celebrations.

This contemporary musical choice encompasses the inclusion of Bollywood songs, sung and performed, representing one facet of this evolving trend. On the other end of this spectrum, there is a growing inclination towards the incorporation of modern dissent songs, as discussed earlier, reflecting the multifaceted nature of musical expression in contemporary Kashmiri weddings. This juxtaposition of traditional and modern musical influences at weddings signifies a broader cultural shift and the dynamic ways in which Kashmiris are redefining and diversifying their cultural expressions in various social settings. These modern songs also comprise the hidden transcript that cannot be expressed in a surveillance state.

The More, the Merrier: Songs and Music Videos

The cultural revolution that unfolded in post-2008 Kashmir brought art to the forefront, manifesting across various genres. Notably, poetry emerged as a prevalent medium of expression. While poetry and songs essentially convey similar sentiments, the inclusion of musical composition amplifies the emotive impact beyond what words alone can achieve. Although robust poetic narratives with heightened emotions abound, the incorporation of musical instruments enhances the memorability of songs. Zareef Ahmed Zareef underscores the significance of rhythm to the essence of Kashmiriyat, attributing it to the region’s rich musical heritage [19]. Furthermore, upon release, a substantial portion of these songs is accompanied by music videos. Another hidden transcript, these music videos can be examined under what Sara Ahmed [2] and Ather Zia [29] call the “affective politics” wherein emotions are mobilised to challenge dominant narratives and create political agency. The incorporation of visual imagery augments the production of affect, rendering this combination an even more potent form of expression. This also provides a platform for other artistic forms such as graphic art, mural art, illustrations, cartoons, all pertaining to resistance, to be seen. According to Shelley Walia, “any negotiation with the march of history will foreground art as a consequence of cultural patterns and trends in cultural politics. It is difficult, however, to distinguish between thought and feeling as the amalgamation of words and music, colour and movement broaden human experience, even when words fall short” [27].

A predominant theme encapsulated in these songs/videos revolves around the profound loss of loved ones. These musical compositions serve as lamentations for the departed and portray the tribulations faced by those who remain among the living. The necessary act of personal and individualistic remembrance of the dead is rendered communal and political within the context. Notably, elderly women, frequently the mothers of young boys who become the victims of such violence, assume a central role in these poignant depictions. In a particularly emotive composition by Ishfaq Kawa titled “Nunde Bani,” a grieving mother addresses her deceased son, expressing how his absence has irrevocably created an everlasting void. Poignantly, she seeks knowledge of his resting place beneath the soil, longing to be reunited with him.

Lalwen che maaji thaveth/

umran che daag keetah/

yekh na balai laghai /

nund baani yaar myanei

Gobro ninder che traveth/

mechi tal katan mea wantam/

laaraan ba toor waatai/

nund baani yaar myanei [17]

Oh! My Love!

For long your mother has to live along with the pains

Do come back as I devote myself to you

Oh! My Love!

Tell me where did you lie yourself down to the final rest

I will drag myself to that spot

Oh! My love!⁸

The music video accompanying the song serves to heighten the emotional impact, illustrating the mother’s vivid visualisations of her son in every young boy she encounters. This visual portrayal adds layers of affective depth to the depiction of loss, underscoring the profound emotional resonance embedded within the narrative. It illustrates how the memory of the deceased haunts the living, creating a perpetual cycle of grief and remembrance. The phrase balai laghai that the grieving mother uses for her son is an endearing phrase commonly used in Kashmir, specifically by mothers for their children. The literal translation of the phrase, as the poet Danyal Hassan writes, is “may I die so that you would live.” Ather Zia calls it an ultimate form of love as “dying in Kashmiri becomes a measure of life.”⁹ The mother’s being unaware of her dead son’s resting location is a reference to the families of the deceased who are denied their loved one’s dead bodies, which lie in unmarked mass graves across various parts of Kashmir. This act of depriving the people of the bodies of the deceased is another active tactic of erasure and obliteration of memory. The material memory of the grave is denied, leaving one questioning the mere existence of the person in the first place. This denial serves to dehumanise the victims and strip them of their identities, reducing them to faceless and nameless entities within the collective consciousness. Since the material memory through her son’s dead body is denied, the mother is rendered wandering. Even the dead in Kashmiri are thus haunted by the questions of identity and existence. This phenomenon can be analysed through Mbembe’s concept of “necropolitics” that explores the way in which the sovereign power exercises control over life as well as death. Thus, the state controls the visibility and the commemoration around the dead and exerts biopower that extends beyond death and maintains its grip over the social and political narrative. This also leads to the disruption in the process of mourning and the preservation of memory highlighting the significance of the act of mourning as a political act since it acknowledges the ‘grievability’ of lives [8]. When the state denies the bodies of the deceased, it attempts to render these lives ungrievable, thereby negating their value and erasing their presence from public consciousness.

Another composition resonating with these poignant emotions is “Lalnawath” by the renowned musician and performer, Mohammad Muneem, known by the artist name Alif. This composition serves as a profound expression of mourning and was honoured with the 8th Dada Saheb Phalke Film Festival-18 in Delhi NCR. In the accompanying music video, Muneem is portrayed in a state of deep mourning, akin to the mother in Kawa’s video. Muneem, in his song, laments not only the departure of a loved one but also mourns the demise of his aspirations, dreams that he endeavours to sustain amidst the challenging political climate of his homeland.

In a poignant visual metaphor, Muneem implores the departed to return, creating an evocative image of cradling them. The symbolism of the cradle, typically associated with new life, is deconstructed in Muneem’s portrayal as he cradles a coffin. This act, which conventionally signifies the beginning of life, takes on a sombre connotation in Muneem’s world, symbolising only death and loss. The juxtaposition of this powerful imagery underscores the profound impact of grief and the struggle to preserve dreams amidst the challenging political realities of the region.

Lobum ha chuni khazanay

Wazum ha souri zamane

Rawraway kya

Sombraway kya

Chaye manz

Wanakh na

Aa kati che pan’e

Lalnawath

Wanakh na [5]

I found your treasure

And realized all of it is a debt

Which of those treasures do I let go?

Which of it do I save? [sic]

For the shadows

O please tell me where you are?¹⁰

The song and the music video use the images to exemplify the collective loss through simple metaphors. The addressed are generally lost and their whereabouts unknown. The addressee thus engages in commemoration, holding on to the material memory of the lost ones. Their everyday objects of use are what is being referred to as the khazane (treasure). Metaphors thus play an important role in these artistic expressions. Through metaphors artists communicate subtleties that transcend direct expression.

Use of Metaphor

Anne Kanes’s [14] assertion on the significance of metaphors in political discourses is particularly resonant in the context of the emotionally charged songs from Kashmir. Metaphorical expressions within political narratives, as Kane contends, serve as emotive structures with the power to catalyse political action, shape collective identity, and foster group solidarity. The utilisation of metaphors in political discourses, especially within the realm of these creative songs, is an established practice. Metaphors, symbolism, and other figurative language serve as vehicles for conveying nuanced political statements while providing a degree of camouflage. This deliberate use of metaphor acts as a central strategy for political legitimisation. They thus serve as important orthopractic tools for infra-political resistance by circumventing direct censorship. The tri-lingual competency¹¹ of the current generation also serves the purpose of providing numerous metaphor choices for the artists. According to Charteris Black, metaphor holds a significant political utility as a “persuasive aspect of discourse” [7, pp. 103–114]. It operates as a bridge between “conscious and unconscious means of persuasion”, navigating the interplay between cognition and emotion [7, p. 99]. In this context, the metaphorical expressions in Kashmiri songs become persuasive tools, effectively conveying the emotional and cognitive dimensions of the political realities within the region.

Among the recurrent metaphors, Jhelum emerges as a particularly powerful symbol in Kashmiri songs. The river, laden with historical significance, becomes a metaphorical repository of turbulent memories and incidents. An illustrative example is found in Faheem Abdullah’s song, where the imagery of a boy jumping into the Jhelum to search for his loved one amidst rising waters and flood warning, signifies both personal and collective struggles. In this specific song, the lamentation for the destruction of the “paradise” echoes through the metaphor of the Jhelum. Faheem Abdullah’s song laments this loss in the following lyrics:

Jhelum Roya

Kashmir ko mere

Ye kya hoya

Jhelum is weeping

What has happened to my Kashmir [1]

Alif’s song Jhelumus, also illustrates the destruction of Kashmir through Jhelum,

Kusu boze kaswane naar ha loug Jhelumas

Khotsan chas be yer ma gas Jhelumas [4]

Is anyone listening? Who can I tell? My river is on fire! And I fear I shall slip into its waters¹²

Extending the river metaphor, contemporary Kashmir is also referred to as Yirvin Naav, a drowning boat. This vivid metaphor encapsulates the precarious state of the region, suggesting an impending threat and the struggle for survival. Among the myriad metaphors employed, the most common one for Kashmir is that of a “paradise.” The valley’s scenic beauty, despite its political turmoil, has rendered it a “territory of desire” [12]. The metaphor of Kashmir as a “paradise on earth” not only underscores the conflict’s tragic impact on the region but also accentuates the stark contrast between its idyllic landscapes and the harsh political realities it faces. Consequently, the conflict in Kashmir is often poignantly referred to as the “burning of paradise,” emphasising the profound loss and transformation experienced by the region, which is depicted in these songs. By using layers of meaning through metaphors, the artists can thus evoke personal and collective traumas making it palpable. These metaphors, thus, not only serve as tools of expression under surveillance but also help express traumatic memories that are otherwise too difficult to articulate.

Trauma is What Trauma Does

Trauma theorist Bessel van der Kolk, in his seminal work The Body Keeps the Score [18], elucidates the profound ramifications of trauma on sensory perception. He extensively explores therapeutic modalities involving art and music, contending, “The capacity of art, music, and dance to circumvent the speechlessness that accompanies terror may be one reason they are employed as trauma treatments across various cultures worldwide” [18]. Consequently, music, operating as a sensory medium, possesses the capability to elicit and navigate the intricate emotional terrain intertwined with traumatic experiences and helps fight this speechlessness. This everyday speechlessness imposed on Kashmiris also finds an outlet in this music. It serves the dual purpose of constructing collective memory and serving as a cathartic expression. Zeeshan Nabi, a member of the musical band Ramooz, characterises his music as a “weird catharsis” [9]. This description also resonates with the multifaceted role that the “sentinel” musician undertakes. While actively participating in the creation of a musical archive, the musician simultaneously employs the process as an instrument of catharsis. The act of creating music becomes a therapeutic release, allowing musicians to navigate the emotional toll of the conflict and provide an outlet for communal grief and resilience.

The songs also generate an affective response in their listeners resulting in a sense of solidarity and serve as catalysts for the emergence of an infra-political resistance. Infra-political resistance as Scott contends is a form of resistance performed through the use of hidden transcripts. The performers carefully bring forth the hidden transcripts out in the public in the form of harmless musical performances. This form of resistance, though unorganised, takes shape through the shared experiences and sentiments conveyed in the music, allowing for a subtle yet potent form of opposition against the prevailing socio-political direction set by the state. The act of creating and consuming this music becomes a survival instinct, a means through which the younger generation asserts agency and resilience against the constraints imposed upon them. In essence, the music becomes a dynamic space where affective responses and infra-political resistance converge. It transcends mere artistic expression to serve as a vital instrument for survival, resilience, and the preservation of collective memory within a sociopolitical context that seeks to impose silence.

The Musical Past

Kashmir’s historical narrative is inherently imbued with musicality, and consequently, it is only natural that expressions of dissent within the region have manifested through musical avenues. The societal evolution of Kashmir, marked by fluid transformations through numerous religious mass conversions over centuries, has nonetheless retained certain enduring features, music being one of them. Owing to its Brahmanical roots, music in Kashmir survived through Bhajans.¹³ The advent of Islam in the 14th century, brought about by Syed Mir Ali Hamdani of Iran, witnessed a transformation in the musical landscape, with Sufiyana Mousique (Sufi Music) becoming an integral part of Kashmir’s version of Islam. Shaped by its diverse cultural influences, encompassing both Brahmanical and Sufi Islamic traditions, Kashmir showcased a rich array of poetic narrations in the late eighteenth century, often presented through sung or performed expressions. Prominent examples include Lal Ded’s Vaakh and Nund Resh’s Shruke. Chitralekha Zutschi, in her exploration of these narratives, observes, “In most cases, this poetry drew on Kashmiri folk styles and forms of narration (such as Kashmiri songs Vakhun, Chakri, and Roph), thereby enabling its performance and widespread circulation among the populace. Predominantly transmitted through oral traditions, these musical compositions serve as archival records, documenting events of bygone eras” [30]. Zutschi points out the use of the verses for the purposes of protest as early as the 19th century. She writes, “Kashmiri verse spoke to the concerns of the common people, and by the middle of the nineteenth century, had become a powerful means of protest against the tyrannies of rulers and their agents” [30]. Musical traditions in Kashmir survived over time through performative arts like Bhand and Ladishah. Bhand Pather, a form of performative art combining drama, poetry singing and dance, akin to English Miracle and Mystery plays, served as cultural archives during different historical epochs, including the Mughal, Dogra, and British periods. Bhand, as a performative art form, tackled a spectrum of social and political issues, thereby establishing itself as a repository of collective memory and a crucial component of oral history. Notably, one variant of Bhand Pather, specifically designated as the Angrez Pather, delves into the historical epoch marked by British rule in Kashmir. This particular manifestation of Bhand serves as a narrative vehicle, elucidating and encapsulating the nuances of that specific historical period within the broader cultural context. Similarly, Raza Pather, another variant of Bhand Pather, resurfaces memories of the alien Afghan rule in Kashmir through its musical and comedic lens. Bhand, employing humour, addresses issue such as autocratic governance, social rigidity, and official vandalism. In parallel, Ladishah, a dying musical form in Kashmir, involves a performer delivering lyrics in a distinctive tone. Historically, Ladishah has played a pivotal role in disseminating information and providing a platform for alternative dissent. Serving as a social mirror, Ladishah carried information in an era devoid of social media. Kashmir then, throughout history, has employed music as a means of expressing dissent in its constant struggle against foreign invasion and tyranny, for example the following Ladishah lyrics look back at the historical event of the sale of Kashmir to Dogra through the infamous Treaty of Amritsar.¹⁴

Dograew moel hyoth mulk-e-kashmir

Dogras have bought the nation of Kashmir

The historical Ladishah tradition in Kashmir exemplifies a strong tradition of oral and aural history. Among Kashmiris, Ladishahs are regarded as a more authentic narrative of their lived history, often presenting perspectives that diverge from the ‘written history’ approved by the state. This underscores Ladishah’s unique role in offering an alternative portrayal of the region’s historical experiences, in contrast to the officially sanctioned historical narratives. The contemporary young generation of Kashmiri artists similarly channels their emotions, serving as a mirror reflecting the societal mood and occurrences. The advent of social media has intensified this trend, empowering emerging talents to articulate their profound sorrows.

Conclusion

A report presented by Coda Story in November 2021 revealed how newspapers in Kashmir from the past couple of decades, containing reports of violence, had started vanishing and no newspaper archives existed [11]. Amidst this enforced erasure of historical records, the active creation of local repository of memory becomes imperative. Foucault’s understanding of the archive informs us of the power that archives wield in creating a political and historical narrative. These songs hence form an alternate, subtler form of archives. The sentinel musician in Kashmir assumes a pivotal role in this archival process, using music as a medium to document and convey the lived experiences of the community. The power dynamics Foucault attributes to archives are mirrored in these musical expressions, which, in their own way, contribute to shaping a narrative that might otherwise be erased or manipulated. This musical archive becomes a counterforce against the imposed amnesia, capturing the nuances of the region’s socio-political struggles and providing a means for future generations to comprehend their history.

The growing popularity of these songs stands as a testament to their emotional and political effectiveness. Suvir Kaul aptly characterises this art as the “voices that linger after political debates are exhausted and after shots have been fired and bodies broken” [16, p. 9]. The resonance of this music goes beyond mere entertainment; it encapsulates a profound connection with the lived experiences and sentiments of the community.

References

1.

Abdullah, Faheem. 2020 November 18. Jhelum | Faheem Abdullah | Official Music Video | Mad in Kashmir. Video. YouTube. https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=​XbvOyH-ACpg.

2.

Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.

3.

Ahmer. 2021 July 15. I.D. Video. Azadi Records. YouTube. https://​youtu.​be/​kZS0gE3AUAs.

4.

Alif. 2016 June 24. Jhelumas: Alif | Music video | Sufi music in India | Unique Stories From India. Video. YouTube. 101 India. https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v83D6fO0REkc.

5.

Alif. 2018 March 30. Lalnawath [to cradle]: Alif | Music video. Video. YouTube. https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=​[video_id].

6.

Bashir, Farah. 2021. Rumours of Spring: A Girlhood in Kashmir. Gurugram: HarperCollins India.

7.

Black, Charteris. 2017. Competition Metaphors and Ideology: Life as a Race. In The Routledge Handbook of Language and Politics, ed. Ruth Wodak and Bernhard Forchtner, 202–217. London: Routledge.

8.

Butler, Judith. 2009. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London: Verso.

9.

Chadudhuri. (2021, Novemer 2). Kashmir protest music: Inside the new wave that’s ‘trying to be the voice of our people.’ The Independent. https://​www.​independent.​co.​uk/​arts-enternainment/​music/​features/​kashmir-protest-music-pakistan-b1946060html

10.

Duschinski, Haley, Mona Bhan, Ather Zia, and Cynthia Mahmood. 2018. Resisting Occupation in Kashmir. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press.

11.

Hassan, Aakash. 2021. Kashmir’s Vanishing Newspaper Archives. Coda Story. November 23. https://​www.​codastory.​com/​rewriting-history/​kashmir-vanishing-newspaper/​.

12.

Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. 2009. Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

13.

Kak, Sanjay. 2013. Until My Freedom Has Come: The New Intifada in Kashmir. Gurugram: Penguin.

14.

Kane, Anne. 2001. Finding Emotion in Social Movement Processes: Irish Land Movement Metaphors and Narratives. In Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements, ed. Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper, and Francesca Polletta, 251–266. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

15.

Kash, M. C. 2011. I protest. In Until My Freedom Has Come: The New Intifada in Kashmir, ed. Sanjay Kak. Gurugram: Penguin.

16.

Kaul, Suvir. 2017. Of Gardens and Graves. Durham: Duke University Press.

17.

Kawa, Ishfaq. 2020 May 26. Nundi Bani | Ishfaq Kawa | Lyrics by Ishfaq Kawa | Syed Muzafar | Qalaam Studio. Video. YouTube. https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=​[video_id].

18.

der Kolk, Van, and Bassel. 2014. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. India: Penguin Books.

19.

Madhav, Tushar and Sarvnik Kaur. 2020, October 13. Soz—a ballad of maladies. Video.

20.

Mbembe, Achille. 2019. Necropolitics. Durham: Duke University Press.

21.

Medecins Sans Frontieres. 2016. Mutazar: Kashmir Mental Health Report 2015. In Peoples Archives of Rural India. https://​ruralindiaonline​.​org/​en/​library/​resource/​muntazar-kashmir-mental-health-survey-report-2015/​.

22.

Milkman, Ruth. 2017. A New Political Generation: Millennials and the Post-2008 Wave of Protest. American Sociological Review 82 (1): 1–31. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1177/​0003122416681031​.Crossref

23.

Schwartz, Joan, and Terry Cook. 2002. Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory. Archival Science 2: 1–19.

24.

Scott, James C. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press.

25.

Shelemay, Kay Kaufmann. 2022. Sing and Sing on. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

26.

Varma, Saiba. 2020. The Occupied Clinic: Militarism and Care in Kashmir. Durham: Duke University Press.

27.

Walia, Shelley. 2020. Humanities at the Crossroads. India: Orient Blackswan.

28.

Zanaan Wanaan. 2020 February 23. Kashmiri bella ciao. Video. YouTube. https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=​[video_id].

29.

Zia, Ather. 2019. Resisting Disappearance: Military Occupation and Women’s Activism in Kashmir. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

30.

Zutshi, Chitralekha. 2004. Languages of Belonging. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Footnotes

1

These comprise the limited musical expressions during the Cultural Revolution in China.

2

PTSD as a category is limiting in the case of Kashmir since traumatic events continue to unfold in the region.

3

State enforced Disappearances were a common phenomenon in Kashmir, especially in the 90s.

4

Translation borrowed from the official Youtube video.

5

Kashmiri struggle for independence is often juxtaposed with the freedom struggle of Palestine against the State of Israel.

6

Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons is an organisation pioneered by Parveena Ahangar, who lost her son, Javed, to enforced disappearance.

7

Songs of the rebels.

8

Translation borrowed from the official Youtube video.

9

From a poem posted on Instagram by Hassan and Zia, respectively.

10

Translation borrowed from the official Youtube video.

11

Most educated Kashmiris of the contemporary generation are fluent in Kashmiri, Urdu and English.

12

Translation borrowed from the official Youtube video.

13

Devotional songs with religious themes, especially associated with Hinduism.

14

As per The Treaty of Amritsar (signed on16 March, 1846), Kashmir was handed over to the Dogra Dynasty in exchange for 75 lakh Rupees and an annual tribute.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2025

S. Malhotra et al. (eds.)Trauma and Memory Studies: Responses from India and Beyondhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-6374-3_9

9. Hand-Crafted Memories: Remembering Voices from Shaheen Bagh and The Bhopal Gas Disaster Through Avant-Garde Feminist Media

Rohit Prasad1  

(1)

Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India

Rohit Prasad

Email: rohitprasad1235@gmail.com

Abstract

This chapter analyses the works and aesthetic practices of two artists, Prarthna Singh and Kokila Bhattacharya, who employ the visual-verbal syntax of comics to create politically driven participatory media (such as zines, sketchbooks, and photobooks) that challenge the metanarrative(s) of recent Indian history. Har Shaam Shaheen Bagh by Prarthna Singh is a collection of memorabilia—photographs, poems, songs, and drawings that she collected as a testament of the fight led by the women of India in 2020, at Shaheen Bagh in Delhi, against the Citizenship Amendment Act. Eyes Wide Shut by Kokila Bhattacharya is an illustrated account of the victims’ never-ending fight following the Bhopal Gas disaster in 1984. It is a gripping description of what happened on the dreadful night of 2–3 December 1984, when the incapacitating MIC gas blanketed Bhopal and killed hundreds of people. It is an essential account that attests to the ongoing effects of the gas tragedy on the lives of the people of Bhopal and is replete with personal anecdotes of hopelessness and sorrow. Focused on the works mentioned above, this chapter seeks to delineate how Singh and Bhattacharya utilise the language of comics to both ‘re-mediate’ (or re-present; re-transmit) and ‘preserve’ collective activist memory. The memory work they create—documenting their own social movements, criticising prevalent media images, and talking back to domineering discourses—creates crucially important ‘counter-memories’ to dominant but insufficient, deradicalised, inaccurate, and often sensationalised representations widely circulated through mainstream media representations. Additionally, the deployment of DIY(do-it-yourself) aesthetic techniques along with analogue and digital printing technologies to create these works, characteristically links their production methods to wider feminist praxis.

“My memory keeps getting in the way of your history.”

                                                                                                      –– Agha Shahid Ali, “Farewell”,

                                                                                        Country Without a Post Office

“It is no longer a matter of saying: to create is to remember—but rather, to remember is to create…”

                                                                                                      –– Deleuze, Proust and Signs

Memory and Performativity

The Oxford English dictionary defines the word ‘remember’ as follows:

(a)

To have or keep an image in your memory of an event, a person, a place, etc. from the past.

(b)

To bring back to your mind a fact, piece of information, etc. that you know.

(c)

To not forget to do something; to actually do something that you have to do. (“Remember” def. [11])

One only needs to examine the above definitions carefully to realise that the word ‘remember’ is a verb. The act of remembering involves psychological (and sometimes, intellectual) labour. How then, can memory be an involuntary thought if it requires remembering? Authors Liedeke Plate and Anekke Smelik are of the opinion that “[w]hile memory may start as an involuntary event, it can turn into an act of active remembrance, even into a practice of remembering the act of memory itself” [12, p. 4]. Bolstering their argument further, the authors declare that we must “move beyond the traditional psychoanalytical distinction between ‘two contrasting ways of bringing the past into the present: acting out and remembering’, seeing them instead as a continuum” [12, p. 4].

Plate and Smelik, therefore, theorise memory as a localised, embodied practice, or rather as a performance [12]. Here they are influenced by philosopher J.L. Austin’s particular notion of performative utterances. A performative utterance, according to Austin, is a speech-act that enacts something rather than simply describing it [1]. What Austin is trying to suggest here is that by enunciating certain words we are enacting them, accomplishing something, or performing an action [1]. For instance, words like ‘promise’, ‘question’, or ‘admire’ are actually speech-acts rather than mere words.

In his theory of deconstruction, Derrida further radicalised this idea of language’s performative nature. To Derrida, all discourse is ‘iteration’, or the reiteration of previously stated thoughts and speech articulations—a repetition [6]. The citational nature of language, said Derrida, makes it possible to interpret language as performance, in which variations emerge from language’s ceaseless repetitions while meaning is perpetually postponed or ‘deferred’ [6]. In other words, meaning- making is a dynamic process that is arrived at through constant deferral of pre-existing ‘signs’ as the ‘signified’ can never be attained [6].

Drawing inspiration from both Austin and Derrida, post-structural theorist Judith Butler further politicises this concept of linguistic performance(s) by incorporating it into our everyday lives to delineate how ‘gender’ and ‘sex’—although they are not existential realities or fixities that we are born with, or that we possess—become social constructs that are formed via performative activities. Building on Austin’s theory, Butler maintains that performative acts are not just theatrical; that they also exert their influence on the social life of individuals—especially on their identity as gendered beings. Gendered embodiment(s), she maintains, are all acts of performance [3]. Taking cues from Derrida, Butler goes on to argue that these performative acts need to be repeatedly carried out in daily life to make them appear natural, or to normalise them as accepted gendered behaviours. However, Butler believes that it is precisely in these performances that one finds an opportunity for change and intervention, since each performance evinces the potential for change [3]. Put simply, if all gendered dispositions are performances enacted and reenacted to elicit conformity, one could very well politicise them to suggest deviance and stimulate dissent. Butler’s idea of performance as deviance, or performativity, can effectively be applied to memory studies to illuminate the subversive and mutinous potential of the act of remembering. If queer performances of gender can build resistance, then so can defiantly performed memories. The ruling regime that wields political power in a country plays a crucial role in shaping its cultural memory. In other words, the ruling regime gets to decide what constitutes or rather what can constitute cultural memory. As such, only those events that constitute a homogeneous, gratifying, and therefore acceptable impression of the nation––an impression that corresponds to the hegemonised image of the country––get to be a part of its cultural memory. Events which either fail, or categorically refuse, to adhere to this fabricated image of the nation are either ritualistically interpellated to complement the discursively dominant idea of the nation, or are strategically obliterated. Put simply, it is the ruling regime which decides which events, or lives, or experiences are worth remembering and which aren’t. In fact, the ruling regime also decides the manner in which certain events are to be remembered. For example, the dominant approach adopted while ‘remembering’ the 9/11 catastrophe is to blame individuals from the Middle Eastern countries in particular, or the Muslims in general, thereby accentuating the communal hate and Islamophobia that already prevails across nations. But, as we know from the discussion of Butler’s theory of performativity thus far, it is also possible to subvert the dominant ways of remembering or memory-construction by ‘re-membering’ or ‘reconstructing’ past events differently. Narratives which promote or amplify marginal memories that contest hegemonised versions of history (in other words, memories which attempt to ruffle the otherwise smooth surface of history) hold tremendous potential to challenge the ritualistic appropriation of a nation’s cultural memory by fascist regimes. The texts that I will discuss in the course of this chapter deal exactly with this issue: performing resistance through the act of re-calling and/or re-membering. In addition to this, the questions that I wish to address through this Chapter are: how do the booklets / artworks/ media under discussion perform the past into the present, and to what ends? From whose perspective do the authors re-call? And for whom do these texts re-collect?

Materialising Memories of Resistance and Trauma

Har Shaam Shaheen Bagh (one of the texts that is ruminated upon in this Chapter) by Prarthna Singh is a collection of memorabilia—photographs, poems, drawings, and songs—that the author acquired as testaments of the fight led by the women of India for more than hundred days, at Shaheen Bagh (or Falcon Park) in Delhi, against the Citizenship Amendment Act—a law passed by the BJP government on December 11, 2019, right after it had managed to secure a sweeping majority in the Lok Sabha (the lower house of the Indian Parliament). The law outlines the requirements for granting Indian Citizenship to refugees from neighbouring countries, with special focus on expeditiously naturalising non-Muslim refugees from India’s three neighbouring Muslim-majority countries, namely Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan [10].

However, as most political scientists rightly point out, the complete thrust of the provisions mentioned in the CAA, begin to appear clearer when they are viewed jointly with another legislation, the National Register of Citizens (NRC) whose implementation was rather strategically announced in the Parliament, which happened coincidentally at the same time when discussions on the (non)implementation of the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) were already doing rounds in the Parliament. The NRC mandated Indian subjects to prove their citizenship through consistent and exacting paperwork—which, in some cases, dated back generations. Funnily, the documents demanded for verification and scrutiny could not include passports, voter IDs, or the biometric national IDs issued by the government of India [10]. And those who failed to produce the documents would either be evicted from the country, forced to relocate, internally displaced, or sent to detention camps.

As Aamir R. Mufti rightly points out, what the CAA effectively (read notoriously) attempted to do was this: the introduction of “a religious element into the definition of citizenship itself” thereby attempting to decimate the revered clause of secularism enshrined in the Indian constitution, along with the equality clauses mentioned in articles 14 and 15 [10]. The women of Shaheen Bagh, as Mufti infallibly points out, were quick to recognise this. Despite coming from relatively low socioeconomic backgrounds (mostly from families of migrant agricultural labourers, shopkeepers, working-and-middle class inhabitants), the women of Shaheen Bagh seemed to understand “that the proposed citizenship policy marked a dramatic shift in the exercise of sovereign power in this constitutional republic that represented a serious danger not only to themselves but in fact to the country as a whole” [10, p. 178].

On the night of December 15, 2019, concerned by, and agitating against the police brutalities levelled against the students of public universities—especially against young women from Jamia Millia Islamia in Delhi—the Muslim women of Shaheen Bagh, mostly housewives and elderly matriarchs with little knowledge on mobilising protests, staged a ‘dharna’ or sit-in, blocking one of Delhi’s busiest thoroughfares, both exhibiting and reinventing the long-term feminist politics of communal solidarity and occupation. Another remarkable aspect about the protests at Shaheen Bagh is the creative/ artistic output that the movement engendered. Women took to writing (mostly in the vernacular): be it letters, poems, or pamphlets; sloganeering; performing songs and acts; while the children who accompanied their mothers, drew. These moments of collective struggle against a set of oppressive legislations, were recorded by Singh in the form of photographs on a regular basis over those hundred days, as she bypassed police barricades between Sarita Vihar and Shaheen Bagh, every day, to join the women at the protest site. However, in March 2020 the protests had to be stalled because of the nationwide lockdown implemented to prevent the spread of Covid-19 virus. Sadly, when Singh returned to the protest site seven months later, in October 2020, she was shocked to behold the shameful erasure and the consequent demise of the political movement, consummated by the joint forces of authoritarianism and communal intolerance. Har Shaam Shaheen Bagh is, therefore, her attempt to try and keep the memory of the protests alive. It is an anthology of multimedia portraits of the many women and children who populated Shaheen Bagh for demonstrations, the posters they made, the poems they wrote, and the songs they performed condemning the CAA. It is, in other words, a ‘material archive’ of the collective struggles and memories of trauma that are affiliated with the Shaheen Bagh protests; memories that have now transformed (or rather remoulded themselves) into images which not only amplify the woes of the Muslim minorities living in India but also impel the nation to acknowledge some kind of accountability towards them, and to arrive at a common resolution to this chronic issue of religious hate and communal disharmony (Fig. 9.1).

Fig 9.1

Polaroid images of some women at the Shaheen Bagh protest site [13]

(Reproduced from Singh, Prarthna. Har Shaam Shaheen Bagh)

The book begins with a hand-drawn map outlining the neighbourhood and delineating checkpoints, barricades and the various points of entry into the protest site. What follows is a collection of multiple portraits and polaroid images of the women and young girls sporting some version of the Islamic veil—be it the full-body burqa, the traditional chaddar (or shawl), or the modern hijab covering the head and the shoulders. Their eyes, unflinching as they appear, cut through the gaze of the reader/ onlooker. Some of these portraits are also superimposed upon the photographs of the shawls and veils worn by these women “to evoke the camaraderie and kinship that formed the essence of the protest” [13]. Carefully interspersed between these portraits are images of poems, and letters (from mothers to their children), that were written during the protest. One of the poems compiled in this collection, composed by Amir Aziz, is titled “Sab Yaad Rakkha Jayega” (“Everything Will Be Remembered”) and it begins like this:

Sab yaad rakkha jayega

sab kuch yaad rakkha jayega.

Tumhari lathiyon aur goliyon se jo katl huye hain mere yaar,

sab unki yaad mein dilon ko barbaad rakkha jayega.

Sab yaad rakkha jayega.

Sab kuch yaad rakkha jayega.

Aur tum siyahiyon se jhooth likhoge

Humein maloom hai.

Ho humare khoon se hi ho sahi,

Sach zaroor likha jayega.

Sab kuch yaad rakkha jayega. (Aziz as quoted in [13], n.p.)

The translated version of these lines reads like:

Everything will be remembered,

It will all be remembered.

The murders you commit with your batons and your bullets,

Their memories shall destroy our hearts, my friend.

Everything will be remembered, It will all be remembered.

You may make your lies permanent with ink,

We will write the truth even if it takes our blood.

Everything will be remembered,

It will all be remembered. (translation by Prarthna [13], n.p.)

Produced below, again, is a self-translated passage (translated from the original one written in Urdu) from a letter written by a woman named Nasreen to her children:

No one could forget the December 15th [sic] when college students were performing since morning, but no one could think of what happened to them. Delhi police started torturing students while protesting [sic], tear gas, lathi charge and even bullets were fired on students. Delhi police enter [sic] college library and tortured students [sic]. That day was a dark day for all of us. I had a very deep attachment because I have been a student there too, your father has also studied and Ayaan you are also studying in class six right now. It was as felt that [sic] some people entered our house and bled us. It was not tolerating [sic]. I was also afraid and could not understand what to do? [sic]. Then thought [sic] that now is not the time to be afraid. Therefore, from December 16th, the dadiyan, Maa and sisters of Shaheen Bagh had landed on the streets. Against atrocities against this law [sic] and forced to protest on the road to save this country from breaking up. ([13], n.p. ,emphasis mine)

Out of all other compiled material, I chose the extracts cited above because they exert so much emphasis on the performance and documentation of activist memory thereby upholding the ethos of the entire work. The phrases “everything will be remembered” and “no one could forget” are not just utterances but speech-acts suggesting that they shall not allow the memory of Shaheen Bagh to slip away into oblivion. Besides the text (the letters and the poems), the photographs in the book too, perform the task of preserving activist memory. As state interventions eventually destroyed every sign of articulated dissent—the posters, the tents, the graffiti on the walls (see Fig. 9.3)—these texts and images are the only material traces of activist memory that remain. I agree with Skye Arundhati Thomas who calls attention to this issue in her contribution to the book. She writes (Fig. 9.2):

Fig 9.2

Footbridge: the epicentre of the protest site of Shaheen Bagh before the Covid-19 lockdown [13]

(Reproduced from Singh, Prarthna. Har Shaam Shaheen Bagh)

Fig 9.3

Footbridge: the epicentre of the protest site of Shaheen Bagh after the Covid-19 lockdown. [13]

(Reproduced from Singh, Prarthna. Har Shaam Shaheen Bagh)

As the physical sites of the movement have been ripped apart, as we stand in the face of an unending and vicious barrage of propaganda and untruths—how we reach toward this brilliant time of resilience is through what remains. These remnants are the charge sheets, the bail petitions, the images that we have collected both in our minds and as documents, in the lifting soft phrases once uttered, remembered in quick flashes. While the movement may have been fragmented, its spirit still survives. This book is a record and testimony , an assembly of the shining, miraculous shards of this spirit. (Thomas as quoted in [ 13 , p. 122]; emphasis mine)

According to Marianne Hirsch, testimonial objects are things that “carry memory traces from the past, to be sure, but they also embody the very process of its transmission. They testify to the historical contexts and the daily qualities of the past moments in which they were produced and, also, to the ways in which material objects carry memory traces from one generation to the next” [8, p. 178]. In its endeavour to materialise, archive, and thereby preserve the memories linked with the women of Shaheen Bagh (along with their quotidian tactics of resistance), Har Shaam Shaheen Bagh becomes an ‘object of testimony’. It preserves a moment of dissent—a critical juncture in recent Indian history—which narrates how a non belligerent sit-in led by the Muslim women of Delhi inspired the commoners of an entire nation to express dissent and disapproval at times of crisis when their democratic rights were being threatened.

Although the political circumstances for Muslim minorities in India were far from ideal right from the early days of the Republic, it is only after the ascendency of the Hindu Right in the 1980s that the position of the Muslims as a demographic minority in India has become more precarious. Their powerlessness is reflected not only in their corporal victimisation owing to random or organised pogroms, but also in their quotidian struggles to ascertain their legal and political entitlements as rightful citizens of this country. A cogitation on democratic rights being flouted, that too on sectarian grounds, brings to mind another incident in modern Indian history, when the most cardinal of all fundamental rights—Right to Life (Article 21 of the Indian Constitution)—was denied (and to some extent, is still denied) to the minorities of Bhopal. Eyes Wide Shut is a booklet/zine by artist Kokila Bhattacharya, commemorating the Bhopal gas disaster. The work, as its author describes it, is a collection of “morose facts about a morose city” (Bhattacharya n.d., unpaginated). But besides being a collection of facts on the Bhopal Gas disaster, the booklet also serves as a material document preserving traumatic memories (both individual and communal) long buried under the rubble of myths and accusations generated by state (national) and capitalist (international) authorities. The book is an illustrated account of the victims’ never-ending fight following the Bhopal gas disaster in 1984. It is a gripping description of what happened on the dreadful night of 2–3rd December, 1984, when the Methyl Isocyanate (MIC) gas blanketed Bhopal and killed hundreds of people.¹ It is an essential account that attests to the ongoing effects of the gas tragedy on the lives of the people of Bhopal and is replete with personal anecdotes of hopelessness and sorrow (Bhattacharya n.d.). There are sections in the book which link local memories of trauma engendered by the gas disaster to memories of global genocides and collective catastrophes spread across the twentieth and twenty first centuries. One such page in the book reads as follows:

NEVER BEFORE IN HISTORY

except in Hitler’s gas chambers

have so many died at one time

from exposure to industrial chemicals.

Never before

except in Hiroshima and Nagasaki

have so many people been maimed by a man-made disaster.

Never before

have so many victimised people struggled

for so many years in the face of repression

and propaganda for justice, accountability

and the right to a dignified disease free life. (Bhattacharya n.d. ,unpaginated)

Forming an intertext with these lines is a visual towards the end of the book presenting a couple (suggestively European) waltzing away in the face of death. Their faces are covered with gas masks resembling the ones used by the soldiers during World War II (see Fig. 9.4). The greenish-yellow shadow cast by their bodies onto the background is highly suggestive of the mustard gas that was extensively used as a chemical weapon during the second World War. The comparison drawn between the deadly mustard gas (a compound created by combining elements of sulphur and nitrogen) and the lethal methyl isocyanate (MIC) is hard to miss. The parallels drawn with global catastrophic events like the second World War associates the traumatic memories emanating out of the Bhopal gas disaster with those caused by the War. In doing so, this work also raises serious questions about the silence surrounding the Bhopal gas disaster despite its sustained lethality.

Fig 9.4.

A couple wearing gas masks, performing Waltz

(Reproduced from Bhattacharya, Kokila. Eyes Wide Shut n.d.)

An important question to ask ourselves at this point is whether the silence around the gas disaster persists because much of the population affected by the leakage consisted of lower-class Muslims? Another section in the zine shows a newspaper cutout discussing how the gas tragedy crippled the lives of the victims—not just physically, but also economically. Anecdotes and statements elicited out of bona fide survivors are cued up, one after the other, to reveal how the gas leakage had incapacitated an entire population of wage-earning, working-class individuals who were, in all likelihood, sole breadwinners of their respective families. The report also sheds light on the sorry situation that journalists, reporting stories related to the aftermath of the gas disaster, found themselves in. A statement from one such journalist, who was dismissed from work, harassed, and persecuted by the police, is recorded on this page too. Palimpsested on these anecdotes, is a startling face of a bearded old man with large watery eyes (see Fig. 9.5). The entire page (containing both, real-life anecdotes, and the superimposition), therefore, becomes a metaphoric representation of the spectral memories that are associated with the 1984 gas leak.

Fig 9.5.

A page designed like a newspaper cutout with a superimposed face on it.

(Reproduced from Bhattacharya, Kokila. Eyes Wide Shut n.d.)

Towards an Aesthetics of the Vanguard: Re-Mediating and Archiving Insurgent Memories

A pertinent issue that needs to be addressed at this juncture is: how do authors of these texts re-mediate memories—both personal and communal—that do not belong to them, or that (at least in Prarthna Singh’s case) only belong to them partially? Moreover, how do these authors carry forward stories based on memories that are not their own, and that too without appropriating them?

A characteristic similarity underlining both these texts is: the use of visual-verbal syntax of comics for re-mediation. The narrative tactics of (graphic) showing or picturing rather than telling through words, works well for staging stories that deal with such harrowing and sensitive memories. According to comics scholar Hillary Chute, the visual-verbal grammar of comics can possibly be read as a metaphor for memory [5]. Elaborating on this idea she writes:

… comics and the movement, or act, of memory share formal similarities…. Images in comics appear in fragments just as they do in actual recollection; this fragmentation, in particular, is a prominent feature of traumatic memory. The art of crafting words and pictures together into a narrative punctuated by pause or absence, as in comics, also mimics the procedure of memory. [5, p. 4]

Since both these narratives are composed using a visual-verbal register that mimics the comics format—a language of delineation rather than simple, verbal retelling—they can effectively communicate the multi-faceted memories that they are dealing with without being intrusive. The visual-verbal language used for narration, prevents appropriation of memories that belong to a particular community of subalterns in India. Additionally, events and circumstances that are too intimate or emotionally overwhelming, are replaced by silences. The silences in the text also provide breathing space to the readers for thought and reflection as they witness the deluge of (individual and shared) memories that these works ambush them with.

It is also worth noting in this context that the practice of documenting memories—which feel more authentic and sincere when compared to their sensationalised or depoliticised versions circulating elsewhere—through self-produced/published media is not new to feminists. The zines produced by women associated with the Riot Grrrl movement in America,² or the diaries of Anne Frank for that matter, or the political posters and pamphlets produced by women in postcolonial India, offer a case in point. Both these authors, whose works have been discussed above, I argue, engage in similar creative and aesthetic practices while trying to amplify the traumatic memories experienced mostly by Muslim minorities in India through recording them and fashioning them in the form of personal diaries or hand-crafted albums that contest dominant versions of national history. Both Prarthna Singh and Kokila Bhattacharya build snippets of politically charged memories to amplify the concerns of marginal communities in India whose voices have been repeatedly unheard or deliberately silenced by mainstream media.

In the closing section of Har Shaam Shaheen Bagh, Singh mentions how she was appalled to see the hurried vandalisation of the protest site when she revisited it after the lockdown was lifted. Articulating her thoughts on this issue, she writes:

Seven months later, in October 2020, when Nasreen [a friend she made at the protest site] and I returned to the footbridge in Shaheen Bagh, once the epicenter of protest, it felt cold and lifeless. The warmth of the neon lights and graffiti had been erased by harsh black brushstrokes that covered every sign of dissent. The library that had been housed at the neighbourhood bus stop, the art installations, the popcorn wallahs and sweet stalls that had cropped up during those 100 days, making the atmosphere joyous and festive, had all been replaced by the lull of everyday traffic ([13], unpaginated).

Viewed in this light, creating, and circulating Har Shaam Shaheen Bagh, then, becomes an act of resistance. The memories that the work sustains and endorses become effective counter narratives to the sensationalised and deradicalised versions of the political movement that exist in mainstream media.

Similarly, by opening a debate on the disastrous MIC leakage that took place in Bhopal in 1984, and its aftermath, Eyes Wide Shut resists the erasure of communal trauma from the collective memory of a nation. Why would a government undermine itself in a battle about a settlement (Bhattacharya n.d., unpaginated)? Why would it prevent medical records about the MIC gas from being made public information; something that might help doctors treat patients who have been exposed to gas poisoning (Bhattacharya n.d., unpaginated)? Why is there still an official atmosphere of concealment and denial about the harm that a foreign corporation has caused to the defenseless citizens whom these officials are sworn to defend and represent (Bhattacharya, n.d., unpaginated)? In raising incisive but potent questions like these, Eyes Wide Shut, resists collective amnesia about memories surrounding the Bhopal gas disaster.

As such, these works become significant ‘material’ documents that contest hostile framings and hegemonisation of cultural history. Moreover, samizdat publications such as these also perform an archival function by preserving alternative histories of subaltern trauma and dissent thereby stimulating micro-resistance(s) at the grassroots level. Additionally, this practice of producing informal albeit radicalised documents narrating stories that need to be circulated but are seldom told, can be linked to DIY feminism. According to Red Chidgey, DIY (do-it-yourself) feminism refers to an informal network of cultural producers who take cues from anarchy, anti-capitalism, queer cultures, and animal rights activism to mobilise low-budget resources and technologies in order to sustain activist memory and foster participatory political cultures [4]. The memory work that these authors create—furthering their own concerns, documenting their own social movements, criticising obsequious media images, and talking back to domineering discourses—creates crucially important “counter-memories” to dominant but insufficient, deradicalised, inaccurate, and often sensationalised representations widely circulated through mainstream media representations [4, p. 87].

It should not come as a surprise then, if at this juncture, it is insinuated that the aesthetic practices employed by both Bhattacharya and Singh must be read as an avant-garde venture. The term ‘avant-garde’ (advance guard) in literary and art history is often used to designate the experimental, risk-taking, and revolutionary potential of modern writing and art. Avant-garde artists and authors deliberately set out to create, and reinvent, modern ways of doing art and writing by violating institutional and accepted methods long associated with canonised art and literature. Like alienated soldiers who often veer away from the established military order, thereby exposing themselves to greater risks and challenges, avant-garde artists take it upon themselves to challenge and subvert the dominant and hegemonic norms of society—well aware of the repercussions that their work(s) may have. According to Deleuze and Guattari, a significant characteristic of modern writing is that it invariably assumes a “minority” position thereby aiming to “politicize” and “deterritorialize” a major language—a disposition which opens up “a possibility of setting up a minor practice of a major language from within.” [7, p. 17]. In this chapter, I have attempted to extend this formulation, premised upon a practice of ‘minorization’, to interpret the aesthetic methods employed by Bhattacharya and Singh. The proto-nationalist elites of India have been using comics and other forms of popular literature for decades now to propagate the notion of India as a hindu (as opposed to a secular) nation state. The swelling popularity of the Amar Chitra Katha series offers a case in point. Through their respective works (discussed above), artists Bhattacharya and Singh counter the rhetoric of ‘ethnic cleansing’ veiled behind administrative policies like the Citizenship Amendment Act, or beneath the silence that enshrouds a major catastrophe like the Bhopal gas disaster; and in their attempts to counter hegemonic cultural history through subaltern memories, both these artists betray vanguardist tendencies.

Commenting on avant-garde artistic practices, art critic Geeta Kapur once argued that if we were to consider the avantgarde as a “historically conditioned phenomenon [that] emerges only in a moment of real political disjuncture, it will appear in various forms in different parts of the world at different times” [9, p. 374]. Considering the troubled state of affairs in the country today where fascist regimes are trying to obliterate subaltern voices (whether it’s the voice of dalits, indigenous communities, women, genderqueer people, or religious minorities) through violence and coercion in order to fashion a homogenised picture of the nation vis-a-vis the contemporary attempts made by younger artists (like Bhattacharya and Singh) to resist continual attempts of cultural usurpation, I think, the ‘moment’ of another (Indian) avant-garde upheaval is now; in fact, it has already dawned.

References

1.

Austin, John L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

2.

Bhattacharya, Kokila. n.d.. Eyes Wide Shut. Self published

3.

Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge.

4.

Chidgey, Red. 2012. Hand-Made Memories: Remediating Cultural Memory in DIY Feminist Networks. In Feminist Media Participatory Spaces, Networks and Cultural Citizenship, ed. Elke Zobl and Ricarda Drüeke, 87–98. Transcript: Verlag, Bielefeld.

5.

Chute, Hillary L. 2010. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia University Press.

6.

Derrida, Jacques. 1982. Margins of Philosophy, trans. and. ed. Alan Bass. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press.

7.

Gilles, Deleuze, and Felíx Guattari. 1986. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. and ed. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

8.

Hirsch, Marianne. 2012. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press.

9.

Kapur, Geeta. 2000. When was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India. New Delhi: Tulika Books.

10.

Mufti, Aamir R. 2023. The Grannies of Shaheen Bagh: Hindutva Power and the Poetics of Dissent in Contemporary India. boundary 2 50(1):165–205. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1215/​01903659-10192159

11.

Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries. n.d.. Remember. In Oxford Learner’s Dictionary. Retrieved January 5, 2024, from https://​www.​oxfordlearnersdi​ctionaries.​com/​definition/​english/​remember.

12.

Plate, Liedeke, and Anneke Smelik. 2013. Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture. New York: Routledge.

13.

Singh, Prarthna. 2022. Har Shaam Shaheen Bagh. Mumbai: Bombay Duck Design.

Footnotes

1

On 2–3 December, 1984, more than 40 tons of methyl isocyanate gas leaked from a pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, killing thousands of people that night and severely maiming the local residents of the city including its future generations. The factory was owned by the Union Carbide Corporation (UCC) of the United States. The gas leak is (in)famously known as the Bhopal Gas Disaster or alternatively the Bhopal Gas Tragedy.

2

Riot Grrl is an underground feminist punk movement that began during the early 1990s within the United States in Olympia, Washington, that combines feminism, punk music and politics. It is often associated with third-wave feminism.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2025

S. Malhotra et al. (eds.)Trauma and Memory Studies: Responses from India and Beyondhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-6374-3_10

10. Maps of Coffee: Diasporas of Trauma in Selected Poems of Mahmoud Darwish

Huzaifa Pandit1  

(1)

Government Degree College Pampore, Pampore, India

Huzaifa Pandit

Email: huzu84@gmail.com

Abstract

A close reading of selected exilic poems of Mahmoud Darwish like ‘As Fate Would Have It’ and ‘Four Personal Addresses’ from the collection ‘Unfortunately it was Paradise’ translated and edited by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forche (2003) reveals that the poems open up a new paradigm of diasporic subjectivities, indelibly marked by trauma. Drawing on a detailed analysis of liminal and fragmented geographies like the hotel, hospital, refugee camp and railway station constructed by the poems, the chapter maps the extraordinary routes and roots of Palestinian lived diasporic experience. In turn, this chronicle transforms writing into a counter-discourse against ‘memoricide’ in subjugated populations, especially the Palestinians. Unlike poetry written by diasporas of privilege, who immigrate for better economic and employment opportunities, the depiction of diasporas of the marginalised engages with their alienation in addition to their trauma and dismemberment. This paradigm of forced diaspora dwells on the condition of exile not from the privileged outposts of hybridity and assimilation, but rather from the routine of fragmentation and exclusion.

A close reading of selected exilic poems of Mahmoud Darwish like ‘As Fate Would Have It’ and ‘Four Personal Addresses’ from the collection ‘Unfortunately it was Paradise’ translated and edited by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forche [3] reveals that the poems open up a new paradigm of diasporic subjectivities, indelibly marked by trauma. Drawing on a detailed analysis of liminal and fragmented geographies like the hotel, hospital, refugee camp and railway station constructed by the poems, the chapter maps the extraordinary routes and roots of Palestinian lived diasporic experience. In turn, this chronicle transforms writing into a counter-discourse against ‘memoricide’ in subjugated populations, especially the Palestinians. Unlike poetry written by diasporas of privilege, who immigrate for better economic and employment opportunities, the depiction of diasporas of the marginalised engages with their alienation in addition to their trauma and dismemberment. This paradigm of forced diaspora dwells on the condition of exile not from the privileged outposts of hybridity and assimilation, but rather from the routine of fragmentation and exclusion.

A revised definition of Resistance Poetry is therefore engendered: one which does not act as a mere auxiliary to armed responses. Rather, Darwish’s poetics opens up the varied possibilities offered by the changing landscape of memory and resistance in subjugated populations. This multifaceted nature of resistance resists the linear and monolithic representations of subjugated people, and draws attention to their historical complexity, highlighting the need to engage with these historical specificities rather than generic assumptions.

We have a country of words.

Speak, speak, so we may know the end of this travel

—Darwish

[3, p. 11]

Memoricide and Domicide: Politics and Praxis

In a career spanning more than forty years that produced more than thirty books of poetry and eight books of prose, the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish obsessed around a single theme: the erasure of Palestinian land, history and tradition occasioned by the ravages of Israeli settler colonialism. It is important to reiterate here that Israeli settler colonialism adopts a two-pronged approach to subdue the Palestinian people and their right to exist: (a) a coercive military apparatus that employs exclusion, assassination, injury, imprisonment and penalisation to subdue the people, in addition to wanton destruction of homes and land, best manifested in the Nakba—the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. An estimated 711,000 people were displaced following the widespread destruction and complete obliteration of at least 418 rural villages [7, p. 328]. (b) by intervening in the symbolic realm and creation of a narrative of victimhood through the complete monopolisation of Israeli myths, not just around the legitimacy of their own history, but also the appropriation of “all roles available in the conflict, the roles of the criminal and the judge, of the murderer and the mourner, of the perpetrator and the victim. This leaves no role for the Palestinians who are thus, by force, eliminated from the historical scene” [1, p. 284]. Not only is the Palestinian land emptied of all Palestinian traces, but also new narratives are evolved simultaneously in its wake that recreate the ‘erased’ Jewish character of the land. One of the most succinct articulations of this image of a ‘land without people’ was offered by the former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir (1969–1974), who claimed in an interview: “It is not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as Palestinian people, and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist” (Meir 1969). This erasure of Palestinian identity, land and memory has been one of the recurrent features of Israeli strategy to consolidate its control over and expand into Palestinian territory. Viewed in this light, Palestine offers a perfect example to illustrate the concurrent operation of ‘domicide’ and ‘memoricide’.

The two terms were coined by John Douglas Porteous, and Sandra Eileen Smith in their book Domicide: The Global Destruction of Home. They define Domicide and Memoricide as two distinct terms, although they can be and are often interlinked. Domicide is “the deliberate destruction of home that causes suffering to its inhabitants” while ‘Memoricide’ “concerns deliberate attempts to expunge human memory, chiefly through the destruction of memory’s physical prop, the cultural landscape” [12, p. IX]. Both terms are crucial to understanding the poetry of Darwish, as he employs poetry as a pointed shrapnel of possibility and time to counter the erasure of home. Poetry manifests best the sole route left open to the Palestinian in order to tackle the existential problem of erasure: “to become more Palestinian until homeland and liberty, a Palestinian till death, for he has no other choice” [3, p. 139]. Till 1971, this belongingness manifested itself in varied forms like poetry of anger, nostalgia and messianic restoration. Fabled poems like “Identity Card” or “I long for my mother’s coffee” illustrate this tilt, while poems like “A soldier dreams of White Lilies” exemplifies the experiment to demystify and humanise the adversary. Yet another discursive shift in Darwish’s poetry occurs post his self-imposed exile to Cairo first in 1971 and then to Beirut in 1973. The change from living in occupied land, to living in exile heralded a paradigmatic shift in his work. Hamdi notes that,

As the Palestinian tragedy deepened, the emphasis on geography in isolation was no longer sufficient to address this dilemma (of separating his identity from the landscape of Palestine), especially as the poet himself was repeatedly forced to leave a certain place or location and the idea of Palestine as a national entity with an identity was in danger of being erased. Thus, Darwish’s later poetry represents his project of constructing/producing different spaces that would challenge the existing colonial construct, and at the same time, construct a new Palestinian identity within a recognised place or geography. [6, p. 242]

This discursive shift in Darwish’s poetry, therefore, is of particular interest since it illuminates an aesthetic of reterritorialisation that seeks not to restore or reverse, but employ loss, dispersal and dispersion to counter originary narratives. In doing so the poems seek to subvert the coherence and unity of apriorist ideological prisms, and so escape total reading, in turn visibilising the enormity of loss, trauma and erasure.

Poetry, Resistance and Memory

The poem: ‘As Fate Would Have It’ dedicated to the Palestinian poet Rashed Hussein is a perfect illustration of this aesthetic. As an elegy for Hussein, who died in a fire in his apartment at New York, the poem metamorphoses into an elegy for Palestine, the appropriation and destruction of Palestinian homes and lives, as well as the consignment of those losses to a past sealed by the dual process of delegitimising its memory, and concentrating all the colonial, juridical and military apparatus of the coloniser to enforce this writ of erasure. The poem begins with two exiled Palestinians meeting in faraway Fifth Avenue New York:

On Fifth Avenue he greeted me and burst into tears. He leaned against a wall of glass

... New York is without willows.

He made me cry, and water returned to its rivers.

We had coffee, and too soon went separate ways

[3, p. 169]

A distinction is offered between the homeland and the metropolitan, whose walls of transparent glass blur the distinction between in and out, indicating a collapse of temporality and chronology, and the pathological dissociation suffered by the exilic Palestinians. The traumatic liminality represented by elliptic omission underscores not just the impersonality and dreariness of exile, but also indicates an impossibility of bereavement, as their mutual loss defies both vocabulary and closure in absence of the referent—the Palestinian land subject to loss of land and memory. As Luckhurst observes tersely “Trauma issues a challenge to the capacities of narrative knowledge. In its shock impact trauma is anti-narrative” [9, p. 108]. The absence of willows, a reminder of home, serves to illustrate this impossibility. While the act of crying is hinted to be cathartic and restorative (since both are scarred by trauma of domicide, their collective mourning makes present the erased land) by the image of water returning to rivers and the drinking of coffee. Sibilio points out that “Coffee is a pervasive trope in Mahmoùd Darwish as a constellated image in his charged poetic landscape. This symbol is a spatial and identity marker…. (and marks a) hermeneutical movement from a mere daily personal habit to a cultural claim of memory” [4, p. 104]. The parting of the two after coffee, therefore, indicates a non-sequitur: after the brief interlude, homeland vanishes again as the two part. The brevity of this restoration indicated by the phrase: too soon, only serves as a sharp reminder of the original exile. Exile thus, is doubly traumatic, since home is perpetually sought to be visibilised, yet the task is perpetually doomed to fail. A dulling routine of recollection, and lamentation sets in, as time stands standstill. “For Twenty years I have known him to be forty”, Darwish reminisces, pointing out that for the Palestinian in exile, memory is a catalogue of events, and objects ever frozen in memory, as Rashed’s poems devoted “a week for the homeland, a day for the invaders/and a time for my mother to sigh” [3, p. 169]. In those poems read over twenty years, he re-lived his trauma in an endless cycle seeking to remedy the “original wound”—the loss of Palestinian land, memory, culture and way of living:

We were heartbroken by the black eyes of the assailant.

We fought and were killed, then we fought again

[3, pp. 169–170].

Darwish conflates the second person singular ‘he’ with first person plural ‘we’, to indicate the blurring of the two. Subsequently, Rashed’s testimony is Palestine’s testimony: Palestine lives in a state of perpetual exile from itself in a state of collected trauma, which as Erikson defines emanates from:

the gradual realisation that the community no longer exists as an effective source of support and that an important part of self has disappeared… “I” continue to exist, though damaged and maybe even permanently changed. “You” continue to exist, though distant and hard to relate to. But “we” no longer exist as a connected pair of linked cells in a larger communal body. [5, p. 187]

In effect then, the parting occurs too soon, as the two exiles depict the rupture of community and kinship, since the traumatic loss of memory, land and identity has virtually rendered them strangers to each other, joined only by mourning for an inexpressible and unassimilated injury. Exile exists then at multiple levels: from the land, from expression, coherence and more importantly from a communality identity itself. In other words, the only bond that exists between the Palestinians is the bond of trauma and loss, all other bonds having been consumed by it. Consequently, the poem commences with just a formulaic greeting, followed by profuse weeping, which as pointed out earlier is a restorative act (albeit brief). In this state of dissociation, Rashed seeks a new idiom, a new language to express the impossibility of moving forward, when the past is not only yet to be established, but also continuously effaced:

From café to café, in search of another language to tell the difference between memory and hell

   Searching for my original limbs,

…..

No. It is not my time yet

[3, pp. 172–173].

The café emerges as a liminal space, where exile is re-lived, an absolute and total ‘non-place’ that articulates the fundamental condition of homelessness and placelessness. Lost and unnoticed in the crowd of cafés, the Palestinian seeks his “original limbs”, a way out of the maze of mutilation, and erasure: an absolute inability to resist and reverse this effacement. Subsequently the café evolves as a lieux de mémoire or ‘site of memory’ as postulated by Pierre Nora who views them as sites “where memory crystallises and secretes itself” and therefore emerge as “meaningful entities of a real or imagined kind, which have become the symbolic elements of a given community as a result of the human will or the effect of time” [11, pp. 2, 14]. Nora contrasts memory with history arguing that histories are retrospective reconstructions of memory, compelled by nationalist impulses to map the past as a continuous and chronological occurrence that culminates in the present, which is necessarily viewed as distinct and peculiar from others similarly situated. Memory on the other hand is dynamic and liminal as it is perpetually “open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived” [11, p. 8]. The performance and mourning of Palestinian memory transforms the café into a sacralised landscape of collective memory, which has been defined precisely by Peter Novick as expressing “some eternal or essential truth about the group – usually tragic. A memory, once established, comes to define that eternal truth, and along with an eternal identity, for the members of the group” [19, p. 126]. The café must be examined particularly in this context, since it exists as a transient and paradoxical monument of Palestinian memory: a vanished landscape, culture and identity is visibilised here, yet its fleetingness also acknowledges the failure of both the imagining of a total identity and possibility of imagining it. Displaced and fragmented by the complete loss of land and memory, the Palestinian identity exists only as a nomadic and fractured collage of traumatic memories, which defy any coherent narration since both vocabulary and its referents as well as the legitimacy of these referents has been appropriated by the occupier.

The abandonment of the ode and elusive nature of Jaffa, an ancient Levantine port city now part of Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel, alludes to this traumatic incoherence. The ode is another cultural marker employed by Darwish to establish Palestinian historicity and its rootedness in the Arabo-Islamic history. The importance of poetry in shaping the history of Arabs has been well chronicled. Anir notes:

Until the second half of the twentieth century, poetry was the principal channel of literary creativity and served as the chronicle and public register of the Arabas (al-shi’rd diwan al-Arab) recording their very appearance on the stage of history. No other genre could challenge the supremacy of poetry in the field of belles-lettres across more than 1500 years of literary history. [17, p. 23]

The ode’s abandoning alludes to not just a disjunction with the past, where the land and its identity existed as linked to an ancient heritage, but also alludes to the crisis of contemporary memorialisation. Since Nakba is indistinguishable from the perpetual domicide and memoricide of the present, the Palestinian subject is confronted by an impossibility of memorialisation. Memorialisation demands retrospectivity, even as it is shaped by contemporary attitudes and contexts. However, some degree of distancing from the past is essential for performing it. Consequently, Palestine is stuck in a routine of loss and mourning, ever stuck in the vanished past with no possibility of future. Rashed voices this indefinite deferment of the law of return against forcible dispossession and disenfranchisement and containment:

I don’t dream of anything now.

……

To desire, or to vanish.

No. It is not my time yet.

[3, p. 173]

The relationship of space to power and practises of memory recurs again in the poem ‘Four Personal Addresses’ comprising four smaller prose poems. The addresses outlined gestures towards the multiplicities of loss mediated through a poetic statement that iterates loss, mapping vectors of a movement into the inside rather than the outside. The first poem ‘One Square Meter of Prison’ begins with an investigation into movement and illumination (of the operation of memory):

It is the door and beyond it is the paradise of the heart. Our things – and everything is ours – are interchangeable……My prison cell accepts no light except into myself. [3, p. 179]

As a symbol of transition between two spaces, the door embodies a duality by marking the departure from one space, and the occupation of another space. As Siegert points out, “Doors are architectural media as an elementary cultural technique because they process the guiding difference of architecture, the difference between inside and outside. They simultaneously thematise this distinction, and thereby establish a system that is made of the operations of opening and closing”… The door brings to the fore the unity of the difference of inside and outside in that “it presents the possibility of closing against the possibility of opening and keeps both possibilities present” [16, pp. 7–9]. This paradoxical unity is especially poignant, since the opening places the ‘door’ as an object of an empty subject in the first clause, thereby complicating the apparently simple assessment of the prison as leading outside to restoration and redemption—an easy transition from dystopia to utopia. Rather, the emphasis forces the reader to question the direction in which paradise lies: inside or outside the prison? The poem offers no clue. Rather, it complicates the notion of paradise. Not only is paradise an emotive state ‘inside’ the prisoner, but also its protean nature also excludes it from the necessity of any external locus of belongingness. This transcendence permits it further to exceed temporal limits, and view history as a continuum that permits the Palestinian to insert himself as metonymic with a larger history. In turn this metonymy subverts the exclusionary narrative that erases his tradition from a ‘Jewish’ land: “And the door is a door, the door of metonymy, the door of legend” [3, p. 179]. Drawing from the legend permits the poem to evoke images of fertility and life associated with home, and thus absent home is not only both reconstructed but also relived in:

A door to keep September gentle. A door that invites fields to begin their wheat. The door has no door, yet I can go into my outside and love both what I see and what I don’t see. [3, p. 179]

The restoration of the practise of cultivation is, simultaneously, a reaffirmation of the dignity of Palestinian tradition, and an elegy for its gradual extinction. Tom Selwyn alludes points out that the extinction of Palestinian autonomy and self-resilience was brought about by a carefully devised two prong strategy of containment and mobility:

In the two decades after 1967, the combination of open borders and military occupation by a developed country of an undeveloped country led to a very one-sided entwinement of the two entities. The inhabitants of the Territories were, at once, a pool of cheap labour, the second largest market for Israeli goods, and a source of resources. By 1987 about 120,000–180,000 workers commuted daily or weekly to employment in Israel. This represents between one- and two-thirds of the Palestinian labour force; movement of goods and people was on strictly unequal terms, with Palestinian independence and control of resources strictly curtailed. Flows across the borders served Israeli purposes as the Territories grew increasingly dependent on the Israeli economy. [15, p. 233]

The “invitation to fields to begin their wheat” is a rueful acknowledgement of this Palestinian dependence upon Israel for sustenance, which is part of the larger Palestinian experience of imprisonment and isolation. Concurrently, it manifests a strong yearning to transgress these prohibitive structures through nostalgia for an idyllic past of autonomy. As with his earlier poems, nature- specifically agriculture, takes on romantic connotations as an instrument of liberation and redemption. However, unlike earlier poems this optimism is qualified: “I wrote ten poems to eulogize my freedom, here and there…. I also wrote twenty satirical poems about the place in which we have no place” [3, p. 179]. The shift from earlier elegy to satire for illuminating the experience of dispossession is revealing since it poses a question on the performative aspect of poetry: Is poetry a performance of commemoration, and bereavement or a performance of deconstructing homogeneities of nationhood? It is a question that is constantly at the centre of Darwish’s poetics after he has outgrown his earlier phase. Freedom, therefore, is redefined not a reclamation of the lost land but “to enlarge my prison cell, and carry on my song of the door” [3, p. 179]. The aim and stated mission of the artist is a reconfiguration of the creative process, liberated from an obsessive chronicle of victimhood.

The second poem ‘A Seat on a Train’ furthers this theme of transition by being set in a train which is a liminal space existing in both presence and absence. The train seat is a paradoxical space: static in train space, yet in motion with respect to world space. It inscribes the landscape with bodies of travellers, flowing in and out of spaces creating a liminal and multilocal matrix of mobility. It is, therefore, an apt metaphor to describe transformed subjecthood that transcends stagnant spaces of occupation to re-create home in highly mobile textual spaces. The poem employs this transformative gaze to create a new poetics of a cultural memory of exile, foregrounding and articulating it to convey the impossibility of Palestinian existence. The presence of objects and agents of intimacy—scarves, lovers, and roses serves as a reminder of their inaccessibility: Scarves that don’t belong to us. Lovers at the last minute…. Roses that deceive a heart in search of tenderness. Treacherous tears on the Platform…. Lanterns, but not for us, to see our love waiting in the smoke [3, p. 180]. These objects and agents are the spectres of disconnection and removal, marking off the Palestinian as a residue whose form is affirmed by a resolute dismissal: the refuse and refuse-d, travelling “in search of nothing”, shut off from meaning and meaningfulness: “Windows, but not for us, to exchange greetings in every language” [3, p. 180]. Thus detached, the poem turns to history to seek answers: “Was the earth any clearer when we rode the horses of past?”, only to find that history is a history of oppression and repression, a disruption of settled stories “Where are the maidens of the songs? And when in us are the songs of nature?” [3, p. 180]. Alienated from the past, a golden age, the yardstick against which tragedy of fall is marked, the poem seeks only to “achieve the rightness of butterflies” [3, p. 180]. Exiled from even the past, the diasporic Palestinian seeks to pollinate textual spaces with the same disinterested and vagrant desire as of a butterfly. The poem becomes its own refuge, its own sanctuary as it references not a past or future, but the moment of its occurrence. In a close echo of Ghalib: I stand there, where even to me/news of me doesn’t reach me,¹ the traveller claims “I am distant even from my own distance. How distant then is Love?” [3, p. 180]. Freed from his own subjectivity, the poem becomes a continuous and unending quest that seeks no end—“We travel in search of nothing”, and thus locates itself not only as a questioning of reality, but also a questioning of the poem itself. Where after all must a poem reach if it travels in search of nothing? It becomes an echo, a shadow of movement that flits across texts, which can neither be plotted nor mapped, nor replicated: “We cannot become an echo twice” [3, p. 180]. Palestine, consequently, is refashioned as a language, rather than remaining restricted to the subject of a poem. Rather than viewing loss in relation to a physical space, this poem addresses the loss in relation to language and form by interrupting the underlying frame of sense and legibility in language, especially poetic language.

The third poem ‘An Intensive Care Room’ is set in a hospital room, perhaps during one of Darwish’s numerous hospitalisations due to a weak heart. The poem starts in a vertigo: “When the earth presses against me, the wind spins me around” [3, p. 180]. Notably, the vertigo is worded in present simple tense, indicating a routine of trauma, claustrophobia and dispersion. As the ICU is warded off as a separate space of extreme criticality and precarity, its substitution as a personal address is an allusion to the precarity of Palestinian existence that is sought to be reverted to an older, pre-linguistic space of trauma through a poetics of pain. Scarry writes:

Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unshareability, and it ensures this unshareability in part through its resistance to language Prolonged pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned. [14, p. 4]

The poem draws precisely on this anterior state, to explore the Palestinian anguish at entrapment and repeated failure to transcend it:

I have to fly, to bridle the wind, but I am a human being.

My sweat is like falling snow, so picture my grave in the

palm of my hand. I was, little by little, tossed into bed, I threw up and lost consciousness for a while, and then I died.

[3, p. 181]

Darwish foreshadows a style here, he was to master later: of narration as a species of out-of-body experience effected by pain and trauma—placing the speaker outside his body, observing himself and the world with a lyrical detachment. The vertiginous description of profuse sweat, fainting and loss of consciousness is constitutive of an arc from exteriority to interiority. Pain—both emotive and physical causes a slippage of language, rendering representation impossible and further rejecting assimilation into coherent narratives of temporality/spatiality. Subsequently, subjectivity is detached from external realities, becoming consumed by and eventually indistinguishable from a static desire, indicating death of the social self that responds to a (nationalistic) identity: “At the gate of that hurried death, I called out: I love you, may I enter death in your feet? Before and after death I loved you, and between I saw nothing but my mother's face” [3, p. 181].

The repetition of the trope of conflation of beloved and mother maps further the evolution of desire. The image of mother symbolises a domesticity, a longing for intimacy, and an unfulfilled nostalgia for a palliative past. Darwish himself explained the symbol of mother thus:

Fathers were many throughout history, but mother is one. The mother possesses a stable identity whereas fathers change. The land in which I was born is, as is well known, a meeting place of invaders, prophets, missions, civilisations, and cultures. But all of those passed away sooner or later. So that the father was not one, eternal and constant. That is why culturally we relate to the land, to the mother. (Qtd in [8, p. 85]

That the object of desire is static throughout the evolution of poetic process, consequently indicates that the primary condition for the existence of desire is the object. Desire, therefore, is integral to identify and map the object—the Palestinian nation, and reverse the erasure of the nation. In desire, the nation remains constant and steadfast, even as it shrinks onto the ground. Since, desire is established now as irrevocable, the nation is insulated from erasure, and thus reclaimed. The paragraph ends here, indicating this culmination. Blank, empty space follows, signifying that the recovery is of ‘empty’ value, restricted only to the text rather than reality. Further, the blank line suggests death of any other possibility, of the annihilation of potentialities and possibilities.

This realisation, accordingly, mourns this loss and lack as this realisation sinks in, and so allows no consolation. Disappointed and pained, the poem turns back to the sanctuary of desire, almost in a self-parodic mode, reiterating it, as no other vocabulary for expressing loss exists: “It’s the heart, set loose for a while, that has returned. We still have considerable time, so hold out with me until a hoopoe from the Queen of Sheba’s land comes to you” [3, p. 181].

The return of the heart is illustrative as it is synonymous with the self. It indicates that the self, and perception of self is an emotive state, a state of desiring, and hence desire evolves as a space of restoration. The inquiry about the heart in which the poetic subject was struck appears to suggest that not only is desire the marker of corporeal, but also of temporality; in effect concluding that desire is the only means to comprehend existence. At the same time, the poem ruminates on the burden of such desire. Desire rides on the neighing horses of longing and expectation, galloping in search of the object of longing. But inevitably, the horses sink in the morasses of reality, as the expectant-self crashes down on hard grounds of heartbreak. The heart is admonished for grieving so easily, and advised to hold on.

Alluding to the Quranic tale of Solomon and his conquest of the fabled land of Sheba, a note of optimism creeps into the poem: the hoopoe who bore the news of the fabled land to Solomon is awaited. The exiled people live in the dream of a promised land, and someday the promise will be realised. The heart must steady, for the exiled have undertaken arduous journeys to realise their hope: “We mailed letters. We crossed thirty seas and sixty coasts and yet we still have time to wander” [3, p. 181]. That the exiled still have time to wander implies that their journey is not destined yet to end, as the desire is too great to be annihilated: “O heart, how could you fool a horse who loves the wind? Take your time until we finish this last embrace and fall to the earth in prayer” [3, p. 181]. This unbridled optimism, however, doesn’t last long. The poem immediately qualifies it with a sense of disbelief, suggesting it might just be another trick pulled by the deluded heart: “Take your time that I may know whether you are my heart or her voice when she cried out: Take me” [3, p. 181]. Besides the obvious doubts on the veracity of emancipation, the conclusion also demolishes the notion of a temporal order—past, present and future exist in an anarchic simultaneity, a timelessness. This works both ways: on one hand, it depicts the unchanging nature of the Palestinian ordeals and tragedy; on the other hand, it also disrupts reciprocal casualties, and subverts past historical legacies that have perpetuated existing power structures.

The fourth address provided by the poem is “A room in a hotel” which employs erotic interactions in transitory spaces as a metaphor for practices of nation-making in exile. The hotel too is a transit space and hence articulates a peculiar spatiality. It offers the experience of home, yet is manifestly distinct from home, its very existence relying on the customer being away from/unable to access home. Further, while the hotel is subjected to the same laws and mores that govern social relations at home, yet it also offers a relative anonymity that permits guests to disappear into it, and be freed from normal social conventions. The Hotel, therefore, resembles the ICU since it is a part of a landscape while simultaneously being marked off from it. However, it is marked off not by priority, but by excess and freedom from restraint, and thus performs subversive desire. Moreover, as Soja points out the hotel space decentresers and fragments through its anonymity, and the only way to survive in the vastness of hostels is to “submit to forms of overseeing social control, authority, often invisible by the way because part of being lost is that even when you are willing to submit to authority you can’t find it” [18]. The hotel is, therefore, an apt address for exploration of Palestinian subjectivity, since it embodies the contradictions and disembodiments that characterise the exilic subject.

Alluding to this fragmentation, the poem commences: “Peace be unto love when it comes, when it dies and changes lovers in hotels. Does it have anything to lose?” [3, p. 182]. Love is posited as not a singular, monogamous and static attachment, rather a fluid, promiscuous and dynamic desire articulated in a transitory space. Blessing this queering of the hallowed notion of love indicates the poem is ready to muddle the sacred space of desiring a ‘single-origin’ nation, and mongrelise it by the profane ideas of ‘multiple-origins. This self-assured fragmentation itself insures against loss, as loss is nothing but dispersion, and hence can afford to dismiss loss: “Does it have anything to lose?”. Narratives of cultural production, therefore, do not require the intimate space of home, rather the hotel space can be appropriated to serve its ends: “We’ll drink the evening coffee in the garden. We'll tell stories of exile in the night” [3, p. 182]. At the same time, the poem is aware of its limitations placing little trust in the authenticity of narratives created thus: “Then we’ll go to a room-two strangers searching for a night of compassion and so on and so forth.²” [3, p. 182]. Even after coffee has been drunk, and stories of exile told all night, the two remain strangers searching for compassion and intimacy.

The poem concedes the cultural narratives engendered can only be poor substitutes for the original narratives of belonging, and this quest for ‘compassion’ only partly hides the perpetuity of loss. The hotel, therefore, presents not just as a sanctuary from loss, but also reiterates it, embodying both motions at the same time. The possibility of it being a place of threat and anxiety is alluded to when the poem wonders: “How was it that we put faith in our bodies in those hotels? How could we depend on our secrets in those hotels?” [3, p. 182].

Transitory spaces, which are spaces of exile, only permit possibilities of fleeting, unsecure and unfulfilling relationships as cover for absence, which only serve, paradoxically, to accentuate absence. Hotels appear first to embody spaces of motion from points of everlasting departure to points of negotiated arrival. Yet again, however, this motion ends up as an illusion. It heralds no sense of flux and mobility, no rescue from dreariness of exilic existence as the interaction turns out to be just another paradigm of a betrayal, and departure. This banality of circumstance is brought out in ironic detail as memories get blurred, and moments melt into each other, the difference of time and place ceases to exist, and everything exists in a depressing steady monochrome, and monotone: We say only what transient lovers also said a while ago. …. We’ll follow the same steps, so that others may come and follow the same steps and so on and so forth [3, p. 182].

The last line clearly lays down that this cyclic meeting and departure, hope and dejection, mobility and stagnation, life and lifelessness is the only paradigm available for future times for the Palestinian collective. The exilic existence is a paradox that betrays its own resolution, absence of home is necessary to present it, as it exists nowhere but in memory. Exiled, and separated from their traditions and home, the ‘Four Personal addresses’ present a new paradigm of violence under occupation, which doesn’t manifest itself as an event or outcome, rather a processual transition, an unfolding always in motion, always incomplete.

It can be concluded, therefore, that the exilic poems of Darwish demonstrate new frontiers in the diasporic tradition. Unlike poetry written by diasporas of privilege, which immigrate for better economic and employment opportunities, diasporas of marginalised depict not only the alienation of migrants, but also their trauma and dismemberment. This paradigm of forced diaspora dwells on the condition of exile not from the privileged outposts of hybridity and assimilation, rather from the routine of fragmentation and exclusion. In its performance of the traumatised subjectivities, it maps the extraordinary violence of routine and normalisation of abnormal, and thus serves as a repository of the voices that resist the sustained erasure by occupation and subjugation. Diasporic poetry becomes, then, a species of Resistance Poetry. This shift is important because it demonstrates that the act of writing poetry of dissent is not a simple, linear act but a multifaceted process that engages with, and in turn determines the changing landscape of memory and resistance in subjugated populations. This multifaceted nature of resistance resists the linear and hegemonic representations of subjugated people, and draws attention to their historical complexity, and highlights the need to engage with these historical specificities rather than generic assumptions.

References

1.

Celik, Ipek Azime. 2008. Alternative History, Expanding Identity: Myths Reconsidered in Mahmoud Darwish’s Poetry. In Exile’s Poet: Critical Essays, ed. Mahmoud Darwish, 273–292. Massachusetts: Olive Branch Press.

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Darraj, Faysal. 2008. Transfigurations in the Image of Palestine in the Poetry of Mahmoud Darwish. In Mahmoud Darwish, Exile's Poet: Critical Essays, eds. Hala Khamas Nassar, and Najat Rahman, 57–78. Massachusetts: Olive Branch Press.

3.

Darwish, Mahmoud. 2003. Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems. Trans. Munir Akash, and Caroline Forche. California: University of California Press

4.

Darwish, Mahmoud and Simone Sibilio. 2015. The Aroma of The Land. Maḥmūd Darwīsh's Geopoetics of Coffee. Quaderni di Studi Arabi, Quaderni Di Studi Arabi, 10: 103–124. http://​www.​jstor.​org/​stable/​44779923

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Erikson, Kai. 1991. Notes on Trauma and Community. American Imago 48 (4): 455–472.

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Hamdi, Tahrir. 2017. Darwish's Geography: Space, Place and Identity Under Construction. Interventions 19 (2): 238–257. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1080/​1369801X.​2016.​1142884

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Harker, Christopher. 2009. Spacing Palestine through the home. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 34 (3): 320–332. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1111/​j.​1475-5661.​2009.​00352.​x.Crossref

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Jibran, Sulaiman. 2006. The Image of the Father in the Poetry of Mahmoud Darwish. In Mahmiud Darwish: Exile's Poet, ed. Nassar, and N. Rahman, 79–94. Massachusetts: Olive Branch Press.

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Luckhurst, Roger. 2008. The Trauma Question. New York: Routledge.

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Mattawa, Khaled. 2014. Mahmoud Darwish—The Poet’s Art and His Nation. New York: Syracruse University Press.

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Nora, Pierre. 1989. Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire. Representations 26 (Spring): 7–24.

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Porteous, Douglas, and Sandra E. Smith. 2001. Domicide: The Global Destruction of Home. London: McGill-Queen’s Press.

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Rahman, Najat. 2008. Threatened Longing and Perpetual Search: The Writing of Home in the Poetry of Mahmoud Darwish. In Mahmoud Darwish, Exile's Poet: Critical Essays, eds. Hala Khamas Nassar, and Najat Rehman, 41–56. Massachusetts: Olive Branch Press.

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Scarry, Elaine. 1987. The Body in Pain. London: Oxford University Press.

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Selwyn, Tom. 2001. Landscapes of Separation: Reflections on the Symbolism of By-pass Roads in Palestine. In Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile and Place, ed. Barabar Bender and Margot Winer, 225–240. Oxford: Berg.

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Siegert, Bernhard. 2012. Doors: On the Materiality of the Symbolic. Grey Room 47 (Spring): 6–23.

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Snir, Ruven. 2008. “Other Barbarians Will Come”: Intertextuality, Meta-Poetry, and Meta-myth in Mahmoud Darwish’s Poetry. In Mahmoud Darwish: Exile’s Poet, ed. Hala Khamas and Najat Rehman, 123–166. Massachusetts: Olive Branch Press.

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Soja, Edward. 2016. Spatializing the Post-Modern City: Los Angeles. Zane Wubbena, PhD, October 12. https://​zanewubbena.​com/​2016/​10/​12/​a-spatial-analysis-of-the-post-modern-city/​.

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Wertsch, James V. 2009. Collective Memory. In Memory in Mind and Culture, ed. Pascal Boyer and James V. Wertsch, 117–138. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Footnotes

1

Ham vahāñ haiñ jahāñ se ham ko bhī kuchh hamārī ḳhabar nahīñ aatī (Ghalib 31).

2

Italics for emphasis mine.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2025

S. Malhotra et al. (eds.)Trauma and Memory Studies: Responses from India and Beyondhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-6374-3_11

11. Storytelling as Protest: Counter-Narratives from Kenya in Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s Dust

Pratishtha Pandey1  

(1)

Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai, India

Pratishtha Pandey

Email: pratishthapandey25@gmail.com

Abstract

The beginning of Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s novel Dust (2014) in the wake of two new acts of violence plunging the Oganda household into disarray coincides with events leading to the post-election atrocities in Kenya in 2007 and raises a very crucial question central to the novel: how does forgiveness take place when the wrongdoings are continuous and ubiquitous? This chapter explores the ways in which contemporary storytelling acts as a protest against the collective amnesia of the past of those subjects who have adopted silence as an escape mechanism to survive tumultuous postcolonial realities. At the same time, it establishes the postcolonial imagination as a site of healing which uses the regenerative power of memory to effectively deal with trauma in reticent individuals. The novel quickly establishes that the two instances of violence are not isolated; rather, they echo multiple registers of disorienting effects due to which the past becomes difficult to recollect in everyday life. The chapter sheds light on the diverse trajectory of storytelling in Dust that resists the tendency of viewing traumatic events as homogenised, singular and a matter of the past. It not only argues that neo-colonial discourses are complex sites that constantly reinforce trauma in the present but also suggests that the novel’s female characters resist these impulses by refusing to yield to gendered norms of mourning. In this manner, it illustrates the radical potential of the contemporary novel as protest.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), proposed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu in post-Apartheid South Africa in 1996, was arguably conceived as a way forward for a highly polarised country where perpetrators of racial crimes were encouraged to face their surviving victims and confess about their roles in human right violations that took place during the Apartheid era. Like the TRC, other nation states in Africa like Algeria, Angola, Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Liberia, Morocco, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Tunisia, Uganda, and Zimbabwe have also grappled with their divisive post-colonial realities and; put forth their own versions of the TRC. However, social justice initiatives have left behind contentious legacies as they are criticised for blurring the lines between forgiveness as a way to move ahead of the tumultuous past(s), and forgetting to effectively deal with the trauma that continues to affect the nation-states. In “Amnesty or Impunity? A Preliminary Critique of the Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa (TRC)”, Mahmood Mamdani objects to the individualising approach of the TRC which neglected the large-scale racial and ethnic cleansing that took place during the Apartheid attributing faults to individual perpetrators instead of looking at apartheid as a collective problem [10]. Similarly, in discussing the problems with the Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation Commission (TRJC) in Kenya, Gabrielle Lynch in her book Performances of Injustice: The Politics of Truth, Justice and Reconciliation in Kenya (2018) highlights that such commissions were not only ineffective in controlling continuous violence, they also reinforced prejudices amidst continuous political struggle as they resorted to viewing both victims and perpetrators through stereotypical lenses [9]. Such criticisms, as Stef Craps aptly points out in Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds, “shed an interesting light on the debate over the monocultural bias of Trauma Theory in its “classical” mid-1990s formulation” [5]. These formulations that had at first emerged in the 1990s continued to influence the aims that social justice initiatives like the TRC undertook to resolve difficult memories of instances of large-scale violence in order to “shut the door on the past” [15, pp. 91–93]. Apart from providing justice to victims, such state-sponsored initiatives were also sanctioned to resolve past traumas with the intention of moving towards a better future.

In contrast to such a vision, contemporary storytelling aims to act as a protest against the collective amnesia of the past that overlooks the deep-seated violence rooted in unresolved memories of colonial trauma that culminates in the present-day realities as well. This chapter looks at Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s Dust (2014) as an exploration of the complexities of neo-colonial discourses as sites that constantly reinforce historically loaded traumatic experiences in the present, thus challenging tendencies of political frameworks to view traumatic events within neatly demarcated, singularised and homogeneous boundaries. It explores how multiple instances of violence on the surface appear to be isolated; however, they echo multiple registers of disorienting effects emerging from unresolved colonial trauma, due to which the past continues to impact everyday life. It underlines the erased subjectivities of those who have adopted silence as an escape mechanism to survive tumultuous postcolonial realities. At the same time, it establishes the postcolonial imagination as a site of healing instead of depicting totalising narratives borne out of social justice initiatives like the TRC and the TRJC. In its representation of the unique ways in which traumatic experiences affect life in countries with past colonial histories, the novel complicates the understanding that difficult memories are localised in spaces of violence, as colonial trauma is read as a form of generational trauma that travels across spatial and temporal dimensions in its impact.

Storytelling as Protest Against Colonial Trauma

Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor published her first novel Dust in 2014, seven years after the political turmoil that took place after the 2007 election in which Kenya was subjected to political and ethnic division resulting in the loss of many lives. For Owuor this event was not a case of isolated lawlessness, as the crisis was fuelled by what she refers to as “buried histories”. In an interview with Erika Koss of the Image Journal, Owuor refers to Dust as an exploration of Kenya’s “national illusions of exceptionalism” [7]. Dust [13] attempts to chart a historical connection with imperial manipulations that have led to political, social and economic imbalances that are continuous and ever-present. The novel demonstrates how multiple deaths and lives are inextricably linked to the country’s colonial and neocolonial contexts, the sites of which replicate conditions in which every generation finds echoes of violence and trauma with which they struggle to cope. At the same time, Owuor not only implicates the complexities of colonial memories that interrupt the nation-building vision of independent Kenya, but also addresses other instances of oppression that have taken place decades after Kenya’s independence. In this manner, she signals an urgency in healing past wounds as a way of undoing the atmosphere of secrecy on which the vision of political modernity and national heritage is propounded.

In Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (2003), Andreas Huyssen underlines the fraught relationship between the solidified and grounded historical vision of the West. He suggests that this relationship is best represented in the constructions of spaces that shaped the public, social and cultural life in uniquely modern terms, and the elusive and unreliable nature of memory, a subject matter previously confined at the hands of poets and storytellers in their literary depictions. With the memory boom of the late twentieth century, Huyssen points out that the way we view “temporal dimensions of social and cultural life” has gone through a tremendous change in the twenty-first century [8]. The temporal boundaries of modernity, in its Western conception, are therefore noted for the various levels of instability that modernity provides in its constitution and ordering of space that continues in the twenty-first century as well. Amongst other standpoints, the critique of modernity has also coincided with the critique of colonialism. Dipesh Chakravarty in Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference [4] addresses the need for departure of modern historical consciousness from past traditions. Here, the past and the present are seen as universal categories to which Chakravarty objects, as he asks an important question: “If the rise of the modern historical consciousness speaks of the coming of a certain modern and political way of inhabiting the world, I suggest that it also speaks of a very particular relation to the past. This is the desire on the part of the subject of political modernity both to create the past as amenable to objectification and to be at the same time free of this object called ‘history’” [4]. This freedom from the colonial past, in the futures of both sides of colonisation is seen as a discordant task as former colonies continue to be haunted by the contexts of past injustices. As the narrative of liberation fuelled by the hopes of achieving political modernity became prevalent, critics like David Scott addressed the scepticism that ensued decades later. In Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality [14], Scott underlines the temporal shift in value systems of social, cultural and political life, decades after Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (1961). According to Scott, decades after sharing the Fanonian vision of perceiving nation-building as an act of decolonisation, there seemed to be a dislocation at the turn of the century where such a vision started to lose its currency.

In disclosing the flaws of the visions of nation-building, Owuor’s novel begins in the twenty-first century in medias res with a chase scene involving Odidi Oganda, a young man who is on the verge of death and is fighting his chances for survival. Chased by the Kenyan police for being viewed as a transgressor of the law, Odidi is pursued until he is hunted down without being given any opportunity to be arrested and tried. On the surface, it appears that Odidi, the transgressor of law, is a young man who has strayed from the path of living a promising future. However, it is later revealed that Odidi turns to criminality only after being fired from his job as an engineer after refusing to adhere to the company’s billion-dollar corruption scheme. As he is voted out, humiliated and thrown out, Odidi’s battle to seek justice remains incomplete since he is chased by the police after an ex-colleague turns against him. Such an incident of injustice takes place days before the 2007 Kenyan election, after the occurrence of many instances of violence fuelled by the state, police and certain ethnic groups.

In the twenty-first century, the literary depiction of postcolonial experiences would then require two paradoxical efforts. On the one hand, it acknowledges the frantic efforts on the part of newly independent nations to speak the neoliberal and globalised language of contemporary economics that has been brought forth by modernity. Meanwhile, these nations undergo the decolonisation process as postcolonial subjects while new sites of violence continue to emerge in their spaces. For Owuor, it became imperative to lay out relational contexts in which she juxtaposes the horrors of the past with those of the present. Jay Rajiva in Postcolonial Parabola: Literature, Tactility and the Ethics of Representing Trauma (2017) writes, “In many cases, we wonder if political independence truly means that harmful colonial practices are at an end. We question whether forms of neocolonialism are conspiring to sabotage a newly sovereign nation’s self-sufficiency” [12]. Owuor places the blame of sabotage on Kenya’s own people and its systems to show the structural defects that become responsible for the vicious cycle of victimisation in which no one is able to escape the unresolved traumas of their ancestors.

When Odidi is gunned down in Nairobi, a city which is geographically distant from his home “Wuoth Ogik”, the circumstances surrounding his death are unknown to his family. The arrival of Odidi’s body at his house coincides with the arrival of Isaiah Bolton, presumably the son of Hugh Bolton who had built “Wuoth Ogik”, with whom Nyipir and Akai had a complicated relationship. The rest of the novel follows three kinds of investigation. The first involves Ajany Oganda, Odidi’s sister’s quest to “find Odidi” through stories about him, the second involves Isaiah’s quest to look for his ‘father’ Hugh Bolton, which was initiated by Odidi who had reached out to Isaiah shortly before his death, and the third involves the buried confessions of colonial pain that Nyipir and Akai endured throughout their lives. It is also after the culmination in the revelation of these secrets that the novel suggests that healing can begin. Only after the culmination of bringing out such secrets does the novel signal that healing can begin.

As Dipesh Chakravarty critiques modernity’s ambition of trying to achieve a clean break from the past, Owuor too echoes such a critique in her novel as she points out that for formerly colonised spaces, the dream of ahistorical modernity remains impossible to achieve. Through Nyipir and Akai, the head of Oganda household, the novel shows how political modernity as a dream of former colonies inevitably hurts them even after achieving independence. Since his childhood, Nyipir carries within himself painful memories of colonial violence, starting with the loss of his father and older brother to the King’s African Rifles in World War I, where they fought in Burma on behalf of England. Losing his entire family soon after leaves Nyipir to become an orphaned boy. He becomes vulnerable to violence in the hands of his uncle, who he ends up killing in order to protect himself. Eventually, Nyipir ends up working for a grave digger without knowing that he is becoming culpable in aiding the ethnic violence that took place during the Mau Mau uprising. As he discovers the dead body of a man named Aloys Kamau who was “chopped up by seven men in front of his students” by members of the Mau Mau, Nyipir decides to come forward and report information of an attack that was going to happen to a colonial military camp nearby [13]. He is soon enlisted in the colonial army and becomes acquainted with Hugh Bolton, an Englishman. In getting involved in both sides of the conflict, Nyipir—whose aim was to bring back his father and brother—is manipulated and used as a pawn in the country’s secret wars. In his old age, he becomes isolated and distant from the political climate of the country after his dismissal from the military for having a suspicious ethnicity, as he had spent his life in the countryside. However, despite his silence, he is unable to completely turn his back on his past as his son is tragically killed.

Similarly, Akai’s conduct is seen as a problem throughout her childhood resulting in her expulsion from school. Later she becomes Hugh Bolton’s mistress and has a troublesome relationship with him. She also loses her twins which causes her lifelong suffering as well. Eventually, Nyipir, who had become Bolton’s aide, presumably murders Bolton in an attempt to save Akai from being attacked by Hugh. Previously, the skeleton of Hugh Bolton—revealed later to have been murdered by Nyipir—had been discovered by the latter’s children, Odidi and Ajany when they were kids. Even though Akai and Nyipir married each other, they had a tumultuous relationship. When Britain funded an investigation on Hugh Bolton’s whereabouts, a police officer named Ali Dida Hada, camouflaged as a wanderer, comes to Wuoth Ogik and falls in love with Akai. Akai, like Nyipir, is unable to run away from the haunting of her past relationship with Bolton as she falls in love with Ali, the officer in charge of the investigation into Bolton’s whereabouts.

“History”, as Chakravarty mentions in Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, becomes contentious when subjected to specific laws and concretisation. He displays a “concern about how one might think about the past and the future in a nontotalizing manner” [4]. Derek Attridge, in his book, The Singularity of Literature [3] places literature as a useful medium that allows its readers to undertake ethical responsibility through their readings. Considering the notion of ‘singularity’ proposed by Attridge, Owuor’s novel’s ability to bring about “transformative difference” (p. 136) may be read as literature’s ability to make space for otherness. Through Dust, Owuor makes space for the representation of narratives of history and memory that differ significantly from the totalising notion of transitional justice that the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions performed as they tried to consolidate testimonies to portray a complete picture of the nature of injustices.

Mourning Loss: Ritual Performance as Resistance in the Face of Adversity

In Allegory and Ideology (2019), Fredric Jameson looks at the corpus of the “third-world texts” as a unified category in which the individual occupies a losing battle against the ills of its society. He writes, “Third-world texts, even those which are seemingly private and invested with a properly libidinal dynamic—necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory: the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society” [6]. Reducing literature coming from postcolonial spaces to the label of “third-world” writing has attracted a lot of criticism. For Owuor, the “private individual destiny” that Jameson is referring to is neither an allegory of an “embattled situation” nor is it in any sense a story that ends as an individual tragedy against a corrupt society. The prologue of Dust in fact begins with mourning. The mourning is not just for the life that is going to be lost, but also for the life that could have been lived differently while it had lasted. Even though Jameson is quick to dismiss the merit of such kind of adversity in terms of representation, it becomes imperative for Owuor’s narrative to highlight that the aftermath of a tragedy is a site where healing should take place. In “Narrating Trauma in Yvonne Owuor’s Dust” [11], Edgar Nabutanyi underlines the novel’s capability of being amenable to a variety of readings by looking beyond both the political/historical lenses and aesthetic interpretations of the novel. Nabutanyi looks at the novel’s narrative technique in bearing witness to trauma by highlighting the differences of suffering taking place in colonial and post-colonial states. Through his reading of the novel’s narration of trauma from the focal points of two characters, namely, Akai and Nyipir Oganda, Nabutanyi highlights how Kenyan women and men were exploited, manipulated and coerced in colonial and post-colonial spaces. This section further explores the trauma faced by Odidi and Ajany, the children of Akai and Nyipir who struggled to grapple with historical silences on the country’s atrocities, as well as decoding the memories of their parents’ traumatic pasts. At the same time, it allows for a space of mourning, an act that was previously denied to Akai and Nyipir until they realise the importance of mourning after losing their son.

The prologue in which Odidi lives his last moments serves as a ground on which healing remains tangled and unresolved. As memories of the past come flooding into Odidi’s mind in his last moments, the readers get glimpses of a montage of memories that reflects the kind of life he had led. The first recollection is of Odidi receiving a gun from a minor Somali warlord for whom he had sung camel water songs. The second recollection is of his home, where “his people” reside [13]. He thinks about his pregnant girlfriend, Justine, with whom he intended to spend his life, and his time playing rugby in school. He also thinks about his move away from his home, Wuoth Ogik, which he regretted in his final moments and his troubled relationship with his estranged father, Nyipir. He reflects on his memories with his mother, Akai and his sister, Ajany. Dust has multiple instances where familiar and familial expectations tied to funeral and mourning performances are narratively challenged. Soon after his death, his father and his sister go to the morgue to bring his body back to Wuoth Ogik. When they bring his coffin in front of Akai, she breaks down and, shortly after, gets in a car, and physically escapes the scene [13]. Akai’s refusal to stay and adhere to the participation in the funeral process of her son Odidi signals the complex interplay of factors which inform the postcolonial storytelling experience. The absent mother in the face of adversity does not match the gendered narratives that came out of the report put forward by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Kenya (TJRC). Gabrielle Lynch highlights the gendered reasoning of the commission that characterised women as “vulnerable, subordinate, emotional and peaceful”, and men as “powerful, domineering, uncommunicative and violent” [9]. She further elaborates that such insights, no matter how detailed, did “little to start a conversation that could really challenge such gendered experiences” [9]. More importantly, many such commissions intrinsically tied the question of gender to an essentialist definition of what it means to live as a Kenyan woman without taking into factor the range of experiences that fell outside the description of the innocent yet virtuous sufferer.

The novel leaves the quest for ‘truth’ on Odidi’s sister, Ajany and the quest to head normative funeral performance on Nyipir. For the most part, Akai’s grief is left unexplored. Through the silence on Akai’s subjectivity, Owuor affirms the notion that some forms of grief are failed by the phallogocentric notions of language. Gloria Anzaldúa in “Speaking Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers” (2009) explains the complexity of writing about the experiences of postcolonial realities. She underlines the challenges that women writers from the third-world face since they have to cultivate individual literary expressions in a space where there is no default template available to them that is their own. She writes, “For the Third World woman who has, at best, one foot in the feminist literary world, the temptation is great to adopt the current feeling fads and theory fads, the latest half truths in political thought, the half-digested new age psychological axioms that are preached by the white feminist establishment. Its followers are notorious for “adopting” women of colour as their “cause” while still expecting us to adapt to their expectations and their language” [1]. Such an expectation to adapt and adopt culminates in the lived realities of the people living on the margins in contemporary times as well. Through Akai’s absence, Owuor demonstrates the uncomfortable silence that Nyipir and Ajany have to deal with, and until her return, the mourning performance is seen as incomplete. Akai forgoes the role of a passively grieving mother as she steps out of the interiors of Wuoth Ogik, leaving the rest of her family in anticipation of her return.

In this context, the onus of the normative performance of mourning is actively headed by Nyipir. First, Odidi’s body is rescued from the ownership of the state by him. By exerting force, Nyipir shows his dominance and the influence of his military past that helps him recover Odidi’s body. Second, throughout the journey of bringing Odidi’s body via plane, it is Nyipir who indulges in a conversation with the pilot about Odidi. Third, it is Nyipir who tries to bring some confirmation in Odidi’s burial process by digging a space where Odidi’s body would rest. However, the burial of Odidi is delayed when Akai leaves abruptly, allowing the family to mourn. This act of mourning is two-fold, as the personal grief intertwines with the grief felt for the failure of the kind of nation that was envisioned by many Kenyans. Despite trying their best to protect the future generation from the kind of trauma Nyipir and Akai had faced, Odidi’s death became a bleak reminder of the unresolved disputes of the past. Through Dust, the categorisation of particular experiences into an allegorical reading of the past is resisted as we see a spectrum of experiences that allow a coming together of organic mourning performances against the backdrop of a tumultuous Kenya. Nyipir’s silence is exposed as a failed mechanism to bring order into the life of a post-colonial Kenya, which continues to have violent eruptions long after its independence.

However, Owuor does not assume a defeatist position. Until Nyipir and Akai confess their pain, Ajany’s search for “truth” would not stop, which could potentially be life-threatening just as it was for her brother. Unlike Nyipir and Akai’s hesitance to deal with their pain, Ajany on the other hand, finds an alternative way to perform grief. Briefly after the death of Odidi, she leaves Wuoth Ogik to “find Odidi” and “listen to his stories” (121). She embarks on a mission to uncover the kind of life Odidi had lived while she was away in Brazil. This turn to past makes Ajany break away from the outlook of her predecessors, who resisted such an exploration. By aiming to trace the life of Odidi and his motives for reaching out to Isaiah, Ajany takes up the role of an investigator looking into her own family’s history. In this regard, her escape differs from that of her mother, whose grief becomes too elusive to understand. When Nyipir asks Galgalu, their adopted family member, about the whereabouts of Ajany, he informs him that she has gone to get flowers for Odidi.

“Why?” cried Nyipir. “Kenya’s treacherous. She doesn’t know it.”

Ajany’s move to investigate her brother’s past reveals a lack of trust in judicial infrastructures to provide ethical closure. Ajany’s actions can be understood in the light of the failed idealism of both Odidi and his father Nyipir. In the case of Odidi, it manifested as his eventual turn towards petty crimes despite being a celebrated student in his university, which is shown as an inevitable outcome of Kenya’s postcolonial realities despite his parents’ best efforts to protect him from the same. On the other hand, Nyipir’s enthusiasm during Kenya’s independence did not translate into an uncritical agreement with policies that justified the supremacy of the dominant community in the 1960s. In his youth, before Kenya had become a wasteland for Nyipir, he had instilled in himself a hope for a better future.

The day after Independence Day, Nyipir became one of the newly independent warrior- men stepping in array into Hurri like locusts. Invading the nation. Marching, marching, and not seeing then that he and his kind were the new scapegoats, so that a freshly haunted people would never ask why. Marching, marching. Myth of valor spun to explain the desecration of a nation; oaths of silence, Nyipir marched and marched to whispers of blood oaths that had been made for him. [13]

For Nyipir, it was “simpler to obey commands for the good of the nation” [13] even if those commands involved actual murder. The memories of the previously felt triumphs turned futile with the continuous violence which was carried out in the name of fulfilling the colonially influenced vision of a divisive postcolonial state.

Ajany does not share the same idealism precisely because her childhood had shaped her into a very different person from her brother. Despite belonging to the same household and spending all their time together, the two siblings’ childhoods are informed by different experiences that lead to different dreams and aspirations. For instance, Ajany becomes a poster-child for poverty eradication campaigns in school. When the two siblings first take admission in school far away from Northern Kenya, they are subjected to humiliation at the hands of the prejudiced authority figures who assumed that they would not know how to use the toilet. Their school becomes a place of embarrassment for the two as they struggle to get along with their peers and teachers. Soon, Ajany resorts to painting and Odidi gets involved in rugby. Even though their talents were encouraged by the school, they became scapegoats for charity performances that the school organised to show their commitment to helping the people of Northern Kenya. Soon Odidi adapted to his environment as he found popularity as a rugby player. Meanwhile, Ajany dreamt of “somewhere else” throughout her childhood years. This divergence separates the two into paths that seem promising initially but turn into paths beset with violence later. Violence becomes the epicentre of their everyday lives despite the silence assumed by their parents, who had desperately tried to protect the future of the children.

These alternative investigations undertaken by Ajany reveal hidden socio-political conditions which show that the power systems and people in neocolonial spaces are culpable in continuous conflicts. This culpability also extends to her as she had also encountered violence in her abusive relationship in Brazil from which she escaped. The investigation also brings her closer to Odidi as she finds out the circumstances that resulted in his death. Odidi, whose steady fast idealism and refusal to engage in corruption had created a rift with his employees, faces a tragic end after being fired and falling into a life of crime. She also discovers the truth about Hugh Bolton and her parents’ estranged relationship. Unlike Odidi whose active participation within the novel had been agential in catapulting a narrative change that influences the novel long after his death, his sister Ajany, for the most part in the beginning, remained an observer of the actions of those around her. Her insistence on uncovering the secret that her father Nyipir seems defensive about is bolstered by the arrival of a young man named Isaiah Bolton to Wuoth Ogik, claiming that he was reached out to by Odidi regarding information about his father, Hugh Bolton. Since their childhood, Ajany and Odidi were curious about the books in their library which belonged to Hugh Bolton. This curiosity ultimately prompted Odidi to reach out to Isaiah who similarly was looking for his father, whom he had never met. Isaiah Bolton’s entry in the novel occurs just after Akai’s departure. A clueless, out of place Isaiah struggles as an unwelcome visitor who is treated with hostility by Nyipir, Hugh’s murderer.

“Sir..” Isaiah repeats. Papers crinkle, and he leans forward. “What, Bolton?”

“About this house…I found some plans in the library, here, hope you don’t mind…”

Isaiah shows Nyipir a yellowing sheet with penned sketches. Portions of the paper break off.

“The house, Wot Ogyek.” “Wuoth Ogik”

“Yes”

“No”, says Nyipir. “My father”

“Go away”

“My father, Hugh…”

[13]

Nyipir’s resistance towards Isaiah’s questions, his struggle with coming to terms with the loss of his son, and him dealing with the departure of Akai and, later, Ajany is one of many instances in which the postcolonial novel juxtaposes the past and the present to create pluralistic expressions of multiple trauma events that come together organically. Therefore, Odidi’s demise and Isaiah’s arrival at his house trigger the re-emergence of colonial trauma that Nyipir had been suppressing for a long time.

Only when Akai returns to Wuoth Ogik does Ajany discover the truth of her parents’ tumultuous marriage. Akai, who had fallen in love with Ali, confesses to Ajany about her love for her daughter, something which was unknown to her due to the distances in their relationship. The parents reveal to their daughter the extent to which they had been victimised by the country’s violent past, as well as their own culpability. Their confession provides her with a clear picture of the violent imperialism that she inherits as a traumatic history.

Conclusion: Postcolonial Imagination as a Site of Healing

Lizzy Attree in an article titled, “Reclaiming Africa’s Stolen Histories Through Fiction”, acknowledges the emergence of an emergent kind of literature from Africa that spins the genre of historical fiction to produce an effect that brings new perspectives for a “new future” [2]. Through Dust, Owuor provides fresh perspectives to analyse spaces where the impact of colonial legacies has permeated across generations, with each generation discovering the extent to which such legacies continue to harm them. Unlike existing perspectives that would render traumatic events as out-of-blue, the novel reinvents the genre of historical fiction by deliberately moving away from the fixation on singular events of trauma and reiterates that the postcolonial lived realities have elements in them that cannot be limited in their exploration of lived experiences through homogenised lenses.

Thus, Dust underlines several fault lines by identifying the shortcomings of those forms of subjectivity which render themselves complicit in continuous crimes committed by postcolonial subjects against their fellow citizens. It highlights the importance of mourning those losses that transcend the present time and space. Through mourning rituals, it shows the struggle between silences and the memoryscapes of conflict that continue to resurface as the characters grapple with many losses. It demonstrates the conditions that lead to various forms of silencing, from when its people once felt euphoric aspirations towards the future of newly independent Kenya to the time when the neo-colonialist power systems incapacitated the same idealism. It shows how the suffering of black people is an indicator of colonial attitudes prevalent in contemporary discourses that seek to territorialize black suffering. This simultaneous negation and over-fetishizing of racial suffering are critiqued in Owuor’s novel through the feminist resistance offered by Akai and Ajany by their refusal to fall into the accepted norms of feminine grieving. Rather than a blanket insistence on forgiveness and forgetting between the perpetrators and victims of racial violence as prescribed by the various Truth and Reconciliation Commissions within Africa, this chapter highlights the novel’s intention to uncover those crimes that have eluded state-sponsored truth finding commissions. The chapter demonstrates the power of contemporary storytelling in its engagement with narratives of forgiveness and forgetting within families who have been victims of violence across generations. This is evident through Akai and Nyipir’s attempt to finally break the silence about their own traumatic past by confessing it to their daughter Ajany, who can now seek a better understanding of her own subject position within postcolonial Kenya.

References

1.

Anzaldúa, Gloria. 2002. Speaking Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers. In The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, ed. Ana Louise Keating, 26–35. Durham: Duke University Press

2.

Attree, Lizzy. 2018. Reclaiming Africa’s stolen histories through fiction. Los Angeles Review of Books. https://​lareviewofbooks.​org/​article/​reclaiming-africas-stolen-histories-through-fiction/​. Accessed 5 December 2023

3.

Attridge, Derek. 2004. The Singularity of Literature. London: Routledge.

4.

Chakravarty, Dipesh. 2004. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

5.

Craps, Stef. 2013. Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

6.

Jameson, Fredric. 2019. Allegory and Ideology. New York: Verso.

7.

Koss, Erika. 2021. Personal Interview with Yvonna Adhiambo Owuor. Image Journal, https://​imagejournal.​org/​article/​a-god-who-wails-and-dances-a-conversation-with-yvonne-adhiambo-owuor/​. Accessed 21 May 2024.

8.

Huyssen, Andreas. 2003. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

9.

Lynch, Gabrielle. 2018. Performances of Injustice: The Politics of Truth, Justice and Reconciliation in Kenya. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

10.

Mamdani, Mahmood. 2002. Amnesty or Impunity? A Preliminary Critique of the Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa (TRC). Diacritics 32 (3): 33–59.

11.

Nabutanyi, Edgar. 2019. Narrating Trauma in Yvonne Owuor’s Dust. In Cultural Archives of Atrocity: Essays on the Protest Tradition in Kenyan Literature, Culture and Society, ed. Muriungi Columba, Charles Kebaya, and Makokha Justus Kizito. Siboe, 11–31. New York: Routledge.

12.

Rajiva, Jay. 2017. Postcolonial Parabola: Literature, Tactility and the Ethics of Representing Trauma. London: Bloomsbury.

13.

Owuor, Yvonne. 2014. Dust. London: Granta.

14.

Scott, David. 1999. Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

15.

Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa. 1998. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report: Volume I. Cape Town: Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Part IIINarratives of Resilience: Literary and Cinematic Testimonies

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2025

S. Malhotra et al. (eds.)Trauma and Memory Studies: Responses from India and Beyondhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-6374-3_12

12. Re-envisioning Biblical Women: Retelling Memory in Jeet Thayil’s Names of the Women

Jerin Jacob1  

(1)

Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India

Jerin Jacob

Email: jerinjacobanne@gmail.com

Abstract

Jeet Thayil’s novel, Names of the Women, undertakes a significant act of feminist reclamation by re-centering and re-imagining the narratives of fifteen women from the biblical gospels. Through this creative retelling, Thayil confronts the pervasive misogyny inherent within the New Testament's patriarchal framework, which has historically silenced, marginalised, and distorted the experiences of women, while drawing from Adrienne Rich’s idea of ‘revision’ which postulates that one must “understand the assumptions in which we are drenched”. While Thayil’s narration is both poetic and prosaic, it highlights, challenges and subverts the ages of mistreatment meted out to women and the social and institutional sanction provided for the same via incomplete and/or partial storytelling. Some concerns that surface within the corpus of studying biblical narratives are: Who speaks? Who is kept back from speaking, and from remembering? Who generates meaning? Who cannot contribute to meaning making? Who gains when meaning is created? Can those at the margins speak, remember? What is the language of recollection? These concerns are significant in the light of those marginalised, who have been kept away from important spaces, important conversations and important positions. In the light of these challenges, it is critical to take stock of how Thayil’s work contributes to the evolution of these narratives and how they have been disseminated in India. Why biblical stories are retold in the contemporary scenario is important to consider in an attempt to analyse how conventional narratives are circulated among a present-day audience. The idea that conventionally told stories are meant to be handed down across generations is often held within ‘abstractions of cultural literacy’ and Stephens and McCallum opine that these narratives provide a ‘cultural inheritance of “social conditioning”’ (p. 11). As biblical narratives are often used for memory oriented religious indoctrination, the in-depth societal and religious conditioning that follows as a result may come across as being more evident than the ideologies innately constricted in narratives propagated for entertainment.

If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience, it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives... nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or experimentally call by another name.

Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision”

Bold in its imaginative breadth and compelling in its narratorial essence, Jeet Thayil’s 2021 novel is a detailed work that employs restorative craft and playful re-invention. Names of the Women is classified as historical and biblical fiction, and works at retelling the tales of women whose roles and accounts were suppressed, reduced or erased in their traditional biblical representation.

The first impact of Women’s Studies as a discipline on Biblical Studies has been the acceptance that the Bible is a patriarchal document produced by a patrilocal society. With time, we are brought to the conclusive realisation that the Bible holds a fundamental moral flaw, that is—it does not treat all humans equally. We deem respect for all humans as a common dignity and as a socio-moral imperative. Our understanding then that a moral imperative need not necessarily derive from biblical teaching, points out that the Bible is no longer our sole or even final judge of morality and this stand could have enormous religious implications. The command of the Bible must be moderated thus with the authenticity of our experiences as individuals and our values and morals. While it is true that many of our moral ideas stem from the Bible, they have also been influenced by our consistent contemplation on the Bible right since the time it was written.

Such re-envisioned narratives as Thayil’s often convey tensions between fact and memory, history and experience. The discipline of Memory Studies emphasises the idea that while memories are not permanent records, they are rather worked and reworked upon as narratives over time—by also incorporating contemporary memories, socio-cultural-political contexts, and even the individual lives of the narrators, thus bringing in a novel narrative layer or approach. While the discipline looks at how stories are influenced by the characteristics of the current times, this can also entail the prioritisation of personal and collective memory over historical accuracy. This is especially significant in how biblical narratives are recollected and preserved in varied ways and forms throughout cultures and time periods. These narratives, like myths and beliefs, are withheld within community memory and allow the space for them to be re-narrated in many ways to incorporate cultural stories, myths, core values, and ideologies. Collectively, they contribute to the continual act by which collective memory of the present times is constructed and remembered, thus erasing the lines that limit myth from history.

The Act of Re-envisioning as Memory Construction

Adrienne Rich discusses the idea of writing by terming it as re-visioning, and in extension renaming—as an act of power and intense liberation for those who exercise it, in her seminal speech-essay “When the Dead Awaken: Writing as Revision” [18]. Thayil’s stories re-envision and retell age-old biblical narratives while attempting to re-contextualise the individual experiences of women spoken of in the New Testament of the Bible. He adopts a style wherein the accounts are mediated through the characters who experience the retellings, which then may or may not be relatable to the contemporary readers within their contextual discourses. The narratorial technique of using ample artistic licence to enable the connecting and reconnecting of historical and representational elements clearly suggest an attempt to recover the suppressed accounts of these women characters. Even while hermeneutics recognises the role of the interpreter's subjectivity in the act of making sense, it concedes that individuals bring their own ideologies, experiences, and biases to the act of retelling or reinterpreting, which is seen in Thayil’s instance as well.

It is important to consider why biblical stories are retold in an attempt to analyse how conventional narratives are circulated among a present-day audience. The idea that conventionally told stories are meant to be handed down across generations is often held within ‘abstractions of cultural literacy’, and Stephens and McCallum opine that these narratives provide a ‘cultural inheritance of “social conditioning”’ (as cited in Gillhouse [7, p. 11]). These retellings lead us to see something in the text we might have missed, or can help us appreciate the richness or complexity of the text, or encourage us to interrogate the text and its time and culture-bound perspective or agenda. For instance, Bible story collections that include stories of women generally need to exercise a fair amount of midrash to bring out the minimal information that the Bible provides about the female characters, at times even the scarcely mentioned ones.

The Jewish concept of midrash is a kind of rabbinic literature that tries to explain, understand and build upon the stories in the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh). The term’s Hebrew root is “darash” which means “to seek” or “to inquire”, which underlines the act of looking for deeper meaning in the biblical text. Being an important part of the Jewish tradition, the practice of midrash allows scholars and teachers to work with the sacred text in an evolving way, which enriches our understanding of the text through added approaches and interpretations that address the spiritual, ethical and social aspects of our daily lives. Through the practice of midrash, the Bible as a text is seen as a living document that can be applied as and how needed in everyday situations across time and space.

The Merriam Webster dictionary defines retelling as ‘a new version of a story’ (1995) while the Oxford dictionary defines it as ‘a new, and often updated or retranslated, version of a story’ (1992). Reinterpretation, closely connected and almost synonymous with the concept of retellings, is defined as ‘the action of interpreting something in a new or different light’. Using Spivak’s idea of putting together a paleonymy [23] i.e. a set of older meanings of/related to a concept, the broader concept of retellings would then also include or incorporate under its aegis-exact retellings, paraphrases, summaries, interpretations, agential and perspectival changes, updations, translations, recuperations and improvisations - within, around and via popular culture, locally lived experiences and others.

From across the globe, we have engaged with different forms of creation myths, which too have been retold multiple times and have evolved, thus establishing an innate human inclination towards mythology. Different kinds of myths, revised, retold and rewritten, have emerged as a result of their associations with other communities, as they ‘did in the light of greater understanding and growth in knowledge’. In the light of multiple discourses coming up within the scope and aegis of theology, it is particularly significant for the course of this study to look at the nuances of feminist and liberation theologies, as having stemmed from the ambit of global theology, or rather, a menage of contextual theologies devoted to the fight for justice for women and minorities, and the transformation of society. It is by default a critical study of liberation occupied in the remodelling of theology and religion in the aid and service of this conversion process, in the specificity of the many circumstances in which women live. If studied in depth, we can find many methodological commonalities between the different existent liberation and feminist theologies. While for liberation theologians, the inseparability of what goes as theory and what expounds as praxis is of great significance, feminist theology that is in sync with the women’s movement illustrates this link better.

The term “re-vision” as derived from Adrienne Rich’s essay “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision”, is described as follows:

Revision is a supplementary act of power – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction, is for women, an act of survival (for) we need to know the writing of the past and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us. (1972, p. 35)

Rich’s developed notion of “re-vision” hints at an active and nuanced implementation of feminist ideology that is represented in feminist retellings of traditional narratives. Her postulation that we must “understand the assumptions in which we are drenched” makes space for the cultural ramifications indicated by Stephens and McCallum’s “re-version” and works around it to accommodate and maintain an active and holistic understanding of these limited ideologies. While Stephens and McCallum’s term intends a subtext of cultural presuppositions, Rich’s term maintains an overt and active engagement with cultural theories and discourses, specifically feminist ideologies. Here, in Names of the Women, Thayil writes as Christ addressing Mary, and Mary as us—the reader, “Mary, write that they nailed the left wrist first.” (p. 9) and “Write, Mary, that everything follows from that moment, the death, the return, the centuries of turmoil and ecstasy, at the moment I fell into the dream and the dream became real.” (p. 9), coaxing the act of revisioning on the part of both, the reader and the character. Names of the Women as a literary entity re-envisions and reinterprets the lives of women characters from the New Testament who are often overlooked or marginalised in conventionally passed down traditional biblical narratives. This act of “revisioning” could be framed as a conscious mediation within the structural politics of memory making and remaking, thus challenging the set biblical narratives that have for the longest time focused on male characters. By lending voices, albeit fictional, to these women characters, Thayil’s Names of the Women questions the selective memory systems of religious, cultural and social communities that have erased the experiences and furthermore—the contributions of women. The act of re-envisioning such narratives then become a prominent technique in memory work, by bringing to the focus the forgotten memories through imaginative and creative retelling—thus disputing the politics of forgetting.

Becoming Goddesses: The Politics of Memory and Forgetting in Relation to Gender

In the essay, ‘‘Gender’ for a Marxist Dictionary: The Sexual Politics of a Word”, Donna Haraway claims the reason for her motivation to define the scope of her concept ‘gender’ to be defined thus was “...because the women do not appear where they should” [11, p. 49]. While many feminist scholars or artists argue that religion and mythopoeia are the rooted handbooks of patriarchy, two possible schools of resistance have been seen to come about within the scope of theological feminism. While one set of scholars deem it fit to reject the traditions of these scripts, another set of scholars emphasise on revisions and reinterpretations as the solution to and way to get out of this existing patriarchal bondage thus enabling one to relocate their lost agency, power and autonomy of the voices left out or marginalised.

The androcentricity of the biblical text hinders a just analytical study of women in the Bible. While the Bible focuses itself with the communal history/ies of its time and the portrayal of those that led the movements, women get left out naturally as they were not allowed to play a major role in the public institutions of the ancient times. Hence, women are hardly the prime focus in biblical stories, and the stories by themselves never focus on the lives of women, that too among women, to which the men then had little access. Finding out about the history of women characters in biblical times often meant digging out information that the otherwise androcentric authors either did not find interesting or did not find the necessity of communicating to their readers.

This inconsistency between theory and praxis of challenging the androcentricity of the text seems to be due to liberation theology and feminist theology having a significant rooting to praxis as their intellectual foundation, though they might term it as something else. Liberation theology emphasises on praxis, while feminist theology emphasises on experience, and both pay attention to the details of context and location. The point of focus for feminist theology is not just to ponder upon praxis, but to pursue hard to be a kind of praxis which shapes the authentic Christian enterprise. The underlying notion is that there is no one objective theology. Each theology is shaped by its own context/s which will then not be without associations to the respective social-cultural uses of power. Abiding by one’s context as the initial point has for both these theologies meant looking at the theological subject and experience with a focus on the “margins”, from the experiences of impoverished human beings, and also from different women’s perspectives as per their situation. The interplay of forgetting within patriarchal communities often ends up in the removal of women’s voices and perspectives. Thayil’s novel underlines the significance of recollecting these stories and sometimes reimagining them as a way to reclaim agency and assure that future generations do not forget the contributions of these women in biblical cultural history. Names of the Women shows us readers how memory is more often than not gendered, with the memories and stories of women being systematically delineated or erased or forgotten. Thayil’s reinterpretation of these tales can be then seen as a conscious feminist intervention in the politics of memory, which attempts to bridge the gaps and restore balance—and to ensure that the contributions of women and the inclusion of their experiences are not forgotten.

The androcentricity of the text hinders a just analytical study of women in the Bible. We read in Names of the Women, in the chapter on Assia, the sister of Jesus:

She dips into herself and creates a face that is her father’s exactly, down to the sunken eyes and the soft white beard that hangs to his chest. The passage of the weeks and months she has been in this room are inscribed for all to see in layers of red, the early layers turning now into ochre streaked by lumps of coagulate and clot, the tissue of which she is the mistress, the living tissue that is available to her only, measured in months. The texture of red marks the gradation of colour from within, and the ridges and valleys and faces on the wall populate her nightmares and Dreams. (p. 108)

Through these lines, Thayil breaks the halo of superficial dignity associated with traditional representation and seeks the flexibility of creative resistance against amnesia within the portrayal of biblical women, to reimagine their experiences through their femininity. Michael's [20] work on multidirectional memory emphasises upon the productive strains that come about from the bringing together of various memories into dialogue. Names of the Women paves a platform for the memories of these women to interact with each other and confront conventional stories, thus making way for novel understandings and interpretations.

Mary Daly, in her work on re-imagining ancient myths within catholic scholarship says, “the myth (of the fall of mankind as portrayed in the Bible) has projected a malignant image of the male-female relationship and of the ‘nature’ of women that is still deeply imbedded in the modern psyche” [4, p. 44]. This myth has for the longest time deemed and labelled women as capable of evil which in turn negatively influences the way women are perceived in society. Some women in the Bible have gone on to be portrayed such as to receive reputations as notorious as that of Eve. While Delilah, Mary Magdalene, Salome, Vashti and Lot’s wife among the rest are all perceived as promiscuous seductresses and/or disobedient wives, not one of them has had the inauspicious burden of having caused the downfall of all humankind. Being the first representative of the female sex so to say in the Old Testament, Eve’s portrayal is instrumental in providing an interpretative framework for all female characters in the Bible. The need to step out of the text and look at it from an external, nuanced and informed lens is thus underlined by Daly and other female historians and theologian scholars. The memories of biblical women are then re-narrated using the medium of ‘reimagining’ and ‘retelling’ these memories to assure the agency of these women characters. This act of creatively retelling memories is significant to the purpose of both reclaiming the memory of women silenced and erased, and contemporary memory making.

In the portrayal of Old Mary in Names of the Women, Thayil writes:

In the midst of the tumult that follows Old Mary’s words, she sees that it is full day and more men have come into the house. She is seized with the knowledge of time passing, never to return. She has never before felt it with such intensity, that time is her enemy, her implacable enemy who will not be appeased. It fills her chest with dread, two fists of dread where her lungs should be. (p. 17)

In the working of the myth-making of Mary’s personal mythology—as a woman, a mother, an icon of feminine relatability—this agency over time as such is a powerful motif in the novel, that encourages feminine reclamation of not just memory and narratorial space, but also of time and the memory of understanding time, taking up time, making use of time, rationalising time, theorising time, being time and being timeless.

In the chapter “Sexuality, Sin and Sorrow: The Emergence of the Female Character” from the book Women in Scripture, Mieke Bal looks at the entire prospect of mythopoeia—the foundation, creation and working of myths within Christianity (2007). Adri Goosen’s research work “Stealing the Story, Salvaging the She: Feminist Revisionist Fiction and the Bible”, on feminist biblical retellings in the western context analyses six novels by varied women writers. Each of these texts hauntingly rewrites an originally androcentric biblical story from a feminist perspective [8], and goes on to classify these novels as feminist revisionist fiction, and studies minutely how they subvert and at the same time, revise the biblical narratives they are based on, thus offering readers novel gynocentric alternatives to the ancient text. Both Adri’s work and Thayil’s novel foresees the need for women to reclaim spaces, both their bodies and institutions that have been demarcated by religion, while also envisioning and considering alternative divinities via these stories. While Adri Goosen looks at how women writers ‘steal’ the original biblical stories and transform them in ways that prove liberating for women, Thayil’s work ‘salvages the she’ and disrupts the dominant Eurocentric lens through which biblical tales have been portrayed. Both these works show that the new and different stories constructed within these revisionist novels re-conceptualise and re-imagine women, their place in society and thus, even their relation to the divine, thus critiquing the universality of monopolised western interpretations of the Bible.

Rosemary Reuther, expounding on the importance of feminist biblical interpretation, states the problem to be that women’s voices have not been heard, over time. For the longest time, because only male experiences have been heard, it is the male experience that has been counted as the human experience, religiously and thus, post historical and cultural dissemination, even socially. While many feminist theologists argue that the Bible is a religious handbook of patriarchy, two schools of resistance have been seen to come about within the scope of feminism. While one set of scholars deems it fit to reject the theological traditions of the Bible, another set of scholars think otherwise. They refuse to give up on the authoritarian stance of the Bible, emphasising on its liberative nature, while also insisting that the solution lies in reinterpretation. Through feminist reinterpretations, while relocating the lost agency, power and autonomy, one can challenge the patriarchal nature of the biblical texts and narratives. Oftentimes it is also the case that the dominant ideology in power disseminates its beliefs into its texts thus emphasising the influence of access and power within institutions that produce texts.

The narrative of sin thus becomes the court of judgement into which women can with ease and whenever the structure allows convenience, be brought in and placed within. This narrative is also used inevitably and with casual convenience to justify the denigrated position of women within religious communities. ‘Women’ is historically, discursively constructed, and always relative to other categories which themselves change,” Denise Riley observes [19, p. 5]. This ruling and problematically limiting bandwidth of sexuality based policing within religious structures seeks questioning and correction. Joan Scott argues, “Gender is at the same time, the interpretation of perceived sexual difference and a primary medium for talking about power” [21, p. 42]. This power dynamics is typical and historical, one which through his dissentious writing, Thayil chooses and attempts to bring to task. When we analogise the divine and invite it to join presence in the human realm, gender comes forth as a problem of both difference and power. Once the said analogy has been rallied, the two realms (divine and human) seem to oscillate back and forth seamlessly and to no end, each reflecting and reinscribing (while also subtly subduing) the other’s claims [3]. The discourse around how sin as a construct then becomes gendered is an interesting paradigm to note and trace over time within the realm of religion and thus is even reflected in the religious society.

Suspending Mythologies: Rewriting Memory Narratives of Violence and Vulnerability

Vulnerability as a conceptual focus in literature addresses the intersections of susceptibility while analysing how the confluence of the vectors of identities of the characters such as their race, gender, sexuality and class come together to form varied kinds of vulnerabilities. This perspective often allows for a detailed analysis of how different intrinsic factors work in tandem to influence a character’s experiences, and thus their vulnerabilities. A hermeneutical engagement with any literary or historical text would emphasise upon the significance of decoding and analysing texts in their specific socio-cultural, historical, political and linguistic contexts. Hermeneutics as a field also tends to view interpretation as a continuous, consistent and dynamic process. As an analytical framework, it recognizes that the meaning/s of a text can change and grow over time as new interpretations, realities, experiences and understandings come by.

Biblical stories can be viewed as lieux de mémoire or sites of memory—where both individual and community memories blend as per Pierre Nora in Between Memory and History, who says, “Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history is a representation of the past” [17, p. 8]. By safekeeping and showcasing narratives of biblical women and blending their experiences of the past with the present allowing remembrance in an inclusive manner, Thayil’s Names of the Women, too, serves as a symbolic ‘site of memory’. The mini narratives in the novel are not merely religious texts, but rather, rich archives of cultural memory which are revisited and reinterpreted, time and again by societies. For women groups that have gone through different types of erasure based trauma within religious representations, retelling age-old and dominant narratives could be a medium for intense memory work—a deliberate attempt to deal with and make sense of the past and its stronghold over us in our everyday context. This is evident in the way in which certain narratives in Names of the Women too, work around themes of violence and suffering among others, as are understood within contexts of societal and individual trauma, thus working as agents of healing and reconciliation.

Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory posits that the trauma of one generation is handed down from one generation to the other. In Thayil’s Names of the Women, the novel could be considered as working with the postmemory of the said biblical women, by getting their historical trauma/s into the contemporary realm and letting it relate with contemporary readers. While postmemory in general mostly engages with creativity and artistic expressions of trauma and traumatic legacies, Thayil’s reimaging as seen in the novel comes through as an attempt at making sense of, and transmitting of their suppressed experiences. “Postmemory describes the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right” (2012, p. 1). This phenomenon can be observed in Names of the Women in the way Thayil re-envisions and hands over the lived experiences and born witnesses of biblical women mentioned in the mini stories, thus making a combined memory that concurs with generations. Names of the Women can also then be seen as an effort to recover and retell stories that have been repressed or forgotten, which then makes them a part of cultural memory that is consciously revived and re-experienced in the contemporary scene.

By reimagining these stories of women, the novel contests the canonical portrayal of memory that has conventionally excluded voices, not just by including new tales, but by writing in a way that guides readers to interpret, accept and acknowledge the stories of these forgotten women. Memory then is not limited as a neutral space of representative struggle but metamorphosizes into a neutral yet critical space where narratives resist against the literary forces that have marginalised women, making memory a site of struggle and violence. Jan Assman distinguishes between what is valued and remembered and what is stored in our collective memories but not actively remembered [2]. Thayil’s novel contests the canon to bring these women’s narratives from the ‘archive’ of erasures to the active recollection of readers, thus also engaging in an act of restorative memory making which serves as a form of justice for women at large.

When discussing cultural memory, Aleida Assmann says, “Cultural memory reaches back into the past only so far as the past can be recovered as a living context for the present and future” [1, p. 45]. This also applies to the illustration of story recovery and recontextualisation within contemporary issues that is seen in Names of the Women. “In seeking to recover women’s history, feminist historians have mined androcentric sources for clues to women’s lives and leadership, and interpreted and filled in the gaps and silences that erase women’s activity” [22, p. 37]. Dominick LaCapra demarcates “acting out” trauma, wherein people are repetitively reliving the trauma, and “working through,” wherein there is a conscious effort to process and move beyond the trauma [13]. Names of the Women could be seen as an attempt to “work through” the collective trauma of women who were marginalised and forgotten in religious—biblical history. While LaCapra emphasises upon the significance of empathy in figuring out historical trauma in his work Writing History, Writing Trauma: “Trauma brings about a dissociation of affect and representation: one disorientingly feels what one cannot represent; one numbingly represents what one cannot feel,” (p. 21). Thayil’s work encourages readers to empathise with the women characters, letting a deeper historical engagement with their trauma, struggles and broader erasure.

Memory as Resistance: Art as a Subversion Force Against Canonical Memory

Memory as Resistance is a trope in contemporary women’s literature that seeks to explore the power that brings about active resistance inherent within narratives of collective yet personal memory. This novel way of examining women’s literature shows that memory as a discourse, and its explanation and expression through accounts in both autobiographical and fictional writings, and in this case rewritings, can reshape the narratives of the stories that authors tell and, thus, lend instances and leeways for resistance to oppressive ideologies. As narratives allow for a mode to communicate memory, and as it is the major way through which innate existent memory is recorded, both autobiography and fiction can act, in Suzanne Nalbantian’s terms from Memory in Literature, as “a laboratory for the workings of the mind” [16]. It is within the sphere of literature that one can study and analyse both the functioning of memory/ies and the means by which authors use ideas of memory in their study to explain and then question memory’s dynamic and changing nature, while also using it and its potential as a tool for resistance. Thus, in the contemporary context, women’s stories of and from the past, from mythology and those that are used to further religion are, basic storied accounts of these memories which have today become vital records of personal and communal existing histories that may not be voiced or rather even acknowledged otherwise. Thayil’s specific focus has been on challenging the said religio-historical-cultural memories and the theories that ascertain how these memories rely on a particular understanding of the fundamental structures of memory and the means by which these memories and prevalent narratives of memory and history/ies model people’s notions of themselves, their group identities, and by large, the world around them.

“The power of art,” says Herbert Marcuse, “lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality” [14, p. 63]. Art and religion both offer aspiring artists and societal critics a role. Religious traditions, in general, have at their very base, the focused attempt to explain reality/ies. They therefore have an extremely theoretical basis from which we ought to judge the so called good and bad aspects of any one culture. Art then, does not, aid or directly develop traditions of social critique and resistance. Rather, art encourages imagination and creativity by individuals on their own, and some use art forms to draw attention to those aspects of society which need to be challenged. It is not artists or via art that one can raise these questions, but each have their own varied methods to do so and often can raise them better via art and related forms. Through his stories, Thayil’s overly unapologetic portrayal and questioning of historical narratives can also be viewed as narratives that undercut and challenge the validity of the deemed text and its proposed accounts or tales. In Chap. 3 of Names of the Women, Thayil reimagines the story of the unnamed woman who washes the feet of Jesus with her tears. In this process, by giving the woman a voice and a backstory, Thayil questions the conventional biblical representation of women in general as silent and subservient figures. Throughout the later part of the novel, Thayil awards voices to many unnamed women in the Bible, like the woman apprehended for adultery in Chap. 12. By portraying their individual perspectives and unique backstories, he interrogates the usual one-dimensional and disempowered portrayal of women in the Bible.

Once we take into account the most generally adopted precepts of contemporary Memory Studies and related theories today, we can then begin to understand the relation between memory and our sense of oneself, for it is via the memories that we recollect that we aim to build or rebuild our identity. As Nicola King puts it, personal identity “is rehearsed again and again in a narrative which attempts to recover the self who existed before” [12, p. 1]. Dan McAdams agrees, arguing that people design what he calls “personal myths” which are made up of their autobiographical memories to create personal identities. A personal myth, as he expounds, is “a unique kind of story that each of us naturally collates to bring together the varied parts of oneself and one’s lives into a persuasive whole... A personal myth is an effort of imagination that stems from a patterned collation of our recounted past, understood present, and expected future” [15, p. 12]. Just as McAdams pinpoints at the creation of stories, Gayle Greene asserts in "Feminist Fiction and the Uses of Memory" that our idea of our personal and collective identities is “bound up with” the stories we “tell about the trajectory of the past” [10, p. 12]. The narratives that we share and the many reiterations of the past that we personally and collectively share merge who we are as persons and as communities that recollect and remember, be they comparatively accurate historical reconstructions or completely fictional versions of our lives and the past.

Likewise, in Changing the Story: Feminist Fiction and the Tradition, Gayle Greene records that “to bring attention to the structures of fiction is also to draw attention to the conventionality of the codes that govern human behaviour” [9, p. 2). Just as schemas fashion what we encode and aid us to complete the gaps of collective memory, so too do the kinds of narratives and schemas accessible to aid us to find out our prospective memories and the means by which we narrate them. Similarly, Greene argues that these linguistic codes must be brought out so one can see “how they can therefore be changed” (p. 2), and Rita Felski shares the call of many feminists who claim that “for the world to change, new stories [are] necessary” [6, p. 96]. Such novel stories come into being by utilising old narratives to give birth to new plots via “endless chains of revision and repetition” (p. 95), or in Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s words, by “writing beyond the ending, [which] produces a narrative that denies or reconstructs seductive patterns of feeling that are culturally mandated, internally policed, [and] hegemonically poised” [5, p. 5].

The Jewish tradition of ‘midrash’ adopts a religious framework to bridging the spaces between the biblical frames wherein the feminist midrash, a much more secularised version of this tradition, using the practice as a means to negotiate between moving ideologies and sub-constructions of gender within a traditionally patriarchal system. The midrash as a method has been used to respond to contemporary problems by recrafting and recreating new stories while also forming connections between new Jewish realities and the unchanging traditional biblical text. One of the key ideas in hermeneutics being the “hermeneutic circle”, this approach in the light of Thayil’s work indicates that understanding Names of the Women involves moving back and forth between the different parts and the larger whole—the text of the novel along with its context, being read in the light of the chapters dedicated to different female characters and the whole novel.

In Names of the Women, we read in the concluding chapter:

And then you came, Mary, with a sponge to clean my legs and put a drop of oil on my feet as you had done in the life where I was whole, even as some among the watchers commanded you to stop and I told you to stop also, for I want you to listen as I say to you that forgiveness is the recourse of the weak and we are not weak and we must not forgive. (p. 77)

This loop of storytelling and reimagining narratives under the scope of this text, begins and ends with Mary, with Mary portrayed as the primary reader and receiver of the reimagination, as also the significant character reimagining and thus far portrayed as reimaging and re-narrating the experiences of biblical women to us. Thus, in studying and analysing Thayil’s work, the sociological purpose of the larger novel and the individual stories of woman characters as portrayed by Thayil can be mapped as follows:

to question, challenge and divest the partial or incompetent portrayal of subaltern trauma and memory, in the light of marginalised communities as represented in traditional biblical narratives;

to unearth and retell these stories with fresher, contemporary perspectives while ensuring agency, justice and equal representation to the characterisation, the memories and the experiences;

to demythologize the androcentric cultural and gender ideology rooted in innate inferiority portrayals, to challenge trauma stereotypes and socio-cultural memory keeping so as to effect more reciprocal and egalitarian relationships;

to challenge and subvert the binary of the divine-human and find a space for alternate divinities, mysticism and sacred creative spaces through dialogue and deliberation, through literary representation and analysis;

to comprehend their experience of acculturation, subalternity and to resist the dominance of Eurocentric ideals in the representation of these narratives, and to chart how that impacts the inherent meaning making and reception of these narratives.

Names of the Women becomes a subversive site within and at the threshold of religion to host voices of dissent, imaginatively curated by Thayil, which each acts differently in its narratorial context. These retellings reframe particularly Christian ideals, and concepts like vulnerability, memory, and lived experiences. Thus, these unconventional yet nuanced portrayals challenge the existing notions of institutionalised values or teachings to some extent, in various capacities.

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© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2025

S. Malhotra et al. (eds.)Trauma and Memory Studies: Responses from India and Beyondhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-6374-3_13

13. Transgenerational Trauma: The Entanglement of Family Memories in Twenty-First Century Diasporic Women’s Literatures from the Global South

Nadia Butt1  

(1)

University of Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Nadia Butt

Email: N.butt@emi.uni-frankfurt.de

Abstract

This chapter examines transgenerational trauma in relation to family memories as narrated in Indian American writer Anjali Enjeti’s partition novel The Parted Earth (2021) and Moroccan American writer Wafa Faith Hallam’s memoir The Road from Morocco (2011). By focusing on two texts, set in disparate geographical and cultural landscapes, namely India and Morocco, the goal is to demonstrate how history shapes family memories. My contention is that both the fictional and the non-fictional text engages with transgenerational trauma, as family histories spanning three generations intersect with historical catastrophes and political transformations in Asia and North Africa. Thus, the family dynamic mirrors the changes in the social and political landscape into which the members are born. Whereas the events in The Parted Earth span from the partition of India in 1947 up to its 70th anniversary of independence in 2017, the family saga in The Road from Morocco unfolds from the birth of Faith Hallam in 1956 in Morocco, coinciding with the unification of Morocco and independence of the country, until her new life after 9/11 in the USA. Drawing upon research on trauma, particularly by Stef Craps, Marianne Hirsch, and Gabriele Schwab, I aim to investigate transgenerational trauma as presented by these selected and thus far understudied women writers in South Asian and Arab Anglophone diasporic literatures. To this end, I argue that transgenerational trauma tends to surface in two fundamental ways, as the authors of these genres move between memory and history in their writings that act as a family archive: first, the selected texts reveal the outcome of “postmemory”, which Marianne Hirsch describes as “second-generation memories of cultural and collective traumatic events and experiences” (2012, p. 22); second, both texts, as alternative archives, focus on individual and collective memories and remind us of what should not be forgotten and what national or historical records lack. Hence, these narratives break through silences and reintegrate conflicted histories into trans/national spaces. As these texts bring out “the effects of transgenerational haunting” (Schwab 2010, p. 32), they become a literary practice of “haunting legacies”, inviting us to reflect on “the intersectionality and interdependency of different violent histories” (Schwab 2010, p. 32). Thus, the texts manifest the dynamics of memory, history, and forgetting, the overlapping strands of which facilitate the process of comprehending the entanglements of family memories from the Global South from a new perspective.

Introduction

This chapter examines transgenerational trauma in relation to family memories as narrated in Moroccan American writer Wafa Faith Hallam’s memoir The Road from Morocco [22] and Indian American writer Anjali Enjeti’s historical novel The Parted Earth (2021).¹ By focusing on two different genres, set in disparate geographical and cultural landscapes, namely Morocco and India, the goal is to demonstrate how traumatic incidents within families as well as cataclysmic (historical) events shape memories and impact the different family members. My contention is that both fictional and non-fictional texts engage with transgenerational trauma in their own distinct manner, as family histories spanning two to three generations intersect with historical catastrophes and political transformations in the Arab World (or North Africa) and South Asia. Thus, the family dynamic mirrors the changes in the social and political scenario into which the members are born. Whereas the family saga in The Road from Morocco unfolds from the birth of Faith Hallam in 1956 in Morocco, coinciding with the unification of Morocco, the return of the exiled King Mohammed and independence of the country, until Hallam’s new life-turns after 9/11 in the USA, the events in The Parted Earth span from the Partition of India in 1947 up to its 70th anniversary of independence in 2017 and reveal the struggles of family members scattered abroad in the wake of the division of the Indian subcontinent.

Drawing upon research on trauma, particularly by Stef Craps, Marianne Hirsch, and Gabriele Schwab, I aim to investigate transgenerational trauma as presented by these selected women writers in South Asian and Arab Anglophone diasporic literatures from a feminist perspective. To this end, I argue that transgenerational trauma tends to surface in three major ways, as the authors of these genres move between memory and history in their writings that act as family archives.

First, the selected texts reveal the outcome of “postmemory²” or “postmemories”, a term coined by Marianne Hirsch to describe “second-generation memories of cultural and collective traumatic events and experiences” [26, p. 22]. Being particularly interested in memory and transmission over generations, Hirsch aims at investigating “the workings of trauma, memory” in relation to the Holocaust (2012, pp. 2–3). Recalling Eva Hoffmann’s coinage of “post-generation” [26, p. 4], Hirsch points out that the prefix post and after—“define both a specifically inter-and transgenerational act of transfer and the resonant aftereffects of trauma” [26, pp. 3–4]. To Hirsch, postmemory unfolds “an uneasy oscillation between continuity and rapture” [26, p. 6],² which is manifested in the plotline of the texts I have chosen.

Second, as both texts deal with individual and collective memories, they invite us to place Trauma Theory in a non-western context and thus understand trauma as experienced on the other side of the border. Although Cathy Caruth maintains, “trauma itself may provide the very link between cultures” [10, p. 11], Stef Craps argues that some of the founding texts of the field, including Caruth’s, ignore “cross-cultural ethnic engagement” [11, p. 2] and urge us to overcome “trauma theory’s Eurocentric biases” [11, p. 3]. Craps adds that it is important to engage with “the underexplored relationship between First and Third World traumas” [11, p. 3], inferring that “the traumas of non-Western or minority groups must also be acknowledged on their own terms” [11, p. 4]. From Craps’s point of view, ‘decolonized’ Trauma Theory can facilitate the process of understanding “postcolonial literature that bears witness to the suffering engendered by racial or colonial oppression” [11, p. 5], see also [3], p. 500–505).

Indeed, the selected texts urge us to ‘decolonise trauma theory’ since they can be read as testimonies of human sufferings as a consequence of imperial tyrannies.

Thirdly, these narratives, offering an alternative paradigm of Trauma Theory across generations, invite us to re-member, “break through silences and reintegrate conflicted histories into transnational spaces” to use a phrase from Gabriele Schwab [44, p. 32]. As these texts bring out, what Schwab calls, “the effects of transgenerational haunting” [44, p. 32], they become a literary practice of “haunting legacies”, inviting us to reflect on “the intersectionality and interdependency of different violent histories” [44, p. 32]. Thus, the texts demonstrate the dynamics of memory, history, and trauma, the overlapping strands of which facilitate the process of comprehending, what Astrid Erll terms “transcultural” [15, p. 2] and “transgenerational memory” [15, p. 3] and the entanglements of family memories from the Global South from a new perspective.

Thinking Beyond Eurocentrism: Theorising Transgenerational Trauma

I would now like to go deeper into the etymology and history of trauma see Leys [35] before I underline the significance of placing and understanding Trauma Theory in a non-western context. “A trauma originally referred to a physical injury requiring medical treatment. It derives from the Ancient Greek word for ‘wound’ (τραύμα, traûma)” [13, p. 1], see also Luckhurst [36, p. 2]. However, since the nineteenth century, the term has dramatically changed so that it is now mainly employed to delineate emotional wounds or marks left on the mind by extremely tragic and painful events. “Trauma refers to psychological injury, lasting damage done to individuals or communities by tragic events or severe distress” [13, p. 1]. Therefore, Sonya Andermahr and Silvia Pellicer-Ortin address trauma as “an unbearable psychic wound”[2, p. 3]. For Ian Hacking, trauma is a “wound to the soul” 21, p. 4], which injures memory itself and hence the notion of “traumatic” or “traumatised memory” was born [20, p. 25]. I define trauma as an invisible, inner scar, cast either by a chain of painful happenings or by being trapped in a tragic situation over a long period of time, whose healing is a constant struggle. Perhaps by gazing into someone’s soul, it may be possible to fathom the damage trauma has done to a person, the process of which is extremely difficult. Consequently, often writing (fictional and non-fictional) becomes a way of making the inner wounds tangible as well as a means to reconcile with trauma. Also, it is through literature as one of the important art forms that traumatic memory becomes narrative memory. Hence, in this regard, literature can serve as “postcolonial witnessing” [11], giving voice to diasporic women as marginal groups and their struggles with direct (first-generation) and indirect (second-generation) trauma.

The question arises as to when and how Trauma Theory came into being. “Trauma theory in its recent forms grows out of the medical and legal concerns of the nineteenth-century industrial revolution” [13, p. 2]. At the turn of the nineteenth-century trauma was seen more as a “form of mental distress” as opposed to “purely physical illness” [13, p. 2], see also Luckhurst [36, p. 3]. In the twentieth century, “Sigmund Freud’s and other early psychoanalysts’ theory of trauma became increasingly psychological. It came to be seen as a form of lasting injury on the mind caused by a shocking event that tended to elude recall and representation” [13, p. 2], see also [28, pp. 24–32]. In short, when after the First World War, soldiers returned home “shell shocked”, “trauma became a legitimate category to explain psychic injury” [13, p. 2], see also [28, pp. 42–65], see also Luckhurst [36, pp. 49–59]. Soon, it was possible to explain several other mental ailments and behaviour that stemmed from mental distress.

Another important step in this transformation was taken in 1980 when PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) was officially recognised by the American Psychiatric Association, in part as a way of explaining the alarming distress of US veterans of the Vietnam War [13, p. 3], see also [28, p. 38], see also Luckhurst [36, p. 1]. Thus, trauma and the aftermath of trauma was recognised as a discourse in different disciplines. Colin Davis and Hanna Meretoja are, therefore, justified in claiming that trauma has a dual genealogy: first it has developed as a “medical, psychological and psychiatric concept” [13, p. 3] and second it has emerged as a “category of social discourse that has a strongly moral significance” [13, p. 3]. My chapter deals with both these aspects, since the psychological and psychiatric dimensions of trauma are inextricably intertwined with its cultural and social aspects.

It was in the 1990s that Trauma Studies appeared to be an interdisciplinary area of inquiry [2, p. 1]. Indeed, the most significant works by the psychiatrist Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub [18], the historian Dominick LaCapra [31, 32] and theorist and literary critic Cathy Caruth [9, 10] have played a vital role in generating and shaping Trauma Studies. Michelle Balaev identifies three waves of Trauma Studies: The first two are associated with Freud and his Psychological Trauma Theory, and Caruth and her Literary Trauma Theory, whereas the third is called “pluralistic trauma theory: a new model”, according to which the focus is on “the cultural dimensions of trauma and the diversity of narrative expression” 4, p. 366]. For my purposes, I seek a link with the Pluralistic Trauma Theory to read culturally diverse literatures. Since literature urges us to look at the cultural and social strands of trauma, I am particularly interested in how literature engages with forms of violence—racialised or gendered, or with serious (mental) illness as an outcome of a horrible event, revealing the ways individuals, especially diasporic women, deal with traumatic experiences as they come face to face with displacement and uprooting. Drawing a connection between memory and diaspora, Marie-Aude Baronian et al. declare that the combination of memory and diaspora draws our attention to “experiences of migration and dwelling-in-displacement” and how these experiences “impinge upon the lives of an ever-increasing number of people” [5, p. 9]. According to Baronian et al., memory is essential to the diasporic condition, declaring that “memory – understood as the complex relation of personal experiences, the shared histories of communities and their mode of transmission – must be seen as a privileged carrier of diasporic identity” [5, pp. 11–12]. For Baronian et al., “[n]o diaspora” is “without memory” [5, p. 12]. A focus on women’s traumatic memories reveals that “[a] feminist approach to trauma enables the recognition that trauma is also a gender differentiated field, which challenges conceived notions of the sociocultural realm”, where gender difference in understanding trauma is often ignored [2, p. 4].

Keeping the intersectionality of traumatic memory, diaspora, gender and transmission in mind, transgenerational trauma in a postcolonial context is defined as the trauma of one generation “passed down to later generations through their indirect recall” as an outcome of European exploitation of land, people, culture, and resources [28, p. 105]. Transgenerational trauma may seem “secondary trauma” [28, p. 4], but its repercussions over time and generations indicate its intensity and gravity. Roger Luckhurst, therefore, believes that trauma appears “to be worryingly transmissible” [36, p. 3]. I show in my readings how personal traumas unfold cultural traumas that affect a whole community, which may lead to the need to reassess and re-narrate collective identities. This phenomenon I will investigate through family memories as represented in a memoir and a novel. Since much of trauma theory seems to ignore traumatising processes and structures to which women, various ethnic groups and other underprivileged people are subjected on a daily basis, I consider it important to read trauma in women’s diasporic literature and its perpetuation over several generations. Finally, keeping in view Franz Fanon’s connection between trauma and colonialism [16, 17], I also demonstrate how literature reveals the aftermath of violent legacies of colonialism, which have not only divided land but also fractured culture, community, and family. Thus, women’s experiences of trauma, as narrated in literature, shed a new light on trauma as experienced by women in formerly colonised countries and locate Trauma Theory in Postcolonial Studies. In this regard, Michael Rothberg in his essay “Decolonizing Trauma Studies: A Response” asks if “trauma provides the best framework for thinking about the legacies of violence in the colonized/postcolonial world” and calls for a reorientation of Trauma Theory [40, p. 226], just as Irene Visser in her article “Trauma Theory and Postcolonial Literary Studies” argues for a more elaborate conceptualisation of “a ‘postcolonized’ trauma theory” to facilitate the discussion of trauma in the postcolonial field [47, p. 271]. Consequently, it is important to locate Trauma Theory in the context of formerly colonised countries to grasp the ramifications of trauma in a different setup.

In light of these significant dimensions of trauma and its representation in literature, my theorisation of transgenerational trauma puts forward the following: firstly, violent histories of colonialism in North Africa and South Asia and their effect on women from different generations and their ways of recalling the painful past; secondly, ethnic, gender, and religious discrimination women from the Global South tend to face at home and abroad and how these discriminations are experienced over generations. These dimensions are discussed with the help of two exemplary case studies in the following.

‘Remembrance of Things Lost’ in Wafa Faith Hallam’s Memoir The Road from Morocco (2011)

Wafa Faith Hallam, born in 1956 and raised in Morocco, identifies as an emigrant woman of Arab and Muslim background who has been a “naturalized American citizen for thirty years” [22, para. 1]. Hallam’s narrative belongs to, what Bart Moore-Gilbert calls, “postcolonial life-writing”, “a branch of auto/biographical literature” [38, p. xi], which constructs a politics of womanhood that offers fresh perspectives on Arab diasporic female subjectivities. Above all, the memoir demonstrates what mental health issues Arab women face, which often originate from the colonial remains in their country’s, flailing economy, the family law in favour of men, social restrictions on women’s freedom and liberty and “the culture of shame (h’shouma) that permeates Moroccan society” [37, n.p]. Finally, the genre unfolds the aftermath of postmemories as Hallam, together with her mother Saadia, battles her way through life, namely through postcolonial Morocco and post-9/11 America. Indeed, the haunting legacies of Hallam’s mother in a patriarchal society, where women must fight for their freedom, seep into her being, making her feel as if she were (re)living her mother’s tragedies.

A “trailblazing book” [37, n.p] showing “a transnational journey” [6, p. 216], The Road from Morocco, based on a recorded story and family memories, starts in the Moroccan city of Meknes, where Hallam’s mother is married at the age of 13 against her will, and ends with Hallam’s spiritual rediscovery in the US. The reader discovers that unlike her semi-literate mother, Hallam is a French-educated, sexually liberated Muslim woman who travels to Europe and then to the United States, eventually accepting a high-ranking job on Wall Street. While this may seem to be an American Dream come true, such an overwhelming experience, in fact, challenges and threatens everything she holds dear. Thus, the memoir is about leaving home and returning to it by taking several detours around the globe and their impact on Hallam’s and Saadia’s mental health as unconventional Arab women.

These detours, I argue, reveal transgenerational trauma in two fundamental ways:

First, Hallam absorbs the trauma of her mother’s underage marriage at an early age; she is aware that no matter how much love her parents shower on her, she is a product of a very unhappy union, against which her mother has been fighting almost all her teenage years and youth as much as fighting against stringent gender rules and social mores, which clearly favour men over women; second, Hallam turns out to be as depressed as her mother had been after a difficult marriage with Robbie, her Irish American husband, and the birth of their daughter, Sophie. While coping with her financial and emotional problems in New York and later in Morocco, Hallam becomes the sole guardian of her mother, who is unable to survive on her own due to chronic mental illness in her old age. I will now elaborate these two aspects in more detail by underlining how economic and social crises in a country like Morocco and legacies of (neo) colonialism further contribute to transgenerational trauma.

As indicated in the prologue, what urges Hallam to write this memoir is her incredible yearning to write her mother’s life story, which tends to intersect with Hallam’s own story and thus turns out to be a double memoir or a mother-daughter (auto)biography. Being forced into an early marriage, Hallam’s mother Saadia feels that her childhood is stolen and violated. Despite being a single mother of four children with no regular income, Hallam’s mother takes her husband to court in a country governed by Sharia Law and wins the divorce case to liberate herself from an oppressive marriage she had never wanted, as Hallam reveals: “after almost twenty years in a reviled union, my mother had defeated her husband” [22, p. 49). Both Hallam and her mother feel compelled to fight as women in a “country in which two different worlds increasingly lived side by side, a modern French society and a traditional Arab Moroccan culture” (p. 41). And they boldly choose the French one. Yet, the price is simply too high for the road to freedom. As Saadia severs every contact with Hallam’s father, Hallam turns out to be a rebellious teenager who is unable to admit the fact that her mother has made a sacrifice for the sake of her children. Out of chronic anger and depression, Hallam swallows a whole bottle of aspirin and a bottle of painkiller to commit suicide at the age of 14 but is fortunately rescued by her uncle who finds her lifeless on the floor. However, nothing changes after her “botched suicide attempt” (p. 65) in terms of her sour relationship with her mother.

Saadia keeps struggling to be economically free without seeking any help from her ex-husband, for which she is physically attacked by her elder brother Mohamd who could not tolerate a woman rebelling against the father of her children, which naturally broke her spirit and the hope of relying on her prosperous sibling. Physical and emotional abuse in Saadia’s and Hallam’s multiple relationships with men lead to PTSD from which Saadia fails to recover, a phenomenon underlined in Mary Ann Dutto et al.’s essay “Intimate Partner Violence, PTSD, and Adverse Health Outcomes” [14]. According to Dutto et al. “Multiple experiences of victimisation throughout adulthood and childhood, especially among women” experiencing violence “have been found to be associated with greater PTSD” [14, p. 958]. In short, “[g]reater severity of traumatic experiences is associated with greater depression” [14, p. 958]. Moreover, Saadia increasingly suffers from anxiety due to an insecure future always looming large. Eventually, it is volatile financial conditions and fear of impending poverty, combined with loneliness and emotional abuse, that cause a stroke which ends in an early death.

If the memoir recalls how Saadia reinvents herself to shed the trauma of the past, Hallam also undergoes dramatic transformations as a diasporic subject to adjust to her new life in the United States. As a foreigner in New York, Hallam is pressured to change her name into one that would sound like a ‘Western’ name in order to be a successful seller of properties. She legally changes her name from Ouafae to Wafa and her surname from Ben Hallam to Faith Hallam to integrate into a new system; however, a change of name is an unconscious attempt at erasing her previous self and reinventing the new one to extricate herself from dark memories. The narrator declares that “without hesitation I chose ‘Faith’ the literal translation of my Arabic name ‘Ouafae’, not realising then that, in so doing, I had completely obliterated my ethnic background” (p. 128). Undeniably, the impact of traumatic events and memories leave an indelible shadow on her identity. LaCapra, therefore, rightly claims that traumatic memory “has a crucial role in the formation of individual and collective identities” [33, p. 391].

Hallam’s “early promiscuity” (p. 99) is clearly a sign of deep despair, since she grows up without a father but with a mother who is always in need and in search of love. The trauma of her life before and after her divorce haunts Saadia even when she leaves Morocco and begins a new life with Hallam in America. Hallam notices that her mother is extremely unhappy in her relationship with her American partner, who turns out to be an abusive man. Yet, she fails to muster up the courage to walk out of a toxic relationship once again. To Hallam’s shock, her mother is one day picked up “on the street” (p. 201) in New York and is later declared by the doctors as “psychotic” and “schizophrenic” (p. 201). Once Saadia’s “mental disorder”, “deep depression” (p. 203) and “hallucinations” (p. 209) are confirmed, Hallam finds herself struggling on double fronts: her own toxic marriage with Robbie and the pain of seeing her mother disintegrating in the psychotic ward. Hallam reports: “After the heights of acute mania, mom then faced depression sometimes despair” (p. 227). Hallam feels that her mother’s trauma is seeping into her being, as she narrates, “[e]ventually, I succumbed to a nervous breakdown, and I went on a prolonged medical leave under both a psychiatrist’s and a psychologist’s care” (p. 306). After a number of traumatic events within her family, like her own divorce and the loss of several family members, Hallam goes back to Morocco after 9/11 for almost two years to cope with the new phase of her life.

However, after the dreadful experience she has undergone back home due to the shockingly retrograde state of the country, she feels that the existential hole left by her many turbulences cannot be mended. Due to her pervasive feelings of alienation in her homeland and her daughter Sophie’s refusal to adapt, Hallam is compelled to look for new ways of being and belonging. Therefore, she decides to return to America with her daughter and finally finds peace by embracing Buddhism, which merges with her Islamic identity. She declares:

On that fateful night of April 2007, my departed mother had indeed channelled her desire for me to write her story, foreseeing all along that it would lead me to the unearthing of my own narrative, which in turn would pave the way to my true purpose. For if during her lifetime, she never knew how to experience the lasting inner peace and joy that awareness brings, she witnessed it in me, and that must have allowed her to finally rest in peace. Hence, my memoir has gone from a narcissistic exercise in solipsism and self-pity to a tool for self-observation and tangible insight. (p. 196)

In short, by writing a memoir—by speaking out the unspeakable, Hallam comes to terms with traumatic experience and undergoes “the healing that writing autobiographically about traumatic experience can bring about,” as Leena Kurvet-Käosaar in her essay “Trauma and Life-Writing” observes [30, p. 305], underlining the “therapeutic potential of life-writing” [30, p. 310]. As a result, Hallam finds a closure that her mother could not. As a result, she recovers from being, what Suzette A. Henke calls, “the shattered subject” [24] whose trauma and testimony find expression in her life-writing. Eventually, she manages to heal the inner wounds that her mother’s traumatic life and her own have left in her. In her book Trauma and Recovery, Judith Hermann, therefore, observes: “Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims” [25, p. 1].

Displacement and Distress of the Partition Generation in The Parted Earth (2021) by Anjali Enjeti

The Parted Earth by Indian American writer Anjali Enjeti is a “luminous multigenerational story” that “follows people whose lives are ripped in two by the Partition of India” [19, n.p]. The end of the British Raj on the Indian subcontinent (1857–1947) led to the Partition of India into the two nation-states of India and Pakistan in August 1947, which involved “the deaths of half a million to one million men, women, and children” [29, p. 6] besides the displacement of over twenty million people, the biggest exodus in South Asian history [8, p. 3]. Individual acts of killing in the contested province of Punjab “were frequently accompanied by disfiguration, dismemberment and the rape of women from one community by men from another. Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindus suffered equally as victims and can equally be blamed for carrying out the murders and assaults” [29, p. 6]. The British policy of divide and rule led to a countrywide ethnic violence, which took the form of “ethnic cleaning” in which women had to bear the brunt of male aggression and bloodshed [29, p. 6]. See also [12, pp. 1–12, 48] in which “trauma and survival” are often the most salient features [1, 46].

Partition novels can be subsumed under what Anne Whitehead has called “trauma fiction” [48, p. 3]. Recently, a significant number of diasporic women writers such as Shauna Singh Baldwin and Veera Hiranandani have tried to recall the Partition trauma and commemorate the suffering and sacrifices of their forefathers, often missing in state historical accounts, who paid a huge price for, what Mahatma Gandhi called, the vivisection of Mother India. One of them is Enjeti whose novel is “a gripping, multi-generational story of families who must come to terms with their displacement” [39, n.p]. “Partition is not just an event that just happened in the subcontinent”, Enjeti informs the newspaper The Michigan Daily. “These survivors, their children, their grandchildren, migrated to other continents and countries. They set up their lives elsewhere. These stories go with them” [39, n.p]. The novel spans 70 years and covers the life story of three generations, the most members of whom are living as expatriates: grandparents (Partition generation), parents (born a year after the Partition), children (no direct connection with the Partition). As a flashback narration, the novel begins with Hindu-Muslim communities living peacefully for centuries in New Delhi on June 8, 1947 and ends in Agra on August 15, 2017, the 70th Independence Day of India, where the two families—one Muslim and one Hindu—lost to the brutality of the Partition of India eventually unite. Set in different time periods and multiple locations of India, Pakistan, Europe, and America as well as written from different perspectives, the novel unfolds the working of “multidirectional memory” [41], the transmission of postmemories [43, pp. 1–20] and the haunting legacies of Partition in two plotlines as I will show in the following.

The non-linear narrative is mainly based on the story of 87-year-old Hindu retired professor at the University of Amsterdam, Deepa Khanna, who at the age of 16 in 1947 falls in love with Amir Rahim, a young handsome Muslim pupil from her school, who used to express his love to Deepa through the Japanese artform origami. As Deepa’s parents lose their lives when Hindu fundamentalists set their medical clinic on fire during the Partition riots, Deepa is compelled to move to London with her Eurasian godparents, John and Nora, where she gives birth to Amir’s and her son Vijay Khanna, out of wedlock.

Both Deepa and Amir bravely transgress national, cultural, racial, and territorial borders; however, Amir is killed on a train from Lahore to Amritsar, which he has boarded in the hope of uniting with Deepa, while Deepa as a single mother in London keeps waiting to hear from him almost all her life and leads a somewhat lonely, unhappy existence in exile.

Almost 40 years after independence, when the efforts of Deepa’s son Vijay, as a member of the age cohort born after the Partition, to find his father Amir fail and cause his untimely death in Lahore, Vijay’s daughter Shan or Shanti Johnson, half Indian and half American, takes upon the task of finding both her grandmother and then grandfather to unlock the mysteries of the past, located on a different continent. After losing her only son Vijay, Deepa severs contact with her only granddaughter Shanti, but Shanti decides to understand Deepa’s trauma, passed on to her father Vijay and then to Shanti.

From Shanti’s point of view, Vijay has unwillfully ruined his marriage with his American wife as well as his relationship with his daughter due to an unfinished quest for finding out the whereabouts of his lost father without ever knowing that his father had died in the Partition riots even before the birth of his only son. Having suffered from a miscarriage and a consequent divorce from her squandering and callous husband, Shanti loses interest in her job as a lawyer and begins to feel the trauma of Deepa and the loss of her beloved son Vijay despite the emotional and geographical distance between them. It is Deepa’s unexpressed trauma that compels Shanti to evoke the suppressed and silenced past, eroding her grandmother Deepa’s very existence and her relationship with people around her. Shanti becomes an active carrier of second-hand memory or “prosthetic memory” [34] and trauma, consequently, she is determined to help herself by helping Deepa who has survived her son Vijay and is in constant mourning. Silence on Deepa’s part becomes a way of coping with trauma [8], since she feels disconnected from all who cannot share her pain. Yet, as soon as the silence, caused by unbearable trauma, is broken, she reunites with Shanti.

Significantly, the novel not only gives voice to the tragedies of Hindu and Muslim communities but also Sikh communities and their efforts to make peace with the Partition, which seems to keep hurting them like an open wound even after decades. The novel integrates a subplot through Shanti’s Sikh neighbour Chandani Singh, wife of late Harjeet Singh. Harjeet has committed suicide after suffering from depression for over twenty years, which in fact turns out to be post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Shanti is deeply pained to know that Chandani and Harjeet have been married for forty-three years and have been a dream team until Harjeet’s mental illness begins to gnaw at their relationship, increasingly alienating Harjeet from his wife as well as his only son Kush. Literally, “Kush” means happiness, but the son Kush is increasingly alienated from his chronically depressed father and is far from being a source of happiness for him. Hence, father and son remain estranged from each other and Kush is haunted by his father’s inexplicable behaviour.

Chandani finally reveals to Shanti that Harjeet was born in Rawalpindi, in present-day Pakistan, where his family was living before they were forced to move to the newly-created India in 1947. During their flight from their hometown, Harjeet’s 14-year-old sister Simran dies, whose loss has cast an indelible shadow on Harjeet’s entire life no matter how hard he tries to run away from the past. The candlestand that his sister has given him in the refugee camp a night before her death for safekeeping remains with Harjeet until his death. In effect, the candlestand is not merely an heirloom for Harjeet, but a haunting legacy of lives lost in the wake of Partition—an emblem of traumatic memory. Harjeet has left India for good to escape the dark memories and to settle in the US to reinvent himself: “he couldn’t spend another minute on the same subcontinent that robbed him of his beloved Simran” (Enjeti 2021, p. 191). Harjeet’s life story reveals that the Partition trauma has not only changed him forever, but also the series of traumatic events in his mind have become “points of memory”, which Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer define as “points of intersection between past and present, memory and postmemory, personal remembrance and cultural recall” [27, pp. 140–141]. The novelist reveals:

The circumstances of his sister’s death had weighed on Harjeet with each of Simran’s birthdays, each anniversary of India’s Independence, each anniversary of her death, each memory of his bhenji [sister] that gradually faded over the years. Harjeet’s guilt and grief had been one and the same, entwined so intimately he couldn’t tell where one emotion ended and the other began. (Enjeti 2021, p. 193)

Despite being a devoted wife, Chandani feels that she has failed her husband. In spite of having his own family, the first family he has lost keeps haunting Harjeet until his death. As a result, Chandani, born a year after the Partition, relives the aftermath of this historical tragedy with her husband. However, she refuses to give in to depression, to abandon her Indian heritage or to disconnect with Indians in America. It is through Shanti’s discovery of “the Partition Project” (Enjeti 2021, p. 185) that Chandani finds out that it was Harjeet’s father who killed Harjeet’s favourite sister with a sword to save her honour from the men of the other ethnic group. When this dark truth dawns upon Harjeet, he loses the will to live and takes his own life. Schwab describes such a phenomenon with the controversial term “Kollectivischuld”, that is, a transgenerational transmission of guilt and shame [44, p. 26]. The novelist points out that Harjeet simply cannot come to terms with the fact that his father “had been a fool, a fool who believed there was a difference between martyrdom and murder, a fool who believed that fate demanded such brutality from a father’s own hands” (Enjeti 2021, p. 195). As the histories of violence, injustice and collective guilt come together in the figure of Harjeet, he becomes “the implicated subject” whom Michael Rothberg defines as “one who participates in injustice, but in indirect way[s]” [42, p. 20], highlighting that at times, the dichotomy between victim and perpetrator is not as clear-cut as we may like to believe. In addition, the meaning of Harjeet’s name (Har means defeat and jeet means victory) further points to the ambivalence of his position in the family left behind in India and the new one in America, both of which are shattered by the Partition trauma.

Indeed, the recurring image of ‘the parted earth’, reminiscent of Bapsi Sidhwa’s Partition novel Cracking Earth (1998) and Jennifer Yusin’s term “a geography of trauma” [49, p. 453], pervades Chandani’s family saga as well: “When he died by suicide, Chandani felt as if the earth had split open” (Enjeti 2021, p. 140). Yet, as soon as the riddles of the past are resolved, Chandani agrees to travel to her hometown, Amritsar and to take up photography again as her lifelong passion. As a result, she is healed just as Shanti, Deepa and Amir’s only sister Laila are healed after experiencing irreparable losses and breaking the silence of the traumatic past. Journalist Jonathan Haupt is justified in claiming that the novel not only “delves deeply into the ramifications of the Partition and its resulting diaspora through the heartrending experiences of three generations” but amidst “the historical atrocities of her novel, Enjeti likewise offers hope—a hard-earned optimism of the possibility of reconciliation of families, the healing of long-held traumas and the peace of acceptance into a global community” (2021, n.p). Hence, the novelist has a firm faith in human desire for peace and harmony, which can surpass political divisions and affirm the triumph of love between a Hindu woman and a Muslim man in a tragic story.

Conclusion: Trauma Out of Bounds

By moving beyond a US- and Eurocentric paradigm of trauma and by developing new terminologies and approaches of trauma, as Craps proposes, using the term “trauma out of bounds” [11], we can better assess the mediation of traumatic experience in ‘non-Western’ contexts. The two texts—the memoir The Road from Morocco and the novel The Parted Earth—capture, what Susan Sontag calls, the “pain of others” (2003). As the narrator in the memoir takes us to her turbulent journey from postcolonial Morocco to America through several detours, we develop deep insight into the pain of Saadia as a young, single mother of four children, exploring how Hallam as the first born and guardian of her mother deals with her mother’s traumatic legacies overshadowing her entire life and how she manages to reconcile with her own and her mother’s painful memories. Likewise, as the two female characters in The Parted Earth, particularly Shanti and Chandani, revisit postmemories to understand the trauma of the loved ones they have lost, they make the reader reflect on the haunting legacies of British colonialism in India and the aftermath of the Partition, whose remnants are still palpable in Indian and Pakistani politics.

Focusing on texts by or about women from the Global South, my analysis has explored the diversity of representational strategies, employed in a memoir and a novel such as evoking the painful past and suppressed memories and having the courage to say the unsayable. These strategies are not only conducive to depicting traumatic experiences but also articulating the complex relation between trauma, gender, and the diasporic subject. In fact, as these texts deconstruct and revise hegemonic versions of history in which the “human dimension” [8, p. 7] is missing, they serve as counter history and alternative archives. By engaging with Craps’s, Hirsch’s and Schwab’s conception of trauma in my reading, I have tried to show how diasporic women writers from two different continents re-member and re-write the past, challenge colonial stereotypes of race and gender, and invite us to understand transgenerational trauma from a global perspective.

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Footnotes

1

Some ideas in the close readings of these two texts appear in the following publications: Entangled Family Histories of the South Asian Diaspora: The Partition of India as Generational Memory in Anjali Enjeti’s The Parted Earth (2021). In: Journal of Postcolonial Writing. London and New York: Routledge, 2024, pp. 1–14 and Between Contested Solidarities: Agency and Victimhood in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures . Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing forthcoming).

2

“Postmemory” describes the relationship that the “generation after” bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before—to experiences they “remember” only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up. But these experiences were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right [26, p. 5].

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2025

S. Malhotra et al. (eds.)Trauma and Memory Studies: Responses from India and Beyondhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-6374-3_14

14. War and Memory: Remembering Women’s Bodies in War Through a Reading of Brian De Palma’s Casualties of War

Sania Muzamil1  

(1)

New Delhi, India

Sania Muzamil

Email: saniamuzamil1995@gmail.com

Abstract

The memorialisations of gendered violence in war continue to be marginal, especially in cinematic texts. While most of the representations fall into mainstream canonical portrayals, they also provide entry points to confront the violent memories of wars. One such retelling of a real event of a Vietnamese woman facing unimaginable violence at the hands of U.S. soldiers is Brian De Palma’s Casualties of War. The film memorialises the violent rape and the subsequent murder of a young Vietnamese girl by U.S. soldiers, deployed on a routine reconnaissance mission deep into the contested terrain of Vietnam. While most war films portray violent scenes situated in battlefields, Casualties of War depicts how war extends beyond geographical boundaries to claim its victims. The chapter shall attempt to study the politics of representation of gendered violence in war through the prism of memory and analyse the US soldier’s gaze towards the Vietnamese female ‘other’. There exists a huge divide between white feminist discourses and the stark realities of the lives of the native ‘other’. The traumatic memories of such events are lost due to the exclusionary nature of the processes of remembering and enforced forgetting. The chapter will be an attempt at illuminating the disparities in representation and remembering the trauma of Vietnamese people, thus paving a way forward towards problematising the existing processes that govern the creation of historical narratives and construction of memorial archives through various media, and thus reimagine the canonical cultural engagement with the Global South.

“This is my rifle, this is my gun; this is for fighting, this is for fun,” say the soldiers holding their weapons for ‘rifle’ and their genitals for ‘gun’ [29].

Introduction

This chapter attempts to deconstruct the interstices created by war and the inevitable violence emanating from it, to “explore the uncomfortable connections between gender, memory and war” ([4], p. 2). Gendered war violence becomes embedded in various forms or ‘sites of memories’ (lieux de mémoire).¹ When one looks at conflicts with regard to South Asian geographies and cultures, it becomes pertinent to note how the constructions of memory narratives tend to be andro and West-centric, overlooking the experiences of the ‘other’. Erika Apfelbaum explains this systemic phenomenon of silencing specific narratives through politicisation of memory in her essay ‘Halbwachs and the Social Properties of Memory’ (2010). She argues that politics of memory can function to “allow or prevent the reinscription of one’s personal experiences in the larger flow of history…”.

Apfelbaum ([5], p. 90) This explains how canonical representations of wars erase the violent experiences of the ‘other’. Any narrative attempting to remember these erased memories becomes a ‘counter memory’ (Michel Foucault in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”)² and is sought to be silenced by hegemonic mechanisms, resulting in a marginal presence of memorialisations of gendered war violence, especially from South Asia.

War memory narrated by the western media not only ‘otherises’ but in the process also dehumanises the victims of such wars, specifically the female body. Joanna Bourke in her book An Intimate History of Killing [7] brings out a correlation between men’s experiences of killing and the pleasure they feel from it, drawing analogies between killing people and experiencing sexual pleasure. Similarly Marianne Hirsch’s³ feminist theorising of memory with regard to the Holocaust situate the differential impacts of war on women’s bodies and mindscapes. A significant amount of emergent scholarship has attempted to theorise women’s war experiences globally. Talking about resistance towards the gendered politics of knowledge production on war memory, Ayse Gul Altinay and Andrea Peto in their book Gendered Wars, Gendered Memories (2016) write:

In recent years, feminist scholarship has fundamentally changed the ways in which …violent pasts have been conceptualised and narrated. Critical feminist historiographies have challenged “war stories” as we know them, and the growing field of feminist memory studies has alerted us to the ways in which the past shapes the present…in multiple and deeply gendered ways. ([4], p. 5)

Adopting fresh gender-sensitive perspectives to look at war memories becomes pertinent in re-memorialising wars, especially with regard to the Global South. There are several other feminist theorists who have highlighted women’s war experiences, including Veena Das’⁴ study of the gendered aspect of the Partition in South Asia, Nadje Al-Ali's⁵ work with regard to Middle-Eastern nations, Macarena Gomez-Barris’⁶ feminist study of state violence and cultural memory in Chile, Diana Taylor’s⁷ work on trauma and memory in the Americas and sexual slavery of women in Asia during the second world war, and Marita Sturken’s⁸ analysis of popular culture as an important medium for the creation of collective war memory, among others. These theorisations become important frameworks to re-open war narratives, but it remains pivotal to deconstruct these pursuits by looking at the exclusionary nature of feminist movements that are often homogenous in their understanding of womanhood. Catherine Lutz in her paper ‘The Gender of Theory’ (1995) argues that “feminist margins have their own margins” ([35], p. 251). Altinay and Peto also raise important questions with regard to such academic endeavours, asking:

How can we understand the multiple layers of silencing in memories of wars? What do we choose to “unsilence” through our…interventions? Who are the “subjects”...remembered, re-historicized, rethought in feminist memory work? Which women are remembered, which women continue to remain absent from our imagination, research and writing? What, in other words, are the politics of our own “unsilencing” projects? And who are “we,” in the first place? ([4], p. 9)

This leads one to redefine the notion of silence in war narratives, and look for narratives remembered by the war victims themselves. In an attempt to find more authentic representations, one might be tempted to reject western narratives altogether. However, very often one will eventually be faced by a dismal void with regard to such narratives by South Asian writers, especially with regard to cinematic texts. There is a severe lack of films narrativising sexual violence perpetrated by coloniser armies on the bodies of the colonised, due to deliberate policies of cutting the people (of colonised geographies) off from their pasts,⁹ causing an erasure of memories and eventually a ‘national amnesia’.¹⁰ Violence by armed forces in Asian geographies—East-Asian nations, Afghanistan, Middle-Eastern countries and South-Asian nations—Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and multiple states of India among others,¹¹ finds negligible cinematic representation. Jacques Derrida argues that “there is no political power without control of the archives…” ([17], p. 11). The crackdown on any form of counter narration as a threat to the ‘master narrative’,¹² held together through tightly controlled hegemonic processes, leaves no scope for any memorialisation of violent experiences. A huge number of incidents of sexual violence¹³ in conflict regions remain unrecorded and are systematically erased from public memory or the ‘usable past’,¹⁴ an example of how ‘collected memories’¹⁵ are excluded in the formation of ‘collective memory’. One has little choice but to rely on the western narratives that attempt to undo the appropriation of the native victim’s voice. This approach undeniably scaffolds West-centric representational structures of narrative creation. However it also opens up entry-points for the Anglophone audience to look at conflicts that they are not directly a part of,understand and critique the processes of memory creation and propagation. This might in many cases become the sole alternative “to “listen to silence” and regard “silence as a frame of narration”…” ([4], p. 12).

One such retelling of an event of a Vietnamese woman facing extreme violence at the hands of U.S. soldiers, is Brian De Palma’s Casualties of War [15]. The film is essentially in the form of a flashback, where the protagonist, a Vietnam war veteran (Max Eriksson), recalls the violent rape and subsequent murder of a young Vietnamese girl (Tran Thi Oanh) by his platoon members. It attempts to look at gendered violence in war through the prism of memory, highlighting the U.S. soldier’s violent gaze towards the Vietnamese female ‘other’, ensconced in Neo-Imperial practices of territorial acquisition and racism. While Hollywood has produced films that portray how ‘men of colour’ are punished when accused of assault, Casualties of War portrays how violence against the racial ‘other’ is seen as mere collateral damage and any voice speaking against this violence is systematically silenced by the war machinery of the West.

Cinematic Memorialisations of the American War in Vietnam

The American War in Vietnam (1 November 1955–30 April 1975) was distinct in that the neo-imperial ideas of soft power acquisition and exertion of indirect influence on the colonised were seen at such a large scale for the first time. With this, there also began various attempts at commemorating the experiences of this war, mostly those of the U.S. soldiers placed in Vietnam. It was for the first time that a war was being reported at such an enormous scale. Brad West in his book War Memory and Commemoration (2016), talks about the Vietnam War as an important landmark in the evolution of Memory Studies.

In the 40 years since the fall of Saigon, the Vietnam War has been a key site for thinking about the power of commemoration practices. Much has been written about the social and psychological consequences of the conflict being marginalised within established Western traditions of remembrance…Later attempts to incorporate the war within remembrance traditions provided an important platform for theorising innovative commemorative practices and the dynamics of collective memory in an era of cultural plurality and conflict. ([8], p. 37)

A significant part of the retelling of Vietnam War experiences has been done through the medium of films creating explicit narratives of battlefields and soldiers dying far away from home, while simultaneously excluding the real victims of this war- the ‘Vietnamese native’. With regard to the Vietnam War and its American cinematic representation, films like The Deer Hunter [11], Apocalypse Now [13], Platoon [56], Full Metal Jacket [29], Born on the Fourth of July [55], Tropic Thunder [54] and Da Five Bloods [34] among others, draw vivid pictures of this war, however mostly through the subjective and experiential lens of the American soldier. There are only a handful of films like Heaven & Earth [46] and the documentary No Time for Tears [6] that attempt to depict the women’s place in this war, locating their bodies, identifying and memorialising their traumatic experiences and at the same time, highlighting how these experiences are brushed aside as collateral damage and left unacknowledged.

A reading of Casualties of War as a ‘memory text’, a medium for retelling a violent event in the form of a flashback provides a suitable entry point to look at gender-based violence in conflict zones. Unlike other cinematic narratives on the Vietnam War including Apocalypse Now, Platoon and Tropic Thunder which are overwhelmingly action-packed and rush forward along a linear path, Palma’s film puts one brutal event at the centre-stage. It keeps going back in the narrator’s mind to a violent event in the past, before coming back to the present with a jolt towards the end. In doing so, it creates a space for the audience to suspend their expectations of what a Vietnam War film should depict and how creation of narratives is not a homogenous process, but rather a complex, entangled structure intertwining what one remembers with the surrounding silence of the victim. The film’s representation of male behaviour in wartime symbolises an almost Dionysian frenzy,¹⁶ a nightmarish carnival.

As stated above, other Vietnam War films are almost synonymous with their obsession to present an almost video-game-like battlefield with machine guns and guerrilla weapons cutting down young American bodies. This ‘heart-melting brotherhood’ and ‘nostalgia for home’ exist merely as a backdrop for the primary theme of gendered horror against a Vietnamese woman’s body in Casualties of War. The centre is taken up by the single event of Oanh’s kidnapping, torture, rape and murder by Eriksson’s platoon.

Intersection of War Memories and Gendered Violence in Casualties of War

Casualties of War is a cinematic adaptation of a New Yorker article¹⁷ of 1969 by Daniel Lang. Lang reported an event (referred to as the ‘Incident on Hill 192’) of ‘rape and murder’ of a Vietnamese girl Phan Thi Mao by four American soldiers in 1966. In the film, after one of the members of Sergeant Tony Meserve’s platoon is killed in a Viet Cong¹⁸ ambush and the platoon is sent back to base, there is a lot of frustration. Having been denied leave for an extended period and still angry over the killing, Meserve whimsically orders his platoon to kidnap a Vietnamese girl for some ‘R and R’ (Rest and Relaxation/Recreation). Consequently as night falls, the members visit the riverside village and abduct Oanh. The kidnapping is followed by brute torture of the horrified girl, at the hands of the soldiers who gang rape her, not for sexual pleasure but for their sadistic release. Gina Messina-Dysert in the article ‘Rape and Spiritual Death’ (2012) argues that there exists a “cultural tendency to confuse rape with sex rather than recognising it as a brutal exercise of power and control” ([39], p. 125). One soldier refuses to participate, and is met with bullying and violence from his ‘buddies’. The lack of ability on Eriksson’s part to save the girl is due to a culture condoning sexual violence and male aggression, especially in a foreign combat zone where the victim often is the ‘racial’ and the ‘sexual’ other and her life easily discardable.

Although Eriksson is unable to take any action to protect the girl, he tries his best to help her escape; doing everything to prevent her murder, but fails. The guilt of his inaction due to fear and moral dilemma, pushes him to report the incident, but he is met with indifference to the point of blackmail and several attempts on his life. However the soldiers are brought to justice through a court martial and are subsequently sentenced, in spite of them trying to overturn it—by downplaying the incident and peddling the importance of maintaining unity and protecting the sanctity of military brotherhood.

Palma begins the film with Eriksson’s character on a train years after the incident, when seeing a Vietnamese woman suddenly triggers a flashback of the violent incident he had inadvertently been a part of. Through this narrative technique, Palma takes us back to the Vietnam War, and as Eriksson relives the painful moments, the audience is introduced to the gendered horrors that are an inescapable part of wars. Flashbacks (a form of Analepsis)¹⁹ are not arbitrary collections of memories but theorised mnemonic tools. Palma does not narrate the incident through occasional or minor flashbacks interrupting the main plot to reveal brief information about the violent past. The long flashback becomes the primary plot, transporting the whole setting to the violent past, indicating that such events cannot merely be reflected upon, but are to be relived again and again without any escape. The entire film is thus a flashback, with the present state of Eriksson’s life acting as a mere prop to hold the violent memory together.

Rape as a Weapon of War

As one watches the tragedy unfold in Eriksson’s mind, it might appear to be a singular, violent incident. However, this seemingly personal narrative is underlined by a political undertone of rape as a strategic weapon in war; a marker of colonial aggression, rather than a simple act of sexual violence. With regard to the Holocaust, Regina Mühlhäuser²⁰ draws attention to the long held notion of sexual contact between the ‘Aryan’ and the racial ‘other’ as undesirable, and thus its existence denied, and points towards the intertwined nature of war and gendered violence, arguing:

The military leadership faced a dilemma: on the one hand, sexual activity was considered…undesirable, because it jeopardised military discipline…health and reputation of the troops…violated the principles of Nazi racial ideology...on the other hand, male virility was considered to be an expression of strength…beneficial to the war effort…the conquest of “enemy women” symbolised the victory over foreign territory ([42], p. 32).

The rape of local women by occupying military groups is an open strategy employed to exert power over the population, turning rape into a ‘weapon of war’. Speaking of the gendered violence under the Nazi regime, Annette Timm²¹ argues that “the expression of male sexuality was not a matter of individual pleasure but of the nation’s military strength” ([59], p. 253).

A similar incident becomes the basis of De Palma’s film Redacted [16], narrativising the Mahmudiya killings of 2006 in Iraq, where a girl is raped and subsequently killed along with her entire family. Such narratives do not seek to recall or document independent incidents and violent experiences, rather they highlight sexual violence²² as an indispensable weapon for the army in the gendered structure of war machinery. Ruth Seifert in ‘War and Rape: Analytical Approaches’ (1993), defines rape as an “extreme act of violence perpetuated by sexual means” ([52], p. 1). The Oriental male becomes castrated in the minds of the U.S. soldiers for their failure to protect the women, symbolising victory over the ‘other’. In one scene from Casualties of War, Meserve grabs his genitals to assert power, which is more effective than any other weapon: “This is for fighting,” he says, pointing to his genitals, highlighting how in a battle, masculine power to violate a body is seen as pivotal. He then goes off to battle with the enemy: the captive eighteen year old Oanh. The rape is a mission, crucial for America to win the war.

Seifert’s analysis of the function of rape as means to exert power, clearly suggests that “in the perpetrator’s psyche, it does not fulfil sexual functions, but is a manifestation of anger, violence and domination…” ([52], p.1). What becomes significant in both Palma’s narratives is the silence of the victim. All we can hear are their cries of protest, but they are not the ones articulating the incident. These victims never survive the horror and it comes to the witnesses to document these experiences, highlighting the importance of reading silences in these narratives. Cathy Caruth in her book Trauma: Explorations in Memory [9] refers to the notion of ‘collapse of witnessing’ as explained by Dori Laub with regard to the Holocaust. Laub states that “History was taking place with no witness: it was also the very circumstance of being inside the event that made unthinkable the very notion that a witness could exist” ([32], p. 81), highlighting how the testimonies of victims of extreme violence often exist in the form of silences and absences. He further argues that “The historical imperative to bear witness could essentially not be met during the actual occurrence” ([32], p. 84), as seen in Palma’s text where the victim does not survive to tell their story.

As the film proceeds, Palma gives more screen time to the act of pushing Oanh along the trail, delaying the actual act of violence for a long time. This drawn out violence preceding the rape becomes the catalyst for the narrative to move forward. It might also be an expression of the sadistic pleasure that Meserve derives through prolonging the violence as long as possible, pushing his platoon to partake in the same pleasure; ‘sharing the spoils of war’ like brothers. When the rape finally occurs, it becomes a culmination of the long drawn struggle of Oanh against the militaristic horrors she has been subjected to. The murder that follows happens in perhaps the most gruesome manner possible. When Meserve commands the platoon to move to the bridge along with Oanh and kill her, Eriksson fires into the air to expose their position in a last attempt to save Oanh’s life, but as she tries to escape, running around helplessly, the entire squad fires at her until she falls off the bridge.

Steve Vineberg describes Oanh’s death as:

…agonising, staggering from Clark's stab wounds, she stumbles across the tracks like a bleeding ghost out of a Shakespearean play- the walking embodiment of Eriksson's helplessness and guilt, whom he can't reach …before Clark's machine gun cuts her down. De Palma needs to take as long as he does with this sequence so that we'll feel Eriksson's shock and impotence… ([60], pp. 25–27).²³

The Metonymic Relationship of War and Rape

The film's categorisation of characters as ‘good and evil’ barely eases the tension created by the film's primary metaphor: Vietnam as rape. As long as there is war (a state of exception),²⁴ there will be rape. Several texts memorialise stories of sexual violence towards women during conflict and war. Films like 1947: Earth [38], Hey Ram [25], Khamosh Pani [58] and Children of War [18] among others, depict heart wrenching stories of sexual violence particularly in the context of the Partition of the Indian subcontinent.²⁵ Women are seen as territories to battle upon and wipe out entire races. In Children of War [18], a Pakistani officer talking about abducted women explains that “these women have been brought here to serve the nation… The children who will be born from their wombs will be theirs as well as ours. They will be the children of Pakistan…these women's job is to give birth to children… those who cannot, have no need to live.” (00:29:15–00:31:15, [18]. Rape is used as a systemic weapon of war and justified in the name of national security. Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of the creation of a ‘state of exception’ through war, where all laws are suspended to cater to the larger idea of safety and ‘democracy’, explains the very idea of democracy being defined through Western philosophy. This gives the warring state the ability to transcend the ‘rule of law’ in the name of the public good and justify the physical and sexual violence perpetrated on the body of the ‘other’ during war, reducing the other to the status of ‘bare life’ or Zoe, while the perpetrator (usually a white male) enjoys the exclusive right to a qualified life (bios).²⁶ In Casualties of War, this notion scaffolds the soldiers’ attempt to justify the brutalities done to the captive woman and the necessity of maintaining the unity of the group. The rape becomes the war in a microcosm,the woman's body the enemy territory to be destroyed by American military action. “This is what armies do, man!” rejoices Hatcher.²⁷ The enemy is dehumanised through the eyes of the soldier and the woman- a metonym for the enemy, a body to be ‘fucked’, literally, as well as symbolically.

The figure of Oanh as the raped woman in Palma’s Casualties of War can be equated to a signifier of rape and occupation of Vietnam as a nation. Construction of the memory narrative from the perspective of the American soldier again comes to represent the silencing experienced by the native, who never becomes part of the discourse that is essentially theirs to begin with.²⁸ This brings to question the processes of memory formation and creation of collective national memory, especially war memory. Even though done essentially through the memory of an American soldier, the film uses the act of rape to express a Vietnamese perspective of the war. Oanh’s rape by American soldiers is an extension of how the Vietnamese saw themselves as ‘raped’ by the American war machinery and racist ideals. Rape being an act of violence rather than a sexual act, the figure of the raped woman becomes a site of the acting out of the coloniser’s aggression against the colonised native or the racial ‘other’. The American violation of Vietnam as a nation, embedding this violence into the Vietnamese identity and national memory is thus depicted through the trope of the raped body. The American soldier stands as a symbol for the larger American body- the violent American male raping and plundering the female body of Oanh hinting at the ‘rape’ of the whole nation of Oriental Vietnam; Oanh and her nation both becoming the ‘casualties of war’. “The image of the trope of rape also materialises the silencing mechanism which accompanies this violence of domination, giving voice to that which has hitherto been suppressed: the violent subjugation of a people” ([44], p. 143)..²⁹ The memory of trauma and violence, the resentment against the coloniser comes together in postcolonial texts that retell the histories of war. Casualties of War does exactly this. Oanh even through her silence and her grappling fear brings back the memories of the plight of the Vietnamese War victims and becomes a symbol of all the injustices perpetrated during the war.

In Conclusion: West-Centrism within Casualties of War

In Casualties of War, the military is shown to be so autonomous in deciding what's right and what's not, that the ‘rule of law’ seems inconsequential. This has been a pattern throughout war histories, where sexual violence against the ‘enemy’ woman is barely considered an offense, while maintaining military discipline is paramount. Mühlhäuser talks about dismissal of cases of sex crimes by Nazi soldiers leading to a high number of unreported cases. She says:

...unreported cases were much more numerous. If reported..., disciplinary consequences seem to have been the exception. In contrast to desertion,...that undermined military morale, the Wehrmacht did not consider heterosexual violence a “primary crime.” Consequently, the number of cases tried in front of military courts was comparably low. ([42], p. 32)

The state of exception governing the war becomes the norm and soldiers are allowed all excesses under its garb. It rids men from the moral code of the ‘World’ (the West) freeing them to ‘use violence’ without ‘becoming violent’. It allows armies to plunder a nation while masquerading as saviours of democracy. While the text depicts the excesses of American soldiers in Vietnam, it also restores the order at the end when the travellers return to the ‘World’. The hero travels through the underworld—Vietnam, always remaining faithful to the ‘Code of Behaviour’ expected of him. Even in a foreign, lawless world the hero asserts the dominance of the American Code. The hero, despite his inaction or inability to do the right thing, is redeemed and absolved of all responsibility. Only those who fail to maintain the Code are punished. The hero’s innocence excuses his errors as well as his complicity. By the end, the audience who are metonymically represented by Eriksson can heave a sigh of relief and wash their hands of the whole incident. They can relax as Eriksson gazes at the sky. This representation of the West versus East binary is a process of otherising in itself.

The film almost reduces the elements of ‘moral psychology’ of the killers and the specific manoeuvres of the military’s judicial system to dramatic scenes of an action-adventure film, with a beginning, a climax, and a happy resolution. The original report by Lang makes the sexual motive insignificant while the film highlights the connection between the soldiers’ anger at being denied a visit to the red-light district and the rape of the victim. This undermines the connection between the masculine war psychology and the gendered violence of the West towards the nations of the ‘Orient’. The film by sexualising the event thereby dismisses the specific institutional and political questions raised by the narrative of Lang's article. At the beginning of the film, the scene of ‘Brownie’ (Meserve’s buddy) being killed by the Viet Cong almost serves as a justification to the Sergeant’s anger resulting in his subsequent decisions of kidnapping and raping Oanh. The film by highlighting the case of well-intentioned men caught in a web of dilemmas and contradictions beyond their control, relieves both the western policymakers of their responsibilities in warfare as well as the soldiers who always have the excuse of being an innocent victim of circumstances. The Pentagon Papers has explicitly revealed how President Lyndon B. Johnson, in spite of sufficient information, made erroneous judgements resulting in escalation of war and unimaginable casualties. This urges one to look at the problematic representation of the soldiers as victims and the war as the ‘justified course of action’.

In America, film became a source of popular entertainment resulting in a reliance on the cinematic medium for commemoration of Vietnam War memories. One should not dismiss the fact that with the burgeoning of the cinematic ‘memory’ industry, films became a slave medium to serve propaganda and create favourable narratives; through a nexus between cultural productions and policies of memorial politicisation by the West.³⁰ These films in themselves lacked any authentic knowledge or research into the nuances of war and often looked at the war from the point of view of the soldier, who after touring the ‘foreign’ land returned to the ‘World’ of order and sanity, pregnant with stories of horror and bloodshed. These narratives told from the perspective of the soldier, relegate the victims to the margins of silence. Casualties of War, although attempting to highlight hegemonic narrative constructions, itself falls into the same trap. While the conscientious soldier Eriksson tries to be tender towards the Vietnamese ‘other’, his manner resembles that of treating a wounded animal devoid of humanness and agency.

This film also fails to contextualise the war and in doing so places the event in a metaphysical vacuum, devoid of any social or political economy. The film follows the course of a right versus wrong tale, where the hero goes against everyone and brings justice and restores order. The reality of the war and the acknowledgment of the loss of life is almost absent within the event documented. Casualties of War is a journey into the ‘heart of darkness’ which represents the loss of innocence to the level of madness of the soldier, masking the truth that this darkness has been imposed on the land by America itself. The brutalities committed by young, clean-shaved boys are mere inversions caused by external circumstances in the Land of Nam, because this land is out of the purview of their idea of law and morality. This land is symbolically similar to the lands of Arthurian romance where knights travel on quests of ‘a year and a day’, which is far away from the lawful city of ‘Camelot’³¹ (symbolising America), where no uniform code can be followed and every evil against the powerless is justified. Eriksson is ‘Perceval’³² travelling the darkness in search of knowledge, who fails to protect the woman Oanh. He does not create the tragedy, he merely fails to prevent it and by reporting the event he redeems his innocence, but is he really innocent? The film almost serves as a bildungsroman for the American hero rather than a serious representation of war crimes against women. Being the only witness testifying to the event, he shoulders a responsibility of setting aside his own trauma while narrating the incident, to ensure that his voice never drowns out the cries of the actual victim and leaves the silence surrounding her story undisturbed for the audience to decipher. Dori Laub argues that the listener should be able to “hear…the way her silence was itself part of her testimony” (Laub ‘Bearing Witness or The Vicissitudes of Listening’ ([33], p. 62). The audience looks at the narrative through the eyes of an American male soldier, inadvertently drawing attention away from the actual victim- Oanh. Eriksson almost becomes the primary victim of the violent memory and Oanh, merely a part of his story. The ‘otherness’ of the racially different body is deeply ingrained within Eriksson himself. The fact that Thuy Thu Le plays both the Vietnamese victim and the Asian woman on the train exacerbates the disturbing relationship between racism and war. If the ‘other’—the victim and the student on the train look so alike to Eriksson, it parallelly reflects the ‘western’ tendency to homogenise and dehumanise, and in doing so, ‘otherise’.

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Footnotes

1

Pierre Nora defines ‘lieux de mémoire’ as "...any significant entity, whether material or non-material in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community" ([43], pp. 7–24).

2

“The search for descent…it disturbs what was previously considered immobile; it fragments what was thought unified; it shows the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself…” ([20], p. 147).

3

Refer to Marianne Hirsch’s The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. [27].

4

Refer to Veena Das’ Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary [14].

5

Refer to Nadje Al-Ali's Iraqi ‘Women and Gender Relations Redefining Difference’ [3].

6

Refer to Macarena Gómez-Barris’ Where Memory Dwells [23].

7

Refer to Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003).

8

Refer to Marita Sturken’s ‘The Wall and the Screen Memory’ [57].

9

Refer to Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz’ Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates [47].

10

An erasure of ‘national collective memory’; an integral part of one’s understanding of nationhood and identity, results in an aporia or conflict within an individual. Colonial practices often imbibe within them systemic forms of enforced forgetting, whereby the native colonised populace is cut off from their own pasts, and generational experiences, that are often violent.

11

Most of the conflicts in these countries have been due to a direct or indirect impact of Western Imperialism, leading to fractures (mostly religious) within the idea of nationhood.

12

Refer to Antonio Gramsci’s book Selections from the Prison Notebooks (1971). Gramsci’s argument that “the “spontaneous” consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group; this consent is “historically’ caused by the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production” ([24], p. 12) explains the constructed nature of the master narrative that supersedes all other narratives in a hegemonic society.

13

Multiple instances of sexual violence by armed forces have occurred across conflict regions; In India alone, there have been uncountable instances of sexual abuse- 1991 Kunan Poshpora incident in Jammu and Kashmir, 1999 Assam case of Laishram Bimola Devi and her sister Laishram Manishang, the 1999 case of 17-year old Oinam Subhashini Devi of Thanga Island, Manipur, 2009 Shopian rape and murder case, etc.

14

In her book The Search for Reconciliation: Sino-Japanese and German-Polish Relations since World War II (2009), Yinan He argues that “although different social groups form different memories of the past, ruling elites tend to create national myths for instrumental purposes and infuse these myths into national collective memory through social institutional frameworks” ([26], p. 25). The ‘Instrumentalist’ approach to memory argues that ‘elites’ exert political power to create, manipulate and shape collective memories (or a usable past), following the perpetually shifting dynamics of foreign and domestic policy, independent of the historic truth. Recorded memories serve the purpose of legitimising and giving power to the elite.

15

Refer Jeffrey K. Olick’s ‘Collected memory and collective memory: Two roads to the past’ [45].

16

In ancient Greece, Maenads—the followers of the god of wine Dionysus, prepared and used wine, dancing and sex to access a state of frenzy or possession—symbolic of divine madness and ecstasy.

17

Refer Daniel Lang’s ‘Casualties of War’ [31].

18

The Viet Cong is an umbrella term for the communist-driven armed movement and united front organisation in South Vietnam. It was formally organised as the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam and conducted military operations with the name ‘Liberation Army of South Vietnam’ (LASV). During the Vietnam War, the VietCong fought under North Vietnam against the South Vietnamese and United States governments.

19

Analepsis is a literary narrative device used to narrate a past event interrupting the chronological sequence of events.

20

Refer Regina Muhlhauser’s ‘The Historicity of Denial: Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the War of Annihilation, 1941–1945’ [42].

21

Refer Annette Timm’s ‘Sex with a Purpose: Prostitution, Venereal Disease, and Militarized Masculinity in the Third Reich’ [59].

22

Sexual violence, especially against the Oriental woman, is an ossified war practice used by armies.

23

Refer Steve Vineberg’s ‘DePalma in Vietnam’ [60].

24

The notion of a ‘state of exception’ was originally introduced by Carl Schmitt in the 1920s in ‘Dictatorship’ [51], to denote a sovereign’s ability to transcend the ‘rule of law’, and later expanded upon by Giorgio Agamben in his book State of Exception [2] and by Achille Mbembe in Necropolitics [37]. Agamben analyses how the state of exception can be used extensively, for instance the treatment of the prisoners captured during the "war on terror" by the United States, while Mbembe describes how the state of exception can be employed to justify violence and killing.

25

The Partition of the Indian subcontinent was a direct consequence of British Imperialism.

26

In response to Michel Foucault’s and Hannah Arendt’s notion of totalitarianism and bio-power, Agamben develops the concept of ‘Zoe’ and ‘Bios’, derived from the Greek idea of a distinction between ‘bare life’ (zoe) or the life of ‘homo sacer’ (In Roman, Homo Sacer is a person banned by law, who can be killed by anyone…) and a ‘qualified life’ (bios) denoting the life of a ‘citizen’. Refer to Agamben’s book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life [1].

27

Herbert Hatcher is a member of Eriksson’s platoon in the film.

28

The memory of the soldier and that of the Vietnamese victim confront each other in the text, not necessarily in tandem. The idea of ‘multidirectional memory’ is an important theoretical framework that can be employed to understand the multiple versions of a single violent event, acknowledging both without simplifying either, understanding the nuances and complexity of the erased memory of the victim who couldn’t survive. Refer Michael Rothberg’s book Multidirectional Memory Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization [50].

29

Refer Nanette Norris’ ‘Vietnam: Memory of Desecration in Brian De Palma’s Casualties of War’ (2018).

30

Alison Landsberg introduced the idea of prosthetic memories (memories that do not strictly come from a person’s lived experience, yet become part of one’s memory through exposure to various narratives, especially film and television media). She argues that “cinema has the capacity to implant memories of events unexperienced by audiences and previously unknown to them” ([47], p. 334). Theorists of cinema as prosthetic memory look at cinematic works not as representation, but as embodied experience directly engaging the body, its feelings and affects. Refer to Alison Landsberg’ Prosthetic Memory [30]. However while Landsberg focuses on the ability of cinema to be politically progressive by helping one build empathetic connections across class, race and other social parameters and bridging the gap of problematic opposition between authentic and false memories, Foucault highlights how the power of cinema to implant ‘memories’ can lead to the creation of hegemonic apparatuses that can reprogramme or manipulate memory in darker ways, if it becomes an agent of the ruling powers. This view hints at the phenomenon of cinematic texts acting as media to overlay certain memories with false ones, leading to erasure of specific narratives. Refer to Michel Foucault’s interview ‘Film and Popular Memory’ [21].

31

Refer to the story of Fisher King; a figure of the Arthurian legend in King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table [36].

32

Ibid.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2025

S. Malhotra et al. (eds.)Trauma and Memory Studies: Responses from India and Beyondhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-6374-3_15

15. From Delhi with (Co)Creativity: Literary Texts as Material Evidence of Urban Memories and Experiences

Valentina Barnabei1  

(1)

Ca Foscari University of Venice, Venice, Italy

Valentina Barnabei

Email: valentina.barnabei@unive.it

Abstract

Seat of governmental authorities, cultural pole, and economic centre, Delhi has always attracted different sorts of migrants and expats both from the surrounding regions and the whole world. Throughout its long history, the city has often been the scene of demolitions of several kinds of informal settlements, including bastis. One of the most serious demolition waves experienced by the city in recent times happened in the 90 s and early 2000s, coinciding with the organisation of massive sport events such as the Asian Games (2006) and the Commonwealth Games (2010). In the same period, children, teenagers, and young adults residing in Delhi’s bastis and resettlement colonies, many of them experienced demolition and relocation, started engaging in practices of co-creative writing, photography, and video-making in multimedia Labs established in their neighbourhoods by the Cybermohalla Project. This chapter looks at some of the literary outcomes of this project as archives that preserve the memory of demolished bastis and scattered communities, representing at the same time a bridge between the pre and post demolition experiences of some areas of the city by the authors of the texts. Galiyoṃ se – by lanes [30], Nāṃglā hai thā. Nāṃglā Māṃcī anubhavoṃ kī bunāī [12], and Bahurūpiyā śahar [31], as well as the process of co-creative writing from which they originate, represent both a way to cope with the trauma of demolition and forced relocation and material evidence of places and experiences now existing exclusively in memory of their authors. Far from being a mere mourning of past times, this literary production and the whole project stretch towards the future, spreading voices, desires, and plans of the young writers.

Introduction

The National Capital Territory of Delhi (NCTD) represents one of the widest metropolitan areas in the world. With its historical legacy also including UNESCO World Heritage Sites, universities, colleges, clubs, fancy restaurants, modern infrastructures, and governmental and decision-making bodies, the city of Delhi attracts a wide set of migrants (and/or expats) thanks to its working and cultural possibilities.

Unfortunately, the elegant and rich side of the city is not accessible to all its dwellers in the same way. In fact, several activists, scholars, and advocates for the right to housing and to the city proved that, in many cases, the existence of Delhi as a world class city is inextricably connected to the spatial and cultural exclusion of certain categories of dwellers, that is, those who are below the poverty line. Particularly, some scholars [1, 8, 9, 14, 16, 18, 28] to name just a few) investigate the complex relationship between the construction of the idea, often expressed and embodied by the middle and the upper middle class, of a world class city as well as the urban planning of Delhi and the effects of the latter on the residents living in precarious conditions.

The majority of the aforementioned authors highlight the crucial connection between the urban planning of the NCTD, outlined in the Master Plans enacted by the Delhi Development Authority (DDA), the demolition of bastis, and the displacement of bastis’ evicted dwellers. By observing the sometimes-unsuccessful assignment of plots or housing in resettlement colonies to the people evicted from demolished areas and the inaccessibility of infrastructures and facilities to them, the abovementioned scholarship emphasises the exclusionary facet of several policies of urban planning that characterise the modern history of the city.

Throughout its history, the city has indeed been affected by several waves of demolitions that impacted its morphology and demography. In recent times, systemic demolitions took place in 2023, parallel to the preparation of Delhi for the G20 summit.¹ However, one of the most serious waves of demolition in the modern history of the capital city happened in the 90 s and early 2000s, coinciding with the organisation of massive sport events such as the Asian Games (2006) and the Commonwealth Games (2010).²

From the early 2000s, Delhi has been seeing the emergence of several artistic projects reflecting on the interaction of the urban space, the changes in its landscape, and the people who live and cross it. This chapter focuses on one of the keen initiatives born in that period, the Cybermohalla Project, originated from the cooperation of the Sarai program of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) and the Ankur Society for Alternatives in Education (Ankur). Within this framework, facilitators, and researchers at Ankur and at the the CSDS established multimedia Labs in some bastis and resettlement colonies, namely, Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Hospital (LNJP) basti, Nangla Manchi basti (demolished in 2006), Dakshinpuri resettlement colony and the resettlement colony of Sawda-Ghevra.

The aim of this project was to establish creative and safe spaces in which kids, teenagers, and young adults living in those areas could meet, discuss, play, and explore their creativity. Those activities would happen in an environment that encouraged the use of technology as well as the understanding of its creative potential and its capability for enhancing freedom of expression and circulation of ideas. Several young practitioners who used to engage in activities such as co-creative writing, photography, and video-making experienced demolition and relocation.

Starting from the assumption that creative writing can represent one of the many ways to cope with traumas, including those associated with domicide³ and memoricide,⁴ in this chapter I analyse some of the writings included in three literary outcomes of the project: Galiyoṃ se—by lanes [30], Nāṃglā hai thā. Nāṃglā Māṃcī anubhavoṃ kī bunāī [12], and Bahurūpiyā śahar [31].⁵ My study does not exclusively concern the close reading of the Hindi texts, but also that of their English translations when available. For the texts whose English translation is not available, I present my own translation.

By looking at the analysed excerpts and at the whole texts as cultural archives preserving the memory of demolished bastis and scattered communities, I address the following research questions: which narrative strategies and topoi do the authors employ to express the sense of loss and inner displacement caused by demolition and relocation? In what ways can co-creative writing practices be a response to the trauma of eviction and a means to cope with it?

Although including the narrativisation of the traumatic experiences connected to demolition and relocation, the selected literary texts stand as an affirmation of the voices, desires, and aspirations of their young writers. Furthermore, they represent an im/material point of contact between spaces once existing in a certain shape in the city, now existing in the same shape in the inner world of their creators, operating a connection among different time dimensions.

Practising in the Labs or Narrating a Mythical History of the Neighbourhood

“Log”—A Tale of Construction

The first literary outcome of the efforts of the Cybermohalla’s practitioners is the collection of writings and photographs, Galiyoṃ se—by lanes [30]. The work presents itself as a bilingual product as it includes both the original texts and their translations by the Delhi-based editor and translator Shveta Sarda.

Yashoda Singh, Suraj Rai, Shamsher Ali, Shahjehan, Shahana Qureshi, Nilofer, Naseembano, Mehrunnisa, Bobby Khan, Babli Rai, Azra Tabassum, and Ayesha are the authors of the texts and the photographs published in Galiyoṃ se—by lanes. This group of practitioners, mainly composed of girls and young women aged between fifteen and twenty-three years old, used to gather, discuss, and engage in co-creative artistic practices at the Compughar, the Lab that Ankur and Sarai established in LNJP Colony in May 2001. The names of the authors appear in the first page, but the single literary pieces are not tagged with the signature of the author(s) who worked on that specific writing.

In this collection, accounts of one’s engagement with the neighbourhoods, and therefore with the city, along with personal considerations, intersect and coexist with writings shaped and constructed on the method of qualitative interviews. This is often employed by the practitioners in their path for the understanding of the reality of the basti and the metropolis and their own positioning within it. This is particularly evident in the literary piece “Log >  > 30.08.2011” (English published title: “People” >  > 30.08.2001”),⁶ which focuses on the co-construction of memories.

In “Log”, the author(s) report the conversation they had with some basti dwellers, dividing the material in five categories: itihās (“History”),⁷ Pradhān (“Pradhan”), māhaul (“Environment”), laṛāī (“Fight”), and ḍar (“Fear”). The section itihās reveals information about the establishment of LNJP basti:

History: Here there was a burial ground. That was in 1969. Arvind hospital there has been from the beginning. There were quarters for doctors from there. Slowly, those people kept leaving and the land was once again laid bare. Then from Turkhman Gate, some donkey rearers started tying their donkeys, horses here. Slowly, they made little huts for their families as well. These were theirs only in name, for they continued to live at Turkhman Gate. Then there were some who came and settled here from other places. Some were poor and didn't have money to take a house on rent. They put up huts for themselves here. Those who started to live here also called their relatives, who sold off their land in other places and came. This was around 1980. The count of houses came up to 450.⁸ ([30], p. 38).

In the last few years, I have studied the history, the development, and the demographic changes in some of Delhi’s bastis, including LNJP colony, through scholarship in the social sciences, documents produced by governmental bodies, media products, and some visits to the spots, besides literary texts. Yet, the information stored in “Log”, coming from the witness of its residents, is the most accurate account of the history of LNJP colony that I have found so far.

More than the accuracy and authenticity of the details provided, for which I have not found other confirmations, my attention was caught by the very fact that information on the construction of LNJP is stored in a literary text. Thus, it represents a textual database containing information about the foundation of the basti and details allowing the contextualisation of its establishment in the broader discourse about development and demolition of informal settlements in Delhi.

As emerged from interviews with facilitators, activists, and scholars over the course of my doctoral formation,⁹ when Delhi’s bastis make the headlines, most of the times they are exclusively depicted as sites to be demolished or as receptacle of criminality and violence.¹⁰ By preserving the memories of the people who lived and frequented places like LNJP Colony, narrations such as those offered by the Cybermohalla’s practitioners do justice to the complexity and the heterogeneity characterising these bastis. In doing so, they configure themselves not only as an archive useful to reconstruct the history of the basti, but also as a tool witnessing the relevance of these places for some fringes of Delhi’s population.

At a first glance, a tale of construction and of ‘historical’ reconstruction may seem, if not in opposition, very far from what one may imagine when thinking about trauma literature. One of the main features of creative literature is to embrace the writer(s)’ subjectivity and to openly adopt their point of view, which often—if not always—reveals important information about their positionality and intentions. Writing implies choices, but, especially when it comes to narrativising traumatic experiences, these choices may or may not be deliberate. The reason that impacts the decision of what to say and what not to say and that affects the degree of deliberateness in this decision making process is often the very experience of a trauma. Theorist in Trauma Studies, Cathy Caruth defines the notion of trauma’s unspeakability as “a causal view of trauma and dissociation, as well as a view of memory as a storehouse of experience wherein traumatic memory is stored differently and unavailable for normal narrative recall since it remains dissociated from consciousness” ([11], p. 163).

Establishing to what degree living in a basti that has been coping with threats of demolition since almost its foundation has traumatised and enhanced a sense of inner displacement in the young writers of “Log” is impossible. However, thinking that the tales of community-building and historical reconstruction narrativised in “Log” and present in other writings included in Galiyoṃ se—by lanes are not connected with the desire of the authors and of the facilitators of the project of adding layers of complexities to the often flat and one-sided representation of bastis by non-bastiwale¹¹; or that these narrations have nothing to do with the sense of precariousness, which is also the result of cultural and spatial exclusion, that several bastiwale experience in their daily lives, including the young authors living in LJNP Colony, would probably be symptomatic of considering only the surface of the analysed texts.

“Nāṃglā Kyā Thā?”—The Foundation of a Basti

People and communities are quite important in writings such as those included in Galiyoṃ se—by lanes. The log, the people, of the bastis are indeed both the creators and the principal addressees of these narratives. Similar accounts and relationships between creators and readers are in fact present in the entire work of the Cybermohalla’s Practitioners; the Broadsheets, booklets composed of writings and photographs, make no exception.

The Broadsheets were auto printed in the Labs by the practitioners who, if needed, were assisted in the printing process by the facilitators. They were then left in strategic points of the basti or the resettlement colony, like barber stalls, tea stalls, and auto rickshaws, for the residents to be read. The aim was creating an occasion of enjoying literature about them produced by the young residents of their own neighbourhood. At present, only two Broadsheets are available on the Sarai website: Hamsaphar [12] and Nāṃglā hai thā. Nāṃglā Māṃcī anubhavoṃ kī bunāī [12], the latter published in 2006, the year of the demolition of Nangla Manchi basti.

As evoked by its title, Nāṃglā hai thā. Nāṃglā Māṃcī anubhavoṃ kī bunāī focuses on the homonym basti, intertwining individual and collective visions and feelings, as in the style of the Cybermohalla’s literary outcomes. Like in Galiyoṃ se—by lanes, in this broadsheet¹² too the authors chose not to display the name of the writer(s) close to the literary piece they produced.

In this publication dedicated to the memory of Nangla Manchi and lives and feelings of its displaced people, a series of homonymous texts composed of just a few lines caught my attention: “Nāṃglā kyā thā?”. Centred on the establishment of Nangla Manchi, these writings appear separately on different pages and without the name of their author in the broadsheet. Like other texts included in the broadsheets, these short writings have been subsequently published in Bahurūpiyā śahar [31], this time in the same page and showing the name of the author (Dilip Kumar) and the date of writing (22nd March 2006).

1.

I met a man who was wearing blue trousers and a white shirt. His eyes were narrow, like the eyes of the film star Ajay Devgan. He said, ‘There was a vast open field from Nangla till Pragati Maidan. A field where people would stand up and declare war the moment they saw the king approaching from a distance. The field remained. Many inventions took place here; one of them is Nangla Maanchi.’¹³

2.

His face betrayed an unhappiness. He was wearing a waistcloth, and he held a stick in his hand, as if he was holding his entire world in his fist. This elderly man said to me, ‘Sit here and listen. Where Nangla is today, was once a dense forest. Snakes, monkeys, lions ruled the forest. Some people cut down the forest and made their homes here with the wood. And today it has taken the form of a dwelling.’¹⁴

3.

He calls himself the pradhan of this locality. Clad in a shirt and waistcloth, a cap with a pointed tip set on his head, he said, ‘Listen. In the beginning there was water all around. We filled sand and made land out of it. What we didn't fill up now flows as the river Yamuna. The settlement which came up by the river has three parts to it, all of which together are known by the name Nangla Maanchi.’¹⁵ ([32], pp. 145–146).

This quotation corresponds to the entire writing, as it is reported in Trickster City [32], the version of Bahurūpiyā śahar translated into English and published three years after the ‘original’ one. The piece describes the encounter between the narrative voice, which may correspond with the author, and a man¹⁶ who sheds light on different aspects and moments of the foundation of Nangla Manchi.

The narrator of the framed stories traces back the history of the basti to a remote past populated by nobility, fierce people, thick forests, and wild animals. Most importantly, these tales, which can be seen as foundation myths of the place, give evidence and register the cleverness of Nangla dwellers, who, living in an area in which “many inventions took place”, were able to construct a settlement out of sand. However, the basti did not come from intelligence exclusively, but from cooperation among the constructor-residents, a quality and a modus operandi that the Cybermohalla’s practitioners often attribute to their fellow basti and resettlement colony residents.

Dilip Kumar in fact describes the founders of Nangla as the initiators of a community based on sharing and harmony, providing a positive and edifying picture of the origin of the basti, which kept that shape until 2006, and of its constructors. This narration is not similar in any way to those evoking—or denouncing—crimes, illicit businesses, and violence, which, when it comes to unplanned settlements, do not appear exclusively in the information domain but also in scientific and non-scientific literature.¹⁷ The narrativised events are populated by functioning, productive, and organised residents to whom the non-narrativised members of the same (now scattered) community can look up to as role models and who represent a history they can be proud of.

Although narrations are immaterial elements, in some cases they may constitute one of the few tangible presences of the materiality of certain places and experiences. This happens with the literary pieces written within the Cybermohalla Project, especially those focusing on the demolished basti of Nangla Manchi. Materiality, in fact, is not exclusively represented by objects like textbooks or booklets, but is evoked by the narration itself that, like in the case of Nangla Manchi, connects a material past with an immaterial present. Additionally, this applies both to places that no longer have a material form and to those whose shape clearly mutated over time, as in the case of LNJP colony.

Literary texts keep memories safe and, whether it is by strengthening a bond with the narrated events and communities or by providing new knowledge on some areas of the city and creating new connections, they act on the present lives of those who have access to them. The capabilities and functions of literature as a cultural and historical archive has been observed by several studies, an example is represented by the work of literary scholar and theorist Allan H. Pasco, who emphasised the importance that literature had for historians and scholars interested in late-eighteenth century France [24].

The many ways in which creative literature functions as a repository of daily life memories have been explored from several angles: Pernille Hermann focuses on saga literatures as a vehicle of cultural memories [19], while Astrid Erll, from which Hermann draws inspiration, includes even feature films, together with novels, in her analysis on how these cultural products produce memories more through the realisation of feelings of authenticity and truthfulness than via historical accuracy [15].

Not only individual research, but also anthological works have been dedicated to the investigation of the relationship between cultural memories and cultural products, particularly literature: Literature and Cultural Memories [20] is probably one of the most comprehensive collections on this topic. The book addresses issues such as the connection of materiality and memories enacted by the literary production; the process of identity formation, promotion and transmission through cultural products; and their capability of acting as symbolic representations both of memories and histories accepted and promoted by institutions and those considered as countercultural.

This broad field of studies includes and intersects with some narrower ones, like literary Trauma Studies, which build obviously from Trauma Studies too. The anthology Trauma and Literature [21] drafts the genesis and growth of Literary Trauma Theory and, thanks to the contributions that apply theory to the analysis and close readings of a number of literary examples, it is at the same time illustrative of the many issues that this research branch can cover. Some years later, the anthology The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma [13] witnessed the liveliness and the progress of the discipline, including developments in different media, like photography, and several literary genres, like poetry, autobiographical and biographical writings, graphic narratives, and post-apocalyptic fiction. The anthology also pays great attention to themes such as the traumas provoked by climate changes and climate collapse.

The mentioned scholarship, hence, supports the idea that the very act of writing works as a tool to cope with traumas: writing can be cathartic and at the same time can give to the writers the possibility of feeling in control of the emotions connected to their traumatic experiences. Furthermore, in addition to their importance as cultural archives, when they store memories and experiences coming from marginalised subjects, literary texts acquire a deeper meaning: a political one.¹⁸

Deciding on who is entitled to the public discourses and debates, a participation that obviously passes also through cultural production, and who is not is an exercise of power, and those who are in charge of these decisions are the holders of this power. Creating the conditions for a larger access to the cultural productions of individuals and groups living in marginalised situations is therefore an attack to the exclusive system at the basis of cultural and public exclusion [33]. This is exactly the grounding idea of the Cybermohalla Project, whose literary texts considered here are one of the many outcomes.

In the case of the literary production that I analyse in this article, the narratives preserved in the texts constitute evidence of the violence and the effects of spatial exclusion in contemporary Delhi, revealing additional layers of complexity intrinsic to the macro-question of inhabiting the Indian metropolis. This function of literature has also been investigated in Anubhav Pradhan’s work on Trickster City. The scholar recognises this collection as a precious source of information on the perspective of living in Delhi of those individuals who have to routinely negotiate their presence in the city [27].

To him, the artistic outcomes of projects such as the Cybermohalla represent a way of coping with power abuse, perpetuating the memory of lives and losses interconnected with the city development, which, at least in theory, wish to be as democratic and fair as possible. Literary pieces such as those analysed here give body to destroyed places and scattered communities based on the neighbourhood, as for Nangla Manchi, and provide several places neglected or un-prioritised by the city planning and cultural authorities with historical accounts from which their dwellers can draw.

The subjective point of view explicitly delivered by the authors attaches an added value to these narrations, which depart from the pretence of ultimate objectivity held by other textual typologies (surveys, statistics, and identification documents constitute an example of constructed objectivity). In fact, the subjective experiences and even more the way in which the writers narrativize them through omissions, exaggeration, and a dose of imagination represent the elements that, in my view, are the most effective in denormalising the unfair treatments and the tension due to a precarious living to which many Delhi dwellers are exposed.

Any person, any author has a different sense of what is “tellable”, namely, worth to be told [7], which depends on the degree of signification and emotional meaning that a fact, a situation, or an emotion has on who writes—what Monika Fludernik defines as “experientiality” [17]. As highlighted by Michelle Balaev, when it comes to expressing or re-elaborating traumas through creative literature, both the “speakability” and the “unspeakability” of traumatic experiences are strongly influenced by the cultural sensibilities and models characterising the society in which the author lives [6], in relation to which the writers can stand in continuity or in opposition.

Considering this, rather than questioning the percentage of accuracy of the narrativised historical reconstruction of a neighbourhood’s establishment, when examining the works of the practitioners at the Labs, readers should ask themselves- why is there a need to establish an ‘epic’ of the basti’s origins, and why the writers—and likely other residents as well—view this as necessary. In fact, the literary production by the Labs’ practitioners often offers a juxtaposition and an interaction among accounts of demolition and foundation of a given place. The broadsheet Nāṃglā hai thā is illustrative of this tendency.

“Kahāṃ?” and “Kahāṃ Jāeṃge, Nahīṃ Mālūm”—The Edification of a Basti, Its Demolition, and the Construction of Its Memory

In the same way as the literary examples analysed so far, the piece of writing “Kahāṃ?”, included in the Nāṃglā hai thā, employs the voice of a character to illustrate the origin and the development of the unplanned settlement to which the broadsheet is dedicated. “Kahāṃ?” recounts an episode of the life of Manilaal, one of the many residents of Nangla Manchi. One day, the man leaves the basti to go enrol his daughter in an elementary school. There, he finds out that the teacher does not know about the existence of Nangla Manchi.

Hence, the protagonist gives her indications to situate the basti, located in the area of Sarai Kale Khan on the west bank of the Yamuna River, just in front of the Ring Road (sāmne ring roḍ, as reported in the Hindi text). Most importantly, he tells her the story of the families that first started building their kuccha houses, describing the followed procedures and the materials. While narrating how the area was populated, Manilaal tells the teacher that, when the establishment of Nangla was still in process, people used to ask Nangla’s first inhabitants where the basti was located.

Then four-five families filled some pieces of marshy land by pouring mud to build their houses, covering as much as they could, without walls, and made some houses by putting tarpaulin roofs. They spent the whole day outside and came back in the evening. […] Initially, those people were the only ones, but then they called the family from the village. […] When asking for a ticket for Nangla, they too were answered ‘for where?’, so Manilaal gave the teacher the same answer these people used to give. But bit by bit the nest was built, settled, and broadened, and its news spread along with it in the city.¹⁹ (my translation).

What Manilaal narrates echoes in both “Nāṃglā kyā thā?” and the section “itihās” of “Log”. The writings are united by the narrative choice of the frame and framed story enacted by the characters living in the described areas and by other elements too, like the main topic (the foundation of the neighbourhoods that are home for their authors) and the focus on the edification of houses by those who inhabit them. Cooperation among the resident-constructors and the progressive arrival of their family members in the new auto-built areas are also common main motifs in the analysed writings.

Manilaal describes Nangla Manchi as a shelter and refuge for people (basera in the Hindi text), a feature that made it known among the Delhiites. The perception of one’s own neighbourhood as a welcoming space is a common theme in the literary production resulting from the Cybermohalla Project. This is particularly evident when it comes to the description of Nangla Manchi in the broadsheet Nāṃglā hai thā. In another piece included in the broadsheet, “Kahāṃ jāeṃge, nahīṃ mālūm” (“We do not know where we will go”), this basti is described as a place that is home for a heterogeneous group of residents.

The writing revolves around the sense of incertitude that affects the dwellers of Nangla when the basti is finally demolished after years of warnings. In one line, the author(s) connects the beginning and ending of the settlement by affirming: “The encounter of all kinds of people and feelings made the basti, but during the demolition they all look the same”²⁰ (my translation).

Among the many elements characterising life in any place, when it comes to Nangla Manchi, what the author(s) considers as worthy of being told, narrated, and conveyed is the sense of harmony and community they felt in Nangla. If on the one hand this feeling must not be extended to all the population of the basti, on the other hand it is important to acknowledge this feeling experienced from some of its dwellers and now stored and kept alive, as a result of literary documentation.

The title of the writing reflects another important perception of the author(s), that is, the demolition as a negative leveller that flattens the diversity of the basti dwellers in common painful feelings such as sorrow, insecurity, and precarity. Together with a community of people, the bulldozers raze houses in which “each wall tells the story of those who were living among them”²¹ (my translation). Those stories and memories are now transmitted by the written and spoken word of those who experienced them.

Like much part of the literary production concerning issues of displacement realised by the writers who joined the Cybermohalla Project, the literary examples here presented included in Nāṃglā hai thā can be seen as a way to cope with the traumatic experiences entailed by the forced displacement of the authors and/or their close ones. In fact, writing helps people come to terms with the organisation—whether conscious or not— of their thoughts and memories, including those associated with painful experiences.

If on the one hand writing processes, especially those reviving hurtful experiences, may be troublesome, on the other hand writing may constitute an opportunity to intervene on the traumatic events since authors have the possibility of shaping them as they wish, in a more or less deliberate attempt of controlling them and impose their own agentivity on the narration of a traumatic event. The juxtaposition of tales of construction and destruction present in the works here analysed can be considered as an attempt of the authors to control memories and feelings connected to the painful experiences of eviction and relocation, a way to represent and position themselves no longer as passive subjects but as active designers of their lives.

Final Remarks

The writings here analysed constitute a tiny part of the literary, and more in general artistic production resulting from the meetings at the Labs during the first decade of the twenty-first century. However, they are representative of some of the main themes explored and narrativised by the Cybermohalla’s practitioners and some of their narrative strategies as well.

Although they focus on two different neighbourhoods, LNJP Colony and former basti Nangla Manchi, the brief pieces “Log”, “Nāṃglā kyā thā?”, “Kahāṃ?” and “Kahāṃ jāeṃge, nahīṃ mālūm” show common literary motifs and intents. These similarities are not solely the manifestation of similar expressive needs that (at least some of the) dwellers of two Delhiite bastis felt at the beginning of the century, but a sign of the thick interactions among the young residents of both bastis who attended the Labs established in their areas.

In addition to this, the affinities emerging from the literary works produced by different practitioners and resulting from varying interactions among diverse groups of people witness the general vision of Cybermohalla project, centred on encouraging the young practitioners to reflect on their own relationship with their city and their neighbourhood and on the existing dynamics regulating the interrelation between the specific basti or the resettlement colony and the whole metropolis. More importantly, at the Labs kids and teenagers were encouraged to write from their point of view; they spread and recorded their stories and histories, in a context in which, at that time more than nowadays, creative statements from similar perspectives were extremely rare.

The creative and discursive practices enacted during the meetings among practitioners and facilitators are reflected in the writings of the former. In fact, the interviews and the conversations with other residents of the neighbourhood in which the Labs were located served to the authors as an inspiration for the structures of the stories analysed in this chapter. Word of mouth, reported tales, and frame(d) stories are indeed the main narrative tools employed by the authors to shape their stories, especially when it comes to quasi-historical or mythical reconstruction of the history of their neighbourhoods.

To employ narrative strategies involving a polyphony of voices not only reflects the creative practices performed by the practitioners inside and outside the Labs, but also highlights one of the main elements about the lived experience in their neighbourhoods: the existence of a community. This entity, which the practitioners care describing as harmonic, clever, and diverse, is presented as the core without which the history of places such as LNJP Colony and Nangla Manchi can neither be transmitted nor reconstructed and as one of the main addressees of these literary texts.

In contexts characterised by precarity, especially home-precarity, such as those in which the young practitioners of the Cybermohalla project lived, writing represents a way of coping with the traumas provoked by forced displacement (as for the dwellers of Nangla Manchi) or the awareness of this danger (as for the residents of LNJP Colony). Besides writing, reading too may have a therapeutic effect, but it can also act as a trigger, leading people to re-experiencing traumatic events. Both scenarios are possible for the readers who faced similar experiences of eviction and relocation directly or indirectly, as in the case of those who never lived through the demolition of their own neighbourhood but were born into families who endured it.

Pieces of writing such as “Log”, “Nāṃglā kyā thā?”, “Kahāṃ?”, and “Kahāṃ jāeṃge, nahīṃ mālūm” provide information about the neighbourhoods and communities to which they are dedicated from an inner vantage point. The offered perspectives enrich the knowledge the readers had on those areas and communities regardless of the degree of familiarity they previously had with them and add different layers of complexity to their understanding of the narrated areas.

Besides functioning as a coping mechanism for loss and fear, writing always represents a possibility of telling one’s story from their own perspective, expressing the writers’ agency on the reality they live in and interact with. By preventing the loss of their memories and those of their communities and contrasting the scarcity, if not the complete absence, of creative representations of their bastis from an inner perspective, the Cybermohalla’s practitioners and the literary texts they produced are one of the several example of acting on one’s own history and future through writing.

References

1.

Ahoobim, Oren, Laura Goldman, and Shanti Mahajan. 2014. What Makes a “World-Class” City?. Stanford Social Innovation Review, Urban Development. https://​ssir.​org/​articles/​entry/​what_​makes_​a_​world_​class_​city

2.

Areté. 2019. Writing as a Political Act: Dominic Sy in conversation with Eka Kurniawan. In In Conversation With. Audio podcast episode. Ateneo De Manila University. https://​arete.​ateneo.​edu/​connect/​writing-as-a-political-act

3.

Arranz, Adolfo, Adnan Abidi, Anand Katakam, Sudev Kiyada, and Sakshi Dayal. 2023, Rubble and Ruin: How Delhi homes were turned to rubble before the G20. Reuters. September 5. https://​www.​reuters.​com/​graphics/​G20-SUMMIT/​SLUM/​zdpxrxoaypx/​

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AustenSoofi,Mayank.2016.Lifeinanillegalcolony.Mint.November26. https://​www.​livemint.​com/​Leisure/​yJi2UuW8ZcW92Ta3​4n3mBI/​Life-in-an-illegal-colony.html

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Azzouz, Ammar. 2023. “Resisting Memoricide: On the Destruction and Reconstruction of Memory”.SocialSciencesResearchCouncil.April19. https://​items.​ssrc.​org/​where-heritage-meets-violence/​resisting-memoricide-on-the-dest ruction-and-reconstruction-of-memory/

6.

Balaev, Michelle. 2008. Trends in Literary Trauma Theory. Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 41 (2): 149–166

7.

Baroni, Raphaël. 2014. Tellability. In The Living Handbook of Narratology. Hamburg: Hamburg University. http://​www.​lhn.​unihamburg.​de/​article/​tellability

8.

Baviskar, Amrita. 2003. Between Violence and Desire: Space, Power and Identity in the Making of Metropolitan Delhi. International Social Science Journal 55 (175): 89–98.

9.

Bhan, Gautam. 2016. In the Public’s Interest: Evictions, Citizenship and Inequality in Contemporary Delhi. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.

10.

Brueck, Laura R. 2014. Writing Resistance, The Rhetorical Imagination of Hindi Dalit Literature. New York: Columbia University Press.

11.

Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

12.

Cybermohalla Broadsheet Editorial Team. 2006 Nāṃglā hai thā. Nāṃglā Māṃcī anubhavoṃ kī bunāī. New Delhi: Sarai Ankur Publishing House.

13.

Davis, Colin and Hanna Meretoja. Eds. The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma. Oxond and New York: Routledge.

14.

Dupont, Veronique. 2011. The Dream of Delhi as a Global City. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35 (3): 533–554.

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Erll, Astrid. 2010. Literature, Film, and the Mediality of Cultural Memory. In Cultural Memory Studies, ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, 389–398. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter.

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Fernandes, Leels. 2006. India’s New Middle Class Democratic Politics in an Era of Economic Reform. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Fludernik, Monika. 2003. Natural Narratology and Cognitive Parameters. In Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, ed. David Herman, 363–377. Stanford, Ca: CSLI.

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Ghertner, Asher. 2011. Gentrifying the State, Gentrifying Participation: Elite Governance Programs in Delhi. International Journal Of Urban And Regional Research 35 (3): 504–532.

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Hermann, Pernille. 2013. Saga Literature, Cultural Memory, and Storage. Scandinavian Studies 85 (3): 332–354.

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Irmia, Michaela, Andreea Paris, and Dragos Manea. Eds. 2017. Literature and Cultural Memories. Leiden: Brill/Rodopi.

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Kurtz, Roger J. 2018. Trauma and Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Mogul, Rhea, Vedika Sud, and Sania Farooqui. 2023. India, advocate for the global poor, clearsslumsasG20drawnear.CNNWorld. https://​www.​cnn.​com/​2023/​09/​04/​india/​g20-summit-india-slum-home-demolitions-intl-hnk-dst/​index.​html

23.

Nainar, Nahla. 2019. ‘Writing is an extremely political act’... but that’s no reason to brutally suppress alternative views, says poet-activist Salma. The Hindu. February 11. https://​www.​thehindu.​com/​books/​books-authors/​salma-poet-tamil-jaipur-literature-festival-kanhaiyyalal-sethia-award-nahla-nainar-women-feminism-dmk/article26236115.ece

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Pasco, Allan H. 2004. Literature as Historical Archive. New Literary History 35 (3): 373–394.

25.

Porteous, Douglas, J. Porteous, and Sandra E. Smith, eds. 2001. Domicide: The Global Destruction of Home. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

26.

Prakash, Uday. 2012. The Walls of Delhi. Trans. J Grunebaum. Perth: UWAP.

27.

Pradhan, Anubhav. 2019. …will never become quiet. In The Materiality of Literary Narratives in Urban History, ed. Lieven Ameel, Jason Finch, Silja Laine, and Richard Dennis, 243–260. New York: Routledge.

28.

Rao, Ursula. 2010. Making the Global City: Urban citizenship at the Margins of Delhi. Ethnos 75 (4): 402–424.

29.

Shivji, Salimah. 2023. ‘This was our home’: Thousands left with nowhere to go as New Delhi razes slums ahead of G20. CBC. CBC World in India. September 7. https://​www.​cbc.​ca/​news/​world/​india-g20-delhi-homeless-shelters-1.​6957828

30.

Singh, et al. 2002. Galiyoṃ se – by lanes. New Delhi: Sarai + Publishing.

31.

Tabassum et al. 2007. Bahurūpiyā śahar. New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan.

32.

Tabassum et al. 2010. Trickster City: Writings from the Belly of the Metropolis. Trans. Shevta Sarda. New Delhi: Penguin Books India.

33.

Vasallo, Brigitte. 2023. Linguaggio inlcusivo ed esclusione di classe. Trans. Giusi Palomba. Naples: Tamu.

34.

Uzor, Kenechi. 2019. Writing Is Always a Political Act. Electric Lit. November 7. https://​electricliteratu​re.​com/​writing-is-always-a-political-act/​

35.

Webster, Scott. 2023. Revisiting Memoricide: The everyday killing of memory. Memory Studies,0 (0). Ahead of Print. Sage Journals. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1177/​1750698023118456​4

Footnotes

1

More information about bastis eviction in Delhi in late 2023 can be found in Mogul, Sud, and Farooqi (2023); Arranz, [3], and [29].

2

For further information about basti demolitions in Delhi, especially those included in the timeframe ‘90 s and early 2000s, see the project The Missing Basti: https://​missingbasti.​com/​.

3

J. Douglas Porteous and Sandra E. Smith explains that “[d]omicide has been defined as the deliberate destruction of home by agencies pursuing goals, which involves planning or similar processes, and which causes suffering to those who lose their homes” (Porteous and Smith, 2001, p.182). To further investigate the domicide phenomenon, I recommend the reading of Domicide: The Global Destruction Of Home (Porteous & Smith, 2001).

4

The term memoricide, coined in 1992 by Croatian doctor Mirko Grmek, refers to the systematic destruction of the memories and traces from the past of targeted groups and communities. Readings like “Resisting Memoricide: On the Destruction and Reconstruction of Memory” (Azzouz, 2022. Available on https://​items.​ssrc.​org/​where-heritage-meets-violence/​resisting-memoricide-on-the-destruction-and-reconstruction-of-memory/​) and “Revisiting memoricide: The everyday killing of memory” [35] are exemplary in this regard.

5

About the used transliteration system: to transliterate Hindi words, I use diacritics following the Hindi romanisation table provided by the Library of Congress (“Hindi”, 2011); an exception is represented by the transcription of the nasalized vowels, for which I always use the sign ṃ, without differentiating between ṃ and ṁ as the table expects. As for the Hindi words that entered the English language, even when this is exclusively valid for some specific domains, I do not use diacritics and report them as other scholars did. Words like basti and kuccha houses are an example of this.

6

The literary texts produced within the Cybermohalla Project are experimental in many ways, including their format often presenting a dialogue among photographs, drawings, and text and peculiar ways of presenting the texts themselves; an example is the very title of the piece of writing “Log >  > 30.08.2011” included in the collection Galiyoṃ se—by lanes. In this chapter, I maintain the original form of the texts I analyse, avoiding domesticating them and forcing them into the rules of academic writings. However, due to the principle of briefness, from now on I will refer to this piece of writing simply as “Log”.

7

The words reported in this paragraph between brackets and quotation marks are those that appear in the English translation of the writing “Log”, reported as they are in the volume. The authors and the translator decided not to translate the word pradhān, which means “leader” in Hindi, into English and reported it as “Pradhan”.

8

इतिहास: यहाँ क़ब्रिस्तान था | यह सन् 1969 की बात है | यहाँ अरविंद अस्पताल शुरू से ही है | यहाँ उधर के डॉक्टरों के क्वॉटर थे | धीरे-धीरे वे लोग यहाँ से जाने रहे और यह ज़मीन फिर से बंजर हो गई! फिर तुर्क़मान गेट के कुछ गधोड़ी (गधे चराने वाले) थे, जो अपने गधे, घोड़े यहीं बाँधने लगे | धीरे-धीरे उन्होंने अपनी फै़मिलियों के लिए भी यहीं छोटे से झोंपड़े बनाए, जो सिर्फ़ नाम के लिए उनके थे | वे अब भी तुर्क़मान गेट पर रहते थे | कुछ लोग थे जो जगहों से आकर यहाँ बेस | कुछ ग़रीबों के पास किराए का मकान लेने के लिए पैसे नहीं होते थे, वे यहीं अपना झोंपड़ी डाल कर रहने लगे | जो लोग यहाँ रहने लगे वे अपने रिश्तेदारों को भी अपने पास बुलाने लगे | वे दूसरी जगहों की ज़मीन बेचकर यहाँ आ गए | यह कोई सन् 1980 की बात है | यहाँ 450 घर हो गए |” [30], p. 39).

9

During my doctoral research, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork. Activists, scholars, and facilitators engaged in realities such as the Housing and Land Rights Network (HLRN), The Missing Basti Project, Ankur, and the CSDS feature among the participants in my interviews. The results of the interviews and other data collected through fieldwork will be available in my thesis.

10

One of the few journalistic pieces distancing itself from this homologated perspective on informal settlements is “Life in an illegal colony” by Mayank Austen Soofi (Austen Soofi, 2016). The piece, focusing on LNJP Colony basti, developed after the author read Trickster City, probably the most famous outcome of the Cybermohalla Project, and Bhan’s work “In The Public’s Interest”, also quoted in the present chapter.

11

In Hindi, the term bastiwale refers to the residents of the bastis.

12

I capitalise the B in Broadsheets when I refer to the ensemble of all the published items belonging to this category. When I refer to a single broadsheet, I do not capitalise the b.

13

“मैं एक शख़्स से मिला जिसने नीली पैंट, सफ़ेद शर्ट पहनी थी | उसकी अजय देवगन जैसी छोटी − छोटी आँखें थीं | वो बोला, ‘नांगला माँची से लेकर प्रगित मैदान तक खुला मैदान था | एक ऐसा मैदान जिसमें राजाओं को दूर से आते देख लोग विद्रोह में युद्ध का आदेश दे देते थे | ये मैदान ही बना रहा | इस मैदान में कई आविष्कार हुए, जिसका एक रूप बना नांगला माँची’ |” ([31], p. 109).

14

“इन का चेहरा मुर्झाया सा था | इन्होंने धोती पहनी हुई थी, हाथ में एक लकड़ी थी, जैसे जिंदगी को अपनी मुठ्ठी में पकड़ रखा है | उन दादा ने कहा: ‘बैठ जा और सूना आज जहां नांगला है, वहां एक घना जंगल था | इस में सांप, बंदर, शेर जैसे जानवर थे | कुछ लोगों ने जंगल काट काट के लकड़ी झोंपड़ियां बनाई, और आज ये एक बस्ती का रूप ले चुका है |’” ([31], p. 109).

15

“ये ख़ुद को यहाँ का प्रधान कहते हैं | धोती−कुर्त्ता, सिर पर टोपी, जिसकी आगे की नोक थी | वो बोले, ‘सुन | यहाँ पहले चारों तरफ़ पानी ही पानी था | हम ने मिट्टी भर−भर के ज़मीन बनाई | जो छोड़ दिया, वो आज यमुना नदी है | उस नदी के साथ−साथ एक बस्ती है, जिसके अंदर तीन आकार हैं − मतलब तीन बसेरे हैं | इनको मिलाकर नाम दिया जाता है, नांगला माँची |” ([31], p. 109).

16

Considering that originally the three paragraphs were published in different pages, hence the connection shown among each other was less evident, nothing prevents the reader(s) to see the information provided in the paragraphs as delivered by three different men.

17

Examples of this narration can be found in Uday Prakash’ literary production (see the collection The Walls of Delhi, [26] which is not basti-phone, nor intended to result as such, but chooses to narrativize also the dark aspects of life in unplanned settlements.

18

The relevance of the act of writing as a political act has been supported and fostered in several literary environments, whether it be in the context of writing workshops addressing working class people [Toni Cade Bambara’s Pamoja workshops and Pamoja Writers’ Collective; the school, prison, and community workshops run by Piri Thomas and other members of the Harlem Writers Guild; or the recent experience of the Festival di letteratura working class, organised, among many, by the workers of the GKN factory in a former space of the same factory in Campi Bisenzio (Florence, Italy), are only a few of these examples] or within academia [Writing Resistance, The Rhetorical Imagination of Hindi Dalit Literature [10] is only one of the thousands of scholarships addressing issues of writing as a political act]. There is also no shortage of testimonies from writers explaining how and why they see their writing as political. Among the many interviews and conversations, I would like to signal the following ones: Kenechi Uzor’s interview with the Nigerian writer Helon Habila [34],Dominic Sy’s conversation with the Indonesian writer Eka Kurniawan [2]. Accessible on https://​arete.​ateneo.​edu/​connect/​writing-as-a-political-act; and the interviews with Tamil poet Salma reported by Nahla Nainar [23].

19

फिर चार − पाँच परिवारों ने अपने घर बनाने के लिये मिट्टी डाल − डाल के दलदल की उस ज़मीन के कुछ टुकड़ों का भराव किया जितना हो पाया, उतना कवर किया बिना दीवारों के तरपाल की छते डाल कर कुछ घर बनाए | दिन भर घर के बाहर रहते, और शाम वापस आते थे | […] शुरू में तो वो अकेले ही थे, पर फिर उन्होंने गाँव से अपने परिवार को बुला लिया | […] नांगला का टिकट चाहिये तो वो भी पूछते ‘कहाँ का?’ तो मणिलाल मैडम को दिया हुआ जवाब उन्होंने देते | पर धीरे धीरे बसेरा बनता, बसता, फैलता गया, और उस के साथ साथ उस के बारे में शहर में खबर भी |”[12], p. 26).

20

“कई तरह के श स और महौल से आए हुए लोग से fमलकर एक ब ती बनती है | मगर टू टने के समय हर कोई एक सा लग रहा है |” [12], p. 3).

21

“हर दkवार उसम रहने वाले का हाल बता रहk है |” [12], p. 3).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2025

S. Malhotra et al. (eds.)Trauma and Memory Studies: Responses from India and Beyondhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-6374-3_16

16. Remembering and Forgetting War Memory in Nayomi Munaweera's Island of a Thousand Mirrors

Roy Sangjukta 1   and Binod Mishra¹

(1)

Department of Humanities and Social Science, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Roorkee, Uttarakhand, India

Roy Sangjukta 

Email: sangjukta_r@hs.iitr.ac.in

Abstract

Memory encompasses past experiences and allows individuals to shape their identity, while trauma has the menacing quality of haunting individuals and the collective psyche as a result of unpleasant experiences. The novel Island of a Thousand Mirrors by Nayomi Munaweera explores the theme of civil strife between the Tamils and the Sinhalese. The story follows two characters, Saraswathi and Yasodhara Rajasinghe, who are separated socially, culturally, economically, and politically, yet share similarities in their individual trauma and memory due to the insurgency sparked by the Sri Lankan civil war. This chapter explores the concept of war memory by drawing upon the idea of “just memory” from Viet Thanh Nguyen’s influential work Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. The goal is to put both “ethical remembering” and “ethical forgetting” in the context of war memories to achieve a “just memory” free from politicised interpretations. This study highlights the distinction between Meera Atkinson’s exploration of the poetics of “transgenerational trauma” and Debarati Sanyal’s concept of “complicitous memory.” It will also shed light on the relevance of memory and trauma narratives of victims, witnesses, and diasporic or immigrant identities, and serves as a dialectical negotiation between valorisation, and victimisation.

Introduction

Nayomi Munaweera is a Sri Lankan-born American writer of the novel Island of a Thousand Mirrors (2013). Island of a Thousand Mirrors is her debut novel in the South Asian contemporary genre. She was born in 1973 in Sri Lanka and, along with her family, moved to Nigeria three years later to avoid the civil unrest. However, after 1984, facing similar unrest, they had to leave Nigeria and emigrate to the United States, Los Angeles, when Nayomi was only twelve.

In the epigraph of Island of a Thousand Mirrors, a quote from Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting sets the stage for a profound exploration of memory and forgetting within the context of factionalism, nationalism, war, and subjectivity. Divided into seven parts, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979) is worked into layers that explore how totalitarianism affects individual and collective, national and personal memories. Milan Kundera traces the interrelated lives of a handful of characters, each trying to recover or banish poignant memories. The quote from Kundera, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting” [21], epigraph), introduces the thematic underpinning of the novel. Throughout the text, the mode of narration intricately weaves together elements of autobiographical memory, forgetting, and political history, intertwining individual and collective trauma. The author skillfully employs a double narrator's point of view to voice the diverse shades of each character and their personal histories within the backdrop of national events.

In a war-torn Sri Lanka, two distinct worlds, representing the Sinhalese and Tamil factions, etch their stories in unique voices and spaces. Yasodhara Rajasinghe embodies the Sinhalese perspective, while Saraswathi provides the experience and viewpoint of the Tamil minority. Despite their differences, they are mirror reflections of individuality, subjectivity, and nationhood. The two characters remain ignorant of each other’s existence until a climactic suicide bombing episode. The catastrophe sheds light on the war's causality—Saraswathi, who joined the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) organisation and became a militant after being brutally assaulted by Sinhalese soldiers, is the suicide bomber, and among the countless casualties is Lanka, the NRI Sinhalese sister of Yasodhara Rajasinghe. This incident conjoins the two women as victims and agents of this gruesome war. Valančiūnas’ “Haunting Memories: Sri Lankan Civil War, Trauma and Diaspora in Literature and Film,” (2020) discusses the quality of war-related memories in diasporic spaces. He emphasises the haunting nature of these memories and highlights the transnational and transhistorical nature of trauma. For Valančiūnas, trauma continues to affect its subjects regardless of their origin or birthplace. The narratives of victimisation significantly shape the nation's post-war reconciliation and healing process [31]. Rachel Seoighe’s “Discourses of Victimization in Sri Lanka's Civil War,” (2016) details the manipulation of victim narratives by the Sri Lankan government, the Sinhalese, and the LTTE. These groups override individual and collective agencies, denying them their authentic voices and memories.

The status of the victim has been appropriated by the elites of each war-affected ethnic community in Sri Lanka. It has been claimed with alacrity in state discourse to denounce acts of ‘terrorism’ against the Sinhalese by the LTTE, … Since the end of the war in May 2009, major reports by the United Nations (UN) and human rights groups have signalled the need to pursue accountability for war crimes committed by the state forces and the LTTE in the war's final phase. ([28], p. 358–59).

The collective memories of trauma serve many purposes, including the politicising of trauma and the dynamic relationship between trauma narrative and war. Ramanathapillai's “The Politicizing of Trauma: A Case Study of Sri Lanka” (2006) detailed analysis asserts, “Stories about the traumatic events became both a powerful symbol and an effective tool to create new combatants by creating a new Tamil consciousness.”[26]. Henceforth, he supplements his views with a firm alternative conclusion: “alternative, personalised way of storytelling for traumatised people that offers a way to break the cycle of political violence” [26]. Borrowing from Marianne Hirsch’s epic research scholarship on Postmemory, the collective consciousness of these war trauma survivors and the perpetrators building their self-identity through generational perpetuation and the consolidation through art and literature marks the confluence of the temporal disruption (absence) and the continuity (reiteration) of their stories and memories. Hirsch states,

Like them, it reflects an uneasy oscillation between continuity and rupture. And yet postmemory is not a movement, method, or idea; I see it, rather, as a structure of inter- and trans-generational transmission of traumatic knowledge and experience. It is a consequence of traumatic recall but (unlike posttraumatic stress disorder) at a generational remove. ([13], p. 106).

Furthermore, the impact of war trauma extends across generations, with postmemory examining the transfer of traumatic experiences. In the research article “Memory and War: Tamil Women’s Experiences of Sri Lanka’s Civil War” (2018), Niro Kandasamy conducts sixteen interviews with Tamil women residing in Victoria and New South Wales, Australia. Kandasamy delves into how these women grapple with, resist, and reconstruct memories of Sri Lanka and its turbulent history. Drawing on the experiences of Tamil Australian women who have reconstructed their war experiences from their time in Sri Lanka or through generational memories, Kandasamy highlights how the memories of the Sri Lankan Civil War continue to shape the collective consciousness of the nation, emphasising the necessity for comprehensive reconciliation and healing processes.[16] In this quest for equitable justice, the fictional narrative by Munaweera reaches a definitive retributive phase, unambiguously striving to bring to the fore the war trauma, villainy, and victimhood that perpetuate the haunting legacy of the past in the present-day community beyond the affiliations in the Civil war.

Munaweera's text presents a fictionalised trauma narrative from a South Asian perspective, which challenges the traditional Freudian trauma model. This departure from the conventional model is in line with Laurie Vickroy's viewpoint, which contradicts Kali Tal and Lawrence Langer, theorists who argue that only direct, firsthand survivor testimony constitutes legitimate trauma stories. In his work Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction (2002), Vickroy introduces the concept of “empathetic unsettlement,” inspired by Dominick LaCapra, to help readers engage with these trauma narratives. She posits that literary representation and art offer a more reasoned and comprehensive understanding than potential erasures, manipulations, or overwriting of first-hand narratives or histories [33]. This chapter explores the pluralistic trauma model, highlighting the importance of social, cultural, and collective behaviours in examining the trauma narratives of fictionalised war victims through the experiences of two female characters. It investigates how history and memory continue to echo and overlap across generations, perpetuating reconciliatory trauma and memory images. The study also concentrates on narrative reconstruction, ethical considerations regarding remembering and forgetting, generational storytelling, literary restitution, and their impact on self and collective identity formation. The chapter entails a study of memory and trauma by showing the distinction between Meera Atkinson's exploration of the poetics of “transgenerational trauma” and Debarati Sanyal's concept of “complicitous memory” in effect. It sheds light on the relevance of memory and trauma narratives of victims, witnesses, and diasporic or immigrant collective identities, which undergo a continuous dialectic process with perspectives on presence and absence, commemoration and erasure, valorisation, and victimisation. This ongoing negotiation results in a haunting ontological presence of silences in the fictional and poetic renderings.

Caruth's seminal work Unclaimed Experience (1996) delves into the profound implications of trauma, expressing that “The historical power of trauma is not just that the experience is repeated after its forgetting, but that it is only in and through its inherent forgetting that it is first experience at all” ([5], p.17). This insight underscores the transhistorical significance of trauma responses and reiteration, presenting individuals within their cultural and social contexts and emphasising the profound impact of trauma on the constructed self and the world.

The novel is situated within a significant period of Sri Lanka's history, commencing with the country's official independence in 1948. However, the narrative unfolds explicitly from 1983 to 2009, encapsulating the historical and narrative memory culminating in the defeat of the LTTE insurgent group by the Sri Lankan government, marked by the demise of the leader, Vellupillai Prabhakaran. The protracted and tumultuous civil war cast a long shadow of casualties from both Sinhala and Tamil communities, ultimately recording an estimated death toll of nearly eighty thousand individuals.

Munaweera's novel is divided into two narrations: Yasodhara, a Sinhala woman, and Saraswathi, a Tamil woman. These two female characters represent opposite poles of society, nationality, and individuality in their different voices and life choices. The story begins with Yasodhara Rajasinghe, a third-generation diasporic Sinhala narrator, sharing her father Nishan’s story of growing up as a seven-year-old child in Hikkaduwa town, Sri Lanka. He was the son of an Ayurvedic doctor, Rajasinghe, and his mother, Beatrice Muriel, was a village schoolteacher. This part also delves into the generational history and the initial hostile situation between the Sinhalese and the Tamil factions in 1958. He vividly remembers the story of a Tamil schoolgirl, Radhini, who faced the wrath of Sinhala Lions, a communal group seeking revenge and violence against Tamils. This personal trauma was him witnessing the helpless victimhood of Tamils as he clearly remembers the story of a Tamil school girl, Radhini, who faced the gruesome wrath of Sinhala Lions, one section of the communal goons who were at large, trying to exact revenge and violence in their quest to exterminate or persecute all Tamils to reclaim their sovereignty and absolutist majority. The narrative then shifts to Yasodhara's mother, Visaka Sujatha Ranasinghe, and her affluent yet guarded childhood in contrast to Nishan's upbringing. Visaka faced the struggle to choose between conforming to social and cultural norms or being with her lover from a minority community, Ravan Shivalingam. She decided to marry Nishan from the same Sinhala community. However, their daughters Yasodhara and Lanka remained friends with the Tamil boy Shiva, which ultimately culminated in a marriage between Yasodhara and Shiva, son of the Tamil Ravan Shivalingam. Through this relationship dichotomy transcending over generations, the novel touches upon the source of communal unrest and the birth of LTTE and its impact on individuals and community identities. Through this dichotomous conflictual relationship, one gets to the interim essence of the source of animosity that had triggered the communal politics, the birth of LTTE, and the social and communal unrest that subsequently ensued.

As the novel progresses, deep undercurrents of racial and national hatred in a themed ideologue of community disharmony are documented and embroiled in small but significant images and incidents. One such significant incident is the riot provoked by the Sinhala, who wanted to kill, rape and plunder Tamil households and families, resentful of their settlement in Colombo, Sri Lanka, enraged beyond any sense by their fanatic extremist hatred against them for apparently stealing the mainlanders’ opportunities. This incident saw extreme violence and inhuman slaughtering, and on a personal level, Mala and Anuradha's empathy and the subsequent tragedy to preserve humanity over communal hatred. Mala is the aunt of Yasodhara Rajasinghe, Nishan's sister. She has always been a rebel with a strong past of female subjectivity. Mala marries Anuradha against her mother's will and finds the destiny of her free will. She remains unable to conceive throughout her marriage but maintains a positive outlook, pouring her nurturing love into raising plants and developing thriving gardens. Luck smiled on her one fine day, and she conceived. At this juncture, the novel documents a gory July riot on Colombo's Galle Road streets when Mala goes into untimely labour. The incident leaves Mala not only widowed and childless but also traumatised by the grotesque demonic atrocity that the Sinhalese exercised upon Tamils and how that fuelled future militancy and separatist factionalism in the Tamil community, who were vulnerable victims of that massacre.

Arteries, streams, and then rivers of Tamils flow out of the city. Behind them, they leave: looted, soot blackened houses, the unburied or unburnt bodies of loved ones, ancestral wealth, lost children, Belonging and Nationalism … They flee to ancestral villages abandoned decades ago, and it is in these northern places that the events of that July will make them the most militant and determined of separatists. ([21], p. 89).

Mala loses her Sinhala husband, Anuradha, who had tried to disarm an angry mob to rescue a Tamil boy. The mob, intoxicated with wrath and nationalistic jingoism, did not flinch even once to break his skull open since he tried to safeguard a Tamil boy. Poornam, the Tamil house help, and Alwis, a coconut plucker, rescue Mala, and she tragically delivers a stillborn child. The gruesome images of Tamil women ravaged and burnt, and their similitude to animal flesh burnt at a Muslim feast are just horrors and terrors that Mala witnesses and has scarred her for life since she realises how beastly human hatred can be.

A roar of delight drowns the woman's screams. Then again, the sound of gushing petrol…The scent is rising again, the thick fragrance of charred flesh that wafts from the Muslim quarter during Eid, the festive roasting of animal flesh. ([21], p. 87).

Munaweera's novel engages with war, communal factionalism, exile, and belonging, maintaining a distinct pacifist approach. The author highlights that all war victims and survivors, regardless of their allegiance, endure ordeals and trauma. The memory of war remains gruesome and biased on both sides of the conflict. According to the novel's narrator, Yasodhara Rajasinghe, war, and hatred are the actual adversaries. The individuals affected are not influential leaders but ordinary civilians like Saraswathi, who endured abuse and sexual violence at the hands of Sinhalese soldiers due to political and communal animosity, or Lanka Rajasinghe, who lost her life in a bombing carried out by LTTE militants. Saraswathi's words on the day she joins the LTTE camp capture the internalised hostility and trauma shaping their identities. The quote “hatred is real, and that between us and them, it is the only thing” ([21], p. 173) reflects the extensive literature and research on the identity formation of Tamil LTTE women Tigers, documenting their erasure from political records and instances of gendered forgetting. These women were doubly marginalised and victimised by war and patriarchy, leading them to take on roles as LTTE combatants for social settlement and priority despite being disenfranchised of feminine autonomy within strict Martian-regulated LTTE groups. This resulted in trauma-induced identity challenges for Tamil minority women like Saraswathi. She, like many such victims, was left with one of two choices: enduring a life of ignominy and abuse or joining the agentive forces. Gowrinathan’s “Inside Camps, Outside Battlefields: Security and Survival for Tamil Women” (2013), “How Women Rebel: Gender and Agency in Sri Lanka” (2015), and Tamara Herath’s Women Combatants and Gender Identity in Contemporary Conflicts: The Case of the LTTE (2007) are some of the works that give a detailed study on the positional agency of these women.

The literature in social sciences and cognitive sciences examines the relationship between trauma and identity. Authors such as Steven L. Berman and Susan J. Brison delve into how individuals integrate their traumatic experiences into their sense of self. It is suggested that war trauma has a detrimental influence on shaping one's identity and can lead to identity distress [4], p. 1). This common enemy is the part where Saraswathi, a seventeen-year-old child who bore the dream of being a schoolteacher, finds resonance. She gets violated by the Sinhala soldiers in the name of communal hatred and war. For her, war is:

…something huge, with a pointed tongue and wicked claws. When the tanks rumble past in the far field, I feel it breathe; when the air strikes start and the blood flows, I feel it lick its lips. ([21], p. 124).

The protagonists in the novel deal with diverse narrative struggles and the articulation of their identities, which are fragmented, dispersed, and in a constant dialectical negotiation between the past and the present.

Heidegger’s concept of fundamental existentialism discusses the concepts of “being” and “becoming,” as he presents in his influential work Being and Time (1927). According to him, a person's existence in relation to the world is the essence of “being,” while the ongoing process of change and actualisation represents “becoming.” Authentic existence lies in the interaction with one's experiences and the world. The novel can be approached from a Heideggerian idea of being and becoming phenomenologically. Ontologically, the remembrance and forgetting of traumatic history and memory unfold in both Yasodhara and Saraswathi's dual but opposite territories of memory formation—time and its dissociation help to reconsolidate silences and repressed narratives.

War Trauma and Remembering in the Novel

The study of trauma gained significant momentum in the 1990s, drawing heavily on Freud's theory. This theory was a pioneering exploration of the profound impact of extreme experiences on identity, psyche, and memory. The roots of trauma can be traced back to psychoanalytic frameworks, particularly Freud's early works such as Studies on Hysteria (1895), co-written with Joseph Breuer, translated and published with an introduction in 2004 and Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), which highlighted the importance of recall and remembrance finding their outlet in traumatic reminisces or as Freud and Breuer described them as “pathogenic reminiscences” ([11], p. 57). This has emphasised their role in causing psychological distress and leading to traumatic memories.

The early Trauma theorists, including Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, and Geoffrey Hartman, emphasised the unrepresentable nature of traumatic experiences and the discordance between language and trauma. They highlighted the difficulty in representing trauma and its effects on individual and collective cultural experiences, building upon this model, J. Brooks Bouson, Suzette Henke, Deborah Horvitz, Michael Rothberg, and Laurie Vickroy expanded Trauma Studies, incorporating feminism, race, and Postcolonial Studies. They based their work on the Freudian-Caruthian trauma model and its implications on the relationship between individual and cultural experiences through narrative transmission.

A critical counter-reaction to this model was the pluralistic trauma model, led by Ann Cvetkovich, Greg Forter, Amy Hungerford, and Naomi Mandel. This model encourages the idea of remembrance and the fluid nature of memory. It rejects the traditional trauma model's blame on linguistic limitations and empowers trauma survivors to remember and reconstruct their experiences.

Mandel emphasises that silence and forgetting can be strategic and self-conscious gestures rather than just products of the dominating culture’s demands. By examining the cultural context of trauma, one can explore representations of extreme experiences such as rape, war, the Holocaust, the Gulag, American slavery, colonial oppression, and racism. Caruth's concept of psychic trauma refers to a deep psychological injury disrupting an individual's perception of time, identity, and the world, causing considerable emotional distress. This type of trauma potentially changes a person's thoughts about their sense of self, relationships, and the world, leading to intrusive re-experiencing of non-verbal memories that resemble “reliving” rather than just remembering.

In his influential scholarly essay “Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War,” Viet Thanh Nguyen explores the memory of war and introduces the concept of ‘just memory.’ This approach recognises the complex realities experienced by all parties involved in a war, criticising the glorified notion of war. Departing from traditional war ethics, which often perpetuate biased perspectives and valorise specific national sentiments, Nguyen introduces the concepts of ‘ethical forgetting’ and ‘ethical memory’ that require people to acknowledge the potential for both vice and virtue through ‘forgetting’, while condemning the selective nature of memory.

Nguyen effectively integrates Marxist dialectics and memory scholars’ theoretical endeavours, drawing inspiration from Halbwachs to Ricoeur. He emphasises the importance of remembrances in perpetuating power imbalances. He also strives to be inclusive by registering the voices and struggles of not only Americans but also less dominant voices involved in conflicts like the Vietnam War, Cambodian Genocide, Laotians, Hmong, and others. This political tendency towards engineering an absence reveals the inherent gaps in war memory, where one side of the war is glorified and victimised at the expense of forgetting the other. Nguyen argues, “All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory” ([24], p. 4). Thus, the memory of war cannot be selective and complicit in being politicised.

Munaweera is coming from an ethnic perspective of civil war conflict between the two sections of majority and minority communities in Sri Lanka (Sinhalas and the Tamils) from two women victims and the implication it had on their identity, psyche and generational residues. Sinhala Yasodhara’s case was a diasporic trauma along with the war casualty of losing her sister at the gruesome bomb detonation by Tamil militants LTTE. Saraswathi reciprocated the trauma and physical abuse she had to undergo as a Tamil woman at the hands of the Sinhala Force and later as a LTTE woman combatant. Nayomi Munaweera is not holding her authorial valency in taking the decolonised perspective from the colonies by not purposefully taking a route that enhances the retributive and co-organisational space for a Western dictate. She is following an ethnic healing process, seeking reconciliation, which she knows cannot be attained by having a politicised forgotten memory but by an equivocal proclamation towards commemorating civil war and its atrocities from both sides of the community without attaining any bias. This closely recalls Viet Thanh Nguyen’s ethical remembrance in war and also validates Rothberg’s idea of a multidirectional memory that never undermines memories and trauma of one party and culture in valorising the other.

When we are thinking about decolonization, is it easy to fall into the habit of associating particular words with particular concepts. The word silence, in association with colonization, implies an imposed silence, as in when we are/ were silenced. It implies a trauma of not being heard, not having a voice, of having the ability to speak taken by someone or something outside of oneself. However, I’d like to suggest that silence is also an intentional response an act of defiance, a refusal to engage, and an act of resistance. ([22], p. 76–77).

Muñoz’s chapter tries to formalise the decolonial perspective that one needs to take into consideration while studying and exploring epistemic and psychological trauma responses and attributes from colonised countries. If Munaweera’s interaction with trauma from the Sri Lankan civil war trauma is posited along these lines, one can witness the radical forgetting that the political power perpetuates and the memory and trauma that communities culturally and generationally carry forward with effective obscurity at certain points, the silences or forgetting from both ends can be a dialectical clash from the perpetrators and the trauma victims, working both as oppression and subversion or resistance. This is similar to Eve Tuck's decolonised trauma study or Smith’s response to colonised research methodology. For them, decolonisation can be achieved by subverting the imperial and colonial hangover in our epistemic and cultural theoretics only through pondering over the Indigenous identity based on their dependence on the land and water of their own native roots. “[W]e are emphasising land, water and the more-than-human world, emphasising relations as accountability, emphasising a past- present-future that exceeds any nation-state or modern imperial formation.” ([30], p. 22).

This idea finds its beginning in the introductory exposition of the novel where Munaweera explains the departure of the colonialist British empire from the island of Sri Lanka and the narrator quite solemnly foregrounds the bedrock of sectarian war about to be ravaged amongst two flags of bestial insignia, “the rifle toting tiger. A sword gripping lion” ([21], p. 10). The author deftly undervalues the significance of the departing Englishmen, as a strong opening by Yasodhara Rajasinghe talking about her father’s childhood around the ocean unfolds the decolonial subversion. As the story ensues, innumerable instances involving the Rajasinghe family’s immigrant nostalgia during their expatriation owing to the Civil War to LA, California and revisiting the island memories residing in a desert city talks of trauma and a healing restorative nostalgia of Indigenous retrospective reminiscence.

The novel shows the past, present, and future accountability of these memories, traumas and forgetting in the island’s seawater fish, the fruits and their exotic familiar taste to Western alienation, to spices and curries from Yasodhara’s perspective. It eventually gravitates towards Saraswathi’s impoverished Tamil upbringing, where her Amma tried saving up to buy a lagoon fish. The way Saraswathi was lamenting for being denied the right to exercise any kind of fishing privileges as if the island (in this case, the Majority Sinhala community) is trying to get rid of her identity as a minority Tamil woman with a family. The final stage of reconciliation is observed in the quest for communion, as Yasodhara and Shiva’s biracial daughter, Samudhra, who embodies both Sinhala and Tamil heritage, seeks to idolise and transcend the collective memories and traumas of her communities. This quest represents a profound acknowledgment of those who perished from each side, amidst the complex narrative of Sri Lanka's ongoing struggle for ethnic or Indigenous identity realisation, shaped by trauma, memory, and the act of forgetting often manipulated for political ends. Personal and autobiographical oral storytelling, paired with a generational transcendence, defies these political narratives, fostering a decolonised Eastern perspective that emphasizes shared experiences and a revisionist approach to history. In a similar context, Munaweera endeavours to establish the multidirectional ethics of memory and trauma through this novel. Her retelling of the events is free from bias, as the author intends to be authentic to the narrative and historical process. She presents both virtue and vice and portrays villainy and humanity equally for both factions at war. Remembering one memory at the expense of another is some memory politics that she does away with which vehemently ascribes to such decolonised trauma and memory paradigm along the theoretical endeavours of Smith, Tuck and Wang.

Cultural Disparity and Migrant Trauma

Egon [18] categorises refugees into three groups based on their attitude towards displacement. The first group, called “Majority-Identified Refugees” (1981, p. 43), opposes political and social events at home, a sentiment shared by their compatriots, whether refugees or those who remain in their home areas. The second group, called “Events-Alienated Refugees,” comprises individuals who have left their home areas due to discrimination against their group and subsequently feel alienated from their former homes. Finally, the “Self-Alienated Refugees” includes people who leave their home country for personal reasons and feel alienated from their society due to their philosophy and not by any active policy of that society.

This novel delineates this classification in Saraswathi, representing the oppressed Tamil women’s community under the Sinhalese regime as the majority-identified refugee, Shiva and their family as events-alienated refugees, having left their land due to active discrimination and feeling alienated from their fellow citizens. While Ananda, the uncle of Yasodhara Rajasinghe, left his homeland for personal reasons and falls under the self- alienated refugee category.

Paul Ricoeur, a prominent philosopher in hermeneutics, phenomenology, and narrative theories, has argued that forgetting may not always be an “enemy of memory”, suggesting that forgetting plays a role in shaping our memories and identities. An example of this can be seen in Munaweera's fictionalised yet well-documented war narrative, where she explores the function of forgetting in creating or remedying memories and identities.

Viet Thanh Nguyen argues that ethical memory requires an honest approach to forgetting to ensure that all participants in war are acknowledged without favouring a specific group. He also emphasises the presence of both inhumanity and humanity in all individuals, advocating for a cosmopolitan education to promote ‘just memory’. Often, war is erroneously viewed as a struggle between pure good and evil, disregarding our capacity for villainy. Nguyen draws extensively from critics and literature about the Vietnam War and also cites examples from the Cambodian genocide and South Korean history to a lesser extent.

The twentieth century saw one of its biggest trials of harrowing events, including war, destruction, and human rights violations in the name of revolution, communalism, and political and cultural tensions. Both the Cambodian Genocide and the Sri Lankan Civil War stand as poignant examples of the profound impact of identity politics, ideologies, and global power dynamics on their local communities. These events have left a lasting impact on the affected communities’ transnational diasporic socio-cultural positions and identities.

The Cambodian genocide, which resulted in the deaths of approximately 1.5 to 3 million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979, was orchestrated by the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot's regime. The regime's ultra-nationalist, xenophobic, and chauvinistic stance drove its efforts to eliminate perceived enemies, including intellectuals, ethnic and religious minorities, and individuals deemed threats to the regime's vision of a classless, agrarian society.

This paper tries to put forward this approach towards ‘just memory’ in understanding the prominence of Naomi Munaweera's dealing with the war narrative from the South Asian perspective. When the civil war ends with the death of the LTTE leader by the government army officials, in the novel, Mahinda (the then president of Sri Lanka) gives this statement to some foreign journalists upon asking about the possibility of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, speaking about the celebration of long-awaited peace amongst the island inhabitants in Sri Lanka, the political-strategic silence on the idea of reparation and reconciliation hinting at a collective forgetting of all the war crimes and trauma, “I don't want to dig into the past. I don't want to open up this wound” ([21], p. 223), and in stark contrast is the traumatic stream-of-consciousness excerpt of Yasodhara's rumination against such a backdrop helps the author mitigate and mediate her stance on this post-war jubilant situation:

…I dream of the eighty thousand who did not live into this moment. Those who were left behind in the lagoons and paddy fields, in the cement jail cells, in the white vans, beneath the rolling waves of the ocean … those who were shattered in bomb blasts, those who were bludgeoned, … those who were taken in the midst of giving speeches, those who were taken from their beds in the night, … those who were called to strap bombs on and detonate themselves. I dream of the one that I can give a name to: my sister, Lanka Rajasinghe. And that other, her unnamed, unloved assassin. Eighty thousand: it is a number beyond comprehension. ([21], p. 224).

Yasodhara's reflection highlights the impact of erasure and reverberation of haunting absences, along with the deliberate act of cultural forgetting, in anticipation of a future of amicable unity and peace beyond ethnic and racial hatred. Yasodhara wants her daughter Samudhra, who is of mixed race, to find that unison in their reconcilable future was borne out of a traumatic past.

These insights help us understand how memory underlies a continuous process of historicisation. The past is forgotten and resurfaced through narrative mnemonics and cultural revivals. When Yasodhara calls for radical forgetting at the end of the novel to evade the trauma and evils of their shared historical and personal trauma, she knows that her daughter's reconciliation with her generational trauma is inevitable. She concludes by expressing her hope to share the ocean with her daughter, symbolising peace and unity and the waves erasing any record of the past.

The day is coming I think, when I will share with my child the ocean she was named after. I shall show her the island… I shall take her into the country… But it is the ocean that I long to show her most of all. She is the child of peace, the many disparate parts of her experience knit together in jumbled but peaceable unity. The waves lick away her footsteps, the sand retaining no record of what came before her. ([21], p. 225).

Viet Thanh Nguyen introduces the concept of ethical memory concerning Vietnam's memory of war. However, this paper essentially extrapolates that idea in the connection of the war memory and trauma incurred and manifested by Sri Lanka's civil war and its atrocity on both parties in that war.

I pass my hands over my face. I remember that moment so vividly, it was the first time we knew without question that we were different, separate, and that this difference was as wide as the ocean… What came between us were so much painful, I have no desire to remember anymore. ([21], p. 62).

The quoted lines are an excerpt from a section of the text where Yasodhara Rajasinghe explores the similarities and differences between the experiences of two communities and families and her relationship with Shiva. Initially, Yasodhara and Shiva grew up together in an amicable environment, but they became distant due to the hostility between their respective communities. This incident reflects the emotional hostility and cultural tension within the two families depicted in the novel.

Yasodhara recalls the personal trauma she experienced as a result of the war and the animosity it caused among fellow civilians. This painful memory is evoked as she sits in America and reflects on a family photograph. She struggles to forget the unbearable misery caused by her grandmother Sylvia Sunethra, who contributed to the disharmony and the separation of Shiva, a Tamil boy, from her Sinhala family. This absence is symbolised by Shiva's absence in the family photograph, which serves as a painful memory for Yasodhara.

“Acts of remembering differ from other acts of mental representation in that they denote the absent as past” ([10], p. 28). If we contextualise this theory in terms of the novel's characters, we see active remembering and radical forgetting at work regarding the migration process. In Saraswathi's case, however, the trauma induced, even though it etched a new mould out of her, has gradually invoked her into a transitioned reality where she forgets and renounces her normalcy.

Remembering and Forgetting as Part of War Trauma and Identity

When we consider entangled memory, it is integral to account for both remembering and forgetting, as the gaps play a crucial role in providing encoded memorial images. However, when war memory and trauma are selectively forgotten, often manipulated for political reasons, and in favour of nationalistic narratives, personal and collective trauma and memory are tampered with exponentially. In their book chapter “Forgetting Trauma?” (2004), Richard J. McNally, Susan A. Clancy, and Heidi M. Barrett discuss the concept of forgetting traumatic events, emphasising that it can be a natural by-product of daily incidents and does not necessarily involve “special mechanisms of motivated repression” ([20], p. vii).

The official history of the Civil War often overlooks the LTTE women combatants and suicide bombers. Writers like Swati Parashar and Nayomi Munaweera shed light on these overlooked stories, which are deeply concealed in the dark underbelly of history and need alternative retelling. For instance, Parashar (2020)[25] explores the cultural and gendered discourse of women's experiences in militancy, focusing on conflicts in Kashmir and Sri Lanka. She aims to highlight the silenced victimisation and the autonomy of these women in war politics, challenging their stereotypical portrayal as mere victims. The concept of gendered forgetting delves into the processes of commemoration and how women's traumatic pasts are remembered, misremembered, mediated, or silenced, and is depicted in this novel that encapsulates the forgotten memories of women victims while also highlighting the self- other relativity by sharing two women's trauma perspectives.

This paper addresses these gaps in the context of the Sri Lankan Civil War and relates how Munaweera, a Sri Lankan emigrant author, constructs a semblance of truth through a fictionalised narrative. The novel also depicts transcultural memory in the episode of the Rajasinghe family resettling from Sri Lanka to Los Angeles, exploring the role of culinary traditions in restoring cultural and travelling memory.

Pots boil, spices fry, oil sizzles. The room is shrouded in steam which wafts into the hallways and makes our neighbors, … But they are only curious. They have their own foody witchcraft to remind them of various homelands ([21], p. 109).

Soon after, the novel hints at a racism-infused prejudicial statement made by the ‘envy-eyed landlady’ who is probably a white lady.

Ohhh, are they making your nose twitch my Wogums? These Indians. Always cooking with their onions and their curry. How can they breathe in there? Must be used to it. Where they come from it must seem like a palace ([21], p. 109).

Michelle Balaev’s journal article “Trends in Literary Trauma Theory” (2008) talks about Bouson’s Quiet as It’s Kept: Shame, Trauma and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison, and traces how intergenerational trauma gets transmitted and subjectively gets haunted due to shared collective experiences, Balaev suggests,

Moreover, the transhistorical capacity of traumatic experience builds upon an essentialist concept of identity tied to a universally shared (neural-hormonal) response to traumatic experience, indicating that individual identity is defined by a certain historical experience of her or his racial/religious/gender group. ([3], p. 154).

The novel depicts how Nishan and his wife Visaka, who migrated from Sri Lanka to Los Angeles, grapple with the trauma of being racially alienated in a new land. They seek to assimilate into a society that tries to distance them from the native population based on their past. Their migration was an attempt to escape the social unrest caused by civil war in their homeland.

Conclusion

The fundamental Heideggerian concept of existentialism emphasises the dialectics and negotiation of “being” and “becoming,” as he presents in his influential work Being and Time (1927), which gets reiterated throughout Munaweera’s text Island of a Thousand Mirrors. The journey of these two protagonists and narrators from their lived experience allows them a dialectical identity negotiation over time, trauma, and conflict. For Heidegger, a person's existence in relation to the world is the essence of “being,” while the ongoing process of change and actualisation represents “becoming.” This forms the basis for interpreting the novel in terms of the Self and the Other through shared traumatic experiences, leading to the process of actualisation. The protagonists in the novel deal with diverse narrative struggles and the articulation of their identities, which are fragmented, dispersed, and in a constant dialectical negotiation between the past and the present. Ontologically, both remembrance and forgetting of trauma and memory in all the characters collectively, and these two narrators particularly underline the dual yet opposite memory zones whereby the silences of both the self and the hegemonic other find their voice and the silences are addressed through the construction of this double narrative.

The novel has met the Heideggerian process of eventual self-actualisation phenomenologically. Yasodhara, forced to leave her native Sri Lanka for America with her parents, finds solace in her marriage and the world of words. However, when her marriage ends, she realises that her heart still belongs to her homeland. Returning to Sri Lanka, she confronts the harsh realities of war and its toll on her family and society. After the loss of her sister, Lanka, in a suicide bombing, she finds comfort in her childhood companion, Shiva. Their union and the birth of their daughter Samudhra led them to establish a new life in San Francisco, far from Yasodhara's homeland.

Saraswathi displays resilience, vulnerability, and courage as a Tamil civilian striving to pursue education and share knowledge in a war-torn environment. However, her tragic fate at the hands of the Sinhalese army leads her down the path of militancy and insurgency, culminating in her becoming a suicide bomber. As Nguyen, in his book, potently disseminates in the corpus of war memory and forgetting, the dialectical struggle or far more appropriately, negotiation, should be one of the ethics of humanity and inhumanity, where the perpetrator from both factions can feel equally responsible for their participation. He asserts:

When it comes to war, … The basic dialectic of memory and amnesia is instead more fundamentally about remembering our humanity and forgetting our inhumanity, while conversely remembering the inhumanity of others and forgetting their humanity. A just memory demands instead a final step in the dialectics of ethical memory—not just the movement between an ethics of remembering one’s own and remembering others, but also a shift toward an ethics of recognition, of seeing and remembering how the inhuman inhabits the human. ([24], p. 19).

The novel artfully incorporates the themes of memory and trauma as they persist in the characters. As Caruth and other trauma theorists argue, memory and trauma are fundamentally misaligned. These intertwined yet distinct aspects are further explored in the characters. Through transcultural remembrance and forgetting, we see a concept of complicit memory, or “memory-in-complicity,” as theorised by Debararati Sanyal. In her emphatic assertion, memory finds agency in that she says, “one memory [should not] displace or silence another” ([27], p. 85). Sanyal enthusiastically attempts to elevate the postmodern transcultural pluralistic memory identification venture by critiquing and problematising the concept of collaboration. She avoids simply universalising victim trauma and memory. Instead, Sanyal advocates for a multidirectional connective approach, where the interaction recognises the proximity “between self and other, past and present, here and elsewhere” ([27], p. 18). However, she cautions that even these migrations of memories are innately fallacious owing to their propensity to convert the difference into sameness or conflate the extreme and the everyday ([27], p. 18). Sanyal disagrees critically of one’s association with victim trauma in a particular event without finding a strong inclination to the active agent and the perpetrator, witness, and readers who are equally party to the meaning- making and memory reception process. She asserts:

The hypostasis of the victim as sole witness can give us only a partial view of historical violence, and it runs the risk of foreclosing further investigation into the complexity of a historical juncture and our own position within its ethicopolitical fabric. Instead, I give an account of the many instances in which “we” (readers, spectators, witnesses) are positioned in often contradictory ways within configurations of power and violence, as victims, perpetrators, accomplices, or bystanders. ([27], p. 9).

Munaweera's novel thus explores the concept of ‘just memory’ or ‘ethical memory’ and stresses the importance of acknowledging victim trauma along with politicised memory and forgetting. The novel suggests the dynamicity of trauma, highlighting the war’s grey zones between hegemonic binaries in discourse. The chapter explores the ambivalence of perpetrators and victims in this fictionalised trauma narrative. It aims to succinctly shed light on the political silences in history that are poetically revisited through artistic memory.

References

1.

Assmann, Aleida. 2006. Memory, Individual and Collective. In The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis, ed. Robert Goodin and Charles Tilly, 210–224. New York: Oxford University Press.

2.

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© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2025

S. Malhotra et al. (eds.)Trauma and Memory Studies: Responses from India and Beyondhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-6374-3_17

17. Unveiling Alterity: Exploring the Palestinian and Israeli Multifaceted Memories, Identities and Geopolitics Through Select Children's Films

Farsanah Moossa Kappil1  

(1)

University of Calicut, Malappuram District, Kerala, India

Farsanah Moossa Kappil

Email: farshanakappil@gmail.com

Abstract

This chapter explores how select post-millennium children's films address the Palestinian and Israeli memory, ethnic identity and geopolitics in the context of the three events: Holocaust, the partition of Palestine and the formation of Israeli State, and the ongoing Nakba. The chapter aims to openly discuss and challenge the politics and power dynamics involved in the construction of national memory and identity.

The four films taken for this chapter are Farha (2021), The Present (2020), The Little Traitor (2007) and Over the Wall (2012). Darin J Sallam’s Palestinian feature film Farha exposes the stark realities of displacement and mass extermination of the indigenous Palestinians during the 1948 Nakba, and the inherent racial and gender discriminations perpetrated by the patriarchal community and military forces at that period through the lens of a teenage girl. Farah Nablusi’s Palestinian short film The Present is a poignant portrayal of the daily life of Palestinians under Israeli occupation. It narrates the story of resilience of a father and daughter, who are subjected to numerous indignities and humiliations while crossing checkpoints. Lynn Roth’s Israeli feature film, The Little Traitor is narrated from the perspective of a nine-year-old boy depicting the anxieties of the European Jewish migrants who started settling in Mandatory Palestine awaiting the formation of the new State of Israel. Israeli director Roy Zafrani’s short film Over the Wall is the moving portrayal of a friendship that sprouts between two young boys on the Israeli and Palestinian side of the Separation Wall. These films reveal the shared trauma and destiny of children experiencing the ongoing geopolitical conflict, the Othering they face within their own religious community and the coping strategies they adopt.

Through the children’s viewpoint, the study uncovers the motives of collective and structural othering, by creating and maintaining systems and institutions that racially, ethnically, religiously, culturally or politically subjugate certain groups of people. The films discuss the way children are caught between social and personal conundrums; misperception and recognitions; national integrity and human ethics.

The chapter highlights the importance of conducting research on the psychology of traumatised children who are currently experiencing the consequences of Nakba. The current generation of Palestinian and Israeli children can be divided into two groups: those who learn about, experience, and are traumatised by the ongoing Nakba genocide, and those who are instilled with Holocaust memories through public narratives and curricula, and at the same time witness Nakba. Western trauma and psychology scholars developed theories such as post-traumatic stress disorder to describe the condition of Holocaust survivors’ children. However, these theories are inadequate to discuss the trauma experienced by the Palestinian and Israeli children.

The continuous tension between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and the ongoing war and occupation is often characterised by a stark portrayal of ‘otherness’. The social and political discourses usually emphasise the cultural, religious, or ethnic differences between Israelis and Palestinians, portraying them as essentially distinct entities. This sense of alterity is reinforced by the use of stereotypes and binaries such as victims/perpetrators, natives/refugees, natives/settlers, indigenous/immigrants, terrorists/resistors, or civilised/uncivilised. These representations have their roots in competing historical narratives in which the creation of the State of Israel and the Nakba serve as pivotal events that tried to establish the ‘other’ as fundamentally distinct or even dangerous. The word ‘Nakba’ in Arabic means “catastrophe.“ In historical and political context, it specifically refers to the ongoing, mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians since the 1948 Arab–Israeli war. The event led to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and the subsequent Palestinian refugee crisis.

The political motifs that drive and deprive the diverse Israeli and Palestinian communities, reinforce othering. Power disparities between Israelis and Palestinians frequently result in the marginalisation of identities in which the ‘other’ is portrayed as inferior or unworthy of empathy. This leads to an ongoing effort to erase indigenous history; silence revolting voices and downplay tragic events.

This chapter attempts to look into the multifaceted memories, spaces, identities, experiences, and emotions associated with Israelis and Palestinians, as seen from the perspective of the children in selected contemporary films. The two feature films taken for the study, The Little Traitor (2007) and Farha (2021) are set in the backdrop of pre and post 1948 Nakba or the Israeli independence. It addresses the traumatic experiences of native Palestinian children and the immigrant Israeli children of the time. The two short films The Present (2020) and Over the Wall (2018) are set in the present day Israel and Palestine bordering regions, focusing on the manifold identities that were produced after the 1948 Nakba, the rise of Palestinian and Israeli nationalism and other subsequent consequences. The films majorly discuss the effects of marginalisation and the chronic conflicts, attacks or wars on children. The commemoration of the Holocaust and the Nakba, often through powerful cinematic representations, has played a crucial role in shaping national identities of both Israel and Palestine. The films, a form of cultural reproductions of history, serve as potent tools for memorialising past traumas and present-day struggles, galvanising civilian support, influencing public opinion and political discourse both domestically and internationally.

This chapter employs Judith Butler's theory of grievability explained in her compelling book titled Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (2009) to examine the politics of memory construction, remembering, and forgetting. Her study throws light on how some lives are considered valuable enough to be mourned while others are not. It emphasises the need to comprehend the current geopolitical struggle of Israelis and Palestinians, and the lessons to be drawn from children's unsettling ethnopolitical memories. Furthermore, she discusses how certain ethnopolitical frames or boundaries are constructed in order to exclude and excruciate the other. This chapter explicates how film as a mass media exposes and criticises these discriminatory frames. It shows how the contestation between distinct frameworks conditions the ethical and political landscape of every society. It throws light on the ethics and morality of commemorating the ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people.

The selected post-millennium children's films address the Palestinian and Israeli memory, ethnic identity and geopolitics in the context of the three events: Holocaust, the Partition of Mandatory Palestine or the formation of Israeli State, and the ongoing Nakba. The study aims to discuss the politics and power dynamics involved in the construction of national memory and identity. This chapter further establishes that the formation of Israeli and Palestinian identities is a complex and ongoing process, deeply intertwined and marked by these pivotal events.

The Holocaust memories, which were a ‘taboo topic’ as mentioned by Norman Finkelstein in his work, The Holocaust Industry (2009), gradually gained relevance in the late twentieth century (8). Finkelstein also notes that Holocaust memories gained prominence after the 1967 Arab–Israeli war (11). It became a universal epitome of genocide sidelining many later and earlier genocides across the world- one among them being the ongoing Nakba.

The Holocaust memories were acknowledged in the latter half of the twentieth century and subsequently institutionalised through a variety of means, including educational initiatives, museums, memorials, national holidays, documentation, research incentives, and the establishment of legal frameworks to preserve the memory. Global human rights emerged to prevent genocides as a result of the spread of Holocaust victim narratives. Concurrently, the emphasis on the Holocaust sidelined the Nakba narratives, which emerged as a counterpoint, overshadowed by the struggle for survival of Holocaust victims. Nakba or the Palestinian Holocaust is an ongoing reality for the present Palestinians, not a historical event. They perceive the iniquities of the present as reiterations of the injustices of the past. On the other hand, Nakba which began in 1948 as part of creating a nation is the Israeli Freedom Movement for the Zionists and many immigrated European Jews. They perceive it as a fundamental event in their freedom struggle, the War of Independence. The above observations implies that Palestinians and Israelites saw the 1948 war as a formative event in their respective histories leading to the formation of contested memories and narratives.

These memories and experiences fill the social, cultural and emotional milieu of the present generation living in the contested land of Israel/ Palestine. It leaves an indelible impression on their psyche and moulds their later perceptions. This chapter tries to analyse child protagonists in the Israeli and Palestinian films as entities representing the contested land and the inner turmoil of the people. It ponders over the functions of juvenile protagonists in films and the way their roles are dynamically revised and reformed with the passage of time.

Post-colonial thinkers like Benedict Anderson and Homi K Bhabha have defined nation as a product of cultural reproduction and its status as not rigid or static but is continuously subjected to critical reflections, multiple perspectives and changes to envision a different future for a nation, transcending the limitations of its past narratives. Anderson, in his book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983), stated, “Nationalism has to be understood, by aligning it not with self-consciously held political ideologies, but with large cultural systems that preceded it, out of which— as well as against which— it came into being” (19). Homi Bhabha began the introduction to his book Nation and Narration (2008) by stating, “Nations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully realise their horizons in the mind's eye” (1). This study examines how Israeli and Palestinian cinema function as sites for cultural reproduction, shaping and reinforcing collective memories. By analysing film narratives, the chapter explores how these cinematic representations expose the underlying systems that reflect and reinforce the complex dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It investigates how these films grapple with the complex legacies of genocide memories— the Holocaust by Israelites and Nakba by Palestinians—and the ways in which these historical traumas continue to shape present-day realities. Furthermore, it examines how the artistic expressions in these films propose alternative visions that possess the potential to transcend these ethno-political disparities.

The cultural theorists redefined the notion of space from a fixed physical entity prone to dispossession and erasure to a phenomenon which is dynamic, multidirectional and that cannot be easily destroyed. This space is produced through art, films, murals, architectures, graffiti, social media and books. Film spaces encapsulate multiple layers like physical, mental, individual, collective, cultural, political, institutional, mediated and other discursive spaces. Apart from being a reflection, they act as mediated spaces that recognise or subvert; expose or veil; and construct or fabricate realities of the world. The select post millennium Palestinian and Israeli films expose the multilayered identity struggle of people, while depicting the ongoing land occupation and ethnic cleansing.

By examining the cinematic representations, it becomes evident that the experiences of both the Holocaust and the Nakba are far more intricate than simple victim-perpetrator binaries. These films have contributed to a broader understanding of the human condition during genocide, recognising the capacity for both extraordinary cruelty and extraordinary compassion within individuals and societies. They highlight the way certain memories are selectively erased or overemphasised. They try to depict the multi-layeredness of ethnic identities and its multidirectionality leading to national, social, racial, religious, political, gender identities or any other marginalised identities. These films point to the limitations of the homogenised collective memory and identity.

The directors of Israeli and Palestinian films had to address two groups of current generation children: those who simultaneously learn about, experience, and become traumatised by the ongoing Nakba genocide; and those who are instilled with the memories of the past Holocaust through public narratives and curricula, and at the same time witness Nakba. Political violence often deliberately targets civilians, including children, producing dangerous environments that undermine potential for healthy development.

The American film director Lynn Roth’s Israeli feature film, The Little Traitor is narrated from the perspective of a nine-year-old boy depicting the anxieties of the European Jewish migrants who started settling in Mandatory Palestine awaiting the formation of the new State of Israel. This film, based on Amos Oz’s novel Panther in the Basement (1995), is a bildungsroman film that revolves around the life of a spirited Jewish boy Proffy Liebowitz (played by Ido Port), his pro Israelite underground cell organised along with his two friends and his unlikely friendship with a kind British soldier. The film is set in the period just before Israel was declared a state.

The abundance of Holocaust films transformed the public perception of watching and remembering horrific events through films from horrifying to corny as a result of deliberate reconstructions and inventive additions. The film directors started discovering and exploring other unspoken themes too, to commemorate the event and validate Israel’s founding.

The Little Traitor, co-produced by Israeli and US based production companies: Evanston and Panther, is a fiction set in Mandatory Palestine showing the withdrawal of British rule and formation of the state of Israel in Palestine. The film set in Palestine begins with an augmented statement, “After the World War II, the British tried to curtail the flood of post Holocaust refugees into Palestine.” (00:01:00–00:01:15), making it evident from the outset of the film that its goal is to depict Israelis as helpless refugees. The film attempts to reaffirm the Israelites’ identity as victims of the Holocaust and subtly justify their occupation of Palestine as they were landless after Holocaust.

According to the United Nations study published in 1980, ‘The Palestine Question: A Brief History’, the estimated 55,000 Jews in Palestine in 1918 made up about 8% of the total population. Looking at the demographic history (10), it can be seen that later on, this percentage of immigrants increased to 30%, or about 4,45,000, by 1939. If the British Mandates had restricted Jewish immigration during their rule, then this increase would not have occurred. This tremendous increase in the immigration of European Jews with the motive of forming an independent state within Palestine gave rise to the ongoing Palestinian problem. 1929 saw a wave of riots in Palestine as the country's immigrant population grew daily and Arab lands were being purchased and encroached upon without any limits. In order to address the depletion of Arab land due to land confiscation by recently arrived immigrants, Lord Passfield, the British Colonial Secretary, passed the White Paper in 1930, emphasising the policy of treating Arabs and Jews equally and reducing Jewish immigration.

Furthermore, it is noteworthy that neither the British Mandate nor the United Nations made substantial efforts to affirm Palestinian identity. The official documents consistently referred to the Palestinians, who constituted nine-tenths of the population, as the “non-Jewish communities of Palestine” (as in the Balfour Declaration) or simply as the “other” population. The phrase clearly subjugates the Palestinian Arab identity, their history, ethnicity and culture, as they are merely referred to as a community tagged to the dominant immigrant population that recently settled in Palestine.

The anxieties of the European Jews who relocated to Mandatory Palestine are reinvested by Lynn Roth. It must be noted that the British government's attempts to restrict immigration during periods of tension between the British Mandate and international Arabs proved futile and that Jewish immigration eventually resumed. Roth attempts to convince viewers that the British had imposed power on Jews or had restricted Jewish immigration strictly during the long Mandatory Palestinian period. This is evident in the film's opening statement. Even in the twenty-first century, such historical distortions are used to achieve the goal of portraying Israeli Jews as the victims or ‘grievable lives’ and the community who deserve to be protected.

Proffy is portrayed as a child who despises the British. Roth delves into Proffy’s psyche, foregrounding a notion that the British army were the enemies and they imposed power on the immigrant Jews- again highlighting the victim-identity. He likes to hang toy soldiers on the bars of his bedroom cot and plays war games with Zionists and British army toys. He intends to carry out missions with his buddies to agitate the British soldiers. Later, he befriends Sergeant Dunlop, a British soldier who turns out to be a kind man. He is eager to learn Hebrew and Jewish culture. This conflicting relationship gets Proffyhim into problems because his community perceives him as a “traitor,” but ultimately it marks a shift in his way of thinking. Proffy must decide if he is to believe the information that has been instilled in him by his parents and his community, or accept Dunlop as his friend. He faces a dilemma of whether to accept knowledge indoctrinated or knowledge attained from experience.

Despite the fact that it is obvious that the film is set in pre-Nakba Palestine, when Jews were immigrants, Arabs are only very briefly shown in the film, and they are portrayed as coexisting with the Jewish immigrants. They are portrayed as primitive. The young audience who watches the film to learn the history of Israel might believe the misconception that the Palestinian land was under populated, desolate or in the notion of ‘a land without a people, for a people without land’ (as stated by Diana Muir in her article “Texts Concerning Zionism,” an often-cited phrase in the Zionist narratives).

Despite historical inaccuracies and under-representation of the Arab community in the film, it attempts to close on an emotional note. Thirty years later, Proffy states in a speech while addressing an audience in London, “the clash between the Israelites and Palestinians is a tragedy. Neither Israeli Jews nor Palestinian Arabs can find their homeland anywhere else in this world.” (1:19:50–1:20:50). He also states that Zionism was the only life choice for Jews. Proffy’s coming of age helps him to realise the need for coexistence between Jews and Arabs. He even mentions in his speech, the need to tackle the current situation in Palestine/Israel to restore peace. Therefore, this film knowingly or unknowingly asserts the fact that Palestine was a land which welcomed European Jewish refugees, leading to the formation of the State of Israel within Palestine. The dominant motif of this film was to promote the Jewish victimhood identity among children.

The mainstream Israeli or American productions mostly misrepresented, asymmetrically presented or avoided representation of Palestinians, denying their existence even in the twenty first century. The Little Traitor (presented from a child’s viewpoint) is one among them which showed no trace of Palestinian resistance during the period just before Nakba, when Mandatory Palestine invited Jewish migrants to the land. This film showed the independence of Israel but not the realities of occupation of Palestine.

Darin J Sallam’s Palestinian feature film Farha, also presented from a child’s viewpoint, set in the same time period as of The Little Traitor, worked as a counter narrative to it, as it exposes the stark realities of displacement, dispossession and mass extermination of the indigenous Palestinians and occupation of their land during the 1948 Nakba. It also addressed the inherent racial and gender discrimination perpetrated by the patriarchal community and military forces of that period through the eyes of the teenage girl, Farha.

Sallam scripted Farha based on a real-life event that she was told of, of a girl Radiyyeh, who is renamed for the film as Farha, a courageous daughter of a Palestinian village mayor. The film is set in the 1940s, a period just prior to the 1948 Nakba, when the displacement and ethnic cleansing of native Palestinians by the Zionist militia had already begun, though it had not reached Farha’s village. The film begins by showing fourteen-year-old Farha (played by Karam Taher) sitting under a tree indulged in reading a book and her friends playing near a stream and collecting fig. Though the film shows child marriage and restrictions of girl child for higher education, Farha is portrayed as a brave, fearless and daring woman who voices against the odds of her society and wishes to pursue higher education to the city, to which her father (called as Abu Farha) agrees, though after initial reluctance. She is an ambitious girl who wishes to become a teacher and start a girls’ school in her village. The film depicts the culture and customs of a well-established Palestinian Arab community. Farha alludes to the broader context of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.

Through the subsequent scenes, the film drives the audience into the turbulent situation in Palestinian regions where the newly formed Zionist government has started plundering the Palestinians and exterminating them as part of their land expansion.

In an instance, while celebrating the news of her father permitting her to seek further education in the city with her best friend and cousin Farida, they hear sounds of bombs in the distance. They run back to the village to find it in turmoil with sounds from military speakers ordering village inhabitants to evacuate. Farha and Farida are found by Abu Farida, who takes them into his car to evacuate. The film is a glimpse of how, over the course of the last seventy years, the political Zionist Israeli government has adopted and carried out the Nazi Lebensraum policy (extermination of Jews to expand the living space of Aryans) for the benefit of European Jewish settlers and their offspring. The native Palestinians were massacred, expelled, and dispossessed so that the immigrant European Jews could occupy it or expand their living space.

Farha refuses to leave her father. She is taken back to their home and her father locks her in a store room, telling her to stay hidden. Farha is locked in the room for days without any news from her father, while she continues to hear sounds of bombs and gunshots in the distance and is only able to peer through a hole in the wall to the courtyard. The film shows the struggles during her confinement and abandonment. Though initially she feels claustrophobic, however her bravery, determination and luck help her to get through it.

Later the film shows the fate of another family who had been displaced from their village and finds refuge in the abandoned home of Farha. The next poignant scene shows the mother in the family giving birth to a baby boy with the help of her husband (called Abu Mohammed) and her two young daughters witnessing the site. Farha witnesses the whole scene through the hole without being noticed by the family. While Abu Mohammed and his family celebrate the arrival of the newborn, Farha seeks their help to escape from the locked room. Unfortunately, before Abu Mohammed could help Farha, an Israeli military patrol stops outside the house and demands his family to come out and surrender. Abu Mohammad goes outside and is confronted by an Israeli patrol commander and a Palestinian informant wearing a mask. The Palestinian informant appears to know the village inhabitants and tells the Israeli commander that Abu Mohammad is from a different village. The Israeli commander searches the house for guns and finds the family of Abu Mohammad hiding in the house.

Through Farha's eyes, the audience sees the horrific and upsetting scene of Abu Mohammad's family being humiliated and killed at gunpoint. She witnesses these flickering shots through a gap in the door of the store room in which she is locked. The scene shows the parents’ helplessness to protect their children from being killed. One of the most disturbing scenes is when a woman soldier initially hesitated to search the mother’s body for weapons suspecting her to be pregnant but later hastily searches her to find a key to their home. The woman pushes the mother and states, “keep this as a souvenir” (01:00:40). In fact, many displaced Palestinian refugees keep the keys of their home in Palestine as a symbol of belongingness to their homeland even in the present though they are not allowed to return.

The informant sees Farha through the hole in the door of the pantry and recognises her. He calls her name but does not reveal her whereabouts to the Israeli soldiers. After killing all the members of the family except the newborn, the Israeli commander asks a young Israeli soldier to kill the baby without wasting a bullet. The soldier covers the baby’s face with a towel and leaves the newborn on the courtyard floor, unable to bring himself to stamp on it. This series of pathetic, distressing and suffocating shots points at the twisted logic of the Zionist government that rationalises the death of Palestinians in order to provide space and protect the Israelites. The lives of Palestinian people are not considered worthy of mourning as they are not initially recognised or valued as humans worth living. They are dehumanised and their identities are stripped off by the Zionist government. Butler states in her book Frames of War,

We might think of war as dividing populations into those who are grievable and those who are not. An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all. We can see the division of the globe into grievable and ungrievable lives from the perspective of those who wage war in order to defend the lives of certain communities, and to defend them against the lives of others – even if it means taking those latter lives. (p. 38).

Many countries or international communities remain complicit in Israel's war crimes, which include the genocide of the Palestinian people, in order to further their own political agendas.

Towards the end of the film, traumatised and distressed Farha tries to open the door to protect the infant but her attempts turn to be futile. She frantically searches for some equipment to break open the door to save the child and finds a hidden pistol, which she uses to shoot the door lock. After getting out of the pantry, Farha finds the baby boy dead. Numbed by the sights, traumatised Farha leaves her village. The final shot shows her walking away to a distance in anguish and despair. The final coda adds the statement that Farha (Radiyyeh) never found her father, and she eventually reached Syria and shared her life story with the later generations.

The pivotal scene of brutal murder of all the members in a Palestinian family is not a story from imagination but a portrayal of multiple similar realities during the period of 1948 ethnic cleansing. The Israeli historian and social activist Ilan Pappe describes one among such numerous massacres that took place in the Palestinian town of Al Dawayima (a place which is not known to the present generation as it was ethnically cleansed and renamed) in his seminal work, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (p. 195–198).

Palestinians were portrayed in many mainstream Israeli films as barbaric, primitive people without a distinct history or culture. Numerous images of ancient Palestine served as a counterpoint to the Israeli government's ‘imperial gaze’, (as Ann Kaplan puts it), which defined the Palestinian people. Even the Palestinians of today are characterised as aggressive, uncultured and political extremists. Through the number of film representations of the Israel/ Palestine tension, it can be understood that power and control are applied discriminatorily when it comes to people who share a competing history.

The above discussed films, The Little Traitor and Farha look at the 1948 Nakba from two distinct perspectives. Another key children’s film that needs to be mentioned in this context is Annemarie Jacir’s 2012 film When I Saw You. This film too draws the audience to a child’s perspective of life in the war zone.

The main goal of the filmmakers who portrayed the Palestinian cause on screen was to make the world aware of the Palestinian people's ongoing struggle for survival. Social, cultural, and historical amnesia was resisted by the globalisation of Nakba memory. A number of films, including those directed by Elia Sulaiman, Mai Masri, Eran Riklis, Annemarie Jacir and Hany Abu Assad, addresses the ongoing Nakba and its consequences on the younger generations.

Beyond the realm of feature films, a rich tapestry of short films have emerged, offering nuanced insights into the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. These concise narratives delve into the multifaceted lived experiences of Palestinian and Israeli children. These films portray the appalling living conditions faced by Palestinian children who are compelled to live in areas devastated by war and are ruled by the Israeli government. They also show their traumas and the various ways in which they manage to survive. They depict the psychological anguish of the Israeli children, who have relatively better living conditions, and their comprehension of the stark disparity between the realities they experience and the sanitised narratives propagated in schools or in their close social circles.

Farah Nabulsi’s Palestinian short film The Present, paints a disturbing picture of the daily life of Palestinians under Israeli occupation. It narrates the life of a father and daughter’s resilience despite being subjected to numerous indignities and humiliations while crossing Israeli checkpoints.

The film begins with a close up shot of Yusef, the father, lying down on a cardboard near the separation wall. The next shot shows the suffocating and crowded Checkpoint 300, with thousands of Palestinians trying to cross it to reach their workplace or home, and Yusef is one among them. Yusef, his daughter Yasmine (played by Maryam Kanj) and wife live in the Palestinian enclaves of the Israeli occupied West Bank.

The film revolves around the incidents that happened on the day when Yusef and Yasmine set out to buy a wedding anniversary gift for Yasmine’s mother. They decide to go to Betunia, a Palestinian city, to buy groceries and a new fridge. Unfortunately, their journey that starts with full of joy and excitement becomes the grimmest and the most traumatic day in Yasmine’s life.

Yusef and Yasmine are questioned and deliberately humiliated by the Israeli soldiers at the checkpoints while going to Betunia and back home, for being Palestinians. While crossing the checkpoint, Yusef is held back and kept in confinement in a holding pen for hours by the soldiers for no reason, though he has all the permits. His pleas to let him go and not confine him in his daughter’s presence only makes them more insistent on their cruelty. His identity as a father is stripped off by them even in the presence of Yasmine. After hours, Yusef and Yasmine are let to cross. After a while Yusef notices that his daughter has urinated in her pants because of fear, trauma and uneasiness of waiting for hours after parting with her father at the checkpoint. When Yusef expresses his concern and tells her she should have spoken up, Yasmin says, “It’s okay, Dad. There was nothing you could do.” (00:11:40) Yusef is emotionally shattered and feels dejected at his helplessness. It is evident from this traumatising sequence of the scenes as to how insecure the kids feel even when they are with their parents. Elderly people and children fear the Zionist army, who are taught that killing and demonising Palestinians is the new normal and they shouldn't feel guilty. Many Israelites are indoctrinated with the idea that Palestinian children are potential threats to their life. It is the responsibility of a parent to protect their child, and Nablusi skillfully captures Yusef's distraught state to show how, even at such a young age, Yasmine has already come to understand that in occupation, there are limits to what her father can do to protect her.

After a few moments of relief (while they shop), the ordeal of crossing the checkpoint is repeated when they return home. Their mini truck that carried the new fridge is not allowed to cross the first checkpoint, due to which Yusef and Yasmine are forced to push it through the outskirts to reach the next checkpoint. Again, they are impeded from crossing, and are inhumanely treated. The prejudice of the officers is well depicted in this scene. Yusef is forced to open the fridge and show it to them. While inspecting, they are disgusted at finding Yasmine’s urinated soiled pants. One of the Israeli soldiers states “You’re all disgusting” (00:19:00), even though she peed when traumatised by the army themselves. This demonstrates unequivocally how the Israeli army treats Palestinians as sub-humans, against whom violence is waged, thus stigmatising them as unworthy of grief.

Frustrated, Yusef starts demanding to let them go and a young soldier in the group too suggests so, but one among them states that what Arabs are going through is the legal procedure, which is the only way for them to be let in. This statement is ironic as the Palestinians are internally displaced even while being natives of the land. Yusef starts yelling and banging the table out of frustration and all the soldiers point guns at him. Suddenly, their attention is drawn to a creaking sound of the trolley being pushed by Yasmine, rolling the refrigerator past the checkpoint herself. She looks mentally strong, courageous and fearless. Yusef starts to walk alongside her, who resolutely keeps going. The soldiers are stunned for a moment and yells abuses, but the father and daughter leave the checkpoint without turning back. This poignant triumphant ending of the short film is a surrealistic scene. Had they violated the rules, the soldiers would have shot them down, tortured them, or taken them into custody.

Nablusi’s creative ending suggests the potential of the young generation whose identity is shaped by the memory of their ancestors. They are resilient, assertive and fearless, and they have an unwavering hope in their struggle for the freedom of speech and expression and the right to live in their own country and redefine their destiny. Nablusi weaves the story to depict how the trauma of Israeli occupation seeps into the fabric of Palestinian family life. She tries to process the Palestinian pain through art.

Roy Zafrani’s Over the Wall is another thematically dense short film set near the separation wall of Israel and Palestine. The film begins with a boy walking along the separation wall back from school, who is stopped by a ball that falls from the other side of the wall. He kicks it back over the wall, which leads to the coincidental meeting of the two boys living on the two sides of the wall. They see each other through a hole in the separation wall. The Palestinian boy Khaled waits for the Israeli boy Nathan to return from school. Language does not become a barrier between them. They exchange their ideas in sign language and drawings. They play games and pass messages through art.

In an instance, the film shows Nathan drawing a picture of the two children playing standing on the two sides of the wall and after a second of thought erasing the wall that separates them, clearly illustrating his wish to overcome the barriers of culture, ethnicity and politics and consider Khaled as not the other but as equal to him.

Later the film shows a classroom in which the teacher instructs children to move to the bunker of the school as the war between Israel and Palestine has begun. Panicked, Nathan runs to Khaled to inform him and draws a picture to convey to move to the underground to protect himself from bombs. This sequence depicts the large disparity between the living conditions in which the Palestinian and Israeli children are brought up. The Israeli children, as shown in the film, are well trained through continuous drills to evacuate the vulnerable spaces and move to the bunkers. In contrast, Palestinian children are traumatised by repeated exposure to the horrors of war, which can result in their amputation, the loss of their parents, relatives, and possessions, or even their shattering into pieces when explosives fall on top of them. Their lives are filled with uncertainty. They get little or no time to recover from their trauma before which they are faced by another occupation or war. In short, the children of Israel are well trained to look after their safety during the period of crisis as their lives are deemed grievable whereas the children of Palestine are regarded as future threats by those who impose power on them, and hence their loss is either celebrated or not counted, devaluing them and stamping them as the ‘ungrievable lives’ ([3], p. 23).

The hole drilled through the separation wall is a liminal space which dissolves the conventional societal limits that constructed the identities of Khaled and Nathan. It represents the emotional bonding which sprouted between the kids by unlearning what they have been instilled and relearning from their experience. Unfortunately, the film ends by showing Nathan looking at the ceiled hole after the war, which metaphorically represents the dominating authority’s policy of not allowing the children to explore anything beyond what is indoctrinated by the governing body.

The four films discussed the Israeli Palestinian struggle from different perspectives. This research has shown how film directors employed different techniques and forms to convey the thematic density of the crisis by sandwiching innocence and hope between terrorising experiences and traumatic memories. These films reveal the shared trauma and destiny of children experiencing the ongoing geopolitical conflict, the othering they face within their own religious community or from the prejudiced counterpart, and the coping strategies they adopt. Through the children’s viewpoint, the chapter uncovers the motives of collective and structural othering, by creating and maintaining systems and institutions that racially, ethnically, religiously, culturally or politically subjugate certain groups of people. The films have discussed the way children are caught between social and personal conundrums; misperception and recognitions; national integrity and human ethics.

It can be understood that the socio-political aspect of Israelites and Palestinians’ identity construction is based on their interaction as two distinct societies, characterised by political polarisation, phobia, and hostility. They swap the identities of the perpetrator and victim in relation to the othered community based on these tensions. Most of the recent children’s films challenge homogenisation and institutionalised memory, and instead promotes unlearning the indoctrinated national memory to relearn the nuances within the multidirectional Israeli/ Palestinian community promoting a peaceful coexistence.

The four films function as a kaleidoscope, fracturing the monolithic perception of the existence of the two regions: Israel and Palestine and the struggle of the children either enclosed or restricted by these boundaries, revealing the multifaceted experiences of children stuck in the midst of war. Through these microcosmic portrayals, we gain a deeper understanding of how historical narratives, ethno- political pressures, and the ever-present realities of violence shape the worldview of a generation growing up amidst ongoing strife.

References

1.

Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities. New York: Verso.

2.

Babha, Homi K. 2008. Nation and Narration. New York: Routledge.

3.

Butler, Judith. 2009. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable. New York: Verso.

4.

Finkelstein, Norman. 2000. The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. New York: Verso Books.

5.

Herman, Mark. Dir. 2008. The Boy in Striped Pyjamas. Heyday Films

6.

Muir, Diana. 2008. Texts Concerning Zionism: A Land Without a People for a People WithoutLand.MiddleEastQuarterly. https://​www.​meforum.​org/​middle-east-quarterly/​a-land-without-a-people-for-a-people-without-1877

7.

Nablusi, Farah. Dir. 2020. The Present. Philistine Films.

8.

Pappe, Ilan. 2007. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. London: Oneworld Publication.

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Roth, Lynn. Dir. 2007. The Little Traitor. Evanstone Films and Panther Productions.

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Sallam, Darin J. Dir. 2021. Farha. Talebox and Laika Films.

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UnitedNations.1980.ThePalestineQuestion:ABriefHistory.NewYork. https://​www.​un.​org/​unispal/​document/​auto-insert-206581/​

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White Papers on Palestine. 2021. Encyclopaedia of the Modern Middle East and North Africa. Encyclopedia.com. November 15.

13.

Zafrani, Roy. Dir. 2018. Over the Wall. Magic Productions.

Part IVAfflicted Afterlives: Reconfiguring Experiential Trauma of Ostracism

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2025

S. Malhotra et al. (eds.)Trauma and Memory Studies: Responses from India and Beyondhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-6374-3_18

18. Remembering, Forgetting, Forgiving: Perspectives from Philosophy, Psychology, and Manto's Spasmodic Short Stories on the 1947 Partition

Avishek Parui1  

(1)

Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras, Chennai, India

Avishek Parui

Email: avishekparui@iitm.ac.in

Abstract

This chapter will examine the triangulation of remembering, forgetting, and forgiving, drawing on an interdisciplinary framework of philosophy and psychology, concluding with a case study from selected works of Manto's fiction. It will begin with the philosophical anthropology of Paul Ricoeur which studies the suffering subject and highlights the ontological dimension of the unforgivable within forgiving, while also connecting it to questions related to justice, amnesia, and amnesty. Following the above, the chapter will engage with some psychological research on forgiving through the works of Michael McCullough and Glen Pettigrove, and connect the same to a phenomenological study of the same, drawing also on the role of forgetting as examined by anthropologists such as Marc Auge. The chapter will conclude with a study of Manto's stories on the 1947 Partition, examining its cognitive flatness and narrative austerity, and highlight how the fiction foregrounds the entanglement of oblivion and the unforgivable, which connects to Antonio Damasio's notion of the impoverished autobiographical self.

After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

-Eliot, “Gerontion”

This chapter will examine the triangulation of remembering, forgetting, and forgiving, drawing on an interdisciplinary framework of philosophy and psychology, concluding with a case study from selected works of Saadat Hassan Manto's fiction about the 1947 Partition. It will begin with the philosophical anthropology of Paul Ricoeur, which studies the suffering subject and highlights the ontological dimension of the unforgivable within forgiving, while also connecting it to questions related to justice, amnesia, and amnesty. Following the above, the chapter will engage with some psychological research on forgiving through the works of Michael McCullough and Glen Pettigrove, and connect the same to a phenomenological study of allied themes, drawing also on the role of forgetting as examined by anthropologists such as Marc Augé. The chapter will conclude with a study of what may be defined as the spasmodic short stories of Manto on the 1947 Partition, examining their representations of corporeality, cognitive defamiliarisation, and episodic quality, highlighting how such fiction foregrounds the entanglement of oblivion and the unforgivable, which connects to recent research in Trauma Studies and neuroscience, particularly Catherine Malabou’s theory of accident, plasticity, and wound, as well as Antonio Damasio's notion of the impoverished autobiographical self.

In his Epilogue to the monumental work Memory, History, Forgetting (2004), which may be considered as an anthropological study of the suffering subject, Paul Ricoeur foregrounds the innate paradox in the ontology of forgivability. The act of forgiving, in this account, highlights also the element of unforgivability embedded in the same whereby the unforgivable is also applied to the most intimate link uniting the agent and the action, the guilty person and the crime ([25], p. 466). Ricoeur goes on to draw on Derrida here while illustrating this paradox further whereby the very ontology and act of forgiveness are often oriented towards the unforgivable and there is only forgiveness where there is something unforgivable in the first place. While this connects complexly to the comparable entanglement of remembering and forgetting in Memory Studies, whereby the selective nature of reconstruction also already contains forms of erasure [23], Ricoeur extends the paradox of forgiving via unforgivability further by connecting to broader questions about justice, amnesty, and amnesia. This triangulation is significant in the context of this chapter as the latter aims to examine how the event and the experience of the 1947 Partition may also be viewed through a similar lens of inconclusivity where stories about suffering subjects get episodically represented through forms of non-closure which also foreground the unforgivable elements in the experience of horror. This chapter will subsequently situate Manto’s fiction on the Partition within such psychological and social contexts in terms of how the trauma and corporeality of the suffering subject are represented through forms of (un)forgivability. In particular, the chapter will examine and explore the spasmodic quality of the selected short stories of Manto whereby human corporeality and cognition appear through spasms, inconsistent and inconclusive episodes, and sometimes through moments of breakdown and blankness between remembering and forgetting; suffering and forgiving. Through complex forms of non-closure, Manto’s spasmodic short fiction achieves, this chapter argues, states of spectrality that haunt bodies and spaces inhabited by suffering subjects torn between terror and time-less-ness. In the process, what emerges is a narrative landscape of damaged bodies, abandoned sites, and states of being, marked by repetitive violence, spectral returns, and corporeal waste.

A return to Ricoeur is rewarding here, particularly in relation to his examination of amnesty as organised forgetting which has almost nothing to do with the closure forgiveness formally aims to achieve. Flagging up the semantic and etymological kinship between amnesty and amnesia in the French language, Ricoeur underscores how amnesty—in its politically orchestrated sense—precludes both forgiveness and justice in their fullest ontological forms even as he highlights limits of representational structures to delineate depth of suffering and unforgivability. This is in resonance with recent research on forgiveness which also argues how amnesty “may be offered by political authorities for a variety of pragmatic and moral reasons; these do not require the shifts needed for forgiveness” ([11], p. 415). What emerges as urgent in Ricoeur’s reading—especially through his allusion to Saul Friedlander’s edited 1992 work Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution”—is a call for the capacity to make traumas visible and readable, and this chapter will situate the storytelling designs of Manto’s fiction in all their minimalism, narrative austerity, and episodic inconclusivity. Particularly relevant for a study of Manto’s fiction is the irreconcilable and irresolvable nature of trauma suffered by the subject whereby the entanglement of emplotment and erasure, action and aporia, materialises through markers and metaphors unique to the context of 1947 Partition, an event of unimaginable horrors which survivors “remember, selectively, in order to forget” ([5], p. 288). But before moving on to Manto directly, a study of some psychological and philosophical research on forgiving and forgivability may be useful, not least to understand how those reflect on the inwardness as well as the enactive nature associated with the same. Forgiving and forgetting are here seen not necessarily as mutually dependent nor as undercutting one another but as ways to re-member and re-move, the hyphenated usage illustrating forms of mental mobility that may or may not be associated with healing or closure. Also, it is interesting to note narrativity’s relationship with forgiving and amnesty, as the narrative frameworks designed for the same may or may not be oriented towards conclusivity or interpretative consistency. In fact, the non-contiguous quality in Manto’s spasmodic short stories highlight, as this chapter seeks to show, how narrative fiction—especially in its ability to focalize, interiorize, and defamiliarize—is uniquely able to accommodate and articulate aporia and ambivalence across intercorporeal and intersubjective states of shock and shudder.

Recent research reveals that the neural function of forgiving is distributed across different brain regions associated with empathetic response and cognitive control. Michael [17] work Beyond Revenge: Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct makes a clear distinction between forgiveness and condonation and reconciliation, while also examining the evolutionary role forgiveness played across our existence as species. Especially interesting in this study is how social tinkering and rearrangements may facilitate forgiving and McCullough argues thus:

Because our large brains enable us to reflect on our own condition, to view things from the perspectives of other people, to reason about the causes of our behavior and the behaviour of others, to exert control over our appetites and emotions in the service of higher ideals, and to inspire and persuade others to do the same, there is every reason to believe that we can construct social institutions that will encourage forgiveness rather than revenge (19).

The social construction of forgiveness here is of particular significance, McCullough argues, as institutional forms of forgiving may have evolved out of various evolutionary engines corresponding to survival and sustainable growth. Forgiveness here in its structural scope may appear to be connected with forgetting but the roots may run deeper and through more complex cognitive kens. Interestingly similar to McCullough’s arguments here is Susan Sontag’s study of Regarding pain of others, whereby empathy, imagination, and projection become cognitive mechanisms through which intersubjective experiences and entanglements are shaped and re-shaped, extending on to relations emerging from identity and identifications apropos of injustice and forgiving. In her treatise on war, photography, pain, and forgetting, Sontag highlights the ethical scope in the act of remembering, pointing that memory is the only relation subjects can form and maintain with the dead and the lost. At the same time, and making a productive paradox from this position, Sontag enumerates the moral necessity to reconcile, forget, and forgive. To that end, reconciliation requires “memory be faulty and limited” ([27], p. 115). Memory Studies as an interdisciplinary epistemic engagement is interested in examining the faultiness as well as the fault-lines of remembering and forgetting, and in more overtly political situations of injustice, between revenge, remembrance, and reconciliation. As McCullough argues in his thesis, humans as well as several other species have evolutionarily adopted mechanisms of forgiving to “benefit from cooperation with a long-standing group of associates” ([17], p. 111) and this often leads to inconclusive states between remembering and forgetting, particularly in instances of new forms of association and organisation, sometimes in the wake of violent ruptures and departures. The forgiveness instinct, very evidently through human evolution and history, has also been oriented towards actions and intentions which “preserve relationships that had reproductive, economic, and political utility” (155).

In her treatise on the human condition, Hannah Arendt foregrounds the faculty of forgiving through an interplay of irreversibility and unpredictability, defining it as a feature in homo faber to break the chain of events and eventualities. Forgiving, and the promise to reconcile, emerge in Arendt’s study as a productive possibility of redemption from the unpredictability otherwise characterising human condition, both phenomenally and politically. In its problematic position apropos of predictability and uncertainty, forgiving, Arendt argues, “is the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore freeing from its consequences both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven” ([2], p. 241). Forgiving here operates both as a constructed device as well as a cognitive category where the forgiving and the forgiven subjects appear in an intersubjective and interaffective economy that emancipates as well as subverts causal cycles of actions and retributions. Glen Pettigrove’s edited volume on forgiving examines the faculty from a range of research perspectives, including but not limited to theology, philosophy, and psychology. In particular, Crystal L’Hote’s theorisation of Explicit Memory Imperative (EMI) in the volume ([15], p. 313) which argues that forgivers must explicitly remember the wrong and injustice perpetrated to them by subjects who they are about to forgive, flags up the non-oppositional qualities between memory and forgetting apropos of forgiving. While acknowledging the adaptive nature of forgetting in terms of how it can potentially heal and enable the subject to move on temporally as well as existentially, L’Hote ends her chapter by reaffirming that “to the degree forgetting obscures wrongdoing as such, it also obstructs forgiveness” ([15], p. 319), thus debunking again any easy equivalence between forgetting and forgiving, while also arguing that forms of forgiveness require remembrance and reconstruction. Here, interestingly, L’Hote draws on the work of Ricoeur in terms of underlining the entangled, rather than the ontologically oppositional quality of remembering and forgetting, flagging up also how “Ricoeur emphatically opposes amnesia (or amnesty) as a mode of forgiveness” (315) and highlighting how “forgiveness requires what is both and between memory and forgetting” (315). Particularly interesting from the perspective of Literary Studies and its experiments with point of view (POV), L’Hote’s EMI theory argues that “forgiveness does not require a change in what the forgiver sees. It requires a change in how she sees” (315). The perspectival mutations, like shifts in focal points in literary narratives, enable an examination of forgiving through multiple interpretative and affective frames. Elsewhere, Ricoeur writes in resonance to this idea that forgiving “simultaneously consists in a sort of active forgetting that concerns not events themselves—on the contrary, the traces of these must be carefully protected—but the burden of guilt that paralyses memory and, by extension, also paralyses the capacity for a creative orientation toward the future” ([26], p. 480). The temporal orientation of forgiving is important here and the act of forgiving may be examined as futuristic in quality in terms of moving on to a reconciled time while also not necessarily dis-membering the past. Similar to L’Hote and Ricoeur’s readings of forgetting and forgiving which problematize easy equivalences and binaries, Trudy Govier underscores the necessity “to avoid a dichotomous understanding of forgiveness and revenge” which should not be seen as “exclusive alternatives” that preclude “the possibility of intermediate stances” between states ([11], p. 415). The deconstructive play between memory and forgetting; forgiving and forgetting; may thus be extended on to a deconstruction of the dualistic understanding of forgiveness and vendetta, highlighting how the interaffective narrative frameworks in fiction may offer unique forms of engagement between the same. The shadowy space-times between remembering and forgetting, like the ones between revenge and forgiveness, shape and reshape subjects, shifting and suffering across bodies, borders, and affective spaces.

Andreas Huyssen’s study of memory, media, and forgetting argues that the memory-forgetting entanglement has been “transformed under cultural pressures in which new technologies, media politics, and fast-paced consumption are beginning to take their toll” ([12], p. 431) where commemorative events and monuments are almost always accompanied by “an intense public panic of oblivion” (431). Forms of representation about memory, especially in fiction, also flag up—in their interplay of encoding and erasure—forms of forgetting that shape subjects and their intersubjective interaffective entanglements. This is also manifested in what Ricoeur describes as “the difference in epistemological status between what might be called memory narratives (individual or collective) and historical narratives” ([26], p. 477) whereby the incompatibility and incommensurability between what subjects remember and what states remember shape the politics of memory and forgetting, a theme recurrent in Manto’s fiction on the 1947 Partition. Perhaps Marc Augé’s argument about ambiguity is uniquely pertinent here, describing the difference between the duty to remember characterising subsequent generations who have not experienced the event first hand, and the duty to survive the memory which shaped subjects who actually underwent it, who, “if they want to live again and not just survive, must be able to do their share of forgetting, become mindless, in the Pascalian sense, in order to find faith in the everyday again and mastery over their time” ([3], p. 473). Forgetting here is the production of blankness from which new modes of memory and lived experience may begin afresh, which may sometimes be psychologically imperative for subjects who suffered. Manto’s fiction often dramatises corporeal states stuck between memory and forgetting, subjects who have ceased to suffer but yet not able to move on to new territories of time due to their failure to forget or forgive. The limbo situation of affective arrest is described by Augé as a state of vigilance which requires the subject to “remember the past as a present, to return to it to find the hideous shape of the unspeakable again in the banalities of ordinary mediocrity” (473). Augé positions the entanglement of memory and oblivion as “necessary for the full use of time” (473) but this has even more complex cognitive implications for forms of forgiving which require remembrance of the past as well as an orientation towards the future. Forgiving emerges perhaps proximate to how Augé describes forgetting, not as a clean break from memory but as a lived experience oriented towards non-repetition:

Oblivion brings us back to the present, even if it is conjugated in every tense: in the future, to live the beginning; in the present, to live the moment; in the past, to live the return; in every case, in order not to be repeated. We must forget in order to remain present, forget in order to die, forget in order to remain faithful. (474)

Saadat Hassan Manto’s fiction on the horrors of the 1947 Partition illustrate the horror and shock created by the event which affected the lives of millions and still shapes major military policies and political discourses in the two nation-states born out of the same, emerging from a political moment marked by “violence, mass migration, refugeeism, rehabilitation” ([5], p. 5). In particular, the viscerality, defamiliarisation, and deterritorialisation dramatised in Manto’s fiction—which often depict just intense and inconclusive episodic moments—also foreground the interplay of memory and forgetting, revenge and forgiving, emerging as entanglements instead of opposites. This corresponds to Urvashi Butalia’s argument that “unlocking memory and remembering is an essential part of beginning the process of resolving, perhaps even of forgetting” (283). The narrative designs of Manto frequently espouse a deliberate tone of flatness and cognitive detachment, appearing to be journalistic in quality and merely reporting the horrors emerging from violent experiences without any emotional involvement. But it is precisely this apparent narrative austerity and indifference that lend a cold clinical quality to Manto’s short stories that often describe slow burn and sudden shock simultaneously through inconclusive emotional episodes often ending with an aporetic articulation or encounter. Manto’s is a fiction of unforgivability, of the cold kernel of violence that is visceral as well as contagious and collective, depicted in bodies and borders, in riots and sexual assaults, where mistaken identities often create perverse dark-comic effect in moments of intense horror. This emerges from a historical and political backdrop of a massive exodus where “at least sixteen million people—Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims—were forced to flee their homes and become refugees; at least two million were killed in ethnic violence” ([6], p. 6). The immediate aftermath of this movement caused the “cataclysmic events of Partition, civil war, and balkanisation”, which happened at broader as well as local levels “in the absence of any agreement on power sharing arrangements” (Jalal 2). A quick and convenient political manoeuvre by the British, desperate to dump and abandon a bankrupt empire, the 1947 Partition was a “spectacular scene of violent remapping at a cartographic as well as an epistemic level” devised and instrumentalised “with a crudely categorised identity politics using the communal tension of religion” ([23], p. 107).

Shahid Amin’s argument about the power of metaphors and figurative language in collective memory is particularly pertinent here. Discussing the cultural symbolic valency and vocabulary around the Chauri Chaura incident in 1922, Amin highlights how “exaggeration, conflation, repetition, redundancy” become part of shared narratives which “condense to delineate the ambiguities and tensions of an officious record” ([1], p. 197). Important here is the fault-line between dominant historiography and personal lived memory and this is where fiction as a field of affective representation and anticipation, especially exemplified by the inconclusive and spasmodic short stories of Manto, is particularly poignant and pertinent. Such fiction frequently uses a figurative register to resist hegemonic historiography, and as Amin argues, the “event fixed in time” may be subverted by a “metaphor gathering significance outside this time-frame” (3). Manto often uses metaphors to acquire and accrue symbolic currency, to encode and condense events and experiences that are embodied and private as well as collective and contagious, moving on to complex modes of sometimes conflicting memories beyond the moment of experience. Additionally, a recurrent feature in the fiction of Manto is the movement of the human subject from being an insider to becoming the outsider, dramatically deterritorialised due to the sudden and violent remapping of reality and relationships, highlighted by the “abrupt production and experience of homelessness” and the movement of the uncanny (the outside of home and strange) “which is political, spatial, and spectral in quality” ([23], p. 108). The spectrality in Manto’s short fiction, this chapter argues, is closely connected to its spasmodic quality, whereby the violent and sudden swings, stabs, and shrieks are encoded in a language which is at once minimalistic and figurative in their representational mode. This entanglement of the visceral and the spectral, of the symbolic and the minimalist, lends a unique dimension to Manto’s fiction where the impossibility to forget and forgive becomes part of the traumatic repetition and return, shaping and re-shaping the suffering subject as well as the perpetrator of violence, often ending with an “epistemic crisis manifested in madness, aphasia, and amnesia” ([21], p. 58).

Drawing on his personal visits to refugee camps and “smoke-filled bars” ([13], p. 3) as well as his experience from writing radio plays for Filmistan Production Company in Bombay ([6], p. 55), Manto’s spasmodic stories are also about the inability to narrate intense traumatic experiences except through viscerally aphasic and amnesic episodes shaped by an interrupted embodiment, akin to what the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio describes as the “transient impoverishment” of the “autobiographical self” which ordinarily aligns itself to remembrance and reality ([7], p. 207). It corresponds closely to what Catherine Malabou defines as the type of wounds that have “the power to cause a metamorphosis which destroys individual history, that cannot be reintegrated into a normal course of a life or a destiny” ([16], p. 53). Manto’s stories are about the spasms, sometimes silent, which emerge from such wounds, which dis-integrate the autobiographical selves of the suffering subjects who find themselves assaulted as well as abandoned by spaces and times which they once possessed and called their own. This is a fiction about being dis-owned and dis-membered, through forms of intense violence which are corporeal, sexual, and spasmodic in quality, populated by figures who cannot forget or forgive, and who can often only remember through trauma triggers and repetitions.

Drawing on the horrors of bodies in pain and minds in shock, Manto’s short fiction is often marked by muscle movements and memory, whereby the spasms of excitation and contraction bear traces of trauma and traumatic repetition. The spasmodic and corporeal quality depicted in Manto’s writing is often manifested by its minimalism, whereby metaphors and symbols encode experiences of intense viscerality as well as of corporeal and cognitive defamiliarisation. Spasms feature heavily through a complex tactile experience in a Manto’s story interestingly, not about Partition, one called “A Wet Afternoon” where a boy named Masood sees a freshly slaughtered sheep on his way to school. On seeing the vapours arise from the throbbing flesh of the killed sheep carried by a butcher in a basket, Masood feels a “certain warmth rise in his body” (Manto 3). He subsequently touches the dead sheep again while passing by the butcher shop on his way back from school and feels the flesh throb again on his cold finger. These tactile experiences return to Masood later the same day when he is asked to massage the painful back of his sister Kalsoom with this tiny feet whereby the “memory of the slaughtered sheep and its throbbing flesh come back in the boy’s mind in a confused convergence of different orders of experience” ([21], p. 61). Through a process of remembering and experiencing spasms, Masood “felt as if he was gently pounding the butchered sheep’s flesh that he had touched that morning. He felt somewhat confused, not quite sure what was passing through his mind” (Manto 6). The throb of the flesh from a recently dead animal and a living human body create a confusing affect-wave that spasmodically shapes and re-shapes a formative subject drawn to, as well as shaken by a quasi-erotic experience. The production of corporeal strangeness with a newly felt sensation through spasms is vividly illustrated by Manto’s description of Masood’s experience: “It seemed to him that there was some strange presence in his body, but where exactly it was, he couldn’t tell. A feeling of restlessness washed over him. His body seemed to be longer” (Manto 8). “A Wet Afternoon” ends with a quasi-masturbatory image as Masood tries to snap a hockey stick between his thighs and bends it before throwing it off, Manto’s narrative illustrating the way in which an “embodied memory is re-embodied and re-membered in a different emotional register by a sentient self unsure of its proprioceptive process and its symbolic significance” ([21], p. 61). The memory, viscerality, and spasmodic tactility dramatised in the story receive darker and more violent representations in Manto’s fiction about the Partition, specifically in stories such as “Thanda Gosht” (Cold Meat), “Khol Do” (Open It), and “Mishtake”.

The sudden and inconclusive endings sometimes employed in Manto’s Partition stories often correspond to a “dislocating force” which “affectively rehearses the loss of footing” and also “reveals the precariousness of claims to the certitudes of religious identities” ([19], p. 149). This is perhaps most darkly and dramatically instantiated in “Mishtake”, which is a seven-sentence story about an angry communal mob knifing down a man on religious grounds, only to realise in the end, on examining the dead man’s genitals, that they made a mistake. An episodic and spasmodic structure dramatising the “randomness of terror” ([4], p. 22), “Mishtake” is about the screams that kill and die, about “one swift movement, one slice of the knife, followed by a slower slice to ascertain the religious identity of the dead body” ([23], p. 114). The kalma-i-taassuf read out at the end of the story, which the perpetrator of violence recites to beg for forgiveness from the all-powerful God, emerges as a “ritual repetition of holy words” ([4], p. 27) meant to re-orient the subject back into normalcy, to carry out further actions, possibly more acts of violence and vendetta, without being confined by the emotional weight of guilt. The begging for mercy from the subject attacked by the mob, which goes unheeded, followed by the swift and clinical killing, the revelation of the wrong religious identity by examining the corpse’s genitals, and finally the dry rhetorical recitation seeking forgiveness, all point to a space and time of unforgivable violence. Indeed, the realisation of the wrong murder, the symbolic mistake which adds titular significance to the story, does not result in any deep remorse on the part of the perpetrator, and instead “the staccato conclusion at the end suggests his irritation at his inefficiency” ([19], p. 148). As Alok Bhalla argues, the knife in Manto’s “Mishtake” may be read as a symbol and a metaphor “for the partition as an annihilating event” ([4], p. 24), a point that may also be extended to examine the mindless machinery of violence and visceral shock in a state that reaffirms the impossibility of forgetting and forgiving. Blurring the agent and the instrument of violence, “Mishtake” also shows how there is “little difference between the belly which is sliced open and the pyjama string which is untied subsequently” ([23], p. 114), the motor movements of the perpetrator as well as that of the instrument (knife) being part of a mindless mayhem. The disappearance of agency and the foregrounding of the motor memory of suffering and pain are also disturbingly depicted in ‘Khol Do’ (‘Open It’). A story about repeated sexual assault and the suffering body’s muscle memory and involuntary motor response to the same, “Khol Do” is also about the impossibility to forget and forgive in a world of traumatic repetitions. Set in the riot-marked city of Mughalpura, “Khol Do” uses the passing trains as a moving symbol of death and body count, corresponding to the historical situation of Partition where “as many as 673 refugee trains moved approximately 2,80,000 refugees within India and across the border” ([14], p. 948). The story features a missing young woman Sakina whose father Sirajuddin searches for her frantically “as if his eyes were blocked” (25) and whose dead mother is described through her torn-out intestines, an image of violence which keeps flashing in Sirajuddin’s eyes as he moves with his traumatic triggers feeling “as if he were floating in a void” (25). Sakina is defined through her missing dupatta which her father carries across different refugee camps in his search for her, the piece of cloth “becoming a metaphor of her unclothing which anticipates the sexual violence she is subjected to by unnamed men who move in groups and travel in trucks across border” ([23], p. 121) in a world populated by spectral figures and maimed corpses. “Khol Do” ends with a climatic moment that corroborates what Jisha Menon describes as a feature in Manto’s fiction, a crystallisation of several states of shock “peeling away the reader’s horizon of expectations” ([19], p. 149) through which the textual medium of the fictional narrative shifts the shudder from its imagined subjects to its real audience. Sakina is finally discovered in a refugee hospital being carried on a stretcher, with clear indication of having suffered multiple sexual assaults. She is identified by the beauty spot on her right cheek, “a marker which appears with intense irony in the context of the grotesquely violent setting of the story” ([23], p. 121).

As an irascible young male doctor checks an unconscious Sakina’s state and brusquely instructs an anxious Sirajuddin to open the window of the room with the words Khol Do (Open It), the sound of the sentence triggers the traumatic memory in the woman’s sexually violated body which passively proceeds to untie the dress to offer herself for another attack. The doctor stands “drenched from head to toe in sweat” (Manto 26) while the repeatedly violated female subject subconsciously responds to the words signifying and anticipating abuse with passive motor movements. “Khol Do” is a story about traumatic repetitions, about what the body remembers through multiple moments of pain from repeated sexual attacks and assaults in an unforgiveable and unforgettable world where “the difference between men who help find lost girls and men who rape and torture them is never fully demarcated or mapped out” ([23], p. 122). It depicts the impossibility of forgiving and oblivion in a state where shock and shudder are painfully internalised in the assaulted body and where spasmodic subjects live in close and permanent proximity to death, a theme dramatised in the final Manto story examined in this chapter, “Thanda Gosht” (“Cold Meat”).

“Thanda Gosht” is a story about “inadvertent necrophilia where a rioting man desires to sexually consume his looted female trophy without realizing she is dead already” ([23], p. 115), depicting a state of violence where even the dead have not seen the end of war. The coldness of the flesh, which appears in the title of the story, illustrates “the metaphoric meat gone awry, depicted by the hypermasculine figure’s failure to consummate a sexual act following his unsettling experience with a cold corpse” (115). It corresponds closely to Valentine Daniel’s study of the violence in the civil war of Sri Lanka where the supremacy of religious identities take place paradoxically through “the recognition of a corpse, which is no recognition at all” ([8], p. 69). The dead woman’s corpse, which the strong and sturdy Ishwar Singh carries on his back after a riot with the desire to sexually consume emerges as a “type of shorthand for the ‘real’, functioning both as metaphor for her own degraded condition and for the lamentable state of society” ([10], p. 245). ‘Thanda Gosht’ may be read as a dark and dramatic example of perpetrator trauma, where the violent man who, after killing six people and looting many jewels from a house during a communal riot, captures a young woman with the hope to taste a different fruit—the crude consumption metaphors reflective of the corporeal quality of violence—only to discover in the end that he is about to sexually consume a corpse, a cold meat. This realisation paralyses him, rendering him impotent to carry out and consummate his subsequent sexual act with his partner Kulwant Kaur, foregrounding again the impossibility to forgive or forget in a world where the dead and the killed continue to haunt and paralyse the perpetrators and suffering survivors. A story which literally and symbolically is about “re-forming the body” ([18]), “Thanda Gosht” shows the meat gone cold, both through deadness and subsequent libidinal failure which ultimately results in another assault and death.

The intercorporeality and interaffectivity depicted in Manto’s story are both shaped by blurry borderlines between the public and the private, where looted jewels from a ravaged outside enters the intimate amorous space inside but this also underscores the dis-appearance of stable spaces and bodies in a world of volatility and violence. This is ironically corroborated by Ishwar’s response to an angry Kulwant on being questioned about his failure to finish his sexual act: that he has been nowhere and been with nobody. The nothingness symbolically and organically embodied by the dead woman’s corpse, dramatises the interplay of corporeality and spectrality in ‘Thanda Gosht’ and the story ends with an angry Kulwant lending a fatal blow to Ishwar with the very same dagger he had earlier used to kill others during communal riots. As a dying Ishwar gasps for breath, still stunned in a state of sexual frozenness, the story shows a “switch from brutal bodily sexuality and corporeal violence to a de-corporealised melancholia” eventually ending in death, ironically by the same dagger used by the dying subject to kill earlier, illustrating “how the instrument and instrumentality of violence symbolically as well as functionally override the logic of human agency in moments of mindless destruction” ([23], p. 118). A story about the ultimate failure to forget, forgive, recover, and redeem, “Thanda Gosht” shows how the coldness of death spreads across the living and the non-living, where corpses appear alive and subjects are paralysed in a stunned state of fear. It shows how the process of paralysis affects the organic as well as the inorganic, allowing life-forms and movements only through motor memory of the trauma suffered and perpetrated.

Manto’s spasmodic short fiction—with all its cognitive and corporeal unsettling, defamiliarisation, and deterritorialisation—illustrates how “in the uncertainty created by Partition, violence became one of the few certainties” ([5], p. 285). It corresponds to a state of shudder and shock where memory operates only through oblivion and traumatic triggers and where the body remembers states of violence in all their viscerality and psychological intensity. More importantly, and in the context of this chapter, such fiction shows the liminality between remembering and forgetting, revenge and forgiving, and how the intercorporeal quality of such entanglements eschews any easy equivalence with amnesty and reconciliation. The irreconciliation and inconclusivity depicted and dramatised in Manto’s spasmodic stories also highlight the unique ability of fiction as a representational medium to accommodate and articulate ambivalence and aporia, in order to open up “the ontology of givenness, whereby the reified relationships between author and character, time and space, history and identity, substance and its absence, are debunked and deconstructed” ([22], p. 25). In describing the horrors of a historical event which affected and continue to affect lives of millions, Manto’s fiction foregrounds what Martha Nussbaum describes as the “third ability” corresponding to true citizenship, the power of “narrative imagination” that shapes the “ability to think what it must be like to be in the shoes of a person different from oneself” ([20], p. 95–96). In its moving and affective representations of unimaginable sufferings and unforgiveable acts of violence, Manto’s stories deserve renewed and special scholarly and readerly attention today.

References

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Gopal, Priyamvada. 2002. Bodies Inflicting Pain: Masculinity, Morality and Cultural Identity in Manto’s ‘Cold Meat’. The Partitions of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India, ed. Suvir Kaul, 191–216. Ranikhet: Permanent Black.

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Jalal, Ayesha. 2013. The Pity of Partition: Manto’s Life, Times, and Work Across the India-Pakistan Divide. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

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Parui, Avishek. 2015. Memory, Nation and the Crisis of Location in Saadat Hasan Manto’s ‘Toba Tek Singh.’ Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 5 (1/2): 57–67.

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© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2025

S. Malhotra et al. (eds.)Trauma and Memory Studies: Responses from India and Beyondhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-6374-3_19

19. Articulating Humiliation: Trauma and Acousmatic Agency in Selected Life Writings of Harishankar Jaladas

Durba Mandal1  

(1)

Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India

Durba Mandal

Email: durbam64_llg@jnu.ac.in

Abstract

The concept of Trauma, particularly in the popular Western imagination, has been understood through experiences resulting from an event of unforeseen circumstances, natural or man-made, that survivors may recall from memory after the event has passed. But this chapter aims to focus on situations where the central psychological trauma is a result of everyday humiliation. This chapter looks into life narratives that centre around experiencing humiliation and delves into how the Auditory infuses such experiences. I take up three biographical narratives by Bangladeshi author Harishankar Jaladas; Nonajawle Doobsnatar (Deep Diving in Salt Water), Kaibarta Katha (Tales of the Fisher Folk) and Nijer Shonge Dekha (An Encounter with Myself). His accounts centre around personal and collective experiences where emotional and psychological trauma is a result of day-to-day humiliation caused by the socio-historical order of caste. Set in modern day Bangladesh, his accounts deal with the kinds of everyday discrimination and subtle networks of exclusion he encounters because of his roots in the lower caste fisherman community. This chapter puts forward the argument that the auditory comes to be documented heavily in documented memories of such experiences. When one loses access to appropriate linguistic response, documenting mere sounds all around us can become a way of retaining agency. This chapter starts with looking into the soundscapes that the author documents and explores possibilities of sonic agency in that act of documentation. These documented experiences are not at all extraordinary. Instead these appear to be absolutely mundane, yet can lodge a deep impact on memory and experientiality. Such engagement can also help us understand how the trauma of the everyday dalit identity goes beyond geographical borders. Dominant notions of understanding trauma such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder are challenged in these lived experiences where trauma is carried generationally and is saturated within mundane, quotidian realities of individual subjects. This chapter attempts to develop an alternate mode of confronting commonplace humiliation and trauma through a keen focus on the ordinary and the auditory.

Trauma in the popular western imagination has usually been understood through encounters resulting from an unforeseen state of affairs. The traumatic event is “re-experienced” in a different place; “the “belatedness” of trauma is another aporia” [17, p. 5]. Drawing on Freudian psychoanalysis, Cathy Caruth understands trauma through its inherent forgetting and haunting returns. The traumatic event is experienced through a fundamental dislocation from the episode that works not only as a testimony of the experience but also blocks any direct access to it. Clinical Studies regard Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, widely popularised by its catchy acronym PTSD, as the primary symptom that leads to the diagnosis of an individual having undergone a traumatic incident.¹ Emerging in 1980 after its inclusion as a new category of diagnosis in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-III), today PTSD is widely understood as a disjunction in the temporal operations of memory. But as Roger Kurtz notes, PTSD is a “rather loose and baggy category” [16, p. 7]. Medical sciences, law, social sciences, humanities and the arts come together to satisfactorily address this enigma, that is the traumatic aporia, and how to navigate it.

Postcolonial scholars resist the glorification of the impossibility of traumatic aporia. Jay Rajiva’s work focuses on the differentiation between particularly postcolonial trauma and other contexts of trauma by focusing on “the degree to which the experience of the postcolonial subject is frequently not exceptional” [21, p. 11]. He engages in the post-structuralist method of suspicion but takes a stand against the celebration of all intricate aporiatic understandings of trauma alongside. Taking forward this line of enquiry regarding diverse traumatic experiences in the Global South, this chapter aims to focus on situations where trauma is experienced as a result of everyday humiliation. The temporal threshold between experience and re-experience is closely interrogated. I argue that the auditory comes to be documented heavily in such experiences where possibilities of human rights and existence are diminished. As one loses access to appropriate linguistic responses, documenting mere sounds that surround us becomes a mode of retaining some sensory acousmatic agency for subjects under duress. Recalling the sounds, their origins, the dynamics or equations of power they bring out and the emotions they generate in the process can help one reconstruct crucial memories associated with experiences of extreme personal and collective vulnerability.

This chapter looks into life narratives that centre around experiencing humiliation and delves into how the auditory infuses such experiences. I take up autobiographical narratives by Bangladeshi author Harishankar Jaladas; Nonajawle Doobsnatar (Deep Diving in Salt Water), Kaibarta Katha (Tales of the Fisher Folk) and Nijer Sange Dekha (An Encounter with Myself). Popularly known for his critically acclaimed riparian novels such as Dahankal (The Times of Burning) and Jalaputra (The Son of Water), Harishankar’s works primarily deal with issues of the downtrodden and the Dalits in contemporary Bangladesh. “Dalit” is a political term used to refer to the discriminated lower caste and untouchable communities in the Indian subcontinent. They were and continue to be treated unequally in everyday life because of the lowest status assigned to them in the Hindu Social Order (HSO) [25, p. 11]. This chapter understands the problematic dynamics of deploying this charged expression in the context of a nation other than India. Even though the HSO primarily belongs to India, as Teltumbde adds, the Dalits are spread all over South Asia comprising not only India but also Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Myanmar as well as the diaspora spread across the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, South Africa and the Caribbean [25, p. 11]. Jaladas himself ponders about the diverse possibilities of this particular term for the predicaments he intends to bring to light. His accounts centre around personal and collective experiences where trauma, primarily psychological, is a result of day-to-day humiliation caused by the practice of the caste system in urban neoliberal societies set in modern day Bangladesh. His accounts deal with the kinds of everyday prejudices he grew up with and the subtle networks of exclusion he has encountered and continues to face because of his roots in the lower caste Bengali speaking fishermen (Jaladas) community. Much of his focus in these memoirs remains on the lived realities of someone coming from one of the many Dalit Hindu communities in Bangladesh. His important autobiographical writings can help us understand how the Dalit identity travels beyond geographical borders.

Humiliation and the Social Through an Autobiographical Lens

The caste system that divides the Hindu populace into higher and lower caste groups based on birth and its deep impact on the socio-political rubrics of India have been and continue to be the subject matter of many academic debates. But what often remains comparatively ignored is the fact that the operations of the caste system remain quite prominent in many South-Asian countries and diasporic communities as well. Bangladesh is one of the countries that deploys discriminatory measures against communities that can be labelled as Dalits and thus are associated with particular marginal and ‘unclean’ occupations; perhaps it is a long term effect of having been an integral part of the colonial Indian subcontinent. Bangladesh is home to both Hindu and Muslim Dalit communities who are positioned at the bottom of the social chain. An estimated 5.5 Million people, 1.11 percent of Bangladesh’s population, fall under these communities [4, p. 2]. These people continue to be subjected to generational prejudices in all spheres of civil society. They remain confined to particular menial professions and geographical areas in the city. They face problems with land rights, healthcare, and educational facilities. Statistics show that 28.5% of dalit children in Bangladesh never get enrolled into formal education, and 68% of them drop out of educational institutions because of economic instability and caste-based discrimination [6, p. 2]. In the case of Harishankar, he particularly writes about his experiences of belonging to a Hindu dalit community. Surindar Jodhka points out, “Dalits, who make for nearly one-fourths to one-fifth of the Bangladeshi Hindu population, become double victims of Islamic majoritarianism as well as caste untouchability” [13, p. 104]. This chapter is not qualified to engage with the political situation in Bangladesh at large. But such information helps us develop an understanding of the context and circumstances of the author.

Talking about the aesthetics of Dalit writing, Raj Kumar notes how distinctively dalit writers try to be true to the experiences they have lived; they compel their readers to listen to the marginal voices. Their preferred vessel is “often the brutal, coarse and crude language” that emerges out of “a life of poverty, ignorance and violence” [15, p. 73]. Sharmila Rege argues that Dalit life narratives should be considered “testimonios” which “forge a right to speak both for and beyond the individual” as well as oppose conventional forgetting of painful histories of caste based persecution and dissent [22, p. 13]. I wish to look into Jaladas’s works in such a light. They focus on his personal experiences but also draw our attention to the societal evils that he faced because of his identity being tied to a particular community. The language he uses very often incorporates slangs, slurs and gross insults spoken in specific rural or urban dialects of spoken Bengali. There is never any attempt to make it a pleasant experience for the readers. The author’s is a keen ear that listens to his surroundings and documents from his memory without any filtration.

This chapter engages with a palpable lived notion of the collective Social as well as an individual’s precise location within it. Judith Butler talks about the Social as the space where the “I” formulates itself as a part of the collective exposure to the other. Relation to others is the territory for the subject’s ethical responsibility, says Butler, challenging the post-structuralist notion of a decentered casual subject [1, p. 31]. Humiliation is one such experience that at once de-centres one’s subjectivity and simultaneously re-orients that sense of sovereignty within the social realm. Sanjay Palshikar, looking into the vocabulary deployed in the process of humiliation, sees humiliation as only half a claim that does nothing to suggest the subject-agent’s follow up reaction. It offers a choice regarding its resolution to the subject who makes the claim. As a potentially disruptive element of power, humiliation is not just a condition for communication. It in itself is communication, made possible because of shared language. Palshikar brings humiliation completely within the zone of sociality that seems interactive, based in verbal-aural exchanges [19, p. 5431]. Situating Humiliation as a phenomenon within the public sphere, Gopal Guru gives us a twofold condition to define its context; an element of comparison that evokes within a person a capacity of self-reflexivity and the emergence and articulation of the language of rights that makes the assertion possible against humiliation [9, p. 5]. Such scholarship on the language and vocabulary of the performance of humiliating and undergoing humiliation within the domain of the social draws our attention to this particular experience becoming something more than language. It is a “coefficient”, there is always something more than just linguistic expression that defines the experience and documentation of humiliation.

Humiliation, or enforced shame, becomes a defining experience of any modern Dalit subject, as Udaya Kumar and Susie Tharu discuss. Looking into two short stories by Gita Hariharan and Baburao Bagul, Tharu shows how the space of the Dalit subject, especially Dalit mothers in these stories, remains inadequately and impossibly inhabited as agency and consent keep being annihilated through mundane attacks on self-respect [26, p. 1315]. The Dalit subject’s complex experience in the social sphere smeared with commonplace humiliation can offer a departure in the models of thinking around humiliation as a universal experience. Kumar takes up instances of Dalit autobiographies to take his point forward as he notes, “Humiliation may not be present in Dalit autobiographies solely as a performative claim about an undesirable situation or the choices for future action. It may also be the mark under which the accommodated subject can appear in language” [15, p. 355]. An understanding of this complex language of humiliation in a modern Dalit subject can go beyond the written language and find different channels within the fluid form of autobiography. With that aim to re-explore the form of the Dalit autobiography and asserting modes of agency within it, I hope to put the focus on the documentation of the auditory within the self-narration attempted in and through the structure of Dalit autobiographies.

The Social and The Auditory

While developing his notion of the “Everyday Social,” Gopal Guru notes how the social sphere not only can be perceived by sound but also the essential experiences of our social lives are developed through sound; “It is only by hearing many things that one thinks of the social and this is related to questions of language and music. Sound is, perhaps, the most important element in the creation of society. Sound creates the social in a way which cannot be created by vision.” [8, p. 14]. This chapter argues that the auditory gets deeply lodged into memory and comes to be documented heavily in such experiences where human possibilities are undermined. This chapter starts with looking into some of the soundscapes² that the author documents in his autobiographical writings and explores possibilities of agency in that act of documentation. These documented experiences appear to be absolutely mundane, yet seem to lodge a deep impact on memory and experientiality. Dominant notions of understanding trauma are challenged in these lived experiences where trauma is carried generationally and is saturated within uneventful quotidian realities of individual subjects. This chapter attempts to develop an alternate mode of confronting commonplace humiliation and trauma through a keen focus on the ordinary and the auditory. Cathy Caruth would ask us to look for an alternate model of not just reading but listening to trauma. This chapter attempts to do something similar.

Harishankar’s works deal with a society which has its own sets of rules and insidious networks that control the operations of caste discrimination and profiling. While navigating through these kinds of modern modes of subtle yet pointed discrimination, it becomes important to note the transient sonic, since the dominant visuals fail to draw our attention to subliminal voices. Humiliation, in the manner of an open secret, thrives within networks of basic interactions and communication. It has become a particularly pointed tool especially in urban areas that perpetuate institutional profiling and subtle insular practices for caste discrimination. Focusing on a purely sonic aspect in the documentation of such experiences can expand our ways of understanding one’s response and affective engagement to it. I aim to think of gossip, passing snide remarks, and rumours as primarily sonic acts where some titillating information is circulated in closed networks; information that cannot be traced back to a singular origin or fixed source, nor can its veracity be concretised. Access and individual roles in the circulation of such information can reveal one’s position within wider hierarchies of power. In workplaces, neighbourhoods and similar social situations that one has to inhabit on a daily basis, humiliation is often perpetuated through gossip networks without a fixed subject. Because of Harishankar’s texts, I am particularly focusing on academic workspaces and urban neighbourhoods in certain geographical contexts (contemporary Bangladesh) and trying to think of these spaces as sonic microcosms with their very own operating methods. Aarushi Punia discusses how modern day casteism operates through subtle methods of caste profiling and determining dalitness in backhanded manners [20, p. 14]. In these cases, as the texts mentioned in the chapter often note, particular words can generate potent affective reactions because of their mere sonority. It will be interesting to think of how the literary reader also processes such soundscapes. I am interested in the sheer sonic origin of affective responses. The question that I address is whether one resorts to documenting mundane soundscapes in an attempt to make peace with a kind of fundamental and normalised practice of humiliation. Sounds, speeches and the auditory infuse our experiences of the Everyday Social. A conscious engagement with them can help us re-investigate our complex encounters within the societies we inhabit.

This chapter proceeds by isolating some important moments of the Auditory being lodged deeply into memory to deal with difficult experiences of humiliation. By Sound/the Auditory I refer to sounds, voices, uttered speech, noise, music, aural registers, even silence- all that borders close to the domain of the auditive phenomena, imagined or embodied, that get imprinted on mnemonic devices. My idea is to note how agency is retained in the form of an authority over the acousmatics that surround us. The workings of memory become interesting to note in such situations, as the subject recalls incidents of scarring indignity yet seems to not really focus on the dominant visuals. The exact site of experiencing such intense emotions caused by experiences like humiliation evades proper articulation. Discontinuous memories seem to be haunted by the sounds, silences and expressions that were accessed through one’s auditory faculties. Meaning-making becomes complicated in these instances. Particular slurs or phrases become capable of evoking a tangible sense of humiliation through their mere delivery into the sonic sphere. Our everyday life is dominated by the auditory- the immersive conversations, strategic silences and neutral cacophonies. To engage with experiences such as normalised humiliation and to understand the propagation and internalisation of such phenomena, it is indeed important to put more focus on the auditory that surrounds us. One’s idea of self is also much dependent on what one hears from other members of the society. Minor sonic acts such as a random passed comment or a particular phrase repeatedly directed to a specific object can determine how one may imagine their identity. It helps us rethink how to react to particular offensive phrases or slangs: whether to build a subconscious subscription to these kinds of ideas that others impose, or to develop notions of selfhood precisely on the grounds of opposing these kinds of discrimination, or somehow do both at once.

Memory, Humiliation and the Auditory in Harishankar Jaladas’ Writings

Let us take up some such instances of the soundscapes leaving a deep impact on memory documented in Harishankar’s memoirs. In Nonajawle Doobsnatar, there is an incident where he recalls an encounter with this particular unnamed person on his regular morning walks in Chittagong’s popular DC Hill area. He had been appointed as the principal of the City College then, a post of an educator of the highest echelons, assumed to be highly honourable. This person, a familiar face and a fellow stroller, on just another random day in a ritualistic way acknowledges him and they exchange pleasantries. There is nothing that stands out about the whole exchange. On this day though, this particular person had two fellow pedestrians with him. After the exchange, Harishankar walks ahead as usual. But he overhears this person introducing him to the other two as the principal of City College, ending the short introduction with “Jaillya kintu” (meaning- He belongs to the lower caste fisherman community though). The word “Jaillya”, a colloquial term and slang for the fisherman community Harishankar belongs to, completely undercuts whatever feelings of content the first part of that introduction would have induced in him. He starts to think whether the person would have brought in communal identities as well to introduce a principal. He wonders why it has to be his caste background that his identity bottles down to. He also realises that this person is not capable of feeling any sense of respect or recognition for him as such; there is only negligence, reproach and indignation even in his formal niceties, no matter how much he tries to fit in. The affect that this word lodges is located in the particularly sonic momentum of the delivery. It is spoken behind his back. It is the sound that has an affect on him in this absolutely mundane situation of encountering a person on a morning walk.

As a first generation literate from his family, Harishankar was admitted to sixth grade in Patenga High School. That made him somewhat of a scholar in the Jaladas locality in the sea-side region of North Patenga. In the class, he remembers being the only person from his community cornered in the vivacious high school classroom. This is quite an easy soundscape to imagine for the readers. But even the urban clear Bengali pronunciation of the teachers left a mark on him; this classroom was so different from his world and the soundscapes that had defined it. When his full name was called by the teacher, it was as if the pronunciation, the sonic act of saying that name, generated a round of mocking laughter. He recalls hearing someone call him a dom³ from behind and fellow classmates laughing and mocking the mere mention of his name. That was the day he first figured out, he writes, that a Jaladas could be a Dom, a fisherman is merely a clown for some people to laugh at. It is as if his presence is an impossibility in the classroom. It is as if there is no need to distinguish one Dalit individual from another, but they all need to be thought of as trespassers in certain domains and end up reduced to mockery in case they try to overstep these boundaries. The faces in that classroom blur in his memories, but the words remain. The sound of the uniform laughter becomes definitive of his school experience. The only way for him to talk about such painful memories is to bring us back to the soundscapes on an ordinary first day at an ordinary high school.

In another instance of facing blatant discrimination because of his caste identity, Harishankar brings up his living situation in Kaibarta Katha. Finding a place in many neighbourhoods had been difficult for him even after getting a teaching position at a government college. He recalls being told clearly by a landlady how her building has been built to be rented by gentlemen and not for fishmongers. It took him much effort to find a good place to stay in Gurkhadaktar Lane in Chittagong, an aristocratic Hindu locality. The housing issue remains quite a hassle with the Dalit communities, even in urban areas of Bangladesh. Lower caste communities remain confined to particular localities or informal ghettos. In their study on localities inhabited by dalit sweeper communities, Anindita Ghoshal, Fairooz Jahan and Shah Md Azimul Ehsan note how the conservative civil society opposes proper relocation of these lower caste deprived factions. [7, p. 49]. The Jaladas family’s living space here was marked by much blatant discrimination; the neighbour in his opposite house would start openly singing casteist slurs towards the family, repeatedly calling them “Kauar jaat” and “jaillyar jaat”⁴ His young daughter, unfamiliar with the meanings of these words but aware of the intended implications of these expressions, ends up asking her father, “Baba, why does that man call us kauar jaat?” Harishankar remembers not having a suitable reply to her innocent question.

There is another family, the Ghoshes, who the Jaladas family had an unpleasant encounter with. The two families started out sharing an amicable neighbourly relationship, as the Ghoshes would entrust the Jaladas family to look after their daughters and exchange pleasantries. Harishankar recalls even teaching the daughters of the Ghosh family. But the Ghosh family’s dog once caused an accident by attacking and biting Harishankar’s five year old son. His wife, in a fit of rage, tried to tell the Ghosh matriarch that this situation would not have gotten so bad if the dog was chained. Mrs. Ghosh does not take any accountability for the situation; instead finds the commotion absolutely unnecessary for such a minor issue. Mrs. Jaladas and Mrs. Ghosh get engrossed in a bit of a heated argument. While taking care of his wounded son, Harishankar recalls overhearing the ruckus as Mrs. Ghosh lashes out at his wife, “Dom professor! Domor poa abar professor! Jatot Uithosh je na?” [Dom professor! A son of a Dom becoming a Professor! What, do you think you have risen in the caste ranks?] The Ghosh family matriarch might have intended for her words to have the exact impact that they did. Perhaps these words were too commonplace in her vocabulary and she hurled them casually at the Jaladas family in a moment of volatility. Harishankar could do nothing but shed some tears in the face of such ignominy. He could not even get out of his room after this. He starts thinking how even after being a college professor to the daughters of the Ghosh family, his identity does not seem to be able to surpass his caste background. He is nothing but a “domor poa” to the mother of his students. He writes how this “lajjya janok bedona”, the shameful pain from this past incident still eats away at his insides. All he could do is to look for another locality where things might be better and shift there, but even that search wasn’t easy. Even though he does not elaborate on his harrowing house hunt, from this incident, it is clear from Harishankar’s account that the mundane yet harsh reality of a lower caste family looking to find housing in upper class Bengali neighbourhoods in urban Bangladesh remains quite grim. There is no Freudian inherent forgetting that is possible. The traumatic event does not reside in the past; it seeps into the lived present and proliferates.

In another instance recalled vividly in Nonajawle, Harishankar reminisces about losing a job as the headmaster of South Halishahar High school. It was a newly founded school in a developing area in post-independence Bangladesh. One random afternoon, Harishankar hears from a close associate of the school committee that plans have been set in motion to have him fired. The executives in the School Committee held a meeting where it was decided that now that the school has found some footing, the higher-ups should not be made to include a “jeler pola”⁵ in important administrative decisions or bow down to someone from that background. There are communal issues at play as well; the school needs a proper headmaster in a particular political climate and so on. He can choose to be an assistant headmaster, but he’ll have to give up his post as the Headmaster of the school. This whole meeting is visualised through sonic cues and clues both for Harishankar and the readers. This meeting is not something the author had access to, so direct visuals are not available to him. The news reaches him as gossip through whispers, as some foreknowledge that he was not supposed to have known. This conversation in his temporary office carried out in a secretive hush-hush tone blatantly shows him the limits of his authority and the honour he is allowed to command in society.

In a documented interview in Nijer Sange Dekha, when asked to talk about the humiliation faced while growing up, Jaladas writes of his and his father’s experiences selling fish in marketspaces. Other than the competition within their community while fishing he also records how in marketplaces they were often abused and beaten up while selling. In one instance he writes about some assailants attacking their small shop, and then later looting and even going as far as aiming to occupy their home. The incident he recalls through “chatgaiyan gaalir jhor” or a storm of slangs delivered in the Chattogram Bengali dialect. It is not surprising that most of the slangs are those familiar caste slurs that he is made to repeatedly deal with, like domer poa and jaillyar poa. He writes how he grew up not only just seeing such behaviour, but also very often hearing such abuses and snide remarks because of his lower caste background. Even when he starts teaching, he encounters similar slang and caste slurs where even his fellow professors in his department have a problem with his origin.

Such traumatic and insidious networks of humiliation are not available to the naked eye. One can only listen to them and remember what they heard and how they heard it. Such auditory disruptions in one’s selfhood seem to have long-term effects on the author. In the twofold way that Guru has discussed regarding the conditions of humiliation, encountering these experiences so frequently makes Jaladas constantly doubt himself and interrogate his identity. He documents feeling helpless and internalising the knowledge that no matter how established he becomes, he will always have to keep anticipating such abuses because of his caste background. These slang words and the way they are said, so casually in a conversation, in the middle of an introduction, or in the heat of the moment, all of it has a profound impact on his self-respect. He feels utterly disrespected and humiliated. It shows how commonplace these discussions are for those who perpetrate such discrimination, almost to the point of indifference. The fact that a person like him can be a respectable member of the civil society starts feeling like an impossibility. In response, he looks for some kind of a language of articulation and finds it in writing, where he draws major inspiration from his lived realities filled with not just visuals but sounds of humiliation and shame. The words and the phrases repeatedly directed at him such as dom, domer poa, Jeler pola or jaillyar pola, become detached from their meaning and transcend into a sonic realm. Even if the words become unfamiliar or unknown, the mere sound of them can generate the feeling of humiliation, disrespect and helplessness. He also talks about how such behaviour, when they come directly from fellow laymen, can be somewhat tolerable. But when the highly educated sophisticated section of the society engages in such crude behaviour, it makes him feel doubly hopeless. Punia discusses how Dalits in urban spaces try to shed their identity and attempt to become a part of the utopian caste-free urbanscape. But such attempts are doomed to be futile because of ubiquitous upper caste networks [20, p. 15].The battle for respect and equal treatment seems to be neverending as people across all classes, both victims and perpetrators, keep taking part in practising such violation. The focus on the auditory can help re-interrogate these micro behavioural patterns of everyday life. Perhaps we should not only try to see but also keenly listen to injustices practised around us.

PTSD and Beyond

The idea of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) often comes up regarding the discourse around appropriate documentation of traumatic experiences. Freud took up the idea of the return of the traumatic event in his seminal work Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Major scholars in the field of trauma studies have been constant contributors when it comes to trying to extend and evolve these ideas. Taking into account radical gaps and disruptions in memories of traumatic experiences and how trauma unsettles and forces us to rethink our notions of experience and communication, Cathy Caruth notes, “To be traumatised is to be possessed by an image or an event” [2, p. 5]. The return of the event, for the one who inhabits it, becomes central in any kind of psychoanalytic understanding of experiencing what could be thought of as traumatic. But the question remains; how can something which has never left and has become a perpetual state of being for those bearing witness to it, return. Looking at how one experiences trauma on a daily basis as part of civil society, and how institutional discrimination and humiliation become a commonplace practice within social networks can bring in an important breakthrough in the dominant modes of studying articulations of trauma. In case of PTSD, the definition urges that the event of origin has to keep returning through its inherent latency and forgetting. But one is tempted to ask about those situations where the traumatic event is nothing exceptional. Instead, the event is turned into practices and micro-events and thus multiplied. Either because of everyday practices of discrimination and seclusion of selected populations, or the prevalence of everyday insidious networks of forced acceptance, such return of one singular event of origin becomes impossible. Trauma is to be located in a perpetual state of being. There is also nothing latent, nor any forgetting possible. One is constantly reminded of their identity and made to stop before any breach of it can come into being.

For a history to be considered “a history of trauma”, it needs to be “grasped only in the very inaccessibility of its occurrence” [3, p. 8]. This inaccessibility or ineffability that defines something traumatic opens us up to the challenge of “a new kind of listening”, a mode of listening that intends to tackle the “witnessing of impossibility” [3, p. 10]. To listen to the impossible or the ineffable, to truly understand what harrowing situation someone else has gone through or continues to struggle with, a listener needs to focus not just on the event but also keenly listen to the gaps and departures in a survivor’s testimony, Caruth believes. In this chapter, I have tried to open these texts up to such deep and nuanced listening. The aim of this chapter has been to locate moments of interaction between sound, literature and contingent affective networks. Literature cannot be thought of as soundless, we just need to extend our ideas of listening. Such affective listening, alongside a sonic sensibility and sonic imagination can help us navigate difficult situations experienced by another. One’s idea of self is as much internal as it is external. Our circumstances and surroundings form who we are. We are shaped by how our fellow beings perceive us. This paper notes how much of these surroundings are sonic. Jean-Luc Nancy announced the failure of philosophy to merely listen because of its preoccupation with understanding. Nancy associates a signature isomorphism with the sonorous. Unlike the dominant visual that “persists until its disappearance”, the fluid sonorous “appears and fades into its permanence” [18, p. 2]. This ability that the auditory possesses of fading into permanence yet not really being grasped in all its entirety can help us rethink the momentary affective networks of memory; especially memories of discomfort, grief, trauma, humiliation and pain where articulation is incomplete and ambiguous.

Conclusion

When it comes to moments of sheer indignation, tracing how one remembers certain details sonically can be an alternate method of understanding the experientiality of humiliation and related psychological trauma. Unlike how we think of imagining a scene of trauma through exceptional visuals that stand out, here we consider cases where we don't see anything extraordinary. These are mundane scenes of neighbourhood quarrels and conversations taking a heated direction. The mundane auditory details stand out not only to the ones who remember these incidents but also to the readers. Experiences of humiliation seem to keep returning to a subject by becoming a part of their identity. They never really leave or are forgotten. The event does not create a clear image; the event does not return. Instead, the event is made to inhabit permanently. Articulation of such experiences is indeed difficult to do justice to in writing. One of the primary productive actions can be merely recalling the sounds and becoming an earwitness. The idea is to understand; this chapter does not search for any recuperative methods when it comes to engaging with difficult texts.

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Guru, Gopal, and Sundar Sarukkai. 2019. Experience, Caste and the Everyday Social. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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Jaladas, Harisankar. 2018. Kaibarta Katha [Tales of The Fisherfolk]. Dhaka: Maola Brothers.

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Jaladas, Harisankar. 2012. Nijer Songe Dekha [An Encounter With Myself]. Dhaka: Maola Brothers.

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Jaladas, Harisankar. 2018. Nonajawle Doob Snatar [Deep Diving in Saltwater]. Dhaka: Prothoma Prokashoni.

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Kumar, Raj. 2019. Understanding Dalit Aesthetics. In Dalit Literature and Criticism, 67–91. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan India.

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Kumar, Udaya. 2009. Two Figures of Shame: Exposure, Ethics, and Self-Narration. Études anglaises 62 (3): 345–357.

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Nancy, Jean Luc. 2007. Listening. Trans. Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham University Press.

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Palshikar, Sanjay. 2005. Understanding Humiliation. Economic and Political Weekly 40 (51): 5428–5432.

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Punia, Aarushi. 2023. The Necessity of Dalitude: Being Dalit in Urban and Academic Spaces in the Twenty First Century in India. Critical Philosophy of Race 2 (1): 8–32.

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Footnotes

1

See Diedrich (83–95).

2

A Soundscape is any acoustic field of study that consists of events that are heard and not objects that are seen, as R. Murray Schafer notes. This idea is extended beyond musicology.

3

Dom is a dalit community that deals with the burial or cremation of the dead. The word is used as a slang to collectively refer to lower castes.

4

Literally these phrases would translate to “caste of crows, caste of fishermen”.

5

Meaning: son of a fisherman.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2025

S. Malhotra et al. (eds.)Trauma and Memory Studies: Responses from India and Beyondhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-6374-3_20

20. This is My Story: Role of Tibet Museum in Preserving Memory in Exile

Lakshmi P.1  

(1)

Department of English and Cultural Studies, CHRIST (Deemed to Be University), Delhi, India

Lakshmi P.

Email: lakshmi.p@res.christuniversity.in

Abstract

Tibetans, driven out of their homeland, have been living a life of exile since 1959. As they grapple with the challenges of preserving, shaping, transferring, and negotiating collective and cultural memories of a distant homeland, the role of the Tibet Museum at Dharamshala, Himachal Pradesh (the seat of the Tibetan government in exile) is pivotal. This chapter stems from an interest in understanding how the Museum serves as—what Pierre Nora referred to as—a “site of memory” for the Tibetans in exile to preserve the intergenerational memory. It tries to bring together the concepts of exile, culture, memory, and the institution of Tibet Museum to locate how it becomes a site of memory. How do the 9000-square-foot museum's permanent and temporary exhibitions institutionalise the memory of the imagined nation in exile? Of particular focus is the permanent exhibition titled “I am a Tibetan, This is My Story” housed at the Museum.

Museums, especially in post-colonial nations, have played an important symbolic role in representing the nation to its own citizens as well as the outside world. While the Museums in Europe showcased the narrative of world dominance, the newly decolonised countries conceived museums as “shrines to the national culture” [40, p. 108]. Museums have been used as spaces to create a narrative of nationhood and a cultural heritage owned by, inherited by, and accessible to all the members of a nation. What happens when the nation, in its physical and material sense, does not exist for a community? Tibetans are an example of what [3] referred to as an “imagined community”,they are a group of citizens whose “sense of shared terrain and history” is communicated through “iconic fragments of the past” [14, p. 154]. In the case of Tibetans, they were deprived of their nation due to a colonising power occupying their homeland. How does a community without access to their homeland imagine a nation and reimagine the space of a museum as a space to represent and articulate themselves? This is a study of the curious case of the Tibet Museum at Dharamshala, India, a museum for and by the Tibetans, who have been living in exile for the last six decades in India and other parts of the world.

Under the leadership of His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, their spiritual leader, Tibetans have resettled themselves in India and other parts of the world. According to the latest census (2009) conducted by the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA), the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile based in Dharamshala, India, approximately 90,000 Tibetans are residing in India (CTA). Spread across various self-governed settlements across India, three generations of Tibetans in exile continue to negotiate the spaces of statelessness, identity-making, and loss. This chapter stems from an interest in understanding the role of the Tibet Museum established by the CTA in creating the memoryscape of Tibetan life in exile. An attempt is made to study the museum as a site of memory and the functions it carries out to create a sense of nationhood in Tibetan life in exile. Of specific interest to this chapter is the permanent exhibit titled “I am Tibetan, This is My Story” [34].

Inaugurated in February 2022 to “document, preserve, research, exhibit and educate Tibetans and non-Tibetans on all matters related to Tibet’s history, culture and present situation”, the Tibet Museum of the Department of Information and International Relations, Central Tibetan Administration, is located in the Main Temple complex in McLeod Ganj, Dharamsala (The Tibet Museum). This was not a new initiative; a Tibet Museum (housed in the Department of Information and International Relations (DIIR) which was opened in 2000 in Mcleodganj used witness testimonies to draw attention to the trauma of Chinese occupation of Tibet and the exile that followed [27]. Though this Museum has received considerable scholarly attention [14, 21], the new Tibet Museum offers scope for further explorations. According to the website, the Museum is driven by the belief that “knowing the past gives strength and guidance for the future and hope”. It is not only “more than a space for exhibitions, installations and lectures” but also a “platform for educational activities relating to Tibetan history—through in-house activities and special events, travelling museum kits, catalogues, and various other publications” (The Tibet Museum). What is the story that the Museum tells? What are the devices that the Museum uses to tell the story? How does it use memory to articulate its message to the viewers? What is the significance of Dharamshala in providing meaning to the space?

According to Pierre Nora, lieux de memoire are sites where memory crystallises and secretes itself; this occurs “at a particular historical moment, a turning point where consciousness of a break with the past is bound up with the sense that memory has been torn-but torn in such a way as to pose the problem of the embodiment of memory in certain sites where a sense of historical continuity persists” [31], p. 7). Museums were considered a “site of memory” by Nora himself. The preservation of memories is a crucial aspect for communities in exile, like those of Tibetans who were forced to leave their homelands. The Tibet Museum at Dharamshala is such a site where memory “crystallises and secretes itself” [31].

Dharamshala, for Tibetans, has become a “charged signifier”; spiritual, owing to the presence of the Dalai Lama, and secular, owing to the presence of the Central Tibetan Administration [38]. The place is in itself, for the Tibetans in exile, what Pierre Nora called lieu de mémoire which provides “a maximum amount of meaning in a minimum number of signs” and where memories “converge and coalesce” [35]. This flow and convergence of meaning happens in Dharamshala in two different ways. First, it is the residence of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama and his government in exile. For Tibetans inside Tibet, true Tibet lies “not in a territorially defined homeland”; it is where the Dalai Lama resides and they go through a sense of displacement without being displaced in the physical sense of the term [46, p. 5]. Their home (the XIVth Dalai Lama) has departed and they see Dharamshala as a nurturing ground for Tibetan culture and traditions increasingly threatened in Tibet itself. Second, it is the focal point of many “individual, communal and institutional practices of Tibetan culture” [2, p. 116]. In an attempt to recreate their homeland in exile, Tibetans have tried to recreate the holy sites of Tibet in exile. In Dharamshala, also referred to as ‘Little Tibet’, shops, buildings, and institutions have been named after places in Tibet [8, p. 190]. While the homeland for Tibetans lies across the Himalayas, this Indian hill station, which they refer to colloquially as Dhasa (like Lhasa) is a project in a possible reclamation and restitution in exile. It is a place of pilgrimage, a place of rest, and “physically embodies the memories of Lhasa” [38, p. 69].

Tibet Museum is not the only museum that is housed at Dharamshala; the Library of Tibetan Works and Archive Museum, Men-Tsee-Khang Museum (set up to preserve the Tibetan medical system), Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts Museum and Losel Doll Museum (that houses a collection of over 150 dolls from various regions of Tibet) are also key sites where the exercise of preserving the memories of the Tibetan selves is at work. This importance ascribed to museums can be seen as part of the new “CTA—sponsored cultural development within the Tibetan exile community” [27].

Museums perform a traditional function as “storehouses of memory”, and “memory stores for nations” and act as a “collective memory” [1, p. 63]. According to [10], a museum, “like an archive, holds the material manifestations of cultural and scientific production as records”; the “articulated memories” are “removed from the mental world and literally placed in the physical world” (p. 5). Modern museums are places where “subjectivities and objectivities collide” and provide a “meeting place between the personal and the public, individual and institutional, subjective and objective”, and create new relationships between museums and memory [32, p. 5]. They act as a repository of memory, the “location of the collections that form the basis of cultural or national identity” and “deliberately forge memories in physical form to prevent the natural erosion of memory, both personal and collective”[10, p. 3]. In the Tibet Museum, the key tools used to capture memory are photographs, material objects, and digital tools that focus on the journeys that the Tibetans had to undertake while escaping into exile, the rebuilding of tradition in exile, the Tibetan identity, history of Tibet, the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan resistance as they place Tibet within the larger context of the modern global era.

The things that those who undertook the arduous journey into exile brought with them are displayed to describe the trauma that they suffered during the journey. There are photographs, clothing, and other things that are easily portable and survive the harsh cold of the terrain for a long period. There is a video that shows Nyima Lhamo, a survivor who arrived in India in 2016, sharing her journey from Tibet to exile in 2016 alongside a display of three items she managed to take with her during the escape. The chuba,¹ the backpack, and the boots act as important interfaces between the Tibetans and their homeland. These objects interact with the testimony and authenticate each other “as original representatives of the past in the sense of object authentication” [20, p. 124]. They are also what [44] has called “material witnesses”; they are those materials that witnessed violent acts or catastrophes that happened in the past, and whose consequences continue to unfold (p. 14). They are witnesses to the trauma and pain that thousands of Tibetans like Nyima Lhamo have undergone. These objects are being used to “summon the memories of a vacated homeland” [14, p. 155]. They act as what David Parkin described as “transitional objects” that “extend the boundaries of the self to ease the pain of uprootedness” [33, p. 320].

The very use of “transitional” objects in creating the site of memory—to capture and share their memories of the homeland that they were forced to forsake—gives Tibetans the narrative agency of being able to narrate their stories of exile. This is especially important for refugees, as in the case of Tibetan refugees. In the event of losing access to the land, perhaps the most basic material signifier of Tibetanness, they are left with the only tangible reminders of home, the things they could carry from home when they were trying to escape. The Tibet Museum thus ‘crystallises’ the memory of a generation, and acts as a site of memory.

Here, [11] concept of the travelling memory is also relevant. When objects and their owners move between spaces, countries, or continents, material objects become relevant and how they connect to the material objects they carry or forsake becomes an important area of inquiry. According to Erll, migrants act as “carriers of memory”, who “share in collective images and narratives of the past” [11, p. 12]. In the case of Tibetans, the memory of home travels through the generations in the form of texts that were carried into exile by those who escaped Tibet.

Testimonials are another tool that the Museum uses to make the viewers understand the gravity of the trauma the Tibetans have had to go through. Since 2009, more than 100 Tibetans have chosen to immolate themselves as a protest against the Chinese repression inside and outside Tibet² and the Chinese government has declared self-immolation a crime, making those who commit this act “criminals” [47]. An installation called “Burning Fur” covers self-immolations and features a harrowing video alongside a box filled with the last statements made by 153 protesters since 2009 [43]. In her article on self-immolations in Tibet, Tibetan scholar Dawa [26] looks at self-immolations as “a dialogic medium of communication” like Makley (2012), which “produce counter-narratives of Tibet that challenge China’s historical narrative on the region”. The photographs of self-immolation that get circulated later inside and outside Tibet create what [42] refers to as a ‘memory freeze-frame’. The section can be looked at as a commemoration that helps “refer and construct a commonly shared past, and thus create communities of remembering” [22, p. 298]. There is a video testimony where the Tibetans who have escaped into exile explain the reasons why they chose to leave their homeland. Here, memory is being used as a museum exhibit. The musealisation of such video testimonies which undertake the task of “freezing the memories and bodies of living individuals in time and space” is used to “testify to a certain narrative of the past—to a certain history” [20, p. 28]. The testimonies used in the Museum are examples of how, as de Jong proceeds to explain, “musealisation is ultimately the process during which a thing becomes a carrier of cultural memory” (20, p. 15). Such new forms of memorialisation and representation of Tibetan suffering have the potential to “transform how this event is curated, narrated, interpreted, and observed”, as [28] observed in the context of the Atomic Bomb Museum in Nagasaki (p. 125).

Along with the permanent exhibition, many temporary exhibitions are also being held by the Tibet Museum regularly, creating a platform for Tibetans and non-Tibetans to showcase their work related to Tibet. Documentary screenings and Tibet awareness talks are held where experts and researchers are invited to speak on particular topics on a bi-monthly basis. In its focus on lending a voice to the hitherto muzzled voices of Tibetans and its reliance on memory to create a narrative, the Tibet Museum becomes a ‘Post-Museum’. [19] suggested that traditional museums are successively transforming into what she referred to as post-museums. They shed light on “previously forgotten narratives”, with an “increased interest in intangible heritage, for example, memories and songs” and are increasingly ‘multivocal’ with “other kinds of events including those in which the communities are invited to take part” [6, p. 16]. It is important to note that the key tool that the Museum relies on is memory.

The exhibition is also a project of what [17] refers to as ‘post-memory’. Hirsch described post-memory as the “relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right” [17, p. 103]. The exhibition makes “visible and palpable” the suffering of the Tibetans “whose presence it asserts and whose memory it recalls [18, p. 388]. Today, the Tibetan diaspora faces the challenge of maintaining their cultural identity, and history, and struggle for autonomy in the face of dispersal and potential assimilation. Spread across various self-governed settlements across India, three generations of Tibetans in exile continue to negotiate the spaces of statelessness, identity-making, and loss. The second and third generations are mostly born and raised outside Tibet and have only heard about Tibet through stories [45], and then there is a 1.5 generation, “those born in Tibet but left it as children” [36]. Intergenerational memory is at work here.

During the Cultural Revolution, many artefacts and valuables were destroyed by the Chinese forces [48]. Extensive looting happened during the 1904 Younghusband Mission to Tibet too [30, p. 123]. The Museums in the West have the majority of the artefacts and are repositories of Tibetan material culture [14], p. 162). The objects currently housed in the Tibet Museum are primarily the small and intimate items that the refugees brought with them during their escape. They were officially donated to the Dalai Lama himself [14, p. 163]. Other than these objects and the images, photographs, and audio that are shared, the Museum is largely devoid of any other material displays. It is the text and images that carry much of the “burden of representation” [14, p. 167]. Many of them were also forced to sell the possessions that they brought with them during their escape to support themselves financially as the situation in the refugee camps of South Asia during their early days was not very stable In her latest study on curating absence in Tibet Museum, the curator [27] points out another reason for this absence: since its beginning in 1998, the Tibet Museum did not give adequate importance to collecting material objects in its collection policy. The New Tibet Museum, however, tries to make the visitor feel/experience this absence. Consider, for instance, the empty plinths near Nyima Lhamo’s testimony. According to the Museum curator, the plinths “give presence to those Tibetans that did not reach exile, whilst also acknowledging the materiality connected to the exile experience that was discarded in moments of leaving, hiding, waiting and arriving” (2024, p. 263). Bearing witness to such an absence becomes “a powerful tool for narrating the long-term effects of material displacement, loss, and exile” in the museum [27, p. 247].

What makes the case of the Tibet Museum interesting is the fact that in the case of Tibet, the right to represent the nation is being claimed by two entities [41, p. 3]. On the one hand, there is the Tibetan Autonomous Region in the People’s Republic of China and then there is the virtual Tibet that has been recreated in exile. While preserving memory in exile, which and what memory is it that the Museum preserves and perpetuates? The Tibet Museum does not call itself a national museum. However, making a Museum under the current political circumstances has to be seen as “a rite of nationhood” and “an assertion of both having the moral right to represent a nation and of possessing the means to do it” [41, p. 8]. The museum made by and for Tibetans aims “to challenge the representations of Tibet and the Tibetan people that feature in museums in China, Europe, and North America” (The Tibet Museum). The Museum allows them the power to speak for themselves; the power of self-representation is important for a community in exile like that of Tibetans.

Talking about how Tibet was curated, conserved, and imagined in the past, [14] points out how museums, along with photography, were instrumental in fixing a particular way of seeing Tibet for generations. The representation of Tibet in the twentieth century has been “doubly colonial” [14, p. 5]. During the Younghusband Mission to Tibet (1903-’04), thousands of Tibetan objects were collected as trophies of war [14, p. 54]. The Chinese invasion and takeover of Tibet led to a “more sustained demolition of Tibet’s material and intangible culture” [27, p. 249]. The Museums being built by China in occupied Tibet are converting the history and culture of Tibet into a spectacle for tourist consumption. The objective of these museums is “to illustrate their redundancy and to demonstrate that Tibet is not so different from the rest of China” [14, p. 6]. Not only are the stories told by these museums different from the stories that Tibetans in exile have to share, but they are also deprived of and displaced from the material culture that can be used to tell their story.

Tibet in the Tibet Museum at Dharamshala, however, “has a past, a present and a future” (Tibet Museum). By creating a museum where the emphasis is not on the image of Tibet as whose “cultural heritage (is) expropriated and accommodated” into the Western culture but on absences that rely on memory, thus fostering a complex understanding of Tibet’s history and culture, it is an act of resistance and resilience [14, p. 54]. It is at once a resistance against the myth of the Shangri la,³ the history of “Western desire and mythmaking” [25], and the many other museums across the world where the accumulated objects from Tibet that are displayed are markers of “the extent of conquest and dominion” [14, p. 153]. The exhibition seeks to highlight “Tibet’s historical, political and international importance by showcasing Tibetan culture, recent history in exile, and the teachings and legacy of His Holiness the Dalai Lama”, reads the website. The first panel reads: “We do not claim to be neutral. Our museum deliberately challenges China’s version of Tibet’s past and its distorted version of the present”. The display board at the entrance with the statement “I am a Tibetan, and this is my story” (Fig. 20.1) serves as an introduction, inviting visitors to engage with the personal narratives and perspectives of the Tibetan people. Tibetans—young and old, men and women—from different parts of the world are shown saying, “I am a Tibetan and This is My Story” in different languages, including English, Tibetan, and Hindi. The entrance of the Museum building also has many portraits of Tibetans looking at the viewer, and asserting their identity and the fact that this is ‘my story’. A sense of nationhood in exile is being created in the Museum, which can be seen in some other curatorial choices as well.

Fig. 20.1

Traditional Tibetan clothing exhibit on display at Tibet Museum (2023) (self- recorded)

A portrait of the Potala Palace has been displayed. The erstwhile residence of the Dalai Lama in unoccupied Tibet and the “institutional heart of Tibetan Buddhism” has been converted by the Chinese authorities into a “hollow edifice” and its contents removed to create a museum [14, p. 250]. According to [14], the monumentalisation of the Palace was carried out to ensure that the original history of the monument is relegated to the realm of what [9] referred to as ‘organised forgetting’ (p. 14). However, for those in exile, the image of the Potala Palace elicits positive memories of their homeland, and the use of the image in the Museum can be seen as a protest against the attempt to alter their collective memory of their common past.

The Museum uses a host of digital tools as representation strategies to narrate the Tibetan story. There are Tsampa (dried flour mixed with butter tea, a staple drink of Tibetans)—making videos, videos that show the major rivers and mountains of Tibet, photographs, songs, videos explaining Tibet’s army, and footage of the Dalai Lama’s tailor explaining the story of designing his clothes, among many others. The signifiers or emblems of nationness are on display, thus forging nationhood in exile. There is a section dedicated to the development of the Tibetan language, the various dialects, and how it is being preserved in exile. As [3] pointed out, unlike other “emblems of nation-ness” like costumes or folk dances, languages can “generate imagined communities”; they have the power to build “particular solidarities” (p. 133). Here, the Museum tries to counter the memory-making processes at work by China by memorialising and forming particular meanings and understandings of the past by musealising it, in the same manner, employed by the Chinese authorities, “in order to register future interpretations” [4, p. 61]. In this project, the importance of the figure of the Dalai Lama for the sustaining idea of Tibet as a nation is significant. As far as the Tibetans in exile are concerned, the Dalai Lama is the embodiment of the nation itself [40].

The distinct dressing styles of the three parts of Tibet—Kham, Amdo, and U-Tsang, the three divisions of unoccupied Tibet—are shown with life-sized statues wearing Tibetan traditional dresses, and panels explaining the details have been showcased. Displayed also are various utensils used to grind tsampa. The section also has the popular Tibetan song Shapaley (2012), and videos of His Holiness the Dalai Lama talking about the importance of tsampa. “I am a Tsampa eater from Tibet”, the song goes, in a reassertion of Tibetan identity and self. Tsampa and dressing styles are mnemonic devices that carry significant meaning and memory as far as the Tibetans outside the homeland are concerned. The everydayness of these objects makes them authentic, open up for intimate encounters, and generate vulnerability [37, p. 231]. Building on the memories invoked and recreated by these objects, the Tibet Museum can be seen trying to construct a nation-state narrative. Such educational videos enable awareness and collective understanding of Tibetan culture and lifestyle. The texts, maps, videos, and photographs make the Tibet Museum a ‘living museum’ that presents the visitors with multiple manifestations of memory of the Tibet that was and the Tibet that they are trying to recreate in exile.

The map, the emphasis on Bon religion, tsampa, and the dressing styles of the three different regions of Tibet reflect the diaspora representations of the Tibetan polity and the inclusion of Kham and Amdo as part of Tibet construe Tibet as the entity referred to as Cholka-sum.⁴ [16, p. 22]. This delineation of their original homeland is an assertion of their identity as “thinking about the Tibet they have been forced to abandon unifies Tibetan exiles in the face of challenges to their ethnic and political identity” and serve as icons of a “neo-nationhood” [13, p. 42]. They choose to remember and depict Tibet as it was taken over by the Chinese. Here, a sense of nationhood is being created by crafting what has been referred to as a Museum of ‘Absence’ [27]. Set against the historical background of displacement and protracted exile, preserving the collective memory of their nation outside the boundaries of their homeland is significant for the Tibetans and the Tibet Museum thus provides an imagined continuity to an imagined community.

This delineation of the historic Tibetan homeland continues as the Museum provides a “timeline that gives an overview” of Tibet’s “rich and complex history” and displays documents and objects that attest to the country’s “history of independence” (The Tibet Museum). It tries to highlight the narrative that Tibet has always been an independent country, contrary to the Chinese claims that Tibet was always a part of the Chinese mainland. The exhibits include the uniform of a member of what was then the Tibetan army of independent Tibet, the national flag, stamps, documents, and correspondences, coins to show the numismatic history, and a detailed timeline of Tibetan history right from the “Prehistoric and legendary period in Tibet” to 1959 post the establishment of the Tibetan government in exile by the Dalai Lama and a nation outside the geographical boundaries of the nation, Tibetans in the diaspora try to “create a Brand Tibet replete with ambassadors (primarily the Dalai Lama)” [49, p. 63]. He “embodies and defines” Tibet, Tibetans, and Tibetan culture for a significant section of the world population [39, p. 234]. The exhibition has focused on the “many sides to the 14th Dalai Lama”. Some sections show the Dalai Lama as a “Leader of a nation and people”, “a simple Buddhist monk”, “a scientist and a philosopher” and “just another human being”. There are photographs of the Dalai Lama with world leaders, of him receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, audio of his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, and panels that explain his role in being “the leader of over six million Tibetans inside and outside Tibet”. The section “Selfie with the Dalai Lama” features the photographs sent to the Tibet Museum by supporters—Tibetan and non-Tibetan—of photos of themselves with a photograph of the Dalai Lama as a symbol of protest against the Chinese government’s policy of banning his pictures inside Tibet. All these try to project the Dalai Lama as a human being over the prevalent depictions of him as a monk and a religious figure.

The exhibition draws heavily on Lhakar. Lhakar, which translates to ‘White Wednesday’, is a non-violent, non-cooperation movement of civil resistance in Tibet (Lhakar Diaries 2013); white connotes virtue, and Wednesday is the soul-day of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso [29]. Though the movement began in the form of collective boycotts during the 2008–2009 demonstrations that took place in Tibet, it gradually transformed into what includes voluntaristic acts of resistance and “cultural empowerment in the form of personal pledges that relate to upholding Tibetan culture and Buddhist values” [12, p. 295]. In 2010 came a Tibetan language blog post introducing a Lhakar Pledge urging Tibetans to eat vegetarian food, speak the Tibetan language, and wear Tibetan clothes on Wednesdays. Chinese censors later shut down this blog [24].

The Museum hosts digital interactive spaces, including an oral history kiosk, quiet spaces to reflect and consider the museum experience, a library, a testimony area, and a family educational area. By helping the visitors acquire memories of “a past event through which he or she did not live”, Tibet Museum elevates to become a site of what Alison Landsberg (2004) conceptualised as “prosthetic memory”. Prosthetic memories are “not the possession of a single individual, let alone a particular family or ethnic group”, but they open up the possibility for collective horizons of experience and pave the way for unexpected political alliances [23, p. 145].

It is also important to note that Tibet Museum has launched an audio guide and interactive website enabling visitors to access the Museum online, thus “distributing its contents outwards in all directions”, and transforming itself into a “distributive institution” [15, p. 126]. This helps the Tibetan diaspora spread across the world partake in the process of creating an ‘imagined’ nationhood and collective identity formation, retrieving memories and the objects that create what Paul [5] calls ‘object diasporas’ (p. 28). These objects become diasporic objects because they exist in a state of exile, scattered from its place of origin which gain meaning within the larger repertoire of cultural memory.

Natalia Bloch [7] talks about the concept of ‘everyday patriotism’ practised by Tibetans in exile on an everyday basis to “confirm their collective belonging” (p.14). Bloch points out how the commemorations and important celebrations held by the exiled Tibetans, wearing Tibetan clothes, an act as simple as wearing a T-shirt that reads ‘Proud to be Tibetan’ are considered as a form of “everyday patriotism” (2023, p. 15). Another act that Bloch mentions and that is relevant for this chapter is that of “telling non-Tibetans—fellow students, co-workers, customers, and all others encountered anywhere—about Tibet (p. 15). The Tibet Museum becomes a space for the Tibetans in exile to talk about their country and the rich heritage that they have, thus becoming a space for them to practise their ‘everyday patriotism’. Documentaries and movies are screened and Tibet Awareness talks are regularly conducted on the Museum's premises. It thus becomes a site of commemoration where Tibetans act out resistance; to remember is to resist; they remember because they survived. It also becomes an archive characterised by and founded upon the memories of Tibetans outside Tibet.

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Yangzom, Kalsang. 2020. Are We There Yet?: The Politics of Tibetan Self-Fashioning and Representation in Tenzin Tsundue’s Poetry. In Resistant Hybridities: New narratives of Exile Tibet, ed. Shelly Bhoil, 61–80. London: Lexington Books.

Footnotes

1

A long gown, typically worn by the Tibetans.

2

For more details on Tibetan self-immolations see: https://​www.​savetibet.​org/​resources/​fact-sheets/​self-immolations-by-tibetans/​.

3

James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon (1933) mentioned the mythical kingdom of Shangri-la which later became synonymous with Tibet.

4

According to the CTA, the whole of Tibet is known as Cholka-Sum (U-Tsang, Kham and Amdo). It includes the present-day Chinese administrative areas of the so-called Tibet Autonomous Region, Qinghai Province, two Tibetan Autonomous Prefectures and one Tibetan Autonomous County in Sichuan Province, one Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture and one Tibetan Autonomous County in Gansu Province and one Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Yunnan Province. Read more here: https://​tibet.​net/​about-tibet/​tibet-at-a-glance/​.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2025

S. Malhotra et al. (eds.)Trauma and Memory Studies: Responses from India and Beyondhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-6374-3_21

21. Unveiling Cancer, Trauma, and Recovery: A Study of Manisha Koirala and Lisa Ray’s Autobiographies

Anwesha Adhikary1  

(1)

Banaras Hindus University, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India

Anwesha Adhikary

Email: anweresearch99@gmail.com

Abstract

Cancer tends to be associated with an unwanted image of a wasted body and a withered self, rupturing bodily integrity and rendering the individual abject and traumatised. It also compels the body to traverse numerous stages of corporal alterations—from symptoms to treatment to post-treatment, disrupting the natural order of identity formation, which directly stems from the anxiety arising out of the psychological conception of body image due to the resultant bodily mutations. This leads to a persistent attempt to distance and oppose oneself from the present diseased “I,” as Julia Kristeva suggests in her book Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (Kristeva in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Columbia University Press, New York, 1982), considering the uncontrollable “leakiness” of the self caused by cancer. This chapter examines two autobiographies that represent a spectrum of cancer types, treatment modalities, and stages, thereby providing a nuanced lens to explore how cancer narratives transcend the boundaries of body and body image, particularly where the abject becomes the locus of the body’s reception. Through meditative narrations of disempowered and dependent ‘medicalized’ bodies, Lisa Ray and Manisha Koirala, in their respective autobiographies Close to the Bone (Ray in Close to the Bone. HarperCollins India, Gurugram, 2019) and Healed: How Cancer Gave Me a New Life (Koirala in Healed: How Cancer Gave Me a New Life. Penguin Random House India, 2018, Gurugram), reflect on their aversion to entering “cancerland”. This negation is juxtaposed with their gradual acceptance of their cancer-altered bodies. Using trauma theory, and drawing on Judith Herman’s stages of trauma recovery, as adapted by Anne Hawkins for pathography analysis, this chapter analyses how these autobiographies depict the psychological and physical challenges of reconstructing identity after cancer. By focusing on the abject cancer body, these narratives reveal the broader implications of illness on self-perception, offering insights into the personal and relational trauma tied to cancer and recovery.

Introduction

Cancer is frequently understood as a disease that occurs in one part of the body but goes “beyond their usual boundaries to invade adjoining parts of the body and/or spread to other organs” [28] and, hence, its “outreach is the whole body” [24, p. 11]. Cancer also forces the body to traverse numerous stages of corporal alterations, from symptoms to treatment to post-treatment, and the changes have an immense impact on the physicality of the body. The devastating and damaging effect of cancer further exacerbates and varies depending on the type of cancer diagnosed. The uncertainties of treatment regimens, the possibility of cancer relapse, and the threat of an early death lead to disruption of normal life, shattering the illusions of control and continuation of one’s former self. These experiences thus remain “unassimilated fragments that refuse to become past, haunting the present” [8, p. 60]. The idea of whole and complete personhood also stands challenged during such sudden, traumatic revelation. In addition to the havoc it births, cancer is also a harbinger of relational trauma¹ where the family members of the sufferer equally experience “a kind and degree of stimulation that is far more than it can make sense of or manage” [9, p. 10]. Thus, to “repair the damage that illness has done” [8, p. 53], bodies bogged down by cancer often require storytelling. It is often through narrativizing one’s trauma, that one tries to put into language one’s senses about oneself and seek out the available clarity [5, p. 70], thereby leading to trauma recovery.

This chapter explores two Indian cancer autobiographies written by actresses from the Bollywood fraternity, which make these narratives unique in their own sense. Published almost over a span of a single year, both the cancer narratives, namely Manisha Koirala’s Healed: How Cancer Gave Me a New Life [13] and Lisa Ray’s Close to the Bone [22], undertake a meditative realisation of acceptance of their newly formed selves while opening up a vista of disturbing experiences from horror, pain, anxiety, loneliness, and trauma to an often difficult journey of healing. In the course of this chapter, the analysis of these autobiographies will reflect upon the psychological and physical trauma of these individuals as well as their family members. Furthermore, I will examine how these authors negotiate with their trauma and create meaning out of one’s disrupted existence. Decoding along the line of Trauma Studies in understanding the physical and psychological trauma faced by a cancer-inflicted body, the chapter would rely upon the theoretical concepts of Cathy Caruth and Caroline Garland in contextualising trauma with reference to illness infested with death. Additionally, as a significant portion of the chapter will explore the genre of autobiography concerning narrativizing trauma, the theoretical postulations by Arthur W. Frank and Rita Charon will be the fundamental thrust for building the arguments on the reconstruction of self through writing. Further, while engaging with the textual analysis of these autobiographies, the focal point of discussion will be the stages of trauma recovery—“safety”, “remembrance and mourning”, and “reconnection”—originally outlined by Judith Herman in her seminal work Trauma and Recovery (1992) (Herman, Judith Lewis. 1992. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books.). However, this chapter draws on Anne Hunsaker Hawkins’ interpretation of Herman’s model, particularly as articulated in Unfitting Stories (2007), where she applies the framework to illness narratives. Hawkins’ reading becomes instrumental in understanding the survivor’s urge to narrate a story that speaks of reaffirmation and hope for a rebooted life.

Trauma and Shattered Voices of Cancer Reality

As noted by Cathy Caruth in her book Unclaimed Experience [3], the Greek word trauma meaning “wound”, which originally just focused on the bodily injury, metamorphosed into the understanding of trauma as Frank suggested, “a wound inflicted not upon the body but upon the mind” (as cited in [3, p. 3]). A cancer diagnosis, though not a literal wound, is considered a potentially traumatic event as it comes armed with the element of temporality—it remains hidden over time, expands, and increases physical and psychological pain, sometimes even eroding the host body. The physical and psychological traumas are further augmented by the fact that it negates a generic kind of illness experience owing to the difference in cancer types, unrecognisable symptoms, stage in which the sufferer gets diagnosed, follow up painful treatment routines, the possibility of a relapse, and the often prolonged period of pain that is incomprehensible—debunking the notion of a smooth life, sometimes even after recovery. Again, it is an observable fact that writers of cancer narratives, while recounting their overwhelming experiences of pain, mutilation, and loss of social and occupational roles, often juxtapose their narratives with an innate desire for physical and emotional recovery. Thus, to make sense of the traumatised self infused heavily.

with a sense of anxiety, loneliness, absurdness, and meaninglessness, one often tends to perform a “pathographical act”² where one “constructs meaning by subjecting raw experience to the powerful impulse to make sense of it all, to bind together the events, feelings, thoughts, and sensations that occur during an illness into an integrated whole” [11, p. 18]. In seeking closure, as they do in reality, these authors often linearly structure their narrative, following the medical course of actions as their plot progresses. Hall-Clifford in her essay notes that the structure of illness autobiographies often follows from the writer's ignorance about the illness, to diagnosis, to treatment and lastly, to resolution or “establishment of new norms and expectations for life” [10, p. 365]. Thus, there is a constant attempt on the part of the writer to heal or recover though they went through a significant amount of trauma. In their autobiographies, Manisha Koirala and Lisa Ray reflect on their initial aversion to entering “cancerland” but ultimately turn their narratives into stories of discovery and finally accept their newly produced selves. Although there are many illness narratives worthy of analysis, I chose these two autobiographies because the authors narrate their traumatic experiences from the perspective of being a celebrity, the lives of whom are always under the scrutiny of the public eye. Often forced to meet the overarching expectations of the audience and maintain a facade of perfection, they tend to distance their altered bodies from the public sphere. This distancing is quite metaphorical as it also reflects their own denial of the changes their bodies were undergoing. However, in the process of finally accepting their diagnosis, their narratives transcend conventional boundaries by shedding the stigma associated with cancer and emphasise the importance of recovery in terms of personal relationships.

Manisha Koirala, who happens to be a well-known film personality from Nepal, documents her cancer journey in Healed: How Cancer Gave Me a New Life [13]. Her autobiography reflects the disruption in her life at the early age of forty-two, beginning with her cancer diagnosis, subsequent surgery in 2012 to her recovery post-surgery and chemotherapy, the biggest comeback being her return to acting in 2017. Koirala initially mistook her symptoms for obesity or some digestive issues but was later diagnosed with advanced-stage ovarian cancer (later revealed to be stage IV). As soon as her diagnosis was confirmed she decided to temporarily relocate herself from India to New York for better prospects of recovery as she was at loggerhead with the treatment regimen prescribed in Mumbai. Her narrative from herein weaves a moving and personal story of fear, agony and struggle as her “cosmetic body” [19, p. 87] was grappled with bouts of isolation, and “fear of being abandoned by life itself” [13, p. xii] during her cancer treatments. She also equally focused on documenting the strong bond she shared with her family members and the support she got from them during her recovery. Determined to be a newer version of herself, she accepted spirituality as the neo-normal after cancer remission and took to the role of a true storyteller for her readers. Cancer, thus not only transformed Manisha as an individual but also her whole perception towards life. Almost on a similar note, Lisa Ray’s Close to the Bone [22] is a story of rejuvenation, a narrative that reflects not only her traumatic past of losing her mother and of her cancer encounter but also sprinkles her narrative with humour and strength for her readers. But unlike Manisha, whose celebrity self-figured in limited places only, focusing more on cancer as both the protagonist and antagonist, Ray outshined in her narrative as an actor and a supermodel, rather than a cancer victim. As a person always on wheels exploring the whole world and tasting enormous success in the film landscape, cancer knocked at an unexpected juncture in Ray’s life when she was only thirty-seven. Being diagnosed with multiple myeloma,³ her very existence zeroed down to some numbers decided by her doctor as her cancer was almost incurable. But that didn't deter her, as, like Manisha, she also got utmost support from her father and her then-partner. She resorted to journaling and meditation as a way of healing and easing the pain of being subjected to harsh doses of chemotherapy and stem cell insertion. Therefore, by embodying the role of a resilient patient and intertwining emotions, feelings, and poignant experiences, both autobiographies adeptly craft a new identity imbued with subtle traces of trauma. The frequent pauses, silences, and repetitions in their autobiographies showcase the darkness of their feelings of fear, panic, and pain and oscillate between glimmers of hope and shadows of hopelessness. The sense of an uprooted former self and loss of bodily integrity which falls out of control often stems from an unrecognisable and unbearable trauma of going through an illness journey. Ray and Koirala, carry the trophy of winning against cancer, the concretization of which thus occurred in the form of these autobiographies.

Reading Trauma and Recovery Between the Lines

Cancer autobiographies often reflect upon the author’s illness journey, transitioning from denial to acceptance and finally confronting the realities of their diagnosis. Though they find it difficult and traumatic to come to terms with such a wounded body which is thwarted by existential crisis, they eventually recover from their trauma—both in terms of physical recovery and reconstructing their lives. Recovery thus for them is a form of transformation where connecting with their post-cancer free life, demands for a changed perspective with respect to the life they had before their diagnosis. Both Koirala’s and Ray’s works incorporate aspects of writing that reflect the work of traumatised individuals. Their physical body seemed to betray them, and their minds, filled with myriad dreams and plans for the future, came to a standstill along with the desire to have kids. But a steady replacement of Koirala’s, “the old controlling me with the new surrendering me” [13, p. 92] and Ray’s realisation of cancer as “one of my greatest moments” [22, p. 311], they can be seen to have pushed their boundaries to become cancer survivors. Trauma recovery, then, becomes an important part of their unique portrayals of what defines post-traumatic growth for such patients. Judith Herman, in her book Trauma and Recovery (1992), discusses three stages of trauma recovery in the context of the victims of sexual and domestic violence. Following Anne Hunsaker Hawkins’s application and interpretation of this tripartite model on illness narratives in her chapter titled “Writing about Illness: Therapy? Or Testimony?”, the same can be applied to understand how cancer diagnosis works in the mind and memory of an individual and how they ultimately thrive for recovery:

The first stage involves the identification of the problem; the second involves the work of reconstruction, delving into and confronting whatever remains in the psyche of the traumatic experience; and the third is that of integration, whereby the traumatic memory is integrated into the mind and life of the survivor (as cited in [21, p. 120]).

As cancer is a subjective experience, the above-stated stages of trauma recovery often debunk generalisations, though they can be applied in most of the cases, as evidenced by the autobiographies of Ray and Koirala. My attempt in this section is thus to contextualise these stages of trauma recovery and align the autobiographies as testimonies of healing and to understand these narratives as a quest to integrate a new kind of hope amidst the ineffable trauma they encountered.

Identification

The onset of disruption typically precedes diagnosis and treatment, as the bodily alterations and physical weaknesses signal the need for medical evaluation. Both Manisha and Ray, who led high-profile lives marked by a sense of invincibility, busy schedules, and unhealthy lifestyles, often ignored their bodies’ warning signs. This negligence momentarily resulted in a state of disbelief after receiving their cancer diagnosis. For Koirala, her diagnosis came as a perfect cocktail of trauma, accompanied by a rapture of the self, as showcased through her initial reaction:

I remember the sheer shock of hearing that word making me laugh with disbelief. I looked the other way. As if I were throwing away a heavy quilt. As if by shrugging it away I was disowning it. It didn't belong to me. Others have got cancer. How could I have it? I was healthy, ate well, exercised well. No, no, there must be a mistake! [13, p. 10]

Faced with extreme cases of bloating and pain in her stomach, Koirala had limited her expectations to mere digestive issues. However, the biopsy report revealing both BRCA-I⁴ mutation and late-stage ovarian cancer, delivered a double shock, causing her emotional and psychological strength to crumble as she lamented, “Overnight, things had changed… I felt spent” [13, p. 12]. Thus, this aspect of unknowingness about one’s symptoms makes it more difficult for the sufferer to negotiate with the sudden alteration which often has negative effects on existence. Bodily betrayal in the form of symptoms manifested early for Ray when she experienced dizziness and frequent bouts of memory loss during her shooting for the movie Cooking with Stella (2009) [22, p. 238]. Though she remained disturbed and confused about its causation, she remained unbothered, repeating the modern world mantra, “I’m stressed. I’m overworked. I’ve got too much going on” [22, p. 283]. Hence for Ray, being finally diagnosed with multiple myeloma came to her as a “relief” as she continued, “For a long time I had known it in my blood and bones” [22, p. 287].

With finally realising and accepting that they have transgressed the boundaries of a healthy life, the utter unpredictability of the future existence dismantled their understanding of the present reality that their diseased body must face. Their experience with cancer transcended the normative, static understanding of life span. The complications surrounding Koirala’s treatment cast a monochromatic tone over her life, dominated by shades of death, as she reflects, “Who will win? The prey or the predator? I do not know. And perhaps never will” [13, p. 36]. Diagnosed with an aggressive cancer that had spread to her surrounding organs, Koirala’s survival hinged on the right choice of treatment. For Ray, the fatalness of her cancer came to her in the form of some numbers, numbers which have predetermined the course of her life, the terrifying shock of which is vividly reflected in her conversation with her doctor, “‘You have a very serious disease, and only six months to live”… Now when I look back at my journals from that course, it stuns me” [22, p. 276]. Thus, unlike other trauma narratives, illness narratives especially, cancer narratives have a significant role with numbers where the sufferer knows the extent of his/her life span and thus has to live with a looming fear of death. Also, Ray’s initial response to being heralded as a cancer patient and her shock at a later stage of realisation can be understood as Freudian latency where “there is a gap between the traumatic event and the appearance of symptoms” (as cited in [21, p. 54]). Thus the suddenness of the diagnosis may trigger intense fear, helplessness, terror, anxiety, and depression but again how and when it becomes traumatic differs from person to person as it equally depends on the prolongment of the denial phase.

A chronic illness like cancer causes experiences of “brutish suffering” [15,p. 2] in the form of disturbed identity, disorder, powerlessness, pain, torment, and stigma thus as Frank notes “during illness, people who have always been bodies have distinctive problem continuing to be bodies, particularly continuing to be the same sorts of bodies they have been” [8 p. 28]. Koirala here happens to be a classic example where disassociation with her ill, powerless, weak, and disfigured body, takes a hit and is shattered beyond reconstruction from the very early stage of symptoms as she says, “it devastated me to hear people tell me that yesteryear's slim, beautiful girl had gained weight” [13, p. 6]. For someone whose reality rests solely on body image and visibility, the gaining of body weight even after following a rigorous exercise schedule made her comment, “I was very unhappy with the shape my body was taking” [13, p. 6]. This indicates the mental crisis she faces from her sudden incoherent physicality, the body which debunks the idea of “tolerable and thinkable” [15, p. 1] thus rendering it abject for her. For Ray it was her loss of glamour, pale, grey, and sickly complexion that signalled the presence of cancer. “Panic balled up in my chest” [22, p. 224] in the form of her body consciousness when she went for an immediate iron infusion, where she sensed her imminent future in the bald patients [22, p. 224]. As Mary K. DeShazer rightly proposes in her book Mamographies [7], cancer not only disrupts domestic contentment and erases the presumption of a normal lifespan but also “forecloses professional opportunities” [7, p. 178]. This is evident in Lisa Ray’s experience, where her inability to wear her shoes on the eve of her film premiere underscores the professional challenges she faced. She gained a significant amount of weight, rendering her unable to meet the standards typically expected of an actress, enough to not fit in the standards set for an actress. This constant effort to dissociate from her present body, metaphorically by not fitting into her shoes, signals her innate desire to navigate and accept the new reality imposed by her illness.

As Herman suggested, recognising one’s problem necessitates accepting one’s present reality, Manisha’s narrative, imbued with the imagery of herself as a war commander, signals her overcoming of fear and determination to face her reality. She states, “It suddenly dawned on me that acceptance had finally seeped in… No longer will I remain a passive observer. I will now become an active participant in my treatment, I decided” [13, p. 45]. Unlike Manisha, Ray’s constant engagement in activities, from drama classes to shooting, after her diagnosis shows her initial refusal to let go of her healthy past. However, she soon realises the negative outcome of this approach:

I’m in denial. I’m treating cancer like it’s an inconvenience, managing the stage like a tyrannical Bollywood choreographer. Worst of all, I wasn’t looking it in the eye. I was letting the situation tyrannize my heart. I really needed to name it, recognize it, and deal with it head on. [22, p. 300]

It is as her narrative progresses, Ray’s attempt to blog about her trauma becomes a way for her to “process it” [22, p. 305] and finally accept it.

Reconstruction

Cancer embodiment strips away the “last vestiges of control over one’s life” [21, p. 72], shattering illusions of continuity of one's former self. This is a reality faced by both the authors who experienced cancer-induced trauma in various forms and stages. They encountered life-altering events such as prolonged periods of waiting for the results and treatments, uncertainties about prescribed treatment regimens, grappling with the pain and devastating side effects of those treatments, the pressure of publicly disclosing their diagnosis, and the possibility of cancer relapse, resulting in “a breakdown of an established way of going about one’s life” [9, p. 11] and rendering them “vulnerable to intense and overwhelming anxieties from internal sources as well as from the actual external events” (ibid., p. 11).

Cancer treatments are often mutilating, which debars a return to the previously healthy body as the intensity of the violence of treatment begins at the very outset with hospitalisation and subsequent pinning down of the body under surgical interventions. Facing the blow of injections coupled with the unending wait for test results, Koirala’s “patience was snapping” [13, p. 9]. She soon realised “From the high life of a Bollywood star, I had suddenly been reduced to a patient battling for life” [13, p. 1] when her doctor advised surgery to remove all the cancerous cells aggressively intertwined with the organs surrounding her ovary. From enduring extreme physical weakness to getting temporary relief from blood transfusions, Ray’s biopsy report reduced her identity to a mere number, “ Ray, LISA patient 5376” [22, p. 295], when she was finally registered for her treatments. The disruption caused by cancer thus permeates the body and mind, evolving into a more subjective or private trauma, often experienced in various phases of treatment, with post-surgery being particularly haunting. Post-surgical experiences often impose an image of a mutilated body, which is opposed to one’s sense of self [15, p. 1], the trauma of which is reflected when Koirala upon seeing her operated body questions, “Is this really my body?” [13, p. 80]. Her realisation of being “just a mass of flesh and blood—mutilated and broken inside out” [13, p. 81] further emphasises her distress. The severity of her trauma is highlighted when she describes her reaction to seeing her bare body after the removal of the stapled skin:

When I looked down at my bruised body, I was shocked. In the centre of my body were two gaping holes—craterlike, cavernous depressions. Horrified and traumatized, I looked at the nurse in confusion, my swollen lips unable to form the right words. [13, p. 84]

The shock of seeing her “maimed body” [13, p. 80] post-surgery rendered the experience unbearable because this asymmetrical body image haunts her. Cathy Caruth, likewise posits that trauma represents a mode of haunting, “to be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event” [2, pp. 4–5]. This site happens to be traumatising not only for Koirala herself but also for her mother, who had to find a home-care specialist to dress her wound. Thus, the stark reality of her operated body causes severe trauma, shattering the notion of her former body image. In addition to surgery, which is traumatic in terms of physical as well as the permanent scars it leaves, chemotherapy presents a nightmarish recurrence of this pain, the impact of which left Koirala to endure everything as a “professional patient” [13, p. 101] and the experience of which seemed to her as “a lamb being taken to a slaughterhouse” [13, p. 97]. The psychological trauma intensifies even more with the side effects of chemotherapy. Both the actresses did make space for reflecting upon the consequent fatigue, hair loss, and permanent infertility after their bodies went through “a rush of coldness as the chemicals hit their bloodstream” [22, p. 325]. Ray’s experience of limpness after going through chemo regimens made her regard it as “toxic” [22, p. 306]. Ray also records the changed shape of her face due to the intake of powerful steroids as she notes, “you may develop the classic ‘cushingoid’ moon face and if you are really lucky, this fascinating fat redistribution may even give you a buffalo hunchback” [22, p. 301]. Ray had to further go through a Herculean task of stem cell transplantation which she regarded as “the big reseeding” [22, p. 326], ironically though it was meant to save her life, it was full of uncertainties and constant risk of infections. For Koirala it was a little bit harsher as she had to go through a prolonged period of hospitalisation from surgery followed by four months of rigorous chemotherapy as she records, “It has been a particularly painful and exhausting chemotherapy… I feel like my brain is running on 2 percent battery” [13, p. 115]. Thus as Chakraborty rightly notes in her dissertation, “pain is the rabbit hole down which every cancer afflicted person must slide and it is common knowledge in the cancer ward that cancer may not kill you but treatment most certainly would” [4, p. 67], the traumatic narratives of Koirala and Ray stand testimonies to this fact. Where life is seen as a linear trajectory of choices building upon themselves one after another to cumulatively produce a reward, both the actresses fell into a subsequent period of doldrums rendering their accounts of cancer experiences as a vague attempt to search for meaning amidst a debilitating crisis.

Cancer often threatens meaning-making and identity formation by creating a dual version of one single individual, discarding any kind of association with the older other. The former self undergoes the process of erasure to give way to the newly formed self which regardless of anything carries the trauma of the past to retell the story of the survivorship as Ray emphasises, “Of course, I had changed; how could I not have changed?” [22, p. 348] This changed self demands an existence that would employ meaning-making as the shock and denial which stems from their traumatic cancer embodiment, capacitates a rupture in their neurotic responses. “An anxiety-producing position” [6, p. 175], as DeShazer rightly positions this self in making, needs a medium to expose themselves to the trauma and to get involved in a learning process that will enable them to overcome it. This leads to the establishment of a new identity when there is an urge to “fix what's wrong” [22, p. 352] rather than mulling over “the debris of my former life” [22, p. 348]. Similarly, the ill body of Koirala besides narrating pain and trauma, also speaks in a voice articulating strength and triumph thus serving her autobiography as a manifesto of hope and survival, not only for her but also for other people in general. It is a way of reconstructing herself in the garb of a new identity, as “true storyteller for the readers’ sake as well as my own” [13, p. ix]. Though the revisitation of her cancer journey was painful, Koirala almost agrees with Lorde when she says “life-threatening cancer and the trauma of mastectomy can be integrated into the life-force as knowledge and eventual strength” (as cited in Henke [12, pp. 113–114]. Traversing on the other side of illness, both embody a new identity threatened by uncertainty and precariousness but also capacitate managing uncertainty, which impacts the meaning that individuals create to better cope with their experiences. The work of reconstruction thus entails as Herman explains, telling the story of the trauma [21, p. 120] which involves transforming their traumatic memory of encountering a pathologized body [19, p. 87] into narratives of survivorship.

Integration

The third and final stage as suggested by Herman is “reconnection with ordinary life,” which applies most strongly to the methods of recovery—as protagonists strive to manage their lives with the trauma. Recovery entails a rigorous process of post-traumatic growth which in turn involves an element of dissociation from the older version and entails a kind of positive change followed by trauma. Manisha’s realisation of a new friend in her—“Manisha” [13, p. 205] and Ray’s powerful subscription to “Lisa 2.0” [22, p. 332] reflects what psychologist Pierre Janet in his work on hysteria early in the twentieth century had to say about dissociation theory, “the traumatic experience is cut off from other parts of the self, resulting in a dissociative state, and the process of recovery requires an integration of traumatic memories” (paraphrased in [21, p. 119]. Trauma robs one’s sense of agency over one’s own body and thus presses a dire need for re-integration of the lost self which in turn can be performed via writing autobiographies. Autobiography is an enabling process of self-recovery, as it also allows the victim to confront their traumatic event, which often registers in the psyche of the traumatised individual belatedly, long after the occurrence of the event. Manisha devoted the second half of her book to integrating positivity and valuing the need for connection with her close ones. Though the sediments of cancer will remain forever in her psyche, her vouch for cancer to give her a new life of discipline and values, which would not have been possible otherwise is commendable. Back to the world of acting as well as handling numerous responsibilities: as a motivational speaker and as a United Population Fund (UNFPA) goodwill ambassador, Koirala seemed to have been humbled yet resolute by cancer and strives to have an uncompromising new life gifted to her, as she says:

My needs are different now. The new me will not settle for mere existence. I will reach out for adventures that warm the soul. I will reach out for what makes my cell dance with joy. I need to keep growing. I have finally embraced life and I think it has embraced me back. [13, p. 209]

Similarly, Ray’s feeling of improved health made her pour in positive affirmations for her:

I was now living with first-hand experience of cancer. I could not consent to go back to my old ways. Cancer had thrown me through a window into the central courtyard of crisis and because of that impact, new windows had opened. It wasn’t long before an old feeling sprang up: ripples of restlessness. [22, p. 332]

Ray also embarked on a new journey with Jason Dehni, her current partner after successive failed attempts to have relationships. Though she had a high chance of cancer relapse, that did not deter her from leading a life with renewed hope. Ray did not lose any opportunity to sign in for the movie roles offered to her as she said, “…now that I was healing, I was ready to focus on other things” [22, p. 334]. Cancer for Ray became “the gift of gratitude” [22, p. 346] as it made her appreciate every living moment because life never exhibits a static state of being. She is married to the fact there might be a relapse (which she, unfortunately, had after three long years) but at the same time realised that one needs to continue with one’s life and make efforts to face the challenges and move on, if not always winning but negotiating with its effects and repercussions. Thus cancer became a passing reference in their life as they moved on to have a life of discipline, religious calling, and rebuilt relationships. Faced with extreme death-like situations, both the writers took to writing out their story as it would serve both ways: trauma venting for them and a manifesto of hope for the readers. Cancer autobiographies thus not only assume an important role by providing “a space of meaning-making about a traumatic experience” (as cited in [16, p. 3] but also become an important mode of connection between the narrativization of illness experience “which one has to discharge” [5, p. 53] and the urge to “join one human with another” (idbi., p. 52). A person’s changed perspective on life and the body post the traumatic event manifests itself in autobiographical narrations.

Relational Trauma

The experience of cancer profoundly disrupts a sufferer’s life, compromising both physical and emotional integrity, threatening mortality, scarring the body, and altering personal and social identity. Along with mapping the patient’s illness experience, cancer narratives also highlight the critical phase of dependency on family members and loved ones. These narratives encompass the fear of the future and the anxiety of living with an unpredictable condition which is equally faced by the family members, as Manisha writes, “I could feel my mom sitting beside me and grieving silently. I felt bad for her. It was not in divine order that a child should die before her mother” [13, p. 19]. Cancer thus disrupts the expectation of a normal life span, making it crucial to explore how cancer trauma extends beyond the individual to affect the psyche of family members as well. Borrowing the term “Relational Trauma” from Sheinberg and Fraenkel’s book The Relational Trauma of Incest: A Family-based Approach to Treatment [23], Peggy Penn in his paper tries to establish the impact of chronic illness on members of a wider system (here family members and close acquaintances) who also show signs of physical stress, isolation, and helplessness as it renders the “future wounded” [20, p. 37]. The immediate outcome of this wounded future castrates everyone from the symbolic stage where language suffers a state of collapse and silence becomes a way of coping with the trauma as Koirala anticipates “silence” which “lay between us like an impenetrable bridge” [13, p. 10], after her parents became “numb with shock” [13, p. 10], upon learning the severity of her cancer. The impact of this silence further shows her difficulty to come to terms with her cancer diagnosis as she recalls “it was the longest and loneliest night I have ever spent” [13, p. 11]. Again, the way of coping with the trauma differs from person to person as Manisha vividly describes her mother venting her psychological pain through “crying on the phone, asking for blessings and prayers” [13, p. 53] while on the other hand, her father, displaces his feelings by storing it somewhere else [20, p. 37]. He channels his excruciating pain by “reading the same book again and again — often as many as seven to eight times” [13, p. 53] as books offered him an outlet to manage the crisis at hand, a method that Koirala admires as the “most dignified way possible” [13, p. 53]. In contrast to Manisha, for Ray, there was a reversal in the flow of the information as her father became the receptor of the news from his daughter. Ray’s struggle to find the right words to disclose her diagnosis of a rare blood cancer underscores the association of cancer with death, making it traumatic for her family members in the initial stage. But unlike Manisha’s mother, Ray’s father did not wail over her diagnosis. Instead, he attempted to displace his shock by being rational and strong, focusing on “grasping the complexities of this disease” [22, p. 288]. Ray’s father metamorphosed into a new self along with Ray where he “seamlessly stepped into the role of caretaker” [22, p. 296], providing silent strength to his daughter and turning to meditation to cope with the unforeseen crisis. Thus, as Penn rightly observes, “experience of the illness produces incrementally traumatising experiences, not only for the person with the illness, but also for other members of the family” [20, p. 34].

Conclusion

Autobiographies dealing with cancer present personal accounts of wasted bodies that disrupt bodily integrity through prolonged periods of suffering and pain, resulting in long-term psychological effects. Trauma in illness narratives resurface with corporeal disruption which generally signals the breakdown of an established way of going about one’s life. As the follow-up treatment of an acute and chronic illness like cancer involves a prolonged period of pain and hospitalisation, it also leads to a disorientation of neurotic responses and thus renders it traumatic. Thus this rift between the pre-diagnosis and post-diagnosis worlds forces the sick individual to recreate an order and meaning in the current chaotic physical state, often leading to psychological trauma. Thus like every cancer memoir, Manisha Koirala's Healed: How Cancer Gave Me a New Life [13] and Lisa Ray's Close to the Bone [22], also document the triple onslaught of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation to annihilate cancer cells and share their fearful predicament of the insurmountable pain. But it is in their attempt to narrate their trauma that they try to make sense of their disoriented past and attempt to manage the consequences of their illness rather than ridding themselves of its consequences. Thus their struggle to cope and reconstruct a new version of themselves after entering into the cancerland makes their narratives inspiring.

References

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Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Chakraborty, Mandira. 2019. A Study of Selected Illness Narratives. PhD diss., 1–84. Jadavpur University.

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DeShazer, Mary K. 2013. Mammographies: The Cultural Discourses of Breast Cancer Narratives. Michigan: University of Michigan Press.

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Frank, Arthur, and W. 1995. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. Illinois: University of Chicago Press.

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Garland, Caroline. 2002. Understanding Trauma: A Psychological Approach, 3rd ed. London: Karnac Books Ltd.

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Hall-Clifford, Rachel. 2015. Autopathographies: How ‘Sick Lit’. Shapes Knowledge of the Illness Experience. Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford Online 7: 355–369.

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Hawkins, Anne Hunsaker. 1999. Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathography, 2nd ed. Indiana: Purdue University Press.

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Henke, Suzette, and A. 1998. Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life-Writing. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

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Koirala, Manisha. 2018. Healed: How Cancer Gave Me a New Life. Gurugram: Penguin Random House India.

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Krantz, Landon. 2009. The Story of Illness: A Study of the Narrative Writings of the Ill. Bachelor’s thesis. University of Michigan.

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Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Rondeiz. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Martino, Maria. Luisa., Daniela Lemmo, Anna Gargiulo, Daniela Barberio, Valentina Abate, Franca Avino, and Raffaele Tortoriello. 2018. Underfifty Women and Breast Cancer: Narrative Markers of Meaning-Making in Traumatic Experience. Frontiers in Psychology 10 (618): 1–12. https://​doi.​org/​10.​3389/​fpsyg.​2018.​00618.Crossref

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National Breast Cancer Foundation. 2024. BRCA: The Breast Cancer Gene. National Breast Cancer Foundation. https://​www.​nationalbreastca​ncer.​org/​what-is-brca/​. Accessed 7 September 2024.

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National Cancer Institute. Multiple Myeloma. National Institutes of Health. https://​www.​cancer.​gov/​publications/​dictionaries/​cancer-terms/​def/​multiple-myeloma. Accessed 7 September 2024.

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Nayar, Pramod K. 2020. Bollywood Stars and Cancer Memoirs: The Year in India. Biography 43: 86–93.

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Penn, Peggy. 2001. Chronic Illness: Trauma, Language, and Writing: Breaking the Silence. Family Process 40: 33–52.

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Raoul, Valerie, Connie Canam, Angela D. Henderson, and Carla Paterson, eds. 2007. Unfitting Stories: Narrative Approaches to Disease, Disability, and Trauma. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

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Ray, Lisa. 2019. Close to the Bone. Gurugram: HarperCollins.

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Sheinberg, Marcia, and Fraenkel Peter. 2000. The Relational Trauma of Incest: A Family-Based Approach to Treatment. New York: Guilford Press. © Springer Nature.

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Sontag, Susan. 1978. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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Srivastava, Sakshi. 2022. Landscape of Altered Being: Autopathography and Embodiment in When Breath Becomes Air. Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry 8: 36–46.

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Tidwell, Heather Nicole. 2015. Making Meaning of the Illness Experience: Narratives of Partners of Cancer Survivors. Master’s thesis. University of Tennessee.

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Waskul, Dennis D., and Pamela van der Riet. 2002. The Abject Embodiment of Cancer Patients: Dignity, Selfhood, and the Grotesque Body. Symbolic Interaction 25: 487–513.

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Footnotes

1

[20] uses this term to include caregivers and family members of chronically ill individuals who also experience stress and, in some cases, exhibit trauma symptoms themselves.

2

[11] defines pathography as a significant literary form for understanding the personal impact of illness and highlights the need for autobiographical writings for individuals to find a sense of direction in their experiences of sickness.

3

According to the National Cancer Institute, multiple myeloma cells are abnormal plasma cells (a type of white blood cell) that accumulate in the bone marrow and form tumours in various bones throughout the body. Normal plasma cells produce antibodies that help the body fight infection and disease. As the number of multiple myeloma cells increases, more antibodies are produced, which can cause the blood to thicken and prevent the bone marrow from making enough healthy blood cells. Multiple myeloma cells also weaken and damage bones, and can lead to spinal compression, bleeding, anaemia, and kidney failure.

4

According to the National Breast Cancer Foundation, the "BReast CAncer gene" (BRCA), which mainly consists of two types of genes—BRCA1 and BRCA2—help repair DNA breaks that can lead to cancer and uncontrolled tumour growth. However, a BRCA mutation may impair the gene’s ability to repair damaged DNA, increasing the risk of developing breast cancer at a younger age.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2025

S. Malhotra et al. (eds.)Trauma and Memory Studies: Responses from India and Beyondhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-6374-3_22

22. Understanding Intersections of Caste, Gender and Migration in Uttarakhand Through Cinematic Representations of Trauma and Memory in Dev Bhoomi

Natasha Negi1  

(1)

Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India

Natasha Negi

Email: natashanegi7@gmail.com

Abstract

This chapter aims to understand the social contestations in Uttarakhand, India, through a critical study of the film text Dev Bhoomi (2016) by noted Serbian director Goran Paskaljevic. In the narrative, I aim to analyse the nexus of caste, gender, and environmental factors which influence the intersections of personal and collective memories in Uttarakhand. The film brings together the facets of coerced migration, loss of home, suffering and nostalgia through personal and collective memories of the people in the region. In Dev Bhoomi, the protagonist Rahul returns after a forced exile of 40 years from England to his native place, Garhwal, Uttarakhand. He was forced to leave the homeland because of his inter-caste relationship with a Dalit Vaadi woman. The protagonist’s personal memory and trauma become a lens to observe the collective suffering of the village. Rahul’s traumatic past is unravelled in the film through the shared suffering of other characters who continue to bear the brunt of extant social practices of caste and gender discrimination. Social customs like child marriage and endogamy haunt the collective consciousness of the natives and such repercussions affect them lifelong through traumatic memories. The narrative depicts the impact of the traumas through tropes of madness and suicide as outcast people like Rahul are uprooted from their community, homes, and origins. Along with the social contestations, the environmental disasters like the 2013 Kedarnath flood in Uttarakhand also affect the natives’ lives. The intersection of personal and collective memories is again depicted by drawing Rahul’s loss of home parallel to a young boy Munna’s nostalgia and longing for his parents and home which he lost in the flash flood. The chapter explores the theories by Cathy Caruth, Maurice Halbwachs and Kai Erikson to understand the concepts ‘trauma’, ‘collective memory’ and ‘traumatised communities’.

Introduction

What does that fire remember? The screams of satis

Dragged to their husband’s pyres and brides burnt alive;

The wails of caste-crossed lovers put to death,

The tongue-chopped shrieking of raped women.

This has happened before, this will happen again. (Kandasamy).¹

In the social and cultural setup in India, the concept of caste operates via two governing powers based on control over genealogy and meritocracy. Based on birth or genealogy, the caste system is formed by demarcating rules that differentiate between people through the concepts of purity and pollution of one’s birth. The differentiation imposed on bodies based on their castes thus gives rise to cultural differences as well. By differentiating on the basis of a person’s birth and body, the caste system perpetuates violence such as untouchability, disrespect and dehumanisation. It also practises other means of violence like social exclusion and ostracism perpetuated through endogamy, exclusion in festival celebrations and marginalisation by segregating their residential spaces to the peripheries of habitations of communities, away from the upper-caste centred localities. The violence of the caste system is persistently perpetuated through social power structures and institutions like education and white-collar work sectors that are inaccessible to the Dalits due to lack of opportunities.² The Dalits are not allowed to achieve financial growth or experience upward social mobility, and thus are suppressed as a lower-class. The unavailability and inaccessibility of power for the Dalits thus assist the powerful upper-castes in reserving the reins of social, cultural and economic power, and abysmally oppressing others on the basis of caste.

In his seminal essay “Dalit Women Talk Differently” (1995), Gopal Guru also draws attention to how on considering the complex intersection of the forms of disenfranchisement of caste and gender, Gail Omvedt highlights the Dalit women’s need to talk differently because their issues were obscured within the Dalit movements [9, p. 2548]. Guru’s insights help us understand that there arose a need to actualise a Dalit feminist standpoint because the issues were either partially touched upon or entirely ignored by the mainstream women’s movements and the Dalit movements, respectively. The approach of intersectionality helps us analyse the multiple oppressions practised on Dalit women due to their identities based on caste, gender and other intersecting parameters like class, labour, disease, age, desire and so on. Supurna Banerjee and Nandini Ghosh define intersectionality as “primarily an organizing principle which calls for reflexivity in the study of social characteristics, such that one marginality is not substituted for another and lived experiences are not treated as generic and undifferentiated” [3, pp. 2–3]. They assert its significance and refute its main critiques.³ Thus, intersectionality highlights the ways in which the multiple aspects of our identities based on our gender, race, age, nationality, ethnicity, sexual orientation, immigration status, and religion coincide, intersect and affect our experiences.

The issue of gender with caste was addressed in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century with autobiographical works by Dalit women writers. The twentieth century saw autobiographies majorly from Maharashtra like Thoughtful Outburst (1981) by Kumud Pawade, The Kaleidoscopic Story of My Life (1983) by Shantabai Kamble and Weave of my Life (1988) by Urmila Pawar. By the twenty-first century, autobiographical works from South India also emerged, like Karukku (2000) by Bama Tamil Nadu, The Grip of Change (2006) by P. Sivakami and autobiographical poetry collection “A Home without a Kitchen” (2006) by Vijila Chirrappad. In the Hindi film industry, films such as Ankur (The Seedling 1974) by Shyam Benegal, Article 15 (2019) by Anubhav Sinha, 200 Halla Ho (Attack 2021) by Sarthak Dasgupta and Alok Batra also highlighted the issues of the Dalit women who have to suffer due to casteist labour practices, meagre wages and as objects of upper-caste men’s sexual desire. Thus, caste-gender intersectionality has also found expression in Indian cinema.

This chapter aims to highlight the less discussed yet persistent issues of caste-gender based oppression in Uttarakhand through the film Dev Bhoomi (2016) directed by the Serbian director Goran Paskaljević. The film text also helps analyse the deeply rooted concerns of gendered socialisation and migration, which together when studied with the caste-gender based issues, help situate the regional social issues pertaining to Uttarakhand in India. The chapter primarily aims to delineate that the analytical lens of memory and trauma studies helps understand these aforementioned intersecting issues suffered by the natives. Dev Bhoomi uses the tropes of loss of home and longing for certain places or people as the primary means of addressing the intersecting social concerns of caste, gender and migration.

The film Dev Bhoomi was premiered at the 41st Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), and is an Indo-Serbian joint film venture shot in Uttarakhand. The story is set in the rural Garhwal region of the northern-Indian state of Uttarakhand. The film is a homecoming tale that highlights the lingering caste and gender prejudice in rural Indian culture. The film revolves around the protagonist Rahul Negi who returns from exile in England to his village after four decades. Rahul’s return sets off commotion among the villagers who have not forgiven him for his inter-caste relationship and consequent violence that occurred in the past. The storyline proceeds to disclose that the oppressive social rules of caste and gender which made Rahul suffer, still exist in the village. His former lover, Maya, who is a Dalit Vaadi, i.e. a dancer woman suffered after Rahul’s exile. She was doubly outcasted by her family and the villagers on the basis of caste and gender for breaking the rules of endogamy. The traumatic ostracisation eventually turns her mad. The film also depicts deep-rooted gender inequality in the village through the character, Asha’s sub-plot. She is the brightest student in her class but is pulled out of school to get married at an early age. The forceful marriage pushes her to commit suicide.

In the traditional trauma theory pioneered by Cathy Caruth, trauma is viewed as an event that fragments consciousness and prevents direct linguistic representation. Caruth explains that, “trauma describes an overwhelming experience of sudden, or catastrophic events, in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, and uncontrolled repetitive occurrence of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena” [4, p. 181]. The model draws attention to the severity of suffering by suggesting that the traumatic experience irrevocably damages the psyche. In the film, we can observe the traumatic fragmentation of the psyche and disruption of the normal through tropes of madness and suicide. The film highlights how the protagonist Rahul has constant headaches, which keep recurring as he experiences traumatic memories and events. For example, Rahul starts to have headaches as he witnesses the suicide and cremation of Asha. Similarly, he has such headaches when he recalls his former lover Maya and the drastic events that followed in reaction to their inter-caste affair.⁴ The film also depicts how regional factors like environmental disasters also add to the people’s trauma. A child named Munna in the film, becomes an orphan as he loses his parents in the 2013 Kedarnath floods. The film shows his constant longing for his lost home and family throughout the narrative. Thus, the chapter analyses how the film critiques the social contestations in Uttarakhand by intersecting the personal memory and past of Rahul with the collective memory and lived present of other characters.

Reflections of Personal Memory: Nostalgia and Homecoming

This section primarily discusses how the personal memory of the protagonist unfolds in Dev Bhoomi. The film narrative begins with the protagonist, Rahul, an expat, returning to his village after being incommunicado for forty long years. Through flashback scenes, we learn that Rahul, an upper-caste Rajput, was in love with a Dalit woman Maya, but their inter-caste relationship was strongly opposed by his family and the village panchayat.⁵ He tried to break the norms of societal boundaries practised through endogamy and wanted to elope with Maya, in order to marry her. However, he was unable to elope and in a fit of rage tried to fight back by hitting the pradhan with a sickle.⁶ He was in turn shot in the leg by his brother who also opposed the inter-caste relationship. The violent brawl forced Rahul to run away from the village, but he rightly explains later that it was not the violent act that pushed him to flee but, it was the rudimentary and casteist belief system practised in the village, which forced him into exile.

In Dramaturgies of Erasure and Returns: On Exile, Nostalgia and Homecoming (2021), Yana Meerzon explains:

In its primary definition, exile refers to one’s forced removal from home. A metaphor of existential and social estrangement, exile can be seen as a self- imposed journey of migration, seeking a sense of imbalance triggered by one’s desire for voyage […] At the core of an exilic drive, however, is the act of resistance: an individual against the state. Thus, as banishment, exile results in a state of sorrow and personal marginality. [16, p. 63]

Meerzon’s definition of exile helps us understand that Rahul’s migration is also rooted in his ‘act of resistance’ against the local governance and his family. The narrative symbolically depicts that Rahul returns to his village as he is suffering from an eye ailment which will consequently result in the loss of his eyesight. The narrative uses Rahul’s blurring eyesight as a motif to represent his desire to see his homeland once before he completely becomes blind. Rahul’s period in exile can be drawn as a parallel to his losing eyesight through all these years, as he has not only suffered the loss of his lover, Maya, but also is estranged from his close relatives like his father, sister, brother and his best friend. More so, the traumatising events of his past never allowed him to live a life of contentment, as he never married anyone else, nor could he have a family of his own or a home in the foreign land. The conversation with his best friend Balbir reflects Rahul’s yearning for family, loved ones and a life of conjugal bliss:

Rahul:

Is that your son?

Balbir:

Yes.

Rahul:

You have more kids?

Balbir:

Yes, two daughters. They’re married. And I have 6 grandkids too! Do you have any?

Rahul:

I never got married. [17, 27:52]

So, figuratively, all that Rahul could witness or see were the repeated traumatic events of his past which did not allow him to see the world in a new light. Thus, the state of exile only deepened his sorrow due to the loss of home and loved ones.

Moreover, the narrative reveals that Rahul’s vision impairment was also cursed upon him by Maya’s dismayed and angry father so that he would never set his eyes on a Vaadi girl again. Thus, we can notice how his present is still connected with the traumatic events of the past. In the book Spectres of Marx (1994) Jacques Derrida conceptualises the term ‘hauntology’ and explains that “to haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept” [6, p. 202]. The concept of hauntology refers to the reappearance or persistence of components from a social or cultural past as if they were ghosts. Similarly, Rahul is doomed to suffer the burden of his past life and is constantly haunted by his past. Thus, we can also notice how the narrative helps us understand that the mere removal of the native from the homeland cannot suppress the feelings of angst, distress and trauma from the mind and body of the sufferer.⁷

Nostalgia is defined as “a wistful or sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition” or as “a state of being homesick” (Merriam Webster). Thus, nostalgia and memory are interconnected as the former becomes a way to transport to the past.⁸ In the article, Meerzon also helps understand that “homecoming, however, does not produce a cure for nostalgia – an exilic nostalgic can yearn for home both being away and staying at home” [16, p. 65]. Likewise, through the film’s cinematic depiction, we can observe that Rahul’s homecoming is intact with a nostalgic return, such that he witnesses his native land as something that he has already lost. The film highlights Rahul’s nostalgia. It showcases his feelings of loss of home through the literal ruins of houses in the Garhwal region of Uttarakhand, as a result of the 2013 Kedarnath disaster. The director, Goran Paskaljević, has drawn out Rahul’s loss of home and his homecoming filled with nostalgia by focusing on the ruined houses of the natives. Rahul’s driver explains to him that with the 2013 disaster, the people not only lost lives in the earthquakes, floods and landslides but also lost everything that defined their belongingness to the place as a home. The people lost families, relatives, cattle, pets, farmlands and of course their homes.

The film portrays Rahul’s nostalgic return through his observations of the native land, which itself has been irrevocably damaged. This nostalgic return is also filled with a longing for what defined home for him. In the film, through Rahul’s vision, the camera depicts his longing for the scenic beauty, the mountainous terrain, the views of the Himalayas, the forests, the village, its farms, walkways, and other commonly shared spaces. Thus, Rahul’s personal memory and nostalgia for his homeland also unfold through the picturisation of the relation between people and the lived native spaces.

Cinematic language can take many distinct forms, including camera framing, lighting, colour and performance. Camera framing determines when a camera angle and frame convey how a character should be perceived by the audience. In Recognition of Camera Angle and Camera Level in Movies from Single Frames (2023), Mattia Savardi et al. discuss the importance of camera angles and state that, “prior research has demonstrated that low-angle shots […] can convey dominance, strength, and aggression, while high-angle shots […] can imply weakness and vulnerability” [19, p. 79]. In the film, we can observe how most of the scenes are shot from a high-angle shot such that the protagonist becomes minuscule within the frame, and this helps focus upon his vulnerable state as an exile who was forced to spend his life away from his native land and his loved ones. Such technique also helps magnify nostalgia and sense of loss. Moreover, we can also notice how the camera frame captures the native spaces, the walkways, fields, mountains, rivers and other commonly shared spaces. These shared spaces complete the identity of the protagonist as he almost merges into the background of the scenes with the native terrain.

Moreover, this chapter also delineates how the film depicts that much like Rahul’s forced exile due to social issues of casteism, the other natives also suffered consequences of a man-made disaster, which was forcefully brought upon by illegal mining, haphazard construction and commercialisation in the mountainous terrain. The 2013 Kedarnath floods, the recent Silkyara (Uttarkashi) tunnel collapse in 2023, and the rising number of landslides, floods, and other environmental disasters require us to question the nature of these ‘natural’ disasters. This environmental havoc speaks directly in relation to the surge in unplanned and illegal commercialisation and construction in Uttarakhand and in either the loss of homes of natives or the consequent forced migration of natives to other parts of the country for work and survival. In the film, this issue is raised through the orphan Munna’s subplot who has lost his parents, family and home in the 2013 Kedarnath floods and lived with the school teacher, Shaanti. Munna’s inner turmoil and trauma are depicted through his anger and perplexed behaviour, as he throws pebbles in the river as if he is trying to hit back the water body. He confesses his suppressed feelings to Rahul:

Munna:

I’m very angry with Ganga.

Rahul:

Why?

Munna:

It took my whole family. [17, 34:58]

Munna further discloses to Rahul that he believes he is able to talk to his deceased parents. The child believes that the echo he receives back after he calls out to his parents from a hilltop, is the voice of his parents’ ghosts replying to him. Munna’s desperate act to reconnect with his parents shows his extreme longing for his loved ones. Here, Derrida’s theorisation of ‘hauntology’ can help us understand that Munna’s peculiar act of reconnecting with the ghosts of his parents highlights how he is affected by the horror of the traumatising events. Munna’s narrative helps reflect how the natives’ plight is multiplied due to environmental disasters. Moreover, the canon of literary texts, films, and oral narratives from Uttarakhand not only helps critique this rampant course of action in the name of development but also helps register the plight of the natives and the loss of home and the invaluable culture and traditions of the land.

This chapter highlights how Paskaljević’s vision helps build what Alison Landsberg calls the ‘prosthetic memory’. She explains the effect cinema has on memory:

It has become possible to have an intimate relationship to memories of events through which one did not live: these are the memories I call prosthetic. ‘Prosthetic memories’ are indeed ‘personal’ memories, as they derive from engaged and experientially oriented encounters with the mass media’s various technologies of memory. [13, pp. 148–149]

She also adds that due to films or other mass media mediums, prosthetic memories are not just made available to the audiences but these memories also help the audience consume the cinema empathetically. She deliberates that, “a sensuous engagement with the past, which prosthetic memory enables, is the foundation for more than simply individual subjectivity; it becomes the basis for mediated collective identification and for the production of potentially counter hegemonic public spheres” [13, pp. 149–150]. Thus, in Dev Bhoomi as well, we see how Paskaljević underlines this connection of personal and collective memories, such that the protagonist’s personal memory of the native land and his homecoming is interlinked with the collective memory of the villagers.

However, we also need to critique Paskaljević’s narrative for completely overshadowing and omitting the memory of Maya, a Dalit woman, by singularly focusing on the memory of the protagonist Rahul, an upper-caste man. The film rightly portrays how Dalit women like Maya and later even her niece (sister’s daughter) Darshini work as Vaadi or dancers to entertain people at social gatherings like weddings in the village. This casteist and gendered practice of Dalit women working as dancers is common in India and these women are known by different names in different parts of the country, for example Murali in Maharashtra, Jogini in Andhra Pradesh and Devadasi in other parts of India. In Gendering Caste (2018), Uma Chakravarti explains that the Devadasi was “a girl who was dedicated to the temple and became a dancer, occupying a high ritual status within the temple […] Though she was married to the God of the temple she had patrons who would be her sexual partners” [5, p. 84]. Thus, we can understand that when Rahul meets Darshini and inquires if she was taught the dance by her aunt, Maya, the film is also directing our attention towards the vicious and inter-generational cycle of casteist labour practised by women in Uttarakhand, even in the twenty-first century.⁹ Thus, Paskaljević aptly criticises the caste-based labour system, especially for women, which makes them vulnerable to sexual objectification and exploitation. However, he still obliterates the doubly traumatised memory of Maya, who was suppressed both on the basis of her caste and her gender.

We can observe that the film uses the method of flashbacks to reiterate the social ostracisation faced by Rahul, but the narrative depicts that Maya has probably lost her memory as she becomes mad due to the traumatic events she faced in the past. The film chooses neither to validate Maya’s memories or her voice as she is literally shown to have suffered a loss of speech as well. The film does not situate Maya’s dual caste-gender based oppression as there is no representation of her memory or her past events to comprehend what a Dalit woman must have faced after her upper-caste lover was forced to flee the village. As a Dalit woman she already lived a life marked with humiliation, and to add to her oppression as a social outcast, she must have faced all the more marginalisation and ignominy at the hands of the villagers. Nonetheless, she must have also suffered the lack of any means to make a livelihood, pushing her further towards the peripheries of the society and making her more susceptible to social and sexual harassment. Along with the social constraints, additionally the film narrative too does not provide her any means of agency. Thus, it becomes essential to analyse the personal memory of the protagonist in the film text with the collective memories of other oppressed narratives.

Memory and Trauma: Contestations and Intersections

In Collective Memory (1980), Maurice Halbwachs states that Collective memories are a community’s shared renderings of the past that help shape its collective identity. In this section, the chapter focuses on the intersection of the protagonist Rahul’s personal memory and the collective memories of the villagers about him. In Individual and Collective Practices of Memory (2020), Maria Pohn-Lauggas analyses the relation between individual and collective practices of memory. She explains how practices of memory are a characteristic of social relations and pervade societies. Similarly, the chapter aims to discuss how the intersection of personal and collective memories reveals the trauma perpetuated by existing social contestations in Uttarakhand.

The section broadly discusses that the intersections of personal and collective memories happen on two levels. First, the section will discuss how Rahul’s personal memory of the village and homeland is contradicted by the collective memory of the villagers about him. Luggas examines that “the practice of individual memory is considered both as not independent of the past and present and as something that is in constant interaction with collective memories” [14, p. 2]. Along the same lines, the chapter depicts how the protagonist Rahul’s personal memory is also not independent of the past and is affected by the constant interplay with the collective memories of his family and community. While Rahul is overwhelmed with being back in his homeland, he feels equally unwelcomed by the villagers and even by his family members.

The films like Fandry (Pig 2013) and Sairat (Wild 2016) in Marathi by Nagaraj Manjule, Pariyerum Perumal (The God who Mounts a Horse 2018) in Tamil by Mari Selvaraj, C/o Kancharapalem (2018) in Telugu by Venkatesh Maha are some works of regional cinema from India, which have discussed the issues associated with inter-caste love relations. In Castes in India (2017) B.R. Ambedkar delineates how endogamy is the root cause of the caste system. He focuses on the link between caste-based practices and the subordination of women. Ambedkar always maintained that women were the gateways of the caste system. He explains that it “is inevitable that Endogamy is the only characteristic that is peculiar to caste, and if we succeed in showing how endogamy is maintained, we shall practically have proved the genesis and also the mechanism of Caste” [1, p. 3]. Thus, he asserts that the caste system thrived on a structure which emphasised the subordination of women. Paskaljević’s film also resounds with the oppression based on social issues of endogamy and highlights the existence of these prevalent practices in the less represented region of Uttarakhand.¹⁰ In the film, Rahul’s brother and some other villagers oppose his stay and want him punished for the duel and consequent violence that took place years ago. Thus, Rahul’s suffering due to nostalgia for homeland and loss of home is further increased with the intersectional collective memory of the villagers. Thus, on the first level, Rahul is made to relive the trauma of social exclusion along with the longing for home.

Further, the chapter focuses on the second level of intersection of personal and collective memories. While on the first level, we observe contradictions, on the second level we can observe what Kai Erikson explains as ‘traumatised communities’ [7, p. 185]. In Notes on Trauma and Community (1995), he explains that:

Trauma shared can serve as a source of communality in the same way that common languages and common backgrounds can. There is a spiritual kinship there, a sense of identity […] estrangement becomes the basis for communality, as if persons without homes or citizenship or any other niche in the larger order of things were invited to gather in a quarter set aside for the disfranchised, a ghetto for the unattached. Indeed, it can happen that otherwise unconnected persons who share a traumatic experience seek one another out and develop a form of fellowship on the strength of that common tie. [7, p. 186]

Likewise, in the chapter, we can observe how Rahul finds a ‘traumatised community’ among other people from his village who have also suffered due to caste and gender biases.¹¹ Apart from Munna and Maya, Rahul also shares a bond of trauma with the child bride Asha, who wanted to study and pursue a career in teaching rather than getting married against her wish at the young age of seventeen. The film highlights the repercussions of following the tradition of marrying girls at a juvenile age as Asha is compelled to end her life by committing suicide right after her marriage. However, rather than realising their mistake, Asha’s brothers believe that education corrupts the gendered social norms by challenging and questioning such traditional practices. They in turn burn the school building and blame the school teacher, Shaanti, for Asha’s suicide, for counselling her about the need for education and employment for girls. In a conversation with Shaanti, Rahul reminisces the gender oppression faced by the women at his home and confides in her that, “women in these mountains have a difficult life. My mother and my sister never went to school” [17, 33:48]. Shaanti agrees with him and informs how “education serves no purpose. It may even be a burden” [17, 33:59]. Since, the personal is defined by the collective, the intersection of these memories depicts how apart from Rahul, other people also suffer similar traumas of uprootedness and social exclusion. Thus, to add to Erikson, the chapter emphasises that the formation of what he calls the ‘traumatised communities’ can be understood better by analysing the intersection of personal and collective memories. The narrative explores that similar to Rahul, other characters like the madwoman Maya, his Dalit lover, Asha, the child bride, and Munna, an orphan child are also traumatised due to the social and regional contestations in their native land.

The Cinematic Language of Trauma and Hope

Cinematic language includes the conventions and techniques used in cinema to communicate with the audience; this is also sometimes referred to as visual storytelling, though this is only one aspect of cinematic language. Emotions and ideas are visually expressed in cinema through various techniques, including the use of light, performance, mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing and more. Colour and light help build the scenes and backgrounds. Within cinematic language, literary conventions may also be used to convey meaning when attempting to grasp cinematic language. For instance, literature frequently employs literary devices like symbolism to produce meaning to convey plot, character development or themes. Similar techniques are used in screenwriting, but by using cinematic methodologies.

In the film, the traumatic anguish of the victims is represented through the symbolic language of fire. The two prominent scenes are the cremation of Asha and the burning of the school building. These scenes mark the impact of the traumatic social contestations in the region. The scenes show that Asha’s two brothers put fire on her pyre and later they set the school building on fire. The men adamantly refuse to accept or understand the need for women to study, even after their own sister had died fighting against such gendered norms. The fire and its symbolic red colour represent the anguish of the suffering women natives who are denied fundamental rights like education or the choice to marry a partner of their volition as we come across in Maya’s case as well.

Images from the film, used with consent.

In Fig. 22.1, we can observe how the symbolic language of fire is further complicated with the dark and dismal surroundings picturised within the frames. The two star-crossed lovers meet after years of separation and suffering. While Rahul tries to make Maya recall the past, she gets into a fit and starts to howl and cry. Maya and Rahul sit across a hearth with burning wood in the scene. Maya and Rahul’s traumatic memories are mirrored through the red colour of fire reflecting all over their faces. At the same time, the utter darkness around them symbolises the despondent and agonising lives they have had to live after their separation. The film emphasises the similar play of the colours red of fire and pitch-black of the night in several other scenes.

Fig. 22.1

The two primary characters Rahul and Maya meet after decades of separation

(reproduced from Dev Bhoomi- Land of the Gods, 2016)

In Fig. 22.2, again we witness how the film underlines the grave issues of caste and gender through the fiery red and black colours. In the given image, the scene shows the panchayat being addressed to discuss the fate of Rahul, who according to them is still an offender for breaking social rules of endogamy and thus, should be ostracised from the village. The gravity of the situation and the sheer hypocrisy of the upper-caste men of the village are brought out through the darkness of the night which helps criticise the casteist rules the men so fiercely try to protect. In this scene, while the upper-caste men state that the Vaadi girls’ profession is demeaning in nature, in another scene, they organise Darshini’s (a Vaadi) dance performance on the occasion of an upper-caste wedding. Moreover, the absence of a woman representative in the panchayat also speaks volumes about how the decisions taken by the panchayat are completely one-sided, let alone severely patriarchal. The only woman in the frame is the school teacher, Shaanti, who is also not asked for any opinion on the matter. Thus, Paskaljević’s narrative reiterates the hypocrisy of casteist norms, which discriminates the Dalits for the same labour that the upper-caste require and rather force upon the marginalised. The film also uses the play of colours and light and darkness to emphasise and criticise the prevailing social issues.

Fig. 22.2

The village council meet to take a decision regarding Rahul's act of defiance against the social rules of endogamy

(reproduced from Dev Bhoomi- Land of the Gods, 2016)

Goran Paskaljević also represents the protagonist’s trauma through the environmental destruction of his native land. In the initial scenes itself, the camera displays Rahul’s traumatic frame of mind through the damaged mountains. However, in the end, the film juxtaposes trauma and hope through the picturisation of the sites of environmental destruction and the resiliently standing Kedarnath temple. Figure 22.3 depicts the final scene of the film. The closing sequence of the film puts across its message of hope. The devastated terrain of the Himalayas as a result of the 2013 floods is paralleled to the long-standing Kedarnath temple as an indicator of hope over trauma. Moreover, the film ends with the unification of Rahul and Munna across the background of the longstanding Kedarnath temple. In the end, Rahul loses his eyesight as a motif of suffering trauma of ostracisation and longing for home. However, Munna becomes Rahul’s eyes. The camera focuses time and again on the colour of Munna’s blue eyes and it is after Rahul loses his eyesight that we realise that Munna is the personification of a brighter future. The glistening blue colour of Munna’s eyes reflects the colour of the sky, which stands as a motif of opportunities and hope for the marginalised. Pertinently, the blue colour also represents the colour of the Ambedkarite resistance, which believes the colour represents the egalitarian blue colour of the sky. This blue colour is also reiterated through the colour of Shaanti’s clothes as in Fig. 22.2, the colour of the river Ganga, colour of houses in the village and also through Munna’s blue sweater visible in Fig. 22.3.

Fig. 22.3

The devastated terrain of the Himalayas and the long-standing Kedarnath temple

(reproduced from Dev Bhoomi- Land of the Gods, 2016)

Moreover, Paskaljević brings together the issues of caste and environmental destruction again through the symbolic blue colour. The colour of Rahul’s clothes also reflects this unification of the issues. In the beginning of the movie, the mise-en-scène depicts how Rahul wears a green jacket which camouflages him with the green colour of the trees around him and makes him one with the natural environment. Throughout the film, Rahul wears a red jacket with blue denim jeans. The red colour here is representative of his trauma and the blue again emphasises his resistance against caste-based issues, which had adversely impacted his life. In the end, as he leaves the village, he again switches to the green jacket and chooses to become one with his native environment. Moreover, before Rahul leaves the village for good, he decides to help re-establish the school in the village where young children like Munna can aspire for a better future. Thus, education and the child, Munna become a beam of hope for people like Rahul, who have long suffered the trauma caused by social discrimination and environmental destruction.

Films like Dev Bhoomi which discuss silenced issues like caste, gender and environmental destruction are now brought through OTT platforms to enter the personal space of every viewer through their digital screens. In the article “The End of Cinema” (2010), Anne Friedberg contends that the new technologies that surround cinema have significantly altered it. In the 21st Century, we can witness that the distinctions between media such as cinema, television, computers and even mobile phones are gradually fading. Thus, we can understand how OTT (Over-the-Top) platforms like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hotstar and Zee 5 Movies have also changed the mediums of experiencing cinema and the cinematic portrayal of trauma in India. Thus, the transition of technology has altered the viewer’s experience and increased the reach of a film.

It can be further stressed that Paskaljević’s narrative helps develop the ‘prosthetic memories’, which Landsberg explains make paths for newer alliances. She explains that ‘prosthetic memories’ are not then the entity of a single geographical community but become a “public past” [13, p. 149]. Thus, we can understand how Paskaljević, the director, a non-native of Uttarakhand or India, could also develop empathy towards the issues and narratives of caste, gender and environmental disasters. His work of art also helps bring forth an awareness of these issues and succeeds in bringing together coalitions of not just the ‘traumatised communities’ but also of the audiences globally.

Conclusion

This chapter examines the social contestations in Uttarakhand, India, through a critical study of the film text Dev Bhoomi (2016) by noted Serbian director Goran Paskaljević. In the narrative, the chapter analyses the nexus of caste, gender and environmental factors which influence the intersections of personal and collective memories in Uttarakhand. The film brings together the facets of coerced migration, loss of home, suffering, and nostalgia through personal and collective memories of the people in the region. In Dev Bhoomi, the protagonist Rahul’s personal memory and trauma become a lens to observe the collective suffering of the village. Rahul’s traumatic past is unravelled in the film through the shared suffering of other characters who continue to bear the brunt of extant social practices of caste and gender discrimination. Social customs like child marriage and endogamy haunt the collective consciousness of the natives and such repercussions affect them lifelong through traumatic memories. The narrative depicts the impact of the traumas through tropes of madness and suicide as social outcasts like Rahul, Maya, Asha and Munna are uprooted from their community, home and origins. Along with the social contestations, the environmental disasters like the 2013 Kedarnath flood in Uttarakhand also affect the natives’ lives. The intersection of personal and collective memories is again depicted by drawing Rahul’s loss of home parallel to a young boy Munna’s nostalgia and longing for his parents and home which he lost in the flash flood. Thematically and theoretically, the chapter confers the urgent need to study caste-gender based research in the context of Uttarakhand. This chapter discusses the terms ‘exile’, ‘nostalgia’ and ‘homecoming’ in order to understand trauma and marginalisation. The section also delineates how the film text addresses environmental concerns by drawing a parallel to the characters’ loss of home. The chapter uses Maurice Halbwachs’s theory on collective memory, Cathy Caruth’s study of trauma and Kai Erikson’s conceptualisation of ‘traumatised community’ to understand and analyse the intersections between personal memory and collective memories. The chapter deliberates the possibility of recovering or dealing with the ever-present traumas of the natives, caused by grave issues like caste, gender and environmental devastation.

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Erikson, Kai. 1995. Notes on Trauma and Community. In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathay Caruth. John Hopkins University Press.

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Kandasamy, Meena. 2020. Rape Nation. Twitter. Accessed 10 October 2020.

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Landa, Manuel D. 2016. Assemblage Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Meerzon, Yana. 2021. Dramaturgies of Erasure and Returns: On Exile, Nostalgia and Homecoming. Literary Research 37: 61–85.

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Savardi, Mattlia, András Bálint Kovács, Alberto Signoroni and Sergio Benini. 2023. Recognition of Camera Angle and Camera Level in Movies from Single Frames. Proceedings of the 2023 ACM International Conference on Interactive Media Experiences Workshops. Presented at the IMXw ’23: ACM International Conference on Interactive Media Experiences Workshops, June 12. Nantes, France. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1145/​3604321.​3604334.

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Footnotes

1

The poet Meena Kandasamy wrote this poem on the Hathras rape incident. In October, 2020 in Hathras, Uttar Pradesh, a Dalit woman labourer was brutally gang raped by upper-caste men and the state police administration also took part in hiding the incident and denying the charges of rape or caste-based violence.

2

Terminology provided by Raj Kumar in the book, Dalit Literature and Criticism- The Dalit root word “dal” in Sanskrit means crack, split, broken. Jyotirao Phule (1850s) used it to describe the untouchables. Dalit Panthers (1970s) described it as inclusive of “Scheduled Castes and Tribes, neo-Buddhists, landless, poor peasants, women, all those exploited politically, economically and religiously”. Gangadhar Pantawne (1970s) described it as a “symbol of change and revolution, humanism”. In the chapter, the identity of Dalit is restricted to only the Scheduled Castes.

3

Supurna Banerjee and Nandini Ghosh explain that the “critiques of intersectionality have feared that intersectionality results in the fragmentation of the opposition to structural oppression”. They argue that rather than rejecting intersectionality, it should be used as a method of conducting research rather than a radical intersectional praxis. They further add that such an intersectional approach would prove helpful in forming alliances across marginalities.

4

For further reading, refer to The Trauma of Caste by Thenmozhi Soundararajan. In the book, Soundararajan discusses trauma in relation to caste-based violence. Particularly, in the chapter “Caste is Trauma”, she refers to Staci Haines’s work The Politics of Trauma to explain in the context of caste that people who experience trauma or injustice feel deeply alone, ashamed, and helpless—a feeling that is impossible to dissuade (Haines cited in [20, p. 54]).

5

Rajput is the warrior caste in the hierarchy of caste system practised in India. Panchayat is “an elective council of about five members organized in the republic of India as an organ of village self-government” (Merriam-Webster dictionary). However, panchayat can be said to be a patriarchal system of justice as in villages it is only the men who serve as its members and thus act as decision makers.

6

Pradhan is the head of the village panchayat.

7

In “Place, Memory, Literature” Elżbieta Rybicka explains the connection between places and memory through Pierre Nora’s definition of “lieux de memoire – ‘places of memory’” [18, p. 131]. She delineates that places of memory can be understood both physically and metaphorically such that they also symbolise the practices which shape a collective community’s identity [18, p. 131].

8

For further reference, In “Memory and Nostalgia”, Stephen Legg discusses the intersecting relationship between themes of nostalgia, trauma, memory and forgetting through readings of selective texts.

9

In The Trauma of Caste, Thenmozhi Soundararajan uses Eduardo Duran’s concept of “soul wound” to refer to the intergenerational and historical trauma suffered by Dalits. Soundararajan explicates that the concept of “soul wound” could be explained as a wound that affects human beings at a soul level, affecting their cultures as well, and thus is passed on to the next generations as well. She further adds, “so too with Brahminism. Caste is a soul wound. Untreated soul wounds become the work of the next generation, and the next. We just keep passing the violence on […] This is the heart of historical trauma” [20, p. 192].

10

Paskaljević’s narrative thus not only helps contribute towards the cinematic study of caste-gender based intersectional issues but his film also becomes the indispensable text that initiates the said discourse with the context of Uttarakhand. The regional literary works from Uttarakhand like Shailesh Matiyani’s Paap Mukti Tatha Anya Kahaniya (Redemption from Sin and Other Stories, 2013), Vidyasagar Nautiyal’s Fatt Ja Panchdhar (Explode the Panchdhar, 2021) and Mohan Mukt’s Himalaya Dalit Hai (The Himalaya is a Dalit, 2022) have discussed Dalit women’s dual oppression, however, in cinema the issues lacked a representation and Paskaljević’s film helps build the research gap.

11

Further reading suggested- Manuel DeLanda’s conceptualisation of the “assemblage theory” in the book Assemblage Theory (2016). Delanda’s theorisation helps understand how heterogeneous terms or parts which are not uniform either in nature or origin could fit together or build a relation despite the different natures. He refers to the assemblage as “a co-functioning […] a symbiosis, a ‘sympathy’” [12 , p. 1]. We can understand Erikson’s “traumatised communities” as a result of an assemblage between the various characters in the film, who face marginalisation on different grounds.