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

Introduction

On a winter afternoon in the East Delhi colony of Trilokpuri, in 2014, 30 years after the violence of the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom, I sat amongst the survivors and witnesses of the pogrom, listening to them chat casually about their memories of the event. I was there as a middle-class, savarna Hindu, woman PhD researcher accompanying some of them on their ‘memory walks’ through their former homes – a memorial event that takes place every year to mark the homes and lives lost in the violence – but I was being presented instead with narratives that were partly about what they remembered of their lives after the pogrom, and partly to do with how they remembered to remember the pogrom in the present. Their narrations of that violence were in fact cleaved performances of the archive of Chauraasi (the 1984 events),¹ an official, congealed narrative of trauma for the media and politicians every year, and an unofficial, glitchy archive of narratives that signalled their discontent with their present circumstances – which included unemployment, poverty, and drug usage in the community – and became a record of where their re-tellings of those events un/earthed communal memory.² What I had not accounted for in 2014 was a re-emergence of violence: another round of communal violence took place in Trilokpuri in late October 2014 for the first time in three decades since the 1984 pogrom, but this violence was rekindled in an already inflamed site. It affected the decisions of people to revisit their former homes, or walk around or towards them, and the air was thick through November with the rhetoric of safety.

While I was able to find a beginning, middle, and end for the stories I heard in the almost too-neat and contained form of my PhD thesis, I continue to grapple, years later, both with testimonies that exceeded the framing I chose, and those that continue to exist in a cluster of their own, creating their own narrative arcs that exist as an underbelly to my enclosing.

In re-telling the stories of black women whom we know only through records of the enslaved, Saidiya Hartman asks: ‘If it is no longer sufficient to expose the scandal, then how might it be possible to generate a different set of descriptions from this archive?’³ The context I speak of is different but is one that also requires a descriptive rehabilitation of an archive that now gets rehearsed every November at the expense of other stories that make up an archive of their own, accessed largely within the Sikh community. I do not mean to suggest that this rehearsal of narratives of loss – that re-describing the memory of trauma on the anniversary for the State and media powers – is ‘fake’. Rather, I want to examine how traumatic pain emerging from the pogrom has an afterlife in casual everyday narrations, both material and affective. Some of these narrations are oral, others take the form of walks.

The fieldwork was conducted through 2014, and the memorial event at Trilokpuri was attended by me between the 28 and 30 of November 2014.⁴ I used written field notes, photographs, and recordings, to document my visits, and conversations. Verbal consent was taken from those who agreed to speak with me. Here, I attempt a re-telling of some of the testimonies I heard in 2014 as a course correction to mainstream narratives of trauma; a re-narration of what I narrated, of what was narrated to me. This includes narratives delivered to me on and around a ‘memory walk’, and a segment of a conversation from my field notes. In highlighting the spaces between these hear-tellings, I will seek a re-‘worlding’ of the epistemic limits of narrative.⁵ I will do so by initially drawing attention to the very manner in which Chauraasi is narrated and (re)told, then framing the performance ethnography as processes of witnessing, describing, and remembering. I subsequently describe a process of re-telling a narrative second-hand. The slippages between all these processes, I offer, indicate different ways of hear-telling traumatic memory and communal violence.

Hear-Tell as Performing Rumour

There are two ways to (re)tell what took place as Chauraasi. In the dominant (re)telling, the chronology of the events of 1984 – events that some view accurately as having ‘lived in our memory as mediated knowledge available only through newspaper records and official pronouncements if specific local knowledge was not available to correct those’⁶ – is as follows: the prime minister of India, Indira Gandhi, was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards on the morning of 31 October 1984.⁷ She was declared dead by the doctors at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (henceforth AIIMS) at 2:20pm.⁸ The then-president, Zail Singh (incidentally, a Sikh man), rushed back to Delhi from a state visit to North Yemen and travelled straight from the airport to AIIMS; his car was attacked by a mob en-route. He managed to reach AIIMS unhurt. However, a large crowd had gathered outside by this point, and according to some accounts, began growing violent.

The first incidents of violence began around 4 or 5pm.⁹ Mrs. Gandhi’s son Rajiv Gandhi was sworn in as prime minister after 4 pm the same evening. Over the next three days, Sikhs were targeted and attacked across the city. The violence took on a gruesome, recognisable form: several Sikhs were beaten and burnt alive, and in several cases, they were doused with kerosene or petrol, with tyres thrown over their necks [a method known as necklacing], and then set ablaze.¹⁰ Of the officially estimated 2,733 Sikhs murdered in the first week of November 1984, 1,234 were killed in East Delhi.¹¹ On 4 November 1984, when Indira Gandhi’s body was cremated, four trucks piled with corpses were discovered in Block-32, Trilokpuri.¹²

In other (re)tellings, one might avoid talking about body counts and the precise forms of violence faced by the Sikh community, physical and sexual violations, and the number of trucks filled with corpses. In such a (re)tell, it is possible to gesture towards that violence without description. Perhaps even detailing the precise nature of the violence, or talking about the trucks, risks re-inscribing the violence with an attention that could be paid elsewhere, to other narratives that could be retold; some of which lie below. I want to gesture to this narrative aporia, to the possibility of telling without describing, where description itself is not a truth-claim, as I am not a survivor of the violence myself.

The dispute over the appropriate terminology to describe the events of November 1984 reveals as much about the agency of perceived state/subject relations in the nature of the events that unfolded, as it does about the various body-collectives that have engaged with it. The vocabulary includes ‘pogrom’, ‘riot’, ‘massacre’, or ‘sectarian’, ‘communal’ and ‘state-sponsored’ violence in academic, activist, and legal parlance. Roma Chatterji and Deepak Mehta, in the context of the 1992 riots in Bombay, note that legal bodies attempting to order and locate the riot in its aftermath drew ‘from an archive of communal violence’ that was primarily colonial in nature, concluding with the riot as urban pathology.¹³ Although political scientist Paul Brass is accurate in pointing out that pogroms and riots frequently masquerade as each other, especially in the context of ‘militant Hindu nationalism’, he defines ‘pogroms’ as ‘deliberately organized – and especially – state-supported killings and the destruction of property of a targeted group’.¹⁴ Similarly, following Veena Das and Brass’s groundwork, Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi builds on the violent ideology of Hindu nationalism in the context of the 2002 pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat to assert that the distinguishing feature of the pogrom, in spite of the blurring of state/subject boundaries, is how the ‘spontaneous action became linked in the collective understanding of events by those in whose name the violence is perpetrated’.¹⁵ I thus lean on the term ‘pogrom’ here to indicate the Hindu Right’s complicity in orchestrating violence against the Sikhs in 1984.

No narration is exempt from implicit connections made by the narrator and in narrating the ‘official’ events in this sequence, it may appear that a link of causation is being suggested between the assassination, and the violence following it, in that the violence always follows or proceeds from the assassination rather than being distinct from it, or even, more suitably perhaps, as an event in connection with it. I offer this as an initial re-telling of the events of Chauraasi; how the event is narrated recasts political responsibility for the pogrom. Das suggests that we might treat Mrs. Gandhi’s assassination as ‘unfolding within a series of events that included the Partition of India, the rise of the Sikh militant movement in the Punjab, the corresponding counterinsurgency practices of the state in the 1980s, the military action in the premises of the Golden Temple, and finally the assassination of Mrs. Gandhi’; not as ‘cause and effect’,¹⁶ but as ‘chains of connection’ through Bergson’s notions of responding to the present through a translated past (in that ‘the past is not remembered as a succession of “nows” – rather, it is because the whole of the past is in some ways given all at once that it can be actualized in a contracted form’) and a rotated past (wherein ‘although the process of actualization might involve translation that appeals to the present, there is also the process of rotation in which, independent of my will, certain regions of the past are actualised’).¹⁷

Das explores this dynamic in relationship to the role of rumour. I offer examples from the events of 1984 to substantiate her ideas. Translation of a remembered moment – say, the assassination of Mrs. Gandhi and the 1984 riots all at once triggering the memory of a specific incident or a ‘contracted image’ of either/both event(s), depending on the subject who is remembering – could result in the stringing together of a linear narrative as a response. This results in performing a memory through tightened description, where the event-signifiers almost arrive as a synecdoche for the entirety of the event. The rotation of a memory – for instance, alleging rumours about the inherent violence of Sikh men, whether perceived or otherwise, to perhaps activate or anchor ‘general images of hatred, imperatives to revenge’ – might affectively orient a political reality without direct expression.¹⁸ Thus, to narrate the events in the order that I have done here is to clarify specifically that the link, if perceived between the assassination and the pogrom, is a tenuous one and cannot be told sequentially without the caveat of what the narration might serve. For the purpose of this article, it serves to acknowledge that the events of 1984 were located in the connection that Das speaks of, and any ethnographic findings on my part, especially with regards to testimonies and recollections by the survivors of 1984, are best seen within the context of this fluctuating dynamic between the past and the present that Das has opened up for us.

Trilokpuri was established as a resettlement colony in East Delhi post-Emergency in the late 1970s, along with other colonies, such as Nand Nagri and Kalyanpuri.¹⁹ Geographically, it is also viewed as ‘a congested, low-income colony’ on the periphery or the ‘outer reaches’ of the city, and as a ‘trans-Yamuna area away from the center of the city’.²⁰ All of these descriptions, including the term ‘trans-Yamuna’ reference not just the coordinates of the colony – in that it is just across the Yamuna river bed, and amidst areas that Delhi has expanded to encompass – but also, actively, the fact that Trilokpuri is always located in urban discourse in relation to the traditional centre of the city. The colony is ‘barely 10 kilometres from the police headquarters of India’s capital’ and the current-day residents of Trilokpuri ‘are mostly migrants and daily wage earners and work in informal sectors like construction work, as cycle and auto rickshaw pullers, and housemaids’.²¹ While the elements of class, gender, and caste discrimination in the 1984 violence have been emphasised,²² and the fact that it was the massacre at Trilokpuri that ‘finally brought home the extent of the brutality and the terror to a reading public’, ‘it is clear that many peripheral areas in which violence was taking place remained hidden from view’, such as other low-income colonies like Sultanpuri and Kalyanpuri, amongst others.²³

After the events of 1984 the surviving Sikhs from Trilokpuri, most of whom were relocated to the West Delhi colony of Tilak Vihar, began to visit their former homes in Trilokpuri. Tilak Vihar, known to those who live elsewhere as Vidhwa Colony, or Widows’ Colony, was a ‘newly built colony’ in 1984 ‘originally meant for lower-level government employees’.²⁴ About a decade after the massacre, the survivors began returning to Trilokpuri, as P, a survivor, tells me in a personal interview, and a memorial service was started in the Block-30/31 gurudwara in memory of the shaheed.²⁵

While the annual memorial service at the Tilak Vihar gurudwara on the 31 October, 1, 2, and 3 of November draws Sikhs from all over the city who wish to pay their respects, the service at the Block-30/31 gurudwara in Trilokpuri, which happens around mid-November every year, holds a different kind of memorial; one that is rooted as deeply and continually in the physical space of Trilokpuri as it is in the realm of memory. For the Sikhs who visit the Trilokpuri gurudwara, it is not just a service that they travel across the city to attend but also an encounter with the ‘live’ space of Block-32. ‘The act of remembering is always in and of the present, while its referent is of the past and thus absent’, says Andreas Huyssen. ‘Inevitably, every act of memory carries with it a dimension of betrayal, forgetting, and absence’.²⁶ In returning to the site, the (speech-)act of remembering is circumscribed by much more than the – mere – memory of the events of 1984; it encompasses the tangibility and irrevocability of the site itself, and the liveness of the markers that remain, whether they are architectural, human, or procedural.

The former residents of Trilokpuri who do return to the site every year to pay homage to their shaheed do much more than attend services at the Gurudwara. For several individuals – survivors and their families, for instance, or even subsequent generations who have encountered the pogrom only through testimonies, and now through access to the site – returning to Trilokpuri is important because it gives them an opportunity to visit their former neighbourhood. Several choose to walk up to their former homes or around them. Some look from afar. For others, it is enough to visit the gurudwara and return home – the keeping of distance is as important and necessary a choice for them as ‘visiting’ is for others. As this article demonstrates, the notion of ‘visiting’ is a fraught one, indicative neither of consistent duration nor intention. However, it is this form of engagement with the site, through the incidental or inhabiting walks that former residents of Trilokpuri take, that I undertake questions of how walking, memory, and narrative help site each other. Performance ethnography as a methodology allows for bracketing how the durational quality of such ethnography could be served through the lens of performance.

‘How can narrative embody life in words and at the same time respect what we cannot know?’ asks Saidiya Hartman.²⁷ As a witness to those conversations in New Delhi, I am interested in interrogating the unknown in my testimony of those narratives, and reframe how I re-tell what they remembered to and with me. Considering the aforementioned forms of hear-telling – witnessing, describing, and walking – I will proceed to narrate two conversations around these ‘memory walks’, and the act of re-narrating and remembering the violent events of 1984. As Adriana Cavarero reminds us, ‘Whatever the degree of fidelity invoked by the intentions and the documentary archive in its possessions, the tale indeed, as we know, selects, cuts, and discards’.²⁸ What I hope to accomplish in narrating these narrations is identify the telling of the tales of 1984 itself as a frame and recognise the voices and silences of those narrating and making this frame with, and to, me.

Three forms of Hear-Tell: How a Memory Talks

Witnessing

During the 2014 memorial service in Trilokpuri, I spend a great deal of time on the periphery of the Block-30/31 gurudwara and the crossroad that it lies on. I stand there, swaying between the cool shade of the chai shop next door to the gurudwara and the sun beating down on the street life of Block-30, hoping to catch people walking in or out of the gurudwara. There is a great deal of commotion, not merely because of current residents carrying on with their lives on a wintry Sunday, but also because of the police presence outside the gurudwara, curious onlookers, and groups of people entering and leaving the gurudwara. The police are there for numerous reasons; I had seen them linger around the gurudwara on my previous visits through November, when the violence broke out in Trilokpuri.

I watch them heatedly interrogate two men, non-Sikh escorted out of the gurudwara by P, and other Sikh men. The presence of the police there, and other indicators, such as the speakers blaring the prayers, the row of buses arrived from Tilak Vihar parked outside the main road, the crowds moving in and out of the gurudwara, makes it apparent that the Trilokpuri memorial service is not one that happens in the quiet, away from the eyes of the present residents: it is very much of an event that takes place in the present, involving site and sights, and establishing the Sikh identity of the place – and thus, the history of the place – strongly.

In this chaos, the expectation of interviewing, however briefly, former residents who may be visiting suddenly seems both intrusive and impossible. Could I ask to join families on their journeys? Or could I, as I had done before, be content with interviewing them in retrospect about their visits? The dilemma is certainly an ethical one but in retrospect, it was foregrounded by the promise, and premise, of the walk and any ‘tellings’ of memory that may take place on it: the accompaniment of a third person, a stranger who is completely removed from the context both in terms of Sikh identity and sharing the history of the violence, on a walk, carries the potential to disrupt the process of witnessing itself. In this scenario, it is the performance of private memory that I, as an ethnographer, want to observe without partaking in. As with all ethnography, this is fundamentally impossible, but the decision to intrude on a private act of memory has become much more fraught than anticipated.

I manage brief interviews, in the form of informal questions, while I walk around the galis, or narrow alleys, surrounding the gurudwara. A frail looking Sikh woman emerges from one of the buildings and walks back towards the bus that has brought the community from Tilak Vihar to Trilokpuri.

I approach her and ask if she has lived here before.

She replies quickly, ‘Yes, why?’

An introduction ensues. Other residents are walking around the neighbourhood to visit their former homes. Is she one of them?

‘Yes, I left here during Chauraasi’, she says with a frown. ‘And I come here for the memorial. I just walked over to see my house over there. So what?’

She walks off.²⁹

Her suspicion over the questioning of an activity as mundane and private as a walk is to be expected and, more importantly, acknowledged; it is not just the questioning about her engagement with a previous traumatic event that could be deemed intrusive, even if one does not wish to examine the performance of memory, but also the nature of the event being queried.

An urban walk is fundamentally public, in that it occurs outside, or outdoors, and is always open to being witnessed by others. However, the intentions and the context of the walk begin in the realm of the private; if identity markers – such as the turban of the Sikhs, in this case, or the covered heads of the Sikh women, or even familiar faces and names that have formerly belonged here – do not already ‘give one away’ in the event of navigating difference in a site plagued with markers of violence, both former and current, then drawing attention to the very event of the walk would certainly do so. My consciously witnessing or being part of the walk was inevitably an intrusion or disturbance to the private undertaking of it by others, who had a different, more intimate relationship to the site: this became an ethical quandary that, whilst being a broader ethnographic concern, also became particular to walking as a way of remembering because if I wanted to listen to, and hear tellings, I had to ask to walk with.

The next few sections provide contrasts to this section. They are second and third narrative layers, wherein I first speak to survivors at, and in proximity to, sites that matter to them, and then finally accompany a family on their walk to their former home. The walk grows from being one I hear about, to one I watch being delayed at sites that matter to the survivors in question, to one I am allowed to become a part of, even as I am ‘told’ about these walks throughout Image 1.

Image 1 The Room for Martyrs in the gurudwara in Trilokpuri, 2014 (Photograph by author).

Describing

I describe here two snippets from a long conversation with a group of elderly men and women at the intersection of Block-30 and -32 on 30 November 2014, during the memorial services at Trilokpuri. The description serves as a form of hear-telling, attempting to catch a quality of memorialising outwards, a tale as it was told. I speak primarily to an aged woman, whom I will call B, and her acquaintance, a young man, A. We are joined occasionally by two men, who remain silent for the most part, or chime in from a distance. I call them Anon and Anon 2. The conversation occurs at length under a tree at the entrance of a gali; white formica chairs are added and more people join us as the hours pass.

Anon says, from a distance – ‘We used to have so much work here first’.

‘So much work, so much’, Anon 2 agrees.

B turns to me. ‘He used to run his shop at the benevolence of these people’, she says.

Anon, simultaneously: ‘If we wanted chai, we would come right here to drink it’.

Anon 2 nods.

B continues: ‘–crowds would gather all night long to drink chai, right here–’

‘–Business was so good back then’, Anon 2 notes.

Right here?

‘Yes, of course, right here’, Anon 2 replies.

‘Yes, the chai shop was right here’, B chimes in.

Anon begins to mutter to himself.

B carries on, ‘All these children, young boys, the men – everyone who lived came to this shop to drink and shop for their milk, water, everything’, she says. ‘They did their work while drinking chai here. There was a chai shop here, yes, and then one just there, and then one in between–’

So the shops were in front of the houses?

‘Yes’, says B.

‘Yes, they opened shops in the houses too, then’, says Anon 2.

Anon adds simultaneously. ‘–Houses with just a single room, nobody had any money’.

‘Now all these’, A says, gesturing towards the more recently built multi-storey houses.

‘Yes of course they did – some sold their land, others their houses’,

B says. ‘Now it makes no difference’, says Anon quietly. ‘This colony is like that, how do I explain it to you?’

‘The smallest sign of trouble, and there is a fire, and fighting’, says B. She continues, ‘There is no one to douse it. A curfew the next day, even though the fighting went on for 17 hours. The police were aggressive too. That happened once, and then everyone started saying, take my house, please, take my house’.³⁰

The conversation, which is rooted so solidly in describing the past, moves to the present in describing the 2014 riots, and then slips swiftly back into the past when B conflates the gesture of ‘take my house’ – a common sentiment in 1984 shared by those who evacuated their homes in a hurry to escape to safety – with the events of 2014. In revisiting a recent trauma, the trauma of 1984 is invoked too, inevitably: the sites are the same, certainly, but so is the literal siting of memory. The tree under which we are sat marks the site where the past is located by the four interviewees – ‘right here’, they say repeatedly – as what Jay Winter calls a ‘site of memory’, which he defines as a place ‘where groups of people engage in public activity’ through which a shared knowledge of the past is expressed.³¹ The shops are no longer there, neither are the original houses nor most of the people who lived there but the site persists as a lived experience. Winter adds:

The critical point about sites of memory is that they are there as points of reference not only for those who survived traumatic events, but also for those born long after them. The word memory becomes a metaphor for the fashioning of narratives about the past when those with direct experience of events die off. Sites of memory inevitably become sites of second-order memory, places where people remember the memories of others, those who survived the events marked there.³²

Winter’s theory about memory is useful in as much as it allows us to re/view the site of the tree as one where narratives are re-made, but more pertinently, as one where the process of remembering is continual, informal, as in beyond the remits of formal memorialising, and casual, as in everyday, necessarily fragmented and unrecognised by the state. People who wish to remember walk up to the tree, or join our conversation, or simply loiter quietly by the area – the porosity of the process of describing allows for a fluid engagement with the site. One is free to walk in and out, and this is supported as much by the architectural layout of the gridded buildings and galis as it is by the politics of informal memory.

At this point, I turn to the second extract from the conversation, to contextualise the curious undertaking of a walk. I speak to another woman who joins us, whom I will call O. O is known to the others; they pull up a chair for her, but she refuses. She lives elsewhere in the city and is in Trilokpuri just for the day. I ask her some questions but she is evasive. Eventually, I ask:

Have you shown your children your former house?

‘Yes’, she replies.

When?

‘Right at the beginning, when we used to visit – we showed them then. It was such a beautiful house, there are not many left anymore. Now they build four, five storeys atop each house, where three or four families could easily live. Now it’s all different’.

The conversation turns to the location of her former house: B wants to know where exactly it was. They talk between themselves about the house, finding coordinates in the area to remember the house, O pointing and gesturing all the while.

Then, O says: ‘Now the heart doesn’t want to go there – then what is there to show?’

We stand not far from her former house. The proximity to the site is immense, but she cannot bring herself to walk there. The distance from the site of trauma is key for her (a feature that will repeat itself, albeit in a different fashion, in the next section) but so is the distance from a version of the house she loved and remembered, and she is careful to walk so as to maintain that distance. In all the testimonies, my interviewees bemoaned the changes made to their houses: they were so beautiful, now they’re not ours, and they’re ugly, is a recurring sentiment. The architecture comes to signify as much, if not more, than the communal loss of a community through violence.

I want to pause here to consider, briefly, this distance maintained by the description between the site and the body, and how walking promises to bridge that gap but necessarily leaves further gaps, even in its bridging. Das draws on Wittgenstein’s The Blue and Brown Books to elaborate on shared pain, or ‘how my pain may reside in another’s body’.³³ Of the sentence ‘I am in pain’ which she cites as the beginning of a Wittgensteinian language game, she writes:

Pain, in this rendering, is not that inexpressible something that destroys communication or marks an exit from one’s existence in language. Instead, it makes a claim asking for acknowledgment, which may be given or denied. In either case, it is not a referential statement that is simply pointing to an inner object.³⁴

Das is speaking explicitly of pain understood and acknowledged between bodies, as opposed to a moving body in pain at the existence and memory of a changing site, as I suggest here. The loss or remaking of language is what I wish to draw upon: according to Das, Wittgenstein’s experience of one’s pain being shared and sensed by another offers two negotiations, one of which she identifies as ‘the institution that the representation of shared pain exists in imagination but is not experienced, in which case one would say that language is hooked rather inadequately to the world of pain’.³⁵

O is familiar with the site she is trying to avoid; she has lived there, travelled there since, and does not wish to see it anymore. She is in no less pain in her attempt to keep her distance from the site. However, in describing the site, its location, the house, the directions to it from where we stand, I sense what Das calls a claim asking for acknowledgment. Walking to her former home will bring her no catharsis as she is not seeking that ground again. In being in such nearness to her home, however, and in narrating through her pain – inadequately ‘hooked’ as it may be to language – the unwillingness to walk arising as the cause of a different kind of pain-one kind of language is preferred to another, the description over the bodily encounter, the archive over the repertoire.³⁶ ‘We do not, though, so much walk through place as make places through our walking’, notes Deirdre Heddon. ‘Alongside the literal markings of places enacted by the daily habits of tramping bodies, our lived experiences of places imbue them with meanings, narrativising them’.³⁷

Walking

In Trilokpuri, I watch more Sikhs emerge from galis and streets away from the main crossroads of the gurudwara. Some people I recognise as heading back to the gurudwara. Upon abandoning my post at the crossroads and walking slightly ahead into Block-30, I find a Sikh family of a man, his wife and two children standing ahead of me. With their permission, I begin to walk with them.

We walk slowly, not quite together but not straying so far as to lose direction. The five of us stop in front of a narrow gali, framed by enormous, dull blue iron gates. Closed. Inside the gali, a constant buzz of activity: children screaming, playing gali cricket; women combing each other’s hair on woven beds–charpoys–outside flats; women drying clothes on sagging clotheslines affixed to balconies; conversations cancelling each other out; shops opening shutters; people adjusting their blankets around themselves as they hail their neighbours. We are inching towards a crisp, wintry afternoon on the last day of November 2014 in Block-30.

The husband says, ‘It is the same gali’.

‘Nothing has changed here’, the woman says.

‘Nothing at all – the houses have become bigger’, her husband agrees. ‘They were much smaller before’.

Some houses have been rebuilt?

‘Yes, several. The world has started putting locks and other things, look’, the woman says, pointing to the blue gates.

Do they come right here every year to look? Do they go inside?

No, we don’t really go home’, the man replies. ‘Not’ – he hesitates – ‘Inside’.

The woman adds, ‘We come for the Memorial, you know the Memorial that happens here? We don’t go home, though’.

So they do not come here.

‘No’, the woman says. She pauses. ‘Now they have taken the house, now what? Now they live here’.

We stand there watching – what are they watching – what am I? Only talking occasionally. However, people in the gali notice us standing away from it and stop to stare at us. We have not walked very far from the crossroads at which the gurudwara of Block-30/31 is located.

The conversation quarters itself. The couple’s children – a young girl and her older brother – begin to look bored and wander off, having asked all their questions for the moment. The couple, however, edge closer to the gali and continue to stand there for a few minutes more, the man quietly pointing out various architectural features to his wife. It is a private conversation, so I begin to move away.

‘Walk with us’, the woman says to me, as her husband walks in front. ‘He’s taking us someplace ahead’.

The crowds are milling, and the walk is as disjointed as the conversation. The man and his children walk ahead of us. They stop ahead of the mosque in the vicinity, talking quietly amongst themselves, and before long, begin to walk back. The man looks uneasily around him.

The woman tells me then that her husband was showing them the mosque we had stopped in front of.

The mosque?

‘That was where the fight happened’, she says.

The Trilokpuri Riots of November 2014?

‘No’, she says, ‘That was where it began, Chauraasi’.

We are back at the crossroads we had originally set off from. She glances nervously at the policemen gathered around the gurudwara and quickly bids me goodbye.³⁸

There are two moments on this walk that will be addressed here as crucial encounters between walking and site as experienced through memory or gestures of memory. The first is the moment of standing in proximity to the former home of the man, and attempting to talk about the past – the past as the violence of 1984 that unfolded in this site, as he remembers it, but also the past contained within and specific to the architecture and street itself. The second is the generational nature of his particular event-narrative that I am made privy to over the course of the walk; what his family is able to access is the site of occurrence and memory, not the event (which can itself be accessed, and partly, only through testimony), and any stories that were told in situ spiral out of us collectively being there, recognising the simultaneous proximity and distance of both event and home.

The tussle between being present to bear witness to the site and not wanting or being able to venture into the specificities of the site itself – to see the actual house where the man, whose family I accompany on the walk, grew up, and to remember by being there and not merely in the vicinity – is a constant one. While there are occasional moments of silence when we stand near the entrance of the gali, the conversation about the man’s past also resembles the nature of our visit: he and his wife speak around his memories of the house, and not directly of it. A number of factors may have impacted the nature of this conversation, not the least of which is my being deliberately present as a (non-Muslim, caste-privileged Hindu) ethnographer, but what I want to draw attention to here is the gap being negotiated between verbal testimonies of the violence of 1984 that have emerged as important ethnographic work over the last few decades, and these private, almost commemorative practices such as walking around the neighbourhood and trying to grasp at a memory by being present around the site.

The man and his family do not walk right up to their former home: the site that they do walk to is distinct and guarded, becoming one where he can safely watch and talk from. It is in this manner that the site itself bears witness. It offers a language of its own that supplements the memory – and thus testimony, if it comes to it – of the survivor but does not replace it. ‘In the speech act of bearing witness, language must cede to nonlanguage, to an impossibility of language’, writes William Robert. ‘It must incorporate the nonlanguage of the drowned – of the one who is the complete witness – into the language of the saved – of the one who stands and bears witness in the face of the other but does so always by proxy, as a substitute’.³⁹ Although Robert’s ideas on witnessing the archive emerge in response to the specificity of the Holocaust and are primarily concerned with the speech act of testimony, I would venture to extend this idea of witnessing as an eternal substitution to beyond the survivor-drowned dialectic, while it is true that the survivor can never speak for the absent – or testify in the manner that the absent can⁴⁰ – it is perhaps not as useful to think of their own unique forms of testimony in terms of lack.

If there is a gap, one could conceive of it in terms of the aforementioned irreconcilability between site and speech, between living out the site and testimony. How is the memory of the violence approached by walking the site again, and only circumstantially? The site testifies in a way that can attend to the speech-acts of the man concerned. The man chose to be in the vicinity of his home after 30 years; until then, he and family have made the journey to Trilokpuri for the memorial service. The gurudwara is only a five-minute walk away from where we stand but the choice to walk over and then to actively, cautiously remember is a different form of testifying to the violence event: it relies on the ‘unchanged’ site to activate the memory, even as the memory is tinged with rotated memory of perpetually renewing Islamophobic prejudices, such as the throwaway comment about the violence beginning at the mosque: the lumping of the mosque with anti-Sikh violence comes to stand in for an entire event (Chauraasi), marked also by where the woman cannot walk (her former home). In the context of present-day India where Hindutva nationalism reigns supreme, and post the anti-Muslim violence at Muzaffarnagar, these offhand communal comments gain even more charge. The site becomes a necessary form of remembering, if not its aid. The man and his wife constantly speak of the site by juxtaposing the past and the present: the gali is really the same, nothing has changed but perhaps the houses have been expanded, and now there are locks on the gate. According to Robert:

Every act of bearing witness thus carries with it an archive of that element of the unsaid under and around what is said. The act of speaking in a particular place (‘here’) at a particular time (‘now’) by a particular ‘I’ always bears the trace of that which remains unsaid. This points to testimony’s ultimate unarchivability given its performative dimension and its taking place in a threshold between inside and outside, between said and unsaid.⁴¹

If one were to consider the site – in this case, the house in the gali where the man once lived but also the neighbourhood itself – as bearing witness, then the ‘unsaid’ includes what the site itself offers in its tangible, material form, accessible only to the man who has once lived there and who now occupies a threshold of his own making. He is inside a site that allows him several points of access – verbal, sensorial, physical – to his former home but still outside it the whole time, inside a testimony of the events of 1984 that is truly his to speak but outside that of the unsaid. The woman’s attempt to describe her relationship to the place – ‘Now they have taken the house, now what? Now they live here’ – is also indicative of the nature of the unsaid; she has never lived here, and is experiencing the site vis-à-vis her husband. On her first visit here, the question she is preoccupied with is one that attests to her fully being outside of the threshold that her husband negotiates: that someone else has ‘taken’ and is now living in the house where her husband once lived and escaped from, and that there seems to be little point in visiting the house now, seemingly because of this. Contrast this with her husband’s silence over why they do not visit the house itself, and his testimony stretching so far as to say that the houses have been built over but everything else is the same.

This leads us to examine the second moment outlined in the walk; the transference of the narrative and memories to his wife and children by walking through the site. On being asked if his children know about Chauraasi, the man replies, ‘No, what do they know? They are coming here for the first time’.

His wife says, ‘I have also seen it for the first time’.

‘In thirty years, we are coming here for the first time. It has been thirty years … ’ the man trails off.

‘It was actually our children who said, papa, show us your home’, the woman replies, laughing.

It is a curious moment: the violent context of the events of Chauraasi and the circumstances under which the man had to leave suddenly seem divorced from the ‘home’ itself. If the need to fulfil their children’s desire of seeing where they have come from is what has brought them here, after 30 years, that is the focal point of the narrative: anything narrated or remembered through the course of the walk is tailored to the audience at hand.

This selective telling endows the site, once again, with a quality of liveness in that it becomes the premise to revisit a different aspect of the past. The same site can simultaneously be narrated to his children as the house where their father once lived, and as the site where the man has returned to look at after being driven away 30 years ago. If little has indeed changed in that gali in Block-30, Trilokpuri for the man and his family, excepting the size of the flats, then one is left to ponder over much that is ‘still’ left there, apparently unchanged for the man: the culture of neighbourly street life, the views from one flat directly into another because of the narrow galis, the communities in each gali still fraught with their communal differences, the particularities of kinship within communities, the manner in which news travels through the galis, the public/private dynamic that helped save and end Sikh lives in the pogrom of 1984, the people recognised and recognised by the man, the illusion of security promised by the paved, gated streets, and the curtains that still rest in doorways to secure privacy, amongst other elements (see Image 2).

Image 2 Time and memory in the gurudwara at Trilokpuri, 2014 (Photograph by author).

Hear-Tell as Re-Telling the Re-Tell

Saidiya Hartman asks, when addressing the retrieval of enslaved voices: ‘How does one revisit the scene of subjection without replicating the grammar of violence?’⁴² I want to end with a snippet of my field notes from one of my walks in Trilokpuri, holding her question in mind alongside this narration, holding in mind the gaps, pauses, ruptures, and ellipses that displace my own need to create cohesion where there is none. I met with the guardian of the gurudwara at Trilokpuri. This is how I narrated his words to myself that evening, with redactions where necessary.

We talk for an hour and a half. He checks dates with someone else [about] when all the ‘walks’ are supposed to happen. Says should have happened on 14th, 15th, 16th but has been postponed to 21st – 23rd […]. He says he’ll keep me posted. Then talks about himself, how he came to be here. Used to live in [–]. Sold eggs. Was doing so on evening of this day 30 years ago. Headed home at another man’s advice, after his crate of eggs was broken. Got saved by his neighbours. Saw petrol barrels.

[…] At one pt I say I don’t want him to talk about the violence itself since I know it’s painful for him. Happy to talk about the present, I say. He instead narrates a story about a family in block [–] which lost 11 family members.

[…] Talks about gurudwara. Blood not wiped off the walls for weeks.

Tells me about the photo exhibit marking Chauraasi in a gurudwara in central Delhi. Photos of the tyres – petrol – set to flame sequence will be there. This trope keeps coming up. How people were burnt. How he cannot forget. When I ask if it isn’t unbearable for him, if he isn’t in pain [taqleef] at seeing these things again, he says, of course there is pain, but there is also the desire to see. Wish I had the exact quote for translation but I remember thinking, that double bind. Maybe explain the narrative as well. Why it feels present, looming, even when I’m not asking for it. And what he gets by narrating, if he gets anything. Chai is served. Warm, comforting. I wonder how I will remember all this.⁴³

Conclusion

Cathy Caruth identifies the difficulty in telling-all, and the potential impact of listening to a testimony of trauma:

How does one listen to what is impossible? Certainly one challenge of this listening is that it may no longer be simply a choice: to be able to listen to the impossible, that is, is also to have been chosen by it, before the possibility of mastering it with knowledge … To listen to the crisis of a trauma, that is, is not only to listen for the event, but to hear in the testimony the survivor’s departure from it; the challenge of the therapeutic listener, in other words, is how to listen to departure.⁴⁴

Caruth lays emphasis on trauma, the political formulations of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and writing on the Holocaust, but her consideration of ‘listening to departure’ is a useful one for thinking through the narrative of 1984 that has unravelled across all the walks. What Caruth calls ‘listening to departure’ can be taken quite literally here, since walking through the site and viewing it alongside the eyes of the man and his family, if not through it, has helped to recover and recreate much of the ‘unsaid’ discussed previously, the ‘unsaid’ that has been departed from. Similarly, listening to the testimonies under the tree and being shown the whereabouts of O’s house through the walk to the exact location being carefully avoided, the walk becomes a form of perennial departure; in always being avoided, it never takes off and consequently becomes a memory in itself. Both walks are archives, of testimony and memory, but also of the site in question. The walks in the streets, and in the rooms at the gurudwara in Trilokpuri, allow for more literal departures: from displaced families in Trilokpuri, to the commemoration of martyrs and the constant moving of memories and people across the expanse of Delhi.

Listening to the descriptions – disjointed, halting, incomplete but nevertheless persistent – emerging from the relationships of sites with memories of violence undergone at them, discovered on the walks, a new form of listening and telling is borne out; listening to the site tell from its particularities. In the cases of the people I speak to at Trilokpuri – from the woman who has just been to see her home, and O who walks to avoid her former home, to the man and his family who walk to confront and avoid their home simultaneously – walking is not created from a sense of nostalgia for or misplaced belief in ‘authentic’ memory. For instance, it is irrelevant whether the first signs of the pogrom did indeed begin outside the mosque, for the man and his family in Trilokpuri, or even to identify which house exactly O tries to avoid, as the aim is not to chronicle the veracity of the events. As Patrick Duggan and Mike Wallis note:

Witnessing in the context of performance is typically second-order: we bear witness to on-stage witnessing […] not only for theatrical performance but also for direct theatre (Schechner 1992: 89–106), trauma heritage sites and performance art based on personal experience. The testimony is re-framed, the testifier re-personated.⁴⁵

The crucial insight here is how traumata encountered in site and time can be negotiated by a survivor, and the important roles played by site, descriptions and walking memory in ‘re-personating’ this process of witnessing, following Duggan and Wallis, if not fully becoming processes in the performance themselves. Walking through sites wrecked and re-made by violence, and descriptions that accompany and often stand in for the walks, could be seen as acts of remembering. As an ethnographer, the ethics of writing have been most fraught in Trilokpuri, as I not only narrate other people’s stories and private acts of memory – with permission, but nevertheless – but I also hear-tell my past self, in the present, and I enunciate from the position of the ethnographic outside, even as I am allowed in.

The dialogue between the performative act of walking as an ethnography, and its written element has been more visibly entrenched in questions of power and representation: the ethical and empirical aporia between what is written up and what has transpired for months on the street, between the narrative and the daily lived experiences between people and their visits to their former homes, is vast. ‘Walking shifts the burden of memory on to the individual on the ground, stressing the ethical dimension of remembering as an active, participatory practice’, Elissa Rosenberg writes on walking as a commemorative practice.⁴⁶ I would extend this to the practice of remembering as hear-telling too. My positioning vis-à-vis being a part of the walks is therefore more necessary to stress here. The walks produce a hear-telling of an archive of memories, sited, sighted and cited, but they become archives themselves, and contribute to a renewal of the cultural memory of Delhi’s built heritage, its violent histories, and the pedestrian politics of its everyday life.

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.

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).