Hear-Telling the Chauraasi Archive: Performing Testimony After Trauma

Abstract

In 2014, 30 years after the anti-Sikh pogrom (Chauraasi) instigated by the Hindu Right destroyed Sikh lives in New Delhi, I listened to the survivors and witnesses of the 1984 pogrom chat casually about their memories of the violence. Several visited their former homes at the original site of the violence and undertook ‘walks’ to remember what they had experienced. As they did so, they talked, creating a record of where their autobiographical re-tellings of those events created communal memory. While sociological scholarship attends to the trauma of 1984 (Saluja 2015; Das 2006), there is yet to emerge a reckoning with the performance iterations of such event-narratives as the memory walks. Using frameworks of witnessing, describing, and walking, thinking with how a walk can ‘hear-tell’ memory, I ask in this article: how does one re-tell testimonies of trauma and rumour that the survivors of Chauraasi remembered to and with a non-survivor? In what ways does rumour operate officially and informally? How does the telling, description, and undertaking of the memory walk reproduce a crisis of witnessing, and how does the aural and embodied performance of the walk respond to this crisis? How does the aporia between the descriptions emerging on memory walks and the ineffability of traumatic memory conjure the epistemic limits of narration?

Keywords:

• memory
• 1984
• trauma
• witnessing
• walking

Notes

1. The word chauraasi itself – referring to the number 84 in Hindi – used by the survivors has subsequently come to mean the event of 1984. The word no longer connotes merely the date or year itself as much as it does the experience of living through that period of impossible violence.:

2. See Anshu Saluja, ‘Engaging with Women’s Words and their Silences’, Sikh Formations 11, no. 3 (2015): 343–365 for more on the issues faced by the widows and their children, such as using drugs and alcohol addiction. In listening to women’s narratives, Saluja attends carefully to the intersection between caste, poverty, and trauma in particular. See also Kamal Arora’s extraordinary doctoral dissertation, ‘Legacies of Violence: Sikh Women In Delhi’s “Widow Colony”’ (PhD diss., University of British Columbia, 2017), which attends to a feminist methodological reading of the spaces discussed in this article, with a focus on caste, gender, and mourning.

3. Saidiya Hartman, ‘Venus in Two Acts’, Small Axe 26, vol.12, no. 2 (June 2008): 1–14 (7).

4. The PhD was funded by an Intangible Histories Doctoral Studentship, the University of Exeter’s collaboration with the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bangalore. I thank Carol Upadhya and Stephen Hodge for their diligent supervision, my colleagues on the Seminar in Social-Cultural Anthropology course at NIAS for their inputs, and Cathy Turner for the ongoing conversations on walking as a methodology, all of which have enabled the existence of an earlier form of this article as a chapter in my doctoral thesis. My gratitude also goes to Jerri Daboo and Jane Milling for their intellectual companionship and rigorous generosity which have fed my thinking in this article in the years since. Above all, I am grateful to the people cited in this work, who have trusted me with their stories. Any oversights are mine alone. The extracts in this article have been taken from field notes and transcriptions of interviews conducted over the course of my field work. Due to the sensitive nature of the work and ongoing implications for safety today, the names of the respondents have been anonymised at the point of interviews, in order to protect their identities. The names in this article will be pseudonyms.

5. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism’, Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (Autumn 1985): 235–61

6. Veena Das, Life and Words : Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 136, ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/brunelu/detail.action?docID=275766 (accessed October 31, 2021)

7. See Manoj Mitta and HS Phoolka, When a Tree Shook Delhi: The 1984 Carnage and its Aftermath (New Delhi: Roli Books, 2007), 21 and Hartosh Singh Bal, ‘Sins of Comission’, The Caravan, October 1, 2014, https://caravanmagazine.in/reportage/sins-commission (accessed December 23, 2014). See also Das, Life, 136.

8. Jyoti Grewal, Betrayed by the State: The Anti-Sikh Riots of 1984 (New Delhi: Penguin, 2007), 35.

9. India, Ministry of Home Affairs, ‘Report of the Nanavati Commission of Inquiry (1984 Anti-Sikh Riots)’, Vol. 1 (New Delhi: Ministry of Home Affairs, 2005), https://www.mha.gov.in/sites/default/files/Nanavati-I_eng_0.pdf (accessed November 5, 2014; October 31, 2021). See also Das, Life, 136; Mitta and Phoolka, Tree, 10.

10. Nanavati 180; Das, Life, 142.

11. Bal, ‘Sins’; Mitta and Phoolka, Tree, 19–27.

12. Das, Life, 139.

13. Roma Chatterji and Deepak Mehta, Living with Violence. An Anthropology of Events and Everyday Life (New Delhi: Routledge, 2007), 46.

14. Paul R Brass, ‘On the Study of Riots, Pogroms and Genocide’, Sawyer Seminar session on ‘Processes of Mass Killing’, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University, December 6–7, 2002, http://www.anveshi.org.in/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Ripogen.pdf, 2–4 (accessed July 23, 2023).

15. Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi, Pogrom in Gujarat: Hindu Nationalism and Anti-Muslim Violence in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 9.

16. See also Saluja: ‘It did not involve a chain of action and reaction by two conflicting communities. Rather, the Sikhs were hunted down through the length and breadth of the national capital as well as in many other parts of India in a series of fully orchestrated and planned attacks’. Saluja, ‘Women’s Words’, 342.

17. Das, Life, 108–110. Translation, in the context of this article does not refer to literary projects of translation. For more on the connections between literary translation, untranslatability, and political justice, see Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (Boston: Mariner Books, 2019), and Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (London: Verso, 2014).

18. Das, Life, 110.

19. Jamal Kidwai, ‘Violence in Trilokpuri: Hindutva Priming for Elections’, Economic and Political Weekly XLIX.45 (2014): 13 (accessed December 25, 2014). For a more detailed literature survey on Delhi’s architectural and settlement histories, see Sharanya Murali, ‘Performing ethnographic encounters: walking in contemporary Delhi’, (PhD diss., University of Exeter, 2016). See also Sharanya, ‘Walking the Walled City: Gender and the Dérive as Urban Ethnography’, Etnolšoka Tribina 39.46 (2016): 198–212.

20. See Mitta and Phoolka, Tree, 31; Grewal, Betrayed, 76; Das, Life, 138.

21. Mitta and Phoolka, Tree, 34 and Kidwai, ‘Violence’, 14.

22. Das, Life, 149; Mitta and Phoolka, Tree, 20; Saluja, ‘Women’s Words’, 2015.

23. Das, Life, 139.

24. Yasmeen Arif, ‘“Impossible Cosmopolis”: Locations and Relocations in Delhi and Beirut’, The Other Global City, ed. Shail Mayaram (London: Routledge, 2009), 101–130 (114).

25. Author’s field notes, ‘31 Oct 2014’. Shaheed translates from Hindi as ‘martyrs’ or ‘martyrdom’, although the tone then being bestowed upon the translation would be one of reverence and choice, since martyrs choose to die for a cause and in the case of the 1984 pogrom, the deaths were not by choice as much as they were by incident, and occasionally, viewed as sacrifices in the interests of protecting the community. See Veena Das, Critical Events (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997) for a discussion of how constructions of Sikh masculinity contribute to the framing of this violence.

26. Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 5.

27. Hartman, ‘Venus’, 3.

28. Adriana Cavarero, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, trans. Paul A. Kottman (London: Routledge, 2000), 42.

29. Author’s field notes, ‘30 Nov 2014’.

30. Author’s field notes, ‘30 Nov 2014’.

31. Jay Winter, ‘Sites of Memory’, Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates, eds. Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 312–324 (312).

32. Ibid., 313. A crucial caveat here is that Winter speaks in the context of the Holocaust. Although he accounts for informal memories too, I cannot stress enough how necessary it is to recognise the limits of such a transfer of concepts.

33. Veena Das, ‘Language and Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain’, Social Suffering, eds. Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 67–92 (69).

34. Ibid., 70.

35. Ibid.

36. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).

37. Deirdre Heddon, Autobiography and Performance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 105.

38. Author’s field notes, ‘30 Nov 2014’.

39. William Robert, ‘Witnessing the Archive: In Mourning’, in Religion, Violence, Memory, and Place, eds. Oren Baruch Stier and J. Shawn Landres (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 37–50 (42).

40. See Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (London: Routledge, 1992); Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999); Cathy Caruth, ‘Trauma and Experience: Introduction’, in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 3–12, for more context on the impossibility or difficulty of ‘witnessing’ as an ethical imperative, specifically in the context of the Holocaust.

41. Robert, ‘Witnessing’, 44.

42. Hartman, ‘Venus’, 4.

43. Author’s field notes, ‘31 October 2014’.

44. Caruth, ‘Trauma and Experience’, 10.

45. Patrick Duggan and Mike Wallis, ‘Trauma and Performance: Maps, Narratives and Folds’, Performance Research 16, no. 1 (2011): 4–17 (7).

46. Elissa Rosenberg, ‘Walking in the City: Memory and Place’, The Journal of Architecture 17, no. 1 (2012): 131–149 (134).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sharanya

Sharanya is Senior Lecturer in Theatre at Brunel University London. Her work has previously appeared in Theatre Research International, Performance Research, Wasafiri, and other publications. In 2021, she was a Scholar at the Mellon School of Theatre and Performance Research at Harvard University. She is currently writing a monograph on the politics of ingestion in Indian performance art.