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Abstract
How do survivors of violence process their experiences of trauma when they continue to live in and identify the place of the attack as their home? While narrating the 1983 Nellie Massacre, survivors create an oral map that expresses the continuation of the extreme past into their present, revealing a sense of what David Lloyd calls the ‘living on’ of survivors of an event of collective trauma. In the narratives, collected through snowball sampling and purposive sampling during my doctoral research, topographical features such as roads, houses and open fields constantly feature in the descriptions of the massacre today to reveal a consciousness of the survivors being ‘surrounded’ even decades after the attack, which also indicates the survivors’ sense of their political location in the present.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Paulomi Chakraborty, the two anonymous South Asia reviewers, the South Asia editorial team, and Kama Maclean whose comments and suggestions helped me improve this paper.
Notes
1. See Makiko Kimura, The Nellie Massacre of 1983: Agency of Rioters (New Delhi: Sage Studies, 2015); Sabita Goswami, Along the Red River: A Memoir (New Delhi: Zubaan, 2012); Hemendra Narayan, 25 Years on… Nellie Still Haunts (New Delhi: Hemendra Narayan, 2008); Sanjoy Hazarika, Rites of Passage: Border Crossings, Imagined Homelands, India’s East and Bangladesh (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2000); and Sanjib Baruah, India against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), for more details on the massacre.
2. According to the Indian Constitution, members of the Lok Sabha are elected directly from territorial constituencies in the states every five years (Article 83). If a seat becomes vacant in between the general elections, by-elections are held.
3. Diganta Sharma, Nellie 1983 (Jorhat: Ekalabya Publishers, 2007): 13.
4. Ibid.
5. Monirul Hussain, The Assam Movement: Class, Ideology, and Identity (New Delhi: Manak, 1993): 102–03.
6. Sharma, Nellie 1983, 24.
7. Ibid., 47; also see Hiren Gohain, Assam: A Burning Question (Guwahati: Spectrum Publications, 1985); Monirul Hussain, The Assam Movement: Class, Ideology, and Identity (New Delhi: Manak, 1993); and others to know more about the Assam Movement.
8. Nigel Thrift, ‘Space: The Fundamental Stuff of Human Geography’, in Key Concepts in Geography, ed. Sarah L. Holloway, Stephen P. Rice and Gill Valentine (Los Angeles, CA: Sage, 2009): 102.
9. Ibid., 103.
10. Ibid., 117.
11. See Gyanendra Pandey, Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories (Cultural Memory in the Present) (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005).
12. See Raheel Dhattiwala, Keeping the Peace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
13. Michael Rothberg, ‘Between Extreme and the Everyday: Ruth Klüger’s Traumatic Realism’, Auto/Biography Studies 14, no. 1 (1999): 93–107; 100, https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.1999.10846758.
14. Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and The Making of Modern South-Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (New Delhi: Penguin-Viking, 2008): 248; Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); E. Valentine Daniel, Charred Lullabies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
15. David Lloyd, ‘Colonial Trauma/Postcolonial Recovery?’, Interventions 2, no. 2 (2000): 212–28; 214, https://doi.org/10.1080/136980100427324.
16. Veena Das, Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996).
17. Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and Descent into the Ordinary (London: University of California Press, 2007): 48.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., 86.
20. Ibid., 103.
21. Shoah, directed by Claude Lanzmann (New Yorker Films, 1985).
22. Soshana Felman, ‘The Return of the Voice: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah’, in Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, ed. Dori Laub and Soshana Felman (New York, 1992: Routledge): 204–238, 224.
23. Lauren Berlant, ‘Thinking about Feeling Historical’, Emotion, Space and Society 1, no. 1 (2008): 4–9, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2008.08.006.
24. The narrators referred to the attackers alternately as bidrohi meaning ‘rebels’ and andolankari meaning ‘agitators’.
25. ‘Miya’ is used pejoratively to refer to Bengali-speaking Muslims, which they have, in turn, owned up to and use when referring to themselves: see Jabeen Yasmeen, ‘Bengali Muslims in Assam and “Miyah” Poetry: Walking on the Shifting Terrains of “Na-asamiya” and “Infiltrator”’, Journal of Migration Affairs 1, no. 2 (2019): 69–84, https:/doi.org/10.36931/jma.2019.1.2.69-84.
26. Interview with Mohammad Janaluddin, September 18, 2016.
27. Lloyd, ‘Colonial Trauma’, 212–28.
28. Ibid., 226.
29. Ibid., 227–28.
30. Ibid., 227.
31. Rothberg, ‘Between Extreme and the Everyday’.
32. Jakobson explains that metonymy is based upon ‘association or contiguity’: Roman Jakobson, ‘The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles’, in Metaphor and Metonymy in Comparison and Contrast, ed. René Dirven and Ralf Porings (New York: Mouton de Gruyer, rev. ed., 2002): 41–48, 46.
33. Sharma, Nellie 1983, 39.
34. Interview with Zakiruddin Munshi, September 18, 2016.
35. Kimura, The Nellie Massacre, 1.
36. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (London: University of California Press, 1980).
37. Interview with Suleiman Kasemi, September 24, 2016.
38. Interview with Afiya Khatun, September 7, 2016.
39. Interview with a group in Matiparbat, September 20, 2016.
40. Interview with an Assamese Muslim family in Polashguri, September 23, 2016.
41. To understand the complicated caste division in Assam that also affects the identity of ‘Assamese’ and ‘Assamese Hindu’, see Monirul Hussain, ‘Tribal Question in Assam’, Economic & Political Weekly 27, nos. 20/21 (1992): 1047–50; H. Srikanth, ‘Militancy and Identity Politics in Assam’, Economic & Political Weekly 35, no. 47 (2000): 4117–19, 4121–24; Yasmin Saikia, Fragmented Memories: Struggling to be Tai-Ahom in India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Jayeeta Sharma, Empire’s Garden: Assam and the Making of India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Manjeet Baruah, Frontier Cultures: A Social History of Assamese Literature (New Delhi: Routledge, 2016); among others.
42. Dhattiwala, Keeping the Peace, 135.
43. These were refrains from interviews with many of the survivors throughout my field visits.
44. This hand-woven white towel with mostly red, intricate floral motifs at both ends and with a red border has been seen as a sign of Assamese identity.
45. Interview with Mohammad Janaluddin, September 18, 2016; interview with Aksor Ali, September 16, 2016.
46. Interview with Mahen Das, September 23, 2016.
47. Interview with an unnamed woman in Indurmari, September 7, 2016.
48. Interview with Abdul Haque, September 16, 2016.
49. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian and Sarah Ihmoud, ‘Exiled at Home: Writing Return and the Palestinian Home’, Biography 37, no. 2 (2014): 377–97; 377, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24570186.
50. Interview with a group in Indurmari, September 7, 2016.
51. Interview with Nurul Islam, September 16, 2016.
52. Interview with an unnamed woman, September 7, 2016.
53. Interview with an unnamed man, September 7, 2016.
54. Interview with an unnamed man, September 7, 2016.
55. Interview with an unnamed man, September 19, 2016.
56. Interview with an unnamed man, September 16, 2016.
57. Interview with Abdul Kadir, September 16, 2016.
58. Ibid.
59. Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Remembered Villages: Representations of Hindu-Bengali Memories in the Aftermath of the Partition’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 18, no. 1 (1995): 109–29; 114, https://doi.org/10.1080/00856409508723247.
60. Interview with Haji Riyazuddin, March 10, 2016.
61. Ursula Rao, ‘Partition in Contemporary Struggles over Religious Spaces in Bhopal’, in The Partition Motif in Contemporary Conflicts, ed. S. Tewari and E. Ben-Ari (New Delhi: Sage, 2007): 297–320, 313. Pandey, in Routine Violence, refers to similar sloganeering and how the Muslim becomes extraneous to the Indian nation.
62. Shalhoub and Ihmoud, ‘Exiled at Home’, 10.
63. According to the Government of Assam, the NRC is ‘the register containing the names of Indian citizens’ and its updating refers to ‘the process of enlisting the names of citizens based on Electoral Rolls upto 1971 and 1951 NRC’: see http://nrcassam.nic.in/what-nrc.html.
64. Interview with a Tiwa man, September 22, 2016.
65. Interview with Javed Sheikh, September 16, 2016.
66. Interview with Zakiruddin Munshi, March 10, 2016.
67. Lloyd, ‘Colonial Trauma’, 226.