Amritsar 1984: A City Remembers 9781498571050, 9781498571067

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Amritsar 1984

Amritsar 1984 A City Remembers

Copyright © 2018. Lexington Books. All rights reserved.

Radhika Chopra

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London Chopra, Radhika. Amritsar 1984 : A City Remembers, Lexington Books, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5516278. Created from nyulibrary-ebooks on 2020-07-15 08:22:22.

Copyright © 2018. Lexington Books. All rights reserved.

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2018 The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data ISBN 978-1-4985-7105-0 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4985-7106-7 (electronic) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Chopra, Radhika. Amritsar 1984 : A City Remembers, Lexington Books, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5516278. Created from nyulibrary-ebooks on 2020-07-15 08:22:22.

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To my parents, Pran and Sarojine Chopra

Chopra, Radhika. Amritsar 1984 : A City Remembers, Lexington Books, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5516278. Created from nyulibrary-ebooks on 2020-07-15 08:22:22.

Contents

Prefaceix Acknowledgmentsxi Introduction: Pasts We Cannot Forget

xiii

1 Portrait of a Martyr

1

2 Seeing Off the Dead

27

3 Bazaar Divinity 

47

4 Curating the Sacred

67

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Bibliography91 Index97 About the Author

107

vii Chopra, Radhika. Amritsar 1984 : A City Remembers, Lexington Books, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5516278. Created from nyulibrary-ebooks on 2020-07-15 08:22:22.

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Preface

There’s a word in Punjabi which means disturbance or noise—raula. It’s also metaphorically used to denote periods of trouble. The partition of India and the division of Punjab in 1947 are specifically spoken of as Raula: The Partition Disturbances. Today, when we speak of partition, we know it as more than a single event, nested in myriad memories. Looking back has expanded the semantic range of raula. Extended to June 1984, when the Indian army occupied the Darbar Sahib in Amritsar, raula indexes the troubles that preceded and followed the army occupation of the sacred shrine. Over the course of time, 1984 has also been fleshed out as more and more people recount their memories of what happened. For many years, I remembered June 1984 as the year my parents made the journey down from the small hill town of Dalhousie that abuts Punjab. In the period immediately preceding their harrowing journey, the state of Punjab was under curfew. News and mobility were severely restricted, if not prohibited altogether. Rumors about militants hiding out in the hills of Dalhousie tore through the little hill town. Entry to and exit from Dalhousie were barricaded by the army. Supplies were scarce, and people were scared. Staying on in Dalhousie was not considered a “safe” option. For me, June 1984 was about the heart-in-the-mouth fear that, in my mother’s words, felt dreadfully close to her family’s flight from Lahore to Amritsar in 1947. Ironically, in 1984, it was Amritsar that was the danger zone. Later that same year, I was a volunteer with Nagrik Ekta Manch, a citizen’s initiative that came together to protest against the state sponsored riots in Delhi against Sikhs, following the assassination of Indira Gandhi, and to provide relief to the traumatized Sikhs of Delhi. In fact, the riots were not confined to Delhi. Like the Partition, the violence spread over territory and time. But what remains deeply etched in my memories of 1984 is my mother’s ix

Chopra, Radhika. Amritsar 1984 : A City Remembers, Lexington Books, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5516278. Created from nyulibrary-ebooks on 2020-07-15 08:22:22.

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x

Preface

descriptions of their June journey and what happened in Delhi between October and November 1984. To write about Amritsar, the center of so much violence, was a slow-growing idea. As I was researching and writing about political asylum seekers who fled Punjab, settling in migrant neighborhoods that gave them sanctuary, the question “what happened in Amritsar?” took root. Never having lived in Amritsar and with feeble connections to place in my family biography (my maternal grandfather’s mother’s family were traders in the city) I had little knowledge of the city. Despite my ignorance, it was clear to me that the momentous events of 1984 could never really be properly explored without mapping Amritsar and what people of Amritsar remembered of 1984. Starting in 2005, I began my own journey into the past of a city dense with memory. Some residents of the city referred to the army action in the Darbar Sahib in 1984 as raula; some referred to the actions of militants in the period leading up to Operation Bluestar as raula. By 2015, raula denoted the unfolding politics of the pardon of Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh, head of a dera (establishment) accused of blasphemy. The pardon was fiercely condemned, followed by physical clashes within the Darbar Sahib. Once again, residents of Amritsar witnessed security forces around the shrine and the surrounding bazaar. Shopkeepers said it looked and felt just like 1984. Links with the past emerged in the use of the term raula for all these events. Through language, the past came forward to shape the emotional landscape of the city in the present. In this work, I’ve primarily chosen the visual as a strand to understand the remembrance of raula. The ocular register is by no means the only one through which we might know raula. But the visual filled my eye and imagination, reaching out through portraiture, souvenirs, shop displays, even street realignments that sought to reshape remembrance. Together and separately, all these objects showed me how raula as a transitive verb could map the city and how I could understand troubles of a past that cannot be forgotten.

Chopra, Radhika. Amritsar 1984 : A City Remembers, Lexington Books, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5516278. Created from nyulibrary-ebooks on 2020-07-15 08:22:22.

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Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the help and inputs of many different people. In Amritsar, I would like to thank Professor Paramjit Singh Judge, Professor Gurpreet Bal, Professor Joginder Singh, Dr. Aziz Abbas, and other colleagues at the Guru Nanak Dev University, for the discussions that enriched my understanding of Amritsar and its cultures. I owe a deep debt of gratitude to Sardar Surinder Singh and Sardar Satpal Singh Danish, and members of their extended family, for their kindness in sharing material and the enthusiasm with which they engaged with my work. I take this opportunity to thank the Norway Research Council for the generous grant under the project “Indian Cosmopolitan Alternatives” which enabled part of the fieldwork. I would particularly like to thank Professor Kathinka Froystad who headed the project for stimulating discussions in wonderful places, laced with wine and great food. I want to thank all the members of the project team for questions that stirred things up in the best possible spirit. I owe a great deal to Professor Arvind-Pal Mandair at the University of Michigan and Professor Anne Murphy at the University of British Columbia for their insights into Sikhism and Punjabi language and culture. I also thank Dr. Yogesh Snehi at Ambedkar University and Professor Ravinder Kaur at IIT Delhi, and others in Delhi whose reflections and knowledge of Punjab were critical at different stages of this research. I would like to thank Dr. Rosy Hastir and Shri Ramesh Ramachandran, Editor, Outlook, for permission to use some of the images published in this book. My thanks to Navjit Kaur Bhambra, Kamalpreet Singh Gill, and Swati Chawla for invaluable research assistance over these last few years. xi

Chopra, Radhika. Amritsar 1984 : A City Remembers, Lexington Books, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5516278. Created from nyulibrary-ebooks on 2020-07-15 08:22:22.

xii

Acknowledgments

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To students interested in the study of Punjab at the Department of Sociology, University of Delhi, whose curiosity about the subject was exciting and deeply encouraging. Finally my thanks to Dr. Hari Sen, as always, for his immense clarity, invigorating discussion, refreshing skepticism, and unfailing good humor.

Chopra, Radhika. Amritsar 1984 : A City Remembers, Lexington Books, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5516278. Created from nyulibrary-ebooks on 2020-07-15 08:22:22.

Introduction

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Pasts We Cannot Forget

Remembrance is hard.1 It’s harder still when everyone’s recollections don’t match. We all hold on to memories of the past, of people and events who overturned or gave shape to our lives, but different people remember different things. “What happened” is an account that changes shape over time and with every storyteller. An event is written and overwritten many times, though each telling is presented as coherent and complete. At the same time, each recounting might have a little omission, a small part that is overlooked, ignored, or sometimes laid to rest. Memory has the quality of bringing the past forward, but with deletions that suit the present of the narrator and the audience. Traumatic events are harder to remember, harder to uncover, their memories more difficult to repair. They linger in sleepless remembrance, in adjudications based on conflicting accounts, in snippets remembered by successive generations. Dreadful events are sometimes deliberately remembered in commemorations of loss and in memorials that mark injury. Like memory, rituals of commemoration shift and slide across time and space, each a proxy performance of the event as people want to remember it at that moment. Who remembers is germane to the process of bringing the past into the present. The politics of the present actively intervenes in shaping what the past looks like at the time of its commemoration or the moment of its installation as memorial. This book is an exploration of how a traumatic event is remembered, commemorated, or cautiously erased. The “event remembered” is the orchestrated military assault on a sacred complex, the Sri Darbar Sahib in Amritsar, by the Indian army during “Operation Bluestar” in June 1984. It is most frequently spoken of as a deeply traumatic event evoking intense but uneasy remembrances. Different aspects of 1984 have been addressed by scholars, xiii

Chopra, Radhika. Amritsar 1984 : A City Remembers, Lexington Books, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5516278. Created from nyulibrary-ebooks on 2020-07-15 08:22:22.

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xiv

Introduction

deepening the understanding of “what happened.” Eyewitness accounts (Singh 1999) and informed journalism (Tully and Jacob 1985) captured the intensity and details of Operation Bluestar. More recently, newspaper reports outlined the involvement of the special forces unit of the British army, the Special Air Service (SAS), in advising the Indian government on strategy to remove the militants from the Darbar Sahib (Doward, October 29, 2017). Scholars like Joyce Pettigrew (1995) and Cynthia Keppley Mahmood (1996) focused attention on ordinary men and women who lived through the troubled times, and those who fought for Khalistan. Their analysis, which is based on interviews, provides a compelling picture of the “everyman” perspective of dramatic upheavals. Scholars in Punjab were equally engaged with demonstrating the roots of insurgency. The work of Puri, Judge, and Sekhon (1999) stands out; their detailed descriptive and statistical analysis of those who joined the movements strengthened the argument of Pettigrew and others (Deol 2000; Singh and Bhogal 2014) that the roots of violence lay in disruptions and dislocations within the agrarian economy. The ramifications of political unrest were not confined to Punjab. Migrant communities from Punjab who had settled across the globe were linked closely to the politics of their homeland (Axel 2001; Singh 2000). In my own work (Chopra 2011), I traced the biographies of families who sent their sons away to live among diasporic kin, fearing both militant and military violence against young men. “What happened” has been fleshed out and made legible by scholars who have engaged with the past from a number of different perspectives, each adding to what we know. Scholarly accounts apart, different forms of inscription shape remembrance. Even after a hiatus of over thirty years, maps of the besieged city and battle plans of Bluestar are preserved in the library of the Darbar Sahib2 and circulate widely on the internet, arousing shock and awe. All accounts— visual, recited, written (some even sung in lament)—speak of fierce fighting, sometimes in hand-to-hand combat, along the parikrama, the walkway around the Sarover or sacred pool of water, in the rooms surrounding the parikrama, and in the forecourt of the Akal Takht, a key building of the shrine. In the chapters that follow, I tease out the memories as they played out across different sites or registers and pay attention to the formations of forgetfulness. The visual is a key form of remembering. Punjabis have a strong visual sensibility, and significant events find frequent representation in images. Visual images and visually striking artifacts within and around the Darbar Sahib complex, and in the city of Amritsar, are key sites for an elaboration of visual remembrance. Both in ordinary public arenas like the bazaars around the Golden Temple complex and in set-apart spaces like the Central Sikh Museum (CSM) within the prescient of the shrine, the visual appears as a key

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Introduction

xv

register of remembrance. Pilgrims, tourists, and city dwellers in the shrine and the sacred city of Amritsar “see” the trauma of the past in visual form. They also “hear” memories of many pasts as they wander through the shrine or the city. The recitation of the Ardas (the congregational prayer offered at the end of each ritual day) remembers a history of martyrdom. Recited in the shrine, but broadcast over loudspeakers that face outward toward the city, the evocation of martyrs is heard by the gathered congregation of worshippers within the shrine, and by shoppers and residents. Orations of Vars, a form of heroic poetry, recited by balladeers accompanied by the insistent beat of the Dhad, a small handheld percussive instrument, accent a heroic history within the shrine while their audience sits in rapt attention listening to the evocations of an imagined past. A printed universe of modern and medieval martyrs crowds the streets as souvenirs and augments the Ardas cast as an aural canopy over the bazaar, to magnify the very nature of participation in ritual presentations of the past. In an earlier work (Chopra 2011), I detailed at some length the commemorative performance of Ghallughara Dihara, or the day of carnage,3 enacted within the Darbar Sahib complex in June every year. In evoking the event of Operation Bluestar, the commemoration brings alive the memories of that day and of certain key people who died during the military operation. In recitation and in prayer, a valorous history of Sikhism is remembered in the evocation of martyrs, presenting history as sacred, weaving historical events and political personae into rituals of remembrance. Within such a vision of history, those who inhabit the past are persons of value. Political leaders are relocated into lineages of sacred persons and violent or military conflict presented as a defense of faith. Contemporary political events like the politics of Khalistan and 1984 are densely peopled with martyrs or divine saint soldiers, and replete with ideas of valor in the face of persecution and tyrannizing state powers. The equations of past with present are both at the level of those who died in defense of the faith (or are presented as such) across different periods of time and of those in power and authority, presented as oppressors of the faith. A plaque placed at the foot of the steps leading to the Akal Takht, a key building in the sacred complex, equates the medieval Afghan raider Ahmed Shah Abdali and the modern Indian state in their acts of destroying the Takht. The story of martyrdom is continued as a visual chronicle in portraiture in the CSM. Paintings of destruction and protection of the shrine preserved in the CSM chronicle the past for modern viewers. A visit to the museum is part of a pilgrimage to the shrine during Ghallughara Dihara and viewing exhibits an act of devotion. In the midst of images and portraits of martyrs are images of Bluestar martyrs, key figures who were part of the movement for Khalistan and died during the army operation. Portrait captions draw a lineage with chronicles of martyrdom, past and present, and align oppressive

Chopra, Radhika. Amritsar 1984 : A City Remembers, Lexington Books, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5516278. Created from nyulibrary-ebooks on 2020-07-15 08:22:22.

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xvi

Introduction

medieval and modern states. Over the course of some years spent documenting and following the tenor of the Ghallughara ritual, there is a perceptible decrease in the number of visitors to the museum. Fewer people climb the steps to the galleries,to view the displays. The compression of commemoration into a single week, or even a day, emerges sharply. Compression brings its own forms of forgetfulness so that over time, the ritual and the spaces of its enactment have altered perceptibly. Despite the dwindling numbers, the museum is a space dense with commemorative objects. Spent tank shells and bullet casings are part of the museum display. Names of those who died during Bluestar are painted on the walls, somewhat reminiscent of the names of those who died defending Japan through historical periods painted within the Yasukuni Shinto shrine in Tokyo. A quieter space is the library—also a part of the Darbar Sahib complex. I will discuss the holdings of the library in greater detail in a subsequent chapter. What is striking is that despite Operation Bluestar conducted by the Indian army, small images of army personnel cleaning, clearing, and “caring” for the shrine in the aftermath of Operation Bluestar are preserved as an archive in the library. So, while photographs of bodies of slain militants and those of the Darbar Sahib in flames that are preserved in the library are evidence of the army’s complicity with the central government in conducting Operation Bluestar, the small black and white photographs of soldiers cleaning the post-battle parikrama allow an alternate tenor of recall to come into view, a closure to the memory of military violence, even perhaps a fledgling critique of militant violence. The preservation of these little counterimages is itself no small gesture of restoration given the fact that the army operation is spoken of as a desecration. But the indictments of desecration encounter family biographies of Sikhs and Punjabis who have been part of the Indian army since the 19th century. Distinguished careers in military service threaded through lineages of individuals and families need some recognition and acceptance. As an archive and a storehouse, the library is the context in and through which some traumatic memories are remembered while some are gently laid to rest. The vis-à-vis between spaces, visual forms, and material artifacts spurs inconsistent formations of memory. The shrine is a habitus of memories of 1984. Glancing upward at the skyline of the shrine, a pilgrim might see the unrepaired chattri or stone umbrella that remains as a physical mnemonic of the destruction wrought upon the sacred complex during Operation Bluestar. The juxtaposition of the skillfully repaired Akal Takht and the bullet-riddled chattri (Chopra 2011) is a continuous reminder of the army assault. However, I also see formations of forgetting in the architecture of the shrine and its surrounds. The dramatically altered approach roads of the city leading toward the shrine seem to nudge remembrance into “containable” memory to

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Introduction

xvii

re-inscribe the city as a global religious center rather than a desecrated space. The chattri, both architecturally and socially, remains a symbolic residue of a traumatic event. But perched, as it is, well above eyelevel it is an object that might just as easily be “overlooked.” Commemorative practices are not confined to the Darbar Sahib. The bazaars surrounding the shrine are replete with artifactual remembrance available as religious souvenirs that amplify the messages of memory portrayed within the shrine and its museum. Despite the overwhelming presence of shrine-centric rituals, shopkeepers have their own take on the politics of memory promoted by orthodoxy. In and through the language of things, the commemorations within the shrine in the aftermath of Operation Bluestar are both supported and critiqued. The folk of the bazaar see themselves as custodians of belief and their shops as sites of sanctity which are as significant as those within the complex of the shrine. The shrine and its memorials are not the only space or shape of remembrance. Cinema, mainstream and independent, scripts different pasts. Post 1984, films on the nationalist martyr Bhagat Singh (1907–1931), a heroic figure during the nationalist movement against colonial rule, began to be produced. The film Rang de Basanti (approximately translated as “Colors of Spring,” 2006) written, produced, and directed by the well-known Bombay cinema director Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra featuring a very popular actor, Amir Khan, in the lead linked the disconnections of a modern deracinated “young India” with the commitments and passions of a revolutionary past, evoking Bhagat Singh and other Punjabi revolutionaries as heroes. The film, released on January 26, 2006, on India’s Republic Day,4 might be seen as a template for the making of modern martyrs and a celebration of revolutionaries. Along with some other “Bhagat Singh” films made in the post-Bluestar period, most critically The Legend of Bhagat Singh (directed by Rajkumar Santoshi in 2002), Shaheed-e-Azam (directed by Sukumar Nair in 2002), Mehra’s Rang de Basanti deliberately obscured “Bluestar martyrs,” chief among them, the Khalistan leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale who died during the operation. While Jarnail Singh was not the founder of the idea for an autonomous state of Khalistan, he was certainly acknowledged as one of the movement’s key leaders. Post-memory coalesces around Jarnail Singh rather than Jagjit Singh Chauhan (who coined the idea),5 and it is the former’s image that draws the most attention and reverence. The eclipse of Bhindranwale in modern films about martyrs is therefore a comment in absentia, creating a divide between “martyrs” like Bhagat Singh who fought against colonial rule and died during the nationalist movement and those who stood for breakaway states like Khalistan. Many years later, Gurvinder Singh’s Chauthi Koot (2015) addressed the hovering terror of 1980s Punjab, interleaving a critique of militancy with the fear of police or army violence. The cinematic texts are important

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xviii

Introduction

in the making of martyrs “for” an Indian nation-state, but also significant in carving out the transformation of men from “terrorist” to “martyr” in the aftermath of revolution. It is within this paradigm of nationalist martyrs that visual discourse places modern martyrs of Khalistan and Sikhism, creating a joint heroism of militant-martyrs, but also posing questions of legitimacy and comparison between rebellious men. The portrayals of Bhagat Singh in souvenir art and at various state-supported functions (his image appears routinely on posters for blood donation camps) unequivocally establish Bhagat as a nationalist who gave his blood “for” the nation. There is greater ambiguity around the remembrance of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. His investiture as martyr in various visual registers is discussed in the chapters that follow. Remembrance travels. Commemorative “Never Forget 1984” rituals performed by migrant communities link the diaspora to the events in Amritsar creating networks across space, kindling distinct politics of remembrance. The “past” for a diasporic community, however, loops around diverse strands of memory. For migrant Sikhs, the return of sacred arms of the tenth Guru, Guru Gobind Singh, by the decedents of Lord Dalhousie in December 1965 was and is marked as a significant event (Murphy 2009; 2015 57). The return of the arms of the Guru by the great-granddaughter of Lord Dalhousie, Lady Edith Broun-Lindsay, was a solemn event. The arms and other relics of the Guru had come into the possession of Lord Dalhousie sometime after the Second Anglo-Sikh War of 1848–1849, and the annexation of Punjab (India Office Library, Select Materials Shelf-mark Photo 31). The arms were received and displayed at the Indian High Commission before being flown back to India where they were met with a full Sikh guard of honor on parade at the international airport in New Delhi, then called Palam Airport. The ceremonial reception of these arms by the Indian government was an important moment for migrants in the UK to commemorate a connection with Punjab. The journey in reverse of other relics has been as important for migrants. Bringing a khanda or double-edged sword from the tosh khana of the Golden Temple to be placed in the Southall gurudwara at Havelock Road, in west London, was an equally significant moment of symbolic goods moving along migrant networks. Within this discourse of connection, and the value placed on sacred relics and sacred spaces in creating and maintaining identity, the remembrance of the past overlooks the general suspicion of sacred objects as a challenge to the omniscient scriptural “word.” The photographic record of the “travel” of things suggests the many levels at which memory animates different readings of faith. An equally striking, though more contemporary, instance of the nomadic nature of memory is a painted representation of the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her two Sikh bodyguards as revenge for Operation Bluestar that hangs in a gurudwara in the town of Novellara, in Reggio Neil Emilia,

Chopra, Radhika. Amritsar 1984 : A City Remembers, Lexington Books, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5516278. Created from nyulibrary-ebooks on 2020-07-15 08:22:22.

Introduction

xix

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Figure 0.1  The assassination of Indira Gandhi, Painting, Gurudwara Noveralla, Italy. Photograph courtesy Rosy Hastir, 2011.

Emilia-Romagna in Italy (Figure 0.1). The caption remembers the assassins as “shaheed” or martyr brother, and reads “Shaheed Bhai Satwant Singh, Bhai Beant Singh.” The image might be viewed as a painted counterpart of heroic ballads, the Vars (sung in the Darbar Sahib on the commemorative anniversaries of Operation Bluestar), a parallel made apparent by the verse at the bottom of the painting “Indira, Takht Akal, Akal da hai, hamla karan lagiyan, na aiyan dar unnu, Beant Singh-Satwant Singh … ne, bhari … ditta hai kar tannu” The verse relates the caption to poetic laments that accompany the images of the destroyed dome of the Akal Takht available in the bazaar spaces of the city of Amritsar. Images like these circulated within the diaspora; whatever their provenance, their circulation is transformative of the politics of how home itself was envisioned in diaspora imaginings. In transnational commemoration, visual images and vivid material artifacts play as evocative a role as they do during Ghallughara Dihara in Amritsar. The transnational evocation of Operation Bluestar is a public performance of trauma and the theatrics of exhibition and display a form of witnessing the past. In London, for example, every year in the first week of June “Never Forget 1984” processions wind their way through the streets of central London, through Hyde Park, culminating in Trafalgar Square. The processions interleave religious idioms with political symbolisms to reach out to transnational audiences and international media. Placards and posters carried in procession are laid on the steps of India House (the Indian High Commission) after candlelit vigils.

Chopra, Radhika. Amritsar 1984 : A City Remembers, Lexington Books, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5516278. Created from nyulibrary-ebooks on 2020-07-15 08:22:22.

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Introduction

The procession I witnessed in 2006 was headed by the Panj Piyareh, the five ritual elect, who marched barefooted in full ritual regalia into Trafalgar Square, catering perhaps to the international media who gathered to capture the visually striking, exotic-looking men in their orange turbans and white chogas (long shirts). Following closely behind them, however, were turbaned pallbearers, bearing black coffins on their shoulders. Each pallbearer has his mouth bound with a patka, a cloth usually worn under the turban to bind the hair neatly; in the procession, the patka is re-inscribed as a gag muffling free speech. The printed legend on the patka-as-gag reads “The Dead Have No Voice.” Coupled with a black armband, the act of bearing the coffins in silence merges protest and mourning in a single moment, and becomes a way of keeping the issue of loss alive. The coffins I saw were ritually laid out in the park, in the form of an art installation, around which protesters moved as mourners, telescoping installation with performance, art with ritual. I want to dwell briefly on the coffin, an emotive symbol producing for those who bear it and those who view it the troubling issue of remembering Operation Bluestar, interleaved with the remembrance of home. Coffins as material symbols are affective objects that convey not just ideas, but communicate and evoke emotion. Despite the fact that coffins are not part of material cultures in Indic mortuary ritual, empty coffins are increasingly carried in procession in “Never Forget” rallies. In the London procession of 2006, the coffin was strategically used as a global symbol to concretize death and mourning. But, as I see it, the coffin as material object symbolizing “trauma” for immigrant audiences has its own story. The story goes back into migrant histories of exclusion and loss borne by migrants in the UK. In 1979, riots broke out in Southall. The immigrants objected to an election meeting in the Southall Town Hall held by the National Front, a neo-Nazi party, with a strong racist agenda and an anti-immigrant ideology. Local community leaders protested and requested the police to prevent the meeting from being held in a neighborhood inhabited by exactly those whom the National Front sought to expel or exclude from the British polity and nation. The choice of the Town Hall located in High Street right in the heart of the largely migrant neighborhood was deliberately provocative and everyone knew this. But the police and other officials argued that their job was to protect a more general principle—that of free electioneering at any location, a principle that lay at the heart of British democracy. They could not take away anyone’s right to meet and speak anywhere. In the course of the protests that took a violent turn, a 33-year-old activist of the Anti-Nazi League, Blair Peach, who had come to Southall to take part in the protests against the National Front and its policies, was beaten to death by the horse-mounted Special Patrol Group of the Metropolitan Police. The death of Blair Peach was mourned throughout Southall. His coffin was carried

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Introduction

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by South Asian immigrants through the streets of the neighborhood and everyone came out to witness the procession and bless the dead boy, in their own familiar language of gestures—they touched the coffin in small acts of blessing and remembrance. The attitudes toward the coffin in the 1979 funeral procession for Blair Peach, the young Irish school teacher killed in the riots in Southall, and the coffins borne in the Never Forget processions suggest an engagement with being paraya—the other who is also a stranger (Brah 1999); but coffins are also objects of thought that make people reflect on who they are and where they belong. The single coffin of Blair Peach clearly evoked a sense of sorrow. In her moving essay “The Scent of Memory” (1999), Avtar Brah reflects on racial violence and migrant imaginations; Brah dwells on the meaning of the death of Blair Peach, bludgeoned to death by the mounted police in what have famously come to be known as the “Southall Riots.” She writes:

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I saw older Asian women file past his coffin, calling him “put” (my son) as tears streamed down their agonized faces. He was no “outsider,” as far as they were concerned, although they did not know him. He was very much “our own,” laying his life down for a future where racist and fascist activity would not stalk their neighbourhood. The women’s lament was no superficial gesture of sentimentality, as some forms of “hard politic” might maintain. It was a profound expression of love and inclusion. (Brah 1999, 19)

The coffin of the white school teacher became a way for the community to reflect upon itself. Like the Balinese cockfight, it was a moment when a connection to a place was realized and made apparent to everyone who carried the coffin of the dead boy or those who walked in procession, or those who blessed the coffin as it passed them. The boy in the coffin was apna, a son or a brother, and everyone mourned him collectively (Brah 1999). An emotional connection turned to a political claim on the very streets where the violence of exclusion had been ferociously imposed through barricades, mounted police, and batons. For the migrant residents of Southall, carrying the coffin and blessing the dead white Irish boy was at once a gesture of inclusion converting the paraya to apna, as well as a symbolic claim upon the streets and space of the neighborhood as their home. It was in and through the affective language of symbolic gestures that a sense of otherness was challenged and a form of belonging reclaimed. The coffin of the Irish boy produced a moment of self-recognition for the community. The coffins carried in the Never Forget 1984 processions are more politically purposive. There is a strategic garnering of symbols that reach out to international media and to international laws, simulating through the use of symbols like coffins a charter of demands addressed toward India and the

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Introduction

UK. In the face of new immigration regimes that regulate and severely curtail the entry of migrants into Europe and the UK, as well as the reassignment or re-categorization of asylum seekers as “migrants for economic reasons,” the rights of residence, work, and citizenship are no longer as easily available. Those who continue to claim the status of political refugee must find a more public forum to raise their demand. Those who participate in the Never Forget processions each year keep alive the claims of political asylum. They must be given a home beyond India, these coffins seem to claim, for in India they have none—post 1984, their homes are “dead.” The Never Forget coffins are thus both empty and full. They are full of the imagined collective corpses of those killed in the army action in Amritsar and the Delhi riots which cannot be forgotten. But the coffins are also empty of any sense of home, a home that has become ghair ajnabi, completely strange, opaque, and unknowable. The loss of home is mourned in mute silence. Mimetically replicating funerary practices of the host state (bearing coffins) but evoking the sense of collective or community mourning familiar to Sikh and Hindu mourning practices, the coffin bearers suggest themselves as a community without a home. It is the death of home perpetrated by Operation Bluestar which is mourned, and it is home that is the corpse in the coffin. Though people participate in June of every year to remember a past loss, or mourn the destruction of the shrine, Ghallughara Dihara in Amritsar, and its transnational counterpart, the “Never Forget” rallies (enacted on a Sunday in the first week of June by Sikh diasporic communities across the globe), are curtailed. Trimming time for commemoration enables the possibility of putting the past behind. Only certain aspects of an event are possible to remember in the course of a single day or in one procession. Of course, the tenor of remembrance does not remain static; and what might be emphasized from one year (or one place) to the next will not be identical. Dispersal has its own coherence. The coffins of 1984 may seem specific; but given the traverse of memory, they may move across remembrance of different traumatic events. For me, the very fact of condensing time provides the Sikh community a means to disassociate from the vicious violence of modern militant discourses, while still retaining the value of Khalsa identity (a historically significant militant and militaristic identity formation, as Oberoi has so evocatively discussed in his work on the construction of religious identity (Oberoi 1994)). During the course of an interview in 2014, a custodian of a gurudwara in the west London neighborhood of Southall told me that some photographs of militants that hung in the gurudwara in the immediate aftermath of 1984 had fallen down, and their broken glass frames had not been repaired. The damaged images lay in a forgotten corner, no longer on view, no longer etched into memory. For those who lived under the everyday threat of violence (scripted as a palpable presence in Gurvinder Singh’s Chauthi

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Introduction

xxiii

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Koot), remembrance and mourning might always vacillate between memories of the destruction wrought by military action and uncertainty and fear of fundamentalism. Each commemorative moment, presented as a complete and absolute “image” of a total or intact universe of the event, also becomes a moment at which some aspect of memory is laid to rest as a forgetting. The tussle between the insistence on remembering and the need to forget is what this book is about. Outlining what is remembered I have included the significance of diasporic memorialization of 1984. In the chapters that follow, however, my perspective is narrower. I concentrate on the landscape of memory around a single shrine—the Darbar Sahib, the Golden Temple complex, in the city of Amritsar. It is a paradigmatic space of remembrance. Despite that, there has been surprisingly little attention paid to the vis-à-vis between closely contiguous spaces of the city and the shrine, and their kinship to memory. What might a painted portrait in a museum have to say to a printed souvenir? Together and separately, how might these images orchestrate formations of memory? What is the penumbra of an image in a museum as it is “carried” in recollection and reminiscence? What might a small plastic vinyl image stuck on the back of a taxicab say to the portrait hung with such reverence within the sacred precincts of the shrine? In the chapters of this book, I enter a singular and demarcated space; but in doing so, I see the visual cross-referencing between formal spaces of the shrine, and more open-ended spaces of shops in the bazaar. Each space, and the objects within, creates a habitus of remembering. Equally, each is a place where the politics of remembering and the need to forget tip the balance of what is remembered creating their own formations of memory and forgetting. NOTES 1. An earlier version of this chapter titled “1984—Disinterred Memories” was first published in the journal Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory, Special Issue, 1984, 11: 3. 2015, pp. 306–315 (Taylor & Francis, Routledge). 2. The shrine is formally called the Darbar Sahib (the Divine Court); but it is more frequently, and colloquially, referred to as the Golden Temple, referring to the gold-plated roof of the Harmandir Sahib that forms the “spiritual” heart of the sacred complex. Most websites and tourist brochures refer to the entire complex as Golden Temple. In the chapters that follow, I use the formal name of the shrine, the Darbar Sahib. Generally, the term in transliteration is “Darbar.” The use of the “a” in Darbar is odd, given the use of the vowel “u” rather the “a” in the transliteration for Punjab. In personal communication Arvind-Pal Mandair, editor of the journal Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory, felt that though “Durbar” sounds closer to the Punjabi, the term “Darbar” remains is the more general transliteration, possibly

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Introduction

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because of the way Punjabi phonetics developed. Others who are better versed than I in Punjab’s language and culture, felt that the vowel “u” in Punjab has as much to do with how the word “pun” and “pan” are pronounced in the English language (Anne Murphy, personal communication) as it does with convention. 3. When referring to two events in medieval Sikh history, the term ghallughara is usually translated as “carnage.” In post-1984 discourse, the translation draws from Holocaust memorials. Operation Bluestar and the anti-Sikh Delhi riots are translated in the protest literature as “genocide.” During the course of interviews conducted in June 2007, 2010, and 2015, the commemorative ritual was spoken of as Ghallughara Dihara. In conversational Punjabi, the word dihara is the colloquial term for “day” (daily wages are referred to as dihari), extended to “anniversary.” Interestingly, many diaspora scholars whom I met at different conferences speak of the commemoration as Ghallughara Divas. The latter term Divas is common to both Hindi and Punjabi, to denote a special or set-apart day. 4. Almost immediately after independence in 1947, the Constitution of India was adopted in 1949. It came into effect on January 26, 1950, replacing the Government of India Act of 1935. The “birth of the Republic” is celebrated on the twenty-sixth day of January of every year with a parade, presided over by the president of India and invited heads of states from around the world, and most importantly, a display of military hardware. 5. Prior to 1984, Jagjit Singh Chauhan established a Khalistan House in London, and issued currency and postage stamps of the new nation. Following Operation Bluestar, he announced a government in exile.

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Chapter 1

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Portrait of a Martyr

In June 2012 national dailies reported an uproar in the Punjab Legislative Assembly over the proposed building of a memorial in remembrance of those who died in June 1984 within the Darbar Sahib complex.1 Newspapers carried photographs of the five head priests of the five takhts,2 or “seats” of Sikhism, laying bricks to denote intent. Many claimed that building the memorial within the Darbar Sahib would destabilize the hard-won peace finally achieved in the aftermath of militancy that had traumatized the state for almost thirty years. The Punjab chief minister responded to the uproar against the plan, assuring agitated legislators that the memorial would be a gurudwara where a copy of the Scriptural text, the Guru Granth Sahib, would be placed and there would be no photographs of anyone. He also assured the assembly that it would be dedicated as a yaadgar—a memorial—to all those who died during Operation Bluestar. The statement by Prakash Singh Badal, the chief minister at the time, specifically demarcated three objects of anxiety—the style of the memorial, what would be placed inside, and to whom it would be dedicated. The swiftness with which he responded indicated the more generalized anxiety that surrounds memorials and remembrance of this militant and violent period in the modern history and politics of Punjab—and indeed, of the Indian nationstate—and the political need to stabilize the memories of the period. The fear that this memorial would undermine authorized and carefully orchestrated memories lay at the root of the ruckus in the legislative assembly. The uproar made no reference to the commemorations already performed within the sacred complex. In fact, over a period of time the performance of rituals of remembrance were conducted by the Shiromani Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee (SGPC), the body in charge of historic gurudwaras.3 For example, honorific gifts (siropa) were offered by gurudwara authorities to the kin of 1

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Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. The Indian state did not censure these rituals; further, prohibitions on “unlawful assembly” imposed around the vicinity of the shrine were lifted. Perhaps part of that permission or deliberate obliviousness lay in the understanding that the performance was confined and “limited” within a time frame (ghallughara takes place in the first week of June every year) and would not liquefy into toxic politics. Before and after Ghallughara Dihara, memories could dwindle, or might even fade with time. A built memorial was a different matter altogether. Once built, it would remain etched on the sacred landscape, always arousing emotion, comment, and remembrance. Nevertheless, despite the vociferous objections, less than a year after the first reports appeared, the structure was completed and the “inaugural” ritual performed on the anniversary of Operation Bluestar. The new octagonal structure built of polished marble, was engraved and embellished in the pietre dure style. Located across the sarovar from the Harmandir, the memorial’s inauguration captured newspaper headlines once again; both Indian and international media focused on the controversy aroused by the building. The Guardian went so far as to headline its news report “Sikh Golden Temple Memorial Reopens Old Wounds in India.” The columnist went on to suggest that “this was no ordinary shrine (and the) involvement of hardline groups worries many moderate Sikhs” (Burke, The Guardian, Amritsar, Tuesday October 2, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/oct/02/sikh-golden-temple-memorial-india, Accessed May 20, 2015). The anticipated photographs alluded to in the protests by legislators and cited in the chief minister’s assurance were not there. But an image of the militant leader Bhindranwale appeared on the face of a clock placed within the memorial. Within a matter of days, the clock was removed from the memorial by the gurudwara authorities. Despite reassuring statements and hurried removals, the legend above an archway of the Gurudwara Y ­ aadgar Shaheedan (Memorial Gurudwara of Martyrs) indubitably orients the memorial toward “Shaheed Sant Giani Jarnail Singh Khalsa Bhindranwale,” (Learned Martyr Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale) and only secondarily commemorates the “samuh shahidan,” or all the others who had died during the army assault (Figure 1.1). To understand why the face on the clock and the martyr named in the inscription of the memorial archway are thought to be particularly problematic it is important to unravel—at least in some measure—the “pre-history” of this memorial. Why has this memorial created such a stir? Memorials that mark contentious events become controversial because they dispute official narratives of events (Young 1993) and expose “the tension between established commemorative practice and emergent political concerns” (Zerubavel 1995, 147). Controversy and commemoration walk

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Portrait of a Martyr

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Figure 1.1  Inscription at the entrance to the new martyr’s memorial, Darbar Sahib, May 2013. Photograph courtesy of the author.

hand in hand during rituals performed at the site of these memorials. Ritual performances and physical memorials conjointly become a chronicle, enunciating what is to be remembered or eclipsed (Blair 2004). As a manifestation of the past, a memorial is deeply entrenched in the present and its meanings continuously opened through the dialectics between flexible pasts and volatile presents that reconfigure them (Battaglia 1992). Rituals of commemorations aside, there is also the materiality of a memorial. A plaque, a shrine, a Festschrift or a memorial lecture, are purposive and “active,” but also distinctive in their form; the manner in which each evoke or elide memory is not identical. A Festschrift is likely to be a reflective remembrance, a memorial lecture might be an ardent tribute. As a mode of inscription, the laying of bricks for a memorial gurudwara within the Darbar Sahib complex in 2012 was purposive. It actively sought to orient builders and believers toward two sets of sacred spaces and simultaneously to weave these spaces together. As an imagined architectural text, the controversial memorial gurudwara is tethered to the built environs of the Darbar Sahib and its treasured memories. But it is also disruptive because it exceeds the space within which it is located. The uproar generated by the mere act of brick-laying gestures toward the capacity of a built memorial to provoke, subvert, and alter the terms of remembrance. Visiting the yaadgar today, it is evident that it has transcended its singularity and vigorously reorients remembering and forgetting. The commemorative performances of Ghallughara Dihara across local and transnational spaces presaged the act of brick laying for the construction

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4

Chapter 1

of the physical memorial. The Ghallughara Dihara, a post-1990s commemorative ritual inserted into the ceremonial calendar described and discussed in detail in my earlier work (Chopra 2011), produced the Darbar Sahib as a memorial space enfolding an entire community. The act of brick laying diluted this claim, disputing the inclusiveness of ghallughara, seeming to contend that the ritual as enacted within the Darbar Sahib was in fact a “partial account” that accentuated certain memories of loss as vital while deliberately casting out others as unwanted. The insinuation of the partial quality of ghallughara remembrance, and the suggestion that Ghallughara Dihara was “not enough” to commemorate the enormity of the carnage, generated demands for more comprehensive memorialization. The charge of incompleteness emanated from, among others, supporters of Khalistan still active in Punjab well after 1984. The allegations of the shortfalls of the ritual also emerged from the Indian state. The Indian government led by the Congress Party in the immediate aftermath of 1984 emphasized the injuries and the death of soldiers during Operation Bluestar. More significantly, two memorials were constructed in Delhi in memory of Indira Gandhi, one at her home where she was assassinated on October 31, 1984, by two Sikh bodyguards and the second at the site of her cremation along the banks of the Yamuna.4 State-orchestrated constructions and commemorations made the double-sited memorials for the assassinated Prime Minister Indira Gandhi the focus of state attention. Both memorials pit these spaces and anniversaries against the memories evoked within the commemorative ritual of Ghallughara Dihara that dwelt on deaths of Sikhs. Very soon after 1984, another thread of remembrance emerged. The widows of men killed in the 1984 anti-Sikh Delhi riots that followed in the wake of the assassination of Indira Gandhi professed a victimhood that could not be encased with Bluestar memorialization. Within a year of the inauguration of the Yaadgar Shaheedan in the Darbar Sahib, a plaque for a memorial to the Delhi riot victims was installed in June 2013 (again amid intense controversy) in the Rakabganj Gurudwara in central Delhi. Despite the fact that the majority of killings of Sikhs happened in East Delhi, the choice of Rakabganj in the central zone of the city as a place of remembrance of a particularly horrifying event in Indian political history is important, for the gurudwara literally faces the Parliament of India, and forces upon the Indian political imagination the right to mourn forgotten victims and their histories. The neighborhood where the widows were provided housing in the aftermath of the Delhi riots became a particularly emotive site of remembrance. Quite apart from remembrance at the specific location of the Darbar Sahib therefore, commemorations at spatially dispersed mnemonic theaters accentuated discrete threads in memories of the event and the period. Quite apart

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Portrait of a Martyr

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from the form of the commemorations, what was, and is, remembered at each site is discrete and distinct, each site metaphorically turning its back upon the other, addressing dissimilar audiences of mourners. The focus in this chapter is on the controversies aroused by memories of and commemorations for Khalistan’s key leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale who embodied a compelling charisma but whose memory still arouses unease, as the newspaper headlines and the uproar among legislators suggest. When I began following the ghallughara commemorations within the Darbar Sahib complex in 2007, it was apparent to me that the ritual remembrance of Operation Bluestar at the time made little reference to Bhindranwale who, along with some of his key supporters, was killed during the army operation. In part, the absence of commemoration had to do with the fact that for many years following his death in Operation Bluestar, the Indian state prohibited any formal commemoration for him (or for Khalistan) or the construction of a memorial in his name. Even more than state prohibition, however, it seemed to me the continual allusion to the destroyed Akal Takht as the singular focus of ghallughara commemorations entailed the simultaneous eclipse of any competing focus; the Takht was the paramount center of mourning which could not be shared or tempered by anything else. It also seemed to me that part of “overlooking” Bhindranwale was the result of the dilemma that remembering him posed to many within the Sikh community. Living under the fear of militant violence, ordinary people had kept their mouths shut and their thoughts to themselves. The subsequent “forgetfulness” of Bhindranwale was kindled by the memory of that fear. No one seemed quite certain what constituted Bhindranwale’s legacy or how to remember him. Observing the rituals that were inserted in the ceremonial calendar of the Darbar Sahib, it was apparent to me that remembrance of the destruction of the sacred complex, enunciated in a familiar language of rituals and in museum portraiture, relegated Bhindranwale to the side lines of memory. Irresolution about what constituted remembrance of Bhindranwale, around whom homage and allegation abounded, produced idiosyncratic commemorative forms. In the summer of 2007 a protest against the head of a sect, Ram Rahim of the Dera Saccha Sauda,5 was an occasion to circulate CDs of Bhindranwale’s speeches (Baixas and Simon 2008). Demands for political asylum in the UK have frequently projected his image as an embodiment of political dispossession (Chopra 2011, 39). An ambient fear of militancy, coupled with the anxiety of what memorializing him might mean underlay his legacy. Consequently, when the bricks for a memorial were laid in the Darbar Sahib in 2012, over a quarter century after his death, chaos reigned. A contest over commemoration, overtly focusing on “styles” of remembrance but underwritten by apprehension of unrest seem germane to this controversy. Legislators feared that evoking Bhindranwale would be inflammatory and

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6

Chapter 1

having his photograph within a protected sacred space would confer upon his memory the potential to legitimate militant violence and convert it to heroic history. The chief minister’s publicly announced prohibition of photographs in the proposed memorial needs to be understood as recognition of the complexity of remembering Bhindranwale. The prohibition might perhaps also be viewed as a declarative challenge to the priests who laid the bricks that they could go so far but no further and the state still retained the right to forbid specific objects and artifacts from being placed in the memorial gurudwara. The statement, vacillating between warning and appeasement, could be construed as an acknowledgement of the problem of asserting state control within a sacred space. Despite the unmistakable marks of the military assault within the shrine, the state trod gingerly, wary of the recollections that remember the bloodshed to this day. There is another dimension to the chief minister’s assurance that photographs would be prohibited in the new memorial. His words hinted at an inadvertent acknowledgement of the popularity and power of photographs of Bhindranwale to arouse emotion. By 2012, images of the controversial leader were already circulating in the bazaars of Amritsar. The possibility of such images moving from bazaar spaces to sacred shrines was clearly unsettling, for the bazaar view of the sacred is unlikely to follow prescribed paths of memory. The challenge this memorial offers therefore exists at various registers: for the Indian state the challenge is how to allow remembrance without putting itself in the dock for a state-supported pogrom against Sikhs in Delhi. For the orthodox establishment of the Darbar Sahib, the test is how to contain Bhindranwale within a nontoxic discourse of martyrdom and to restrain the act of commemoration within predictable limits, by merging him with all other Bluestar martyrs and denying him an exclusive place in collective memory. For believers of the faith, commemoration is itself the challenge, for it poses the question of how to move beyond the experiences of a violent past and still celebrate rebellious passion embedded in the tenets of Nanak’s game of love espoused in the scriptural verses “Jau tau prem khelan ka chao. Sir dhar tali gali mori aao” (If you want to play the game of love, approach me with your head on the palm of your hand; Guru Granth Sahib 1412; Fenech 1997, 630), and “maranu munasam suridm hakku hai” (O people, death is not called bad if one knows how to die, blessed is the death of heroic men Guru Granth Sahib 579; Fenech 1997, 631). FORMS OF REMEMBRANCE Germane to anxiety is material form. The fact that the memorial was to take the form of a gurudwara was central to the issue of remembering

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Portrait of a Martyr

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Bhindranwale. Evocative of usurpations that Weber spoke of so eloquently in his discussions of city-states, illegitimacy, and domination,6 the usurpation of sacred space and seizure of memory sets apart the birth of this memorial from other, formally sanctioned, sacred structures. For in its material form this is a gurudwara within a gurudwara, a shrine within a shrine. It need not have been a gurudwara. In Sikhism, gurudwaras have their own particular status as spaces where the divine is glimpsed. In the scriptural religion of Sikhism, sacred texts are housed within gurudwaras—or “gateways” (dwara) to the divine gurus. The Darbar Sahib, with its eponymous Golden Temple, is clearly a gateway to the divine gurus. Other structures within are meant as to be understood as contributing without competition to the locus of absolute authority. Though gurudwaras and takhts, as seats of religious authority, are places for acknowledged shaheeds or martyrs who have a special place in Sikhism, martyrs are ritually remembered in distinctive ways. Within the Darbar Sahib complex, there are spots that mark medieval martyrs, most prominent among them, Baba Deep Singh, said to be the founder of the Damdami Taksal under the instruction of the tenth Guru (Judge 2014, 373). For many years there was a Nishan Sahib, a symbolic flag, at the site where Baba Deep Singh’s head was laid.7 Legend has it that he was beheaded elsewhere but rode toward the Harmandir Sahib carrying his head in his hand before laying it down within sight of the shrine. Subsequently, a marble platform was built to mark the spot. By 2015, a built structure with Baba Deep Singh’s figurine housed in a glass case marked the memorial spot.8 Commemorative days of martyrs are important sites for remembering shaheed. For Sikhs, the recitation of Ardas, the prayer to divine authority that marks the end of any religious occasion, is the most spectacular form of remembrance. The grace and virtues of Gurus and martyrs alike are “remembered” in Ardas which is collectively recited in a ritually specified fashion, facing the scriptural text with folded hands. Etymology links the prayer to the Persian term for petition, arz-dasht, so that the Ardas is simultaneously supplication and application. Emerging from a religion born out of ferment and resistance to the imperial Mughal state, its medieval gurus or spiritual spokesmen were deemed saint soldiers, a key concept in Sikhism since the 15th century (Dhawan 2011; Fenech 1997, 2001; McLeod 1995). In the same vein, Sikh shaheed who died in defense of the faith provide testimony of their sahadat, their faith, with their blood. Sacred space shared by scripture and shaheed imagine the latter as endowed with a powerful commitment to the Sikh faith, its doctrines, symbols, and its Gurus (Fenech 1997). The Ardas is a particularly significant spiritual text to remember martyrs. While some aspects of the recitation are mandatory, variant versions exist and within them “personal or community intercessions are offered. They are usually brief and follow no set text” (McLeod 2009, 19).

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8

Chapter 1

Speculatively speaking, I would imagine that part of the unease generated by the memorial gurudwara would have centered on the possible evocations and petitions of the Ardas offered within this memorial shrine to rival the formality of the Ardas recited in the forecourt of the Akal Takht that has been the focus of ghallughara commemoration. Sikh Gurus and martyrs are both linked to histories of religious persecution and political resistance. The critical difference in the vis-à-vis between Gurus and martyrs is the closure of the line of succession of Gurus in 1708, and the transference of sovereign authority to the scriptural text.9 With the closure of succession, Babas (mendicants and ascetics), Pirs (Sufi mystics), Sants (revered heads of religious organizations), and other religious heads of sects and institutional deras, or establishments, constitute the mobile terrains of religious observance as producers of piety. Newly minted martyrs are placed within this dynamic sacred topography. Highly valued in Sikhism, well beyond the medieval period, martyrs continue to be created in response to contemporary politics or social conditions. Like Janamsakhis, the testimonies of Nanak’s life, the chronicles of martyrs become critical texts to institute treasured persons. Martyr chronicles are carefully assembled, with images and symbols that hark back to recognizable historical landscapes, while incorporating newer events. Some visual representations approximate the mazhbi tasveeran or religious portraits of Sants, Babas, and Pirs. It’s possible to argue perhaps that just as Janamsakhis or hagiographies of Guru Nanak become synecdochical for all gurus who appear in scriptural referencing as “Light of Nanak,” some historical figures like Baba Deep Singh became a synecdoche for martyrs in general, an amplification supported by his religious portraits or mazhbi tasveeran. Even more interestingly, images of shrines appeared as an allegory for martyrdom. Baba Deep Singh (the first head of the Damdami Taksal) hand-wrote copies of the Granth for distribution; his tasveer, or portrait, available as souvenir posters, show him sitting on the walkway of the Darbar Sahib, the scripture open before him, and the golden-domed Harmandir etched behind him. The importance of the pairing of the martyr with the shrine cannot be underestimated as I hope to show later in this chapter. Representations of martyrs draw on this manufacture of charisma in the printed medium of the poster, or other pictorial representations, posed against the place of their martyrdom (Frembgen 1998; Bilu and Ben Ari 1992) or sites that are significant in their biographies. Mazhbi tasveeran in their printed or painted form become objects of veneration, creating a close relationship between devotee and martyr, who touch the tasveer with their foreheads or hang them in homes in special set-apart spaces on walls. Sold at shrines or during days of commemoration, chronicles, posters, artifacts, and souvenirs become the stuff of pious observances to tangibly demonstrate belief.

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As symbolic and sacred objects, such representations acquire the power to bestow blessings and create an animation toward specific local events or places. Not necessarily organized, this bricolage of souvenir tasveers reconfigure unconnected memories into utterances of commitment but also of social disaffection (Margry and Sanchez-Carretero 2011, 4). Well before the bricks were laid, images of Bhindranwale in posters, calendars, vinyl transfer graphics for windows and vehicles appeared across various public spaces as “grassroots memorials” (Margry and Sanchez-Carretero 2011) circulating during transnational commemorations, or distributed as pamphlets denouncing the sectarian head of the Dera Saccha Sauda (Baixax and Simon 2008) discussed above, creating an aural and pictorial terrain for the making of Bhindranwale as martyr.

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MARTYRS IN THE CENTRAL SIKH MUSEUM Pictorial souvenirs of martyrs are one form of grassroot memorial that give shape to the stories of martyrs and their martyrdom. Given their significance, martyr images cannot be left to the temporary memorialization of unstructured and transient grassroot memorials. In fact, tasveers of shaheeds are present in the CSM within the sacred complex of the Darbar Sahib, sharing gallery space with paintings of events in the lives of the ten Gurus. Given its location and its holdings of sacred art, this museum is treated as sacrosanct space, a home for revered beings and sacred things. It approximates a memorial of sorts since it houses chronicles of Gurus and of martyrs who died defending the Akal Takht and the Darbar Sahib in medieval and modern history, and those who died defending other shrines or places from where faith spread. The museum therefore is a space where belief and historical events are visually woven together illuminating the chronicle of an embattled community and its defense against tyrannical states. The various images in the museum suggest that these paintings are more than exhibits—they are mazhbi tasveeran meant to be viewed as devotional objects evoking belief, memory, and history all at once. While they are not railed off, or set apart, the sense of “viewing” sacred objects and images is apparent in the attitude of the viewers who appear before them with bare feet and covered heads. The fact that the many different sites of sacredness appear in the paintings of the museum, with images of different martyrs who died defending them, does not in any way disturb the preeminence of the Darbar Sahib, the Harmandir Sahib, or the Akal Takht. Quite the reverse. Veneration is a continuous process across spaces depicted in paintings, but it spirals upward to culminate at the doors of the Harmandir and the Akal Takht, the archetypes of built sacredness.

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10

Chapter 1

As a commemorative space, the museum was—and remains—subordinate to the sacred space within which it is encompassed. The museum holdings in and of themselves do not challenge the preeminence of the Darbar Sahib. Though clearly marked signage indicate its location, by June 2015, I rarely saw people climb the stairs to its first-floor galleries. Walking through the somewhat dimly lit galleries and looking at the exhibits mounted in tiers on the walls, it almost seems as if the museum heralded the arrival of the more prominently placed memorial-gurudwara. In the immediate aftermath of the brick-laying ceremony, it was by no means clear to me that the preeminence of the Darbar Sahib, or who can be remembered within its sacred precincts, remained as unassailably fixed in the vis-à-vis between the established shrine and the proposed memorial gurudwara, to be placed as it was between the Akal Takht and Nishan Sahib (banner) of Miri-Piri.10 The uproar in the political assembly denotes the tussle for prestige between the sacred complex and the memorial. It is not the sanctity of spaces that seemed to be at issue—it was their ability to secure memory and therefore their preeminence as mnemonic spaces that remained unresolved. The museum was never intended to pose a challenge to the space that housed it; but what lay within produced a pivotal text of memory—the memorial gurudwara, the gurudwara within the gurudwara, a shrine within a shrine.

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UNRAVELING THE PAST OF A MEMORIAL As I have said earlier in the Introduction, and elsewhere (Chopra 2011), the ritual of Ghallughara Dihara emphatically emphasizes the mutilation of the Darbar Sahib complex in Operation Bluestar as the hurt to be remembered and the loss to be commemorated. Even after the long passage of time since that catastrophic week in June 1984, there are as many accounts of the event as there are storytellers. Though the death of pilgrims is mourned, collective memory is haunted by the destruction of the sacred complex. The mutilated Takht has become emblematic of the destruction unleashed by Operation Bluestar. The shattered dome of the Takht is repeatedly reproduced in magazines, book covers, posters, calendar art, and verse, like the fragment, produced below, of a lament in the voice of the wounded Takht: Aaj tappdi bhatti ban gayi, Mere vehreh di har eenth, (A. R. Darshi. The Gallant Defender (2001) Back cover) Today, every brick of my core Burns like a furnace

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The dirt of boots defiles the place Where the world worships Shattered are my canopies and minarets Ruined the Divine Throne …11

Ghallughara commemorations mourn the death of the Takht and the mass death of pilgrims who died during Operation Bluestar. As I said earlier, for many years after the military operation, collective commemorations ignored Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, said to have died sometime during the night of June 5–6, 1984. Well after the construction of the double-sited memorial for Indira Gandhi in Delhi, an official embargo prohibiting the construction of a martyr’s memorial for Bhindranwale remained in place. The official restriction was matched by the subtle neglect of Bhindranwale in commemorations enacted within the Darbar Sahib. Perhaps the prominence of the destruction of the Akal Takht as the fundamental loss left no room for any other memory. Perhaps there was a volitional forgetting of uncomfortable persons. Whatever might have been the reason, it later became clear that elisions within formal commemorations did not remain unnoticed. For almost twenty years following Bluestar, functionaries at the Damdami Taksal, the seminary of which Bhindranwale was head before he took refuge in the Golden Temple complex in 1982, produced an alternate interpretation for omitted remembrance. As a collective, members of the Taksal refused to acknowledge Bhindranwale’s death, insisting that the Sant was chardi kala or in an intensely energized state of rising spirit. All rituals of mourning were repudiated by the Taksal (The Tribune, Amritsar, May 17, 2001). Cliques within the seminary positioned their refusal to mourn as a counter to state prohibitions forbidding commemoration. Perhaps the refusal was a repudiation of normalcy, a rejection of the closures suggested by ritual commemoration that the orthodoxy of the shrine embraced, but the seminary disputed. The Taksal’s refusal to acknowledge Bhindranwale’s death could not, and did not, continue unchallenged. In 2001, a group calling itself the Shahid Sant Jarnail Singh and Holocaust Commemoration Committee decided to perform his antim ardas (final prayer before cremation) at the Akal Takht on the June 6, 2001, “in a dignified and peaceful manner” (The Tribune, Amritsar, May 17, 2001), countering, they said, the Damdami Taksal’s “illogical and ridiculous arguments” (ibid) to accept Bhindranwale’s death. The politics of this tussle is evident in the subsequent action of the Damdami Taksal. In June 2005, four years after the Commemoration Committee performed the last prayers, the Taksal decided to honor Mr. Apar Singh Bajwa, a retired superintendent of police, who had been called upon by the army (in control of the sacred complex after Bluestar) to identify the body of Bhindranwale. Bajwa had then witnessed the cremation in 1984 (The Tribune, Amritsar, June 2, 2005).12

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12

Chapter 1

The politics of forgetting and remembering Bhindranwale produced the controversial yaadgar (memorial)13 in 2013. I want to delve further into the material manifestations of erasure and the play of politics between different spaces of the shrine. I turn to the displays and displacements of objects within the Kendri Sikh Ajaibghar, the museum within the Darbar Sahib and its galleries, to “see” the vacillation between acts of forgetting and remembrance. Most writings on sacred art pay attention to the curatorial practices that treat sacred spaces and objects as special, recognizing the significance of these objects vested with emotion or the “spirit” of sacredness. Curators understand the active relations which contemporary communities have with their sacred objects, laying claim to them as signifiers of particular histories.14 Many contemporary museums that house or display religious and sacred art are mindful of “living” quality of these exhibits. Sometimes, curators of exhibitions consult religious experts or anthropologists to put together codes of ethics for the treatment and display of sacred objects. An exhibition of sacred art in a museum, for example, may evoke, even mime, the spaces of the sacred, harnessing threads of memory that convert the museum gallery into a sacred, set-apart space (Greene 1992; Mauze and Derlon 2003; Seligman and Monroe 2006). What is of particular interest to me is the fact that the Kendri Sikh Ajaibghar, the Central Sikh Museum, is already part of a complex imbued with piety. The reconstruction of the destroyed shrine and the restoration and refurbishment of the damaged museum were almost simultaneous. The ritual of Ghallughara Dihara remembers the traumatic event (Chopra 2011); the reconstruction of the museum (a restoration that went on for at least a decade, well into the 1990s) was seen as a way of restoring history to community. Sacred objects, whether the Guru’s arms or mazhbi tasveeran, have active auras and are affective objects. Beyond the issue of sanctity, such objects possess the quality to display authority and “be political.” These objects are active in creating and producing cultural, social, religious, and political landscapes. For me, it is both the museum and its artifacts that demand attention. Location within the mnemonic space of the Darbar Sahib denotes its own understanding of boundaries between the sacred and the political, and a reviewing of how things or persons appear as concurrently sacred and political. Belief and political engagement overlap in an almost synchronized viewing of spaces and objects. The locus of the museum charges the Ajaibghar with a mission: to continue to remember the destruction of sacred things and spaces. Within the sacred complex as seen today, the Akal Takht presents a facade of calm continuity. It is the paintings in the museum that keep alive the memory of its mutilation. The Ajaibghar is therefore simultaneously museum and memorial, synchronizing the pedagogical and the emotive aspects of both. The recitations of Gurbani and Ardas soar through the museum as an auditory canopy to remember and rehearse sacred history. Visitors enter the museum

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13

as believers, barefooted and head-covered, as they would enter Harmandir Sahib, to consolidate a version of Sikh political history and contest the Indian state’s narratives of Operation Bluestar. Contemporary politics ricochets off a medieval past, to reappear quickened by the ecstasy of persecution. Paintings in the museum are an assortment of “event” and “biography.” The death of individuals across four broad periods of Sikh history create a visual narrative of the carnage of pilgrims, beginning with the massacres by Ahmed Shah Durrani (regarded as the founder of modern Afghanistan) in the two ghallughara of medieval Sikh history, followed in the colonial period by the bloodbath at Jallianwala Bagh as well as resistance to the colonial state, deaths during Punjabi Suba agitations of the 1960s, organized against the linguistic reorganization of states in post-independent India, and finally Operation Bluestar. Paintings of deaths in medieval warfare are viewed conjointly as shaheedi tasveeran, painted representations of martyrdom and illustrations of historical events. Some shaheedi tasveeran are hung just below depictions of two major “battles” in Sikh history, the Vadda and Chotta Ghallughara (the major and minor carnage) fought against invading Afghans, or exhibited below paintings depicting assaults on the Golden Temple complex throughout medieval history. In concert, these “war paintings” and “martyr paintings” create a visual storyline to present a remembered history of persecution of the faithful, assault on sacred buildings, and martyrs as embodiments of faith and community. Images of destruction and torture in the medieval period become the frame and the story of the present (Chopra 2010). Viewing is charged with a purposive intention of remembrance and commemoration, and the viewer converted to witness and storyteller of a particular version of history. Post-1984 objects and paintings are clearly signposted in an earmarked gallery, including what I call the “1984 wall.”15 Down the center of a long gallery, empty tank and bullet shells used in the “fauji hamla” (army assault, the popular term for Operation Bluestar) recovered from the walls and debris of the ruined Akal Takht are displayed in glass cabinets. They establish the context for the battle of Bluestar. At one end of that gallery the facing wall, framed by glass cabinets of spent shells is dedicated to a 1987 painting of the destroyed Takht, with a caption that unequivocally states “Sri Akal Takht fauji hamleh toh baad (June 6, 1984)” (The Akal Takht after the army assault, June 6, 1984). Painted to represent the Takht at the moment of its mutilation, the painting represents the primal wound to the sangat, the community of believers (Covington 2009). The painting is the visual heart of the display, framed by portraits of men who died during Operation Bluestar or were put to death by the Indian state as traitors or assassins though the captions below each man’s portrait uses the term “shaheed” (martyr) to describe him, rather than the state-generated terms—uggarwadi or terrorist, or desh drohi (traitor). The collective sangat of shaheed enclose and set apart the wounded

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14

Chapter 1

Takht as a focal point, centering a viewer’s grief which must not be deflected away from the Takht as the primary corpse. The Takht in the museum display mirrors the spatial and architectural enclosing of the Harmandir, the sacred center of the gurudwara complex, framed and set apart by a pool of water, still bearing the bullet marks of the Bluestar battle. Within the physical landscape as we see it now, the living Takht soars as a protective shield of the Harmandir;16 in the museum, we see the wounded Takht, a metaphorical muh dikhaiyi17 (seeing/showing the face) or final viewing of the corpse at the moment of death. Displayed at the site of its destruction, the portrait of the Takht provides the story of Bluestar. The portraits and captions of Bluestar martyrs, if I may use the term, are stylistically distinctive, set apart from earlier depictions of martyrdom (Chopra 2010). Death embraced in allegorical laughter18 evident in captions is the story of these martyrs, whose year of birth is noted without a day or date, but whose date of death is meticulously recorded in the captions. This is the day to remember each man, the day when he displayed his shahadat, commitment to the Sikh faith and its key symbols, and was witness to the making of Sikh history. In June 2007, during fieldwork in the complex and its museum, Bluestar martyrs framed and protectively enclosed the painting of the mutilated Takht, acting almost as metaphoric pall bearers of this primal corpse.19 But later that same year, on November 29, 2007, a portrait of Bhindranwale was installed in the museum in what was reported in newspapers as “a low-key ceremony” (The Tribune, Amritsar, November 30, 2007, 1). I saw the newspaper and television reports and went back to the museum two years later to see the display. The most striking aspect of the November 2007 installation was the “displacement” of the portraits of Bluestar martyrs away from the central portrait of the Takht. Over the course of the years I spent following the museum displays, some of the Bluestar portraits literally turned the corner, onto the next wall, away from the Takht. It is this “movement” that to my eyes signifies the controversial tasveer of a troublesome Sant that now centers the display. Like memory, my discussion of remembrance does not follow a neat chronology, nor does it move down a clearly demarcated pathway. It cuts through different moments of remembrance and their material manifestations not only because I came upon them at different points in my research, but also because the mnemonic objects did not remain static. Some moved; others came up in discrete corners or were visually centered within the complex and the museum. Almost simultaneous with the movement of portraits within the museum, images of Bhindranwale in shop signage grew in size and dominated the bazaar streets around the sacred complex. Though it is difficult to trace an exact chronology, by 2007 I began to notice small vinyl souvenir images of Bhindranwale circulating in Amritsar bazaars, or stuck onto the backs of

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15

taxis or on the fuel tanks of motorbikes. It’s hard to establish whether souvenir art was a response to the installation of the portrait or circulated in sync with the debates generated prior to the installation. In either event, souvenir art exerted itself on the more formal displays within the museum, particularly upon the singular disposition of Bhindranwale’s portrait which I discuss in some detail below. The little images circulating on the peripheries of the shrine posed a vital question to the museum displays and, it seems to me, to the ritual performance of Ghallughara Dihara. The little images seemed to point toward the forms of remembrance authorized within the Darbar Sahib, indexing the elaborate museum displays and emotive ritual performances, to ask “where is Bhindranwale?” The question hovered remorselessly over the museum exposition. Post 1984, no paintings of Bhindranwale were exhibited in the museum nor rituals enacted specifically in his name. His name was briefly mentioned in the captions detailing the death history of Amrik Singh (Bhindranwale’s close associate) and General Subeg Singh (the general who organized the militia and whose body was found in the forecourt of the Akal Takht). These tangential, almost muted, references were clearly unsatisfactory evocations for a person many identified as the embodiment and animating spirit of Khalistan. For almost 20 years, a feeling of incompleteness remained. The refusal to acknowledge the death sat awkwardly within the larger rituals of post-Bluestar remembrance and memorialization. Finally, in 2001, a group calling itself the Shahid Sant Jarnail Singh and Holocaust Commemoration Committee announced that it would perform his antim ardas at Akal Takht, “in a dignified and peaceful manner” (The Tribune, Amritsar, May 17, 2001), countering what they called the “illogical” refusal of the Damdami Taksal to declare the death of Bhindranwale. The group may have been prompted by the widening circuits within which images of Bhindranwale circulated, including car stickers, calendars, posters, and gateway images at entrances of gurudwaras, including diasporic gurudwaras. In 2003, within two years of performance of antim ardas by the Holocaust Commemoration Committee, the ritual head of the Akal Takht declared Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale a martyr. A siropa (an honorific gift to clothe the receiver from “head to foot”; usually a length of cloth) was formally presented to his eldest son as part of the commemorative rituals in the Darbar Sahib complex, an event widely reported in the local press and some national dailies (The Times of India (Chandigarh) June 6, 2003), but very soon “forgotten” in news print and television coverage. Even after the ritual recognition of his stature as martyr in 2003, it took some years for an official portrait of the slain militant to enter the CSM, another delay that suggests the continued disquiet surrounding his memory and the undercurrent of foreboding vis-à-vis the pressure of street and

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16

Chapter 1

souvenir art dictating exhibits in sacred space—and it seems to me, the problem of housing his image in the Darbar Sahib complex. Nothing was openly stated; but the changing displays in the galleries convey the anxiety about the potential “living quality” of a portrait, comparable to the sacred potency of religious objects and sacred art, treated as “culturally sensitive” living things (Greene 1992; Seligman and Monroe 2006; Derlon and Mauze 2003). From what I could establish, through the period of the post-Bluestar reconstruction of the sacred complex and its museum (Chopra 2011) the image of Bhindranwale was preserved in the complex; but it lay low in the library adjoining the museum. Replicating perhaps the Nehru Memorial and Museum Library in Delhi, the official, state-funded memorial to the first prime minister of India, the CSM has its own library. For almost 20 years there seemed to be very little to put in there, a paucity resulting from the damage caused to much of the art and artifacts burned during Bluestar. In the winter of 2006, when I did the first round of exploratory fieldwork in the Darbar Sahib complex, the library holdings consisted primarily of pamphlets, political tracts, and newspaper or magazine reports, some in Gurmukhi and some in English. For example, the coverage of 1984 in the newsmagazine India Today and Raghu Rai’s20 photographs of the aftermath are preserved in the library. It is in this assorted collection that a photographed image of Bhindranwale’s corpse was (and is) to be found, available for view only with special and very restrictive permission. It seems to be the official portrait of the corpse (Figure 1.2). In this reproduction of the museum library, the caption reads: “Shahadat paun toh baad, Sant Jarnail Singh” (Sant Jarnail Singh, after attaining martyrdom).

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PORTRAIT OF A MARTYR Through the period when the politically charged corpse was unavailable for display of any kind, the fact of death was necessary to establish. The fact also needed a witness. Mr. Apar Singh Bajwa, the retired superintendent of police and the chief investigating officer in a criminal case against Bhindranwale (whose role I described briefly earlier in the chapter), was the state’s key witness to Bhindranwale’s death. It is in his witness report that the wounds of the corpse are recorded. The body, Bajwa reported, was “injured on the right side of the face and had bled profusely in the abdomen” (The Tribune, Chandigarh, May 20, 2001). In the unattributed photograph in the library, the corpse is formally laid out on a sheet, a ritually mandatory performance of laying the corpse on the ground. It is in this condition that the corpse is photographed, which itself is unusual in Punjab, for corpses are displayed but rarely photographed (I will discuss this more fully in a subsequent chapter). In the photograph preserved in the library the damaged side of his face noted in Bajwa’s testimony

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is not visible to the viewer. This visual elision suggests that it was very likely photographed by army personnel who would have had access to the corpse but would have needed to show it without signs of injury, for the treatment of a dead enemy has always been an issue in all situations of war and conflict (Neff 2005). It’s possible that Bhindranwale’s corpse would have been treated with some degree of ritual respect by the army under the command of Lt. Gen K.S. Brar (a non-keshdhari Sikh,21 or a person who trimmed or cut his hair), and the photograph taken as evidence of this “deference” toward the dead enemy. It is, however, shown without the turban, an absence as telling as masking of wounds. (Figure 1.2) Though wounded corpses abound in museum portraiture, each identified in their contextual resistance either to imperial Mughal rule or the colonial state, the caption or appearance of this photographed corpse make no reference to “the enemy.” Not many museum or library visitors ever saw the photograph. Perhaps there was a fear that viewing Bhindranwale’s corpse would be too emotive an event, and heighten the commitment to martyrdom and resistance, simultaneously positioning the Indian state’s project as an “imperialist” imposition upon Sikhs, and his body as a metaphor of the wounded Sikh nation (Covington 2009). Perhaps too, this is a photograph that remained hidden because of what images could do, an apprehension voiced by the chief minister in 2012, without making any reference to which photograph would be prohibited within the newly cast gurudwara memorial.

Figure 1.2  Photograph of a photograph: Bhindranwale’s corpse (June 2007). Photograph of photograph courtesy of the author.

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18

Chapter 1

In late November 2007, supporters of Bhindranwale made concerted attempts to hang his portrait in the Ajaibghar. Finally, as mentioned above, the portrait was installed on November 29, 2007, by the SGPC in the Ajaibghar, amid intense controversy described in news reports. The gesture to mute the ceremonial installation was read as an attempt to preempt radical Sikh organizations from mounting a formal portrait depicting Bhindranwale armed with a revolver and other modern weaponry. A newspaper report noted that the low-key ceremony was a way of keeping radical organizations at bay (The Tribune, Amritsar, November 30, 2007, 1). Emerging from 23 years of seclusion into a history of valorous martyrdom, Bhindranwale’s formal portrait clearly could not be an image from an army archive. The painting that now hangs in the museum draws from a popular image of Bhindranwale, most evident in souvenir art in which he is shown looking into the far distance away from the viewer, dressed in the attire of a saint soldier. (Figure 1.3) But it is also markedly different from popular photographed reproductions of revolutionaries like Bhagat Singh. Painted in 2007, the portrait of Bhindranwale is distinctive at various levels. The central figure is positioned standing barefoot on a bank of clouds, in white choga and blue pag (knee length garment and turban), attire most commonly associated with members of the Damdami Taksal. He bears the kirpan, one of the key symbols of Sikh identity, but also touches the hilt of the sword in its elaborate scabbard, a weapon revered for its signification of authority.22 Across his body he holds an arrow, a weapon he was frequently photographed carrying in circumambulations of the sarovar and the Harmandir during the period he commandeered the sacred complex. Floating in celestial sphere, from where Gods in Indic paintings beam blessings upon mortals, are images of the Harmandir and the Akal Takht—the latter edifice shown in its state of pristine wholeness without even a vestigial suggestion of its destruction. Between the Takht and the temple are the triangular saffron flags, Nishan, that demarcate sacred space (Figure 1.3). The flags are a critical inclusion; on the face of it they denote the two sacred structures that hover on either side of the central figure. But whether intended by the painter or not, they flag not just the religious structures as sacred but, it seems to me, signify the portrait itself as sacred space. The visual elements within the portrait reference a range of portrait styles that have wide circulation. On the one hand, the portrait references the mazhbi tasveeran of Pirs and Sants with key shrines appearing in the corners of the visual frame to suggest location and veneration. But the other set of aesthetic styles that are evoked in the painting are images of Sikh Gurus. A brief excursion into the portraiture of gurus is vital to the understanding of bhava, or represented “mood,” of Bhindranwale’s portrait. B. N. Goswamy writes of the mood or dominant feeling of the object or painting—its bhava—that “belongs

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Figure 1.3  Bhindranwale’s portrait (January 2011). Photograph courtesy of the author.

to the work and can be consciously aimed at by its maker” (Goswamy 1994, 190). Its counterpart is rasa, or aesthetic delight, as an experience, belonging “exclusively to the viewer or listener, who alone can experience it” (Goswamy 1994, 190). Seventeenth-century Sikh painting that has become the template for Guru portraiture in modern representations followed the Mughal miniature stylistics in positioning the Guru as a central figure in profile, with a halo.23 Medieval painters drew on a range of sources to “authenticate” their representations. The later Guler or Pahari portraits painted many years after the death of the Guru, attempted to portray the personal traits and attributes of

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Gurus culled from literary and oral traditions. Sometimes the face of the Guru bore a resemblance to the patron who had commissioned the painting (Verma 2002), an element of realism in the portrait that suggests the consonance of power and spirituality in painting. A series of different imageries and material were drawn upon when painting the Gurus and continue in representations of today. Modern montages and poster art follow Mughal and Guler styles, aligning the printed poster with painted portraiture. When the ten Gurus are painted as a collective, they are often represented “in action” as it were, passing on legitimate authority to the Granth Sahib, the book which is now anthropomorphized as the eleventh guru. The book is treated in all respects like a sacred and royal person, referred to as Sahib, carried in a palanquin, fanned by a chaur, a fly whisk, awakened at dawn and put to rest every evening. The book, journeying every morning and evening between the Harmandir and the Takht in rituals of prakash and sukhasan, awakening and repose, is the guru housed in the gurudwara, the sacred being in sacred space. In souvenir posters, the transference of authority and legitimacy upon the book is depicted as rays of divine light emanating from cosmological space from the palms of the ten gurus, placed in an arc from founder to tenth Guru. The rays and the arc delineate the lineage of divinity and the arc of authority. The portrait of Bhindranwale is a composite of Pir and Guru images, drawing on elements of both. Gurinder Pal Singh, the painter of the portrait, seems to have drawn on medieval painters and contemporary printers at once. Like his medieval forbearers, he possibly drew on oral accounts and newspaper images and deployed all the symbolism at his command to suggest the spiritual significance of the man whose portrait he painted. He could not have shown him with a halo for he was neither explicitly a Raja nor a Guru. Nor, it seems to me, could the painter have depicted him wearing the dual crossed swords of miri-piri (temporal and spiritual authority) in mimetic resemblance of Guru Hargobind. That would be overtly sacrilegious. What the painter does instead is to displace the halo as divine light onto banks of clouds to suggest a non-mortal, celestial sphere, upon which he places the central figure. He also subtly suggests the two swords by the scabbard of the sword crossed at the center with the arrow, a weapon Bhindranwale was photographed carrying during his occupation of the gurudwara complex from 1982, when he took refuge in the Darbar Sahib, to June 6, 1984, the night of his death. Together, the clouds, the placement of the sacred buildings where he died (or died protecting, depending on the spectator’s point of view) and the crossed weapons, leave the viewer to decipher the bhava of this image, and understand the import of the painted message. It appears to me that the line of succession from Guru to text apparent in souvenir posters is extended by the painter’s placement of the key sacred buildings, linking the lines of

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cosmic blessing with a further layer—from Harmandir and Takht to the person upon whom cosmic blessings are bestowed. The transference suggests a further movement but this time in reverse: the clouds below the feet seem to elevate the central figure to cosmological space and significance, into the sphere of those who occupy divine space—the ten Gurus. The portrait is also markedly bigger than any of the other portrait of martyrs, certainly larger and more elaborately framed than any of the Bluestar martyrs. The display of portraits of the sangat of Bluestar martyrs have moved, and then moved again, some turning the corner onto an adjoining wall, accommodating the insertion of the ustad, the master, in their midst. The newly installed portrait is in fact as large as the portrait of the wounded Akal Takht. And it is placed next to it. One way of interpreting the coupling is to pair the portraits of the man and the monument as a joint sacred center. And perhaps the way the two portraits are displayed seems to suggest that this juxtaposition was the way museum authorities hoped to contain the volatile memory of the man. In specifying prohibitions of guns and “modern” weaponry in the commissioned portrait, perhaps the orthodox gurudwara establishment hoped to normalize remembrance, making Bhindranwale the defender of the Takht, but the shrine as the emotional center of remembrance. Right up to 2014 (during the period that I regularly documented the politics of portraiture and the museum displays) any visit to museum made it clear that Bhindranwale’s portrait aroused the greatest interest. Like emotions aroused by sacred things, the rasa of this image sets it apart. An anxious sign at the corner of the portrait, fixed some years after the installation, prohibits photography in three languages. It’s a peculiar sign that forbids one visual form, while permitting another. It does seem to me the sign is a vain attempt to restore a balance between the two images, but the marked concentration of viewers’ attention unequivocally suggests the relegation of the Takht as mere “evidence” of Bhindranwale’s shahadat, and his death as the primal wound suffered by the Sikh nation. Far from dispelling attention, the tacked-on sign acknowledges a hierarchy of preeminence between the two images. The panic provoked by the viewer’s photograph prohibited by the sign reflects the fear of small images, souvenirs, and internet communications creating an unpredictable crossing of passion with politics, a destabilization of authorized memory. The truth of the sign, like the image portrayed, is that it triggers transgress. The question remains whether in deflecting attention away from commemorations of the destroyed Takht and converting the architectural mutilation as a metaphor for Bhindranwale’s death, the process of viewing accomplishes more than the gurudwara authorities ever imagined when they conceded the demands for the portrait’s installation. Does Bhindranwale remain enclosed within a collective sangat of martyrs? Or has he metaphorically stepped out

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of this collective and risen above the clouds into another level? It is important to go back to the image once again to discover, in its language of symbols, the potential movement and transformation effected by rasa of remembrance. Unlike other Bluestar martyrs, Bhindranwale is “in action” for while the figure is still, the other elements position the man as possessing an exceptional power to surpass other martyrs. It is the way he inhabits sacred space standing dead center to dwarf the Takht and the Harmandir that is most spectacular. It doesn’t need too much imagination to speculate that the transformation of a political figure to a divine person will require more than a portrait as a tribute; it was only going to be a matter of time for the man to move from being a photographed corpse hidden in an archive to a palpably emotive portrait to a spiritual figure in need of his own space—the memorial gurudwara, a shrine within a shrine. A gurudwara within a gurudwara, a memorial within a habitus already resonant with memories, is unlikely to exist in harmony. The enclosed memorial is in fact a counter-memorial within the memorial space of the Darbar Sahib that challenges and usurps interpretations of the commemorative ritual of ghallughara and its pre-2007 museum. Looking at the displayed portraits and their placements-displacement, it seems to me that this portrait and the memorial gurudwara will present a challenge even more elemental than the performative ritual of ghallughara. The portrait housed in a sacred center might well transform a “historical personality” (Anderson 1991, 209) into a divine figure. The ruckus in the assembly in 2007 was probably prophetic in voicing a fear about the future shape of memory, and its conversion to a rewritten sacred chronicle. Clearly the memorial gurudwara and its architectural inscriptions will pull the memory of this martyr right out of its frame to violate the tenets of a faith that declares its Gurus fixed and its scripture inviolable. In and through the memorial, a militant will not remain a martyr, but will soar toward the cosmological ether, to craft a place among the chosen ten. NOTES 1. An earlier version of this chapter titled “A Museum, A Memorial and a Martyr: Politics of Memory in the Sikh Golden Temple” was first published in Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory, Vol. 9, No. 2, July 2013 pp. 97–114 (Taylor & Francis, Routledge). 2. Literally, takht means throne, or seat of authority. The Akal Takht in Amritsar is translated as “Throne of the Timeless One.” 3. The Shiromani Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee is an elected body of observing and orthodox Sikhs that manages all historic gurudwaras across India. The formation of the SGPC historically lies in efforts to “purify” Sikhism and rid all places of Sikh worship of any signs of “Hindu” or other syncretic ritual observance.

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4. The two memorials are at Shakti Sthal, her cremation ground along the banks of the river Yamuna and at her official residence—No. 1, Safdarjung Road—in the heart of the heritage zone of Lutyen’s Delhi. 5. The head of the dera “establishment” (Singh 2014), Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh Insan, has been a controversial figure in Punjab. Many of the followers of the Dera Saccha Sauda belong to the scheduled castes, and in part this has been the base of his clout. Different political parties wooed him at various points of time for he would assure them of bloc votes in assembly elections. In 2007 he was accused of hurting the religious sentiments of the Sikh community when he was photographed wearing insignia resembling the tenth Sikh Guru. Initially, all apologies by the dera were rejected but in 2015 the Akal Takht, the supreme temporal authority, passed an edict pardoning Gurmeet Ram Rahim. Widespread protests greeted the pardon, and later that same year, the pardon was withdrawn. In 2017, Gurmeet Ram Rahim was convicted by a special court on the charge of rape. 6. Weber’s discussion of the emergence of the patriciate, and the revolutionary zeal of the popolo, recognized the significance of spatial usurpation in establishing “a state within a state” (Weber 1978) or power centers that exist within established structures of authority, usurping legitimacy. 7. Sikh chronicles speak of Baba Deep Singh fighting to protect Harmandir Sahib against the Mughal armies, laying his head within the Darbar Sahib complex. 8. There is a separate building in the city, popularly referred to as “Shaheedan da Gurudwara,” where the last rites of Baha Deep Singh were performed. It is well beyond the precincts of the Darbar Sahib. 9. The Granth Sahib as a sacred scripture does not exhaust all forms of knowledge about gurus or those who are venerated within Sikhism. Janamsakhis, literally testimonies of birth, but more accurately, hagiographies (McLeod 1994; Singh 1992) narrate the life story of Nanak, the founder of the faith. Other narratives of Sikh Gurus chronicle their martyrdom (Fenech 1997; Singh 2011). With the transference of religious authority to the scripture, the elevation of subsequent martyrs to the status of Guru was proscribed. That is the orthodox position. 10. Guru Hargobind, the sixth Guru empowered the Sikh community to defend itself, formalizing the community’s temporal role as equally critical to its spiritual goal, donning the double swords of Miri (the spiritual) with Piri (the temporal) at his investiture. Spatially speaking, within the Darbar Sahib, the Akal Takht represents the seat of temporal authority guarding the Harmandir, the spiritual core. Theologically, divinity is conceived of as honed steel (sarb loh). 11. Translation by author. The stanza is printed on the back cover of the 2001 edition of A. R. Darshi, The Gallant Defender (1999/2001). No poet is acknowledged. 12. The treatment of Bhindranwale’s corpse, as reported by Bajwa in the newspaper interview, needs to be noted, since mass cremation of corpses was also performed in the immediate aftermath of Bluestar. Brahma Chellany, the South Asia correspondent for the international wire service Associated Press, reported that the dead bodies were loaded and carried in the garbage trucks of the Municipal Committee, dumped together and burned by pouring kerosene oil, diesel, and petrol on them. Since some of the bodies were highly decomposed and kerosene oil could not completely destroy

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the human flesh, the stench did not go away for a period of two weeks or even more. Chellaney reported the following account of the man on duty at the city crematorium, “I twice visited the main city crematory on 9 and 11 June to check the fatality toll in the Golden Temple assault. ... Bodies were being brought in municipal garbage truck round-the-clock since early June 6. We have been really busy. To add to our woes, we don't have enough wood to burn the dead, and so we are cremating them in heaps of twenty or more. … Near the Golden Temple, I saw an estimated 50 corpses in a large rubbish lorry that had sewage still smeared on its outer body. From the back of the grey truck, at least two masculine legs were sticking out and from the left side one could see the hanging forehead and the long flowing hair on an apparently unturbaned Sikh. As I peeped into the truck from the back, I could see dead bodies of at least two women and a child. That night it was difficult to sleep; I kept thinking of the dead bodies” (Kumar et al. 2003, 39). 13. The term yaadgar has a semantic range and is variously translated or used as commemoration, monument, memento, relic, keepsake, or souvenir. My translation of the term as memorial refers to the new building called “Gurudwara Yaadgar Shaheedan,” the memorial or monument to martyrs erected by the Damdami Taksal within the Darbar Sahib in 2013 specifically to commemorate those who died in Operation Bluestar, most particularly Bhindranwale, evident in the inscription on the archway at the entrance to the yaadgar. 14. Robust social movements among people of the First Nations have encouraged museums and curators in Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand to recognize the cultural claims of people on sacred objects (Greene 1992; Mauze and Derlon 2003; Seligman and Monroe 2006). Recently, Tibetan sacred objects have become significant to the exiled community as a way to project their dispossession. The treatment of their sacred art in museums and exhibitions is of immense concern to community and curators alike. 15. There has been considerable change in the sequencing of the exhibits and paintings from 2007 onward. I track some of the changes in the chapter. 16. In relation to the Akal Takht the Harmandir is the sanctum, while the Takht is the protective architectural and ideological layer, or shield. Aerial views of the complex accentuate this relationship admirably. 17. I dwell on the term muh dikhayi or last view of the corpse in a subsequent chapter. 18. In the museum, the portraits of certain men characterized by the Indian state as traitors are prominently displayed on what I call the “Wall of Bluestar Martyrs.” The portraits and their captions together suggest a critique of the state as well as a re-inscription of memory. For instance, the captions of two portraits of Jinda and Sukha, the two men accused and hung for the assassination of General A. S. Vaidya, chief of Army Staff at the time of Operation Bluestar, painted in 1997, end with the words “phansi di saza ditti, jo eihnah neh hasdaiyan-hasdaiyan pravan karke Sikh qaum da nam roshan kitta” (he was sentenced to hang, a punishment of death he embraced laughing, making/causing the name of the Sikh community to shine). The “embrace” of death in laughter scorns the death penalty and suggests the “conversion” of those branded as traitors by the state to martyrs seen from the perspective of

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the Sikh sangat, and their re-placement within a heroic history. A similar repudiation through inversion of the finality of death is suggested in interpretations of an earlier revolutionary, Bhagat Singh, put to death by the colonial state (Gaur 2008). 19. Carrying the corpse on its bamboo bier signals proximity to, and respect for, the dead person. 20. Raghu Rai is a well-known photographer and photojournalist; he was also a protégé of Henri Cartier-Bresson. 21. Hair is a potent symbol in Sikhism (Uberoi 1996; Hershman 1974). Being unshorn marks a person (male and female) as a true believer. Trimming, shaving, plucking, or cutting hair is viewed as a sign of pruned belief to the principles of Khalsa Sikhism. 22. As mentioned earlier in note 10, Guru Hargobind who built the Akak Takht, wore the two crossed swords of miri-piri (from the Arabic “mir/amir” (lord) and the Persian “pir” (or saint) signifying the twin sources of legitimacy and authority in Sikhism. The crossed swords are the foundational symbol for the concept of saint soldier. Displays of weapons at Gurudwara Keshghar Sahib during Holla (a festival founded by Guru Gobind Singh) are well-established ritual practice. The wearing of arms, other than a symbolic kirpan or dagger, signifies a person’s exemplar status. 23. The halo was not confined to portraits of Gurus; Maharaja Ranjit Singh (1780–1839), who consolidated the Sikh confederacies, and ruled in the early half of the 19th century is similarly deified. In miniature painting, the Maharaja is frequently shown in profile with a halo, as a sign of his temporal authority, a concrete manifestation of the Sikh tenet of conjoined spiritual with temporal authority. But this is a rare inclusion—though I think an important one. More frequenting, the halo is present in representations of gurus rather than of rulers.

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Chapter 2

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Seeing Off the Dead

On October 31, 1984, Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her bodyguards in the garden of her home in the national capital, Delhi. Following her death, her body was laid out in state for public view at Teen Murti House, the home where she lived with her father as a young adult.1 For two days, Door Darshan, the state television network broadcast, images of the corpse of the slain prime minster, so that apart from those who went to Teen Murti House to mourn, the entire nation participated in a televised form of muh dekhna, a ritual viewing of the face of the corpse before cremation. Viewing the prime minister’s face was reminiscent of the public viewing of another famous corpse, that of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, laid out on the terrace of Birla House, with a single spotlight focused on the body (Cavendish 2008). In Indic mourning practice corpses are highly visible at specific moments in death. The “muh dekhna”—literally, viewing the face—of the dead person is a critical moment in collective mourning rituals, including Sikh ritual practice. Ritually speaking, the ceremonial act of viewing the face of the new bride by her husband’s kinsmen as she enters her conjugal home is analogous to the last viewing of the face of a dead kinsman before cremation. Marriage and death, as moments of “entry” and “exit” are liminal events, creating openings or cracks in the corporate, collective body of kin. Anthropologists have noted analogies between threshold moments in the cultural biographies of individuals. Hershman, for example, understood the parallels between birth and premarital rituals as a “birth” into a new cultural personhood (Hershman 1974). Though there is no specific term for the ritual act of seeing the face of the corpse, all family members, particularly wives (and mothers), are persuaded to see the face of the dead (the dead husband or son) as a form of leave taking before the corpse leaves the home and is taken 27

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toward the cremation ground.2 This is the memory of the corpse that kin will carry in their minds after they see off the dead.3 The remains of cremated corpses—shards of bone and ashes—are collected after cremation and cast into rivers or water bodies. The disappearance of the body after cremation produces a bounded community of mourners who must collectively remember and ritually demonstrate remembrance. Typically, in Indic practice, the material artifacts of the corpse or its residue, like ashes, are not preserved as relics. Instead symbolic representations of the dead become the focus of ritual observances, while photographs and portraits of living persons and their belongings are treated as mementos and objects for everyday remembrance. By and large, in modern Indic mortuary ritual practice, the corpse itself is rarely photographed or painted and it is not displayed for viewing beyond the ritual moment of “seeing off” the dead person, before cremation. This does not mean that followers of Indic religions never photograph corpses, as the photographs of the Mahatma and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi make evident. More recently, the corpse of A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, a muchloved president of India, was photographed and televised, and some mourners took the opportunity to take a “selfie” with the corpse. What message does that photograph send and how is the photographed corpse viewed? Scholars have argued that photographs make the corpse an ambivalent object; it is the subject of gaze but also an expressive, affective object that arouses emotion and acts of sorrow. The corpse is a thing but also the image of a person. Fontein and others of the Bones Collective4 have argued, that corpses have an “emotive materiality” and an “affective presence as dead persons” (Fontein 2010, 431) bringing forward the past into the present. This is probably as true of the images of corpses, as it is of the material body. Vis-à-vis Indic rituals, the very nature of the photograph as an artifact and a record refutes the act of cremation, for cremation is meant to make the physical corpse disappear altogether, unlike a photograph that retains the integrity of the corpse as an image, denying what cremation accomplishes.5 The photograph also creates a fluid set of viewers as mourners dissimilar to those “connected” to the dead person, who come together as a bounded community of mourners to view the corpse before cremation. The fact that corpses are photographed says something about the individuals whose corpses are thus preserved as images. The photograph needs to be understood as a special practice of mourning and remembrance as well as of material cultures, an aspect of contemporary mourning rituals that bears further reflection. In this chapter, I address the issue of the transformation of ritual practice with specific reference to the act of viewing the face of the corpse. My interest is evoked by the number of photographs of corpses that are increasingly “on view” for modern Indian citizens. Given that Indians are also increasingly “militant” in defense of religion, how does an act that seems to contradict

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29

religious principle emerge, and under what conditions or “cultural eyes” do people continue to view the face of the corpse well after it is cremated? The fact that these photographs appear in a number of different, though coded, spaces, and that each space is in overt or implicit dialogue with others, is of critical importance to my exploration. Whether these acts and artifacts are “religious” or “secular” does not concern me here. Cavanaugh argues for a constructivist approach to religion—and religious violence—“Religion exists, but as a constructed category” (Cavanaugh 2014, 492) emerging within a historical period or a political moment. Following Cavanaugh, I take the view that the context of ritual and ritual transformations is also a response to the political and social contexts within which rituals are enacted/ performed. Meaning is created in and through performance, simultaneously referencing the field of familiar ideas and laying out the power of formidable “others.” The fact that ritual is also a process “in the making” and is therefore never complete (though it may appear fixed and unassailable at any one moment of its enactment) is the point I draw from Cavanaugh’s argument of religion as a constructed category. Ritual, as I hope to show, is also a process of construction both at the level of act, and the level of what the act means, and who the ritual community is therefore at any one period of enactment. I draw on the work of anthropologists in the interpretations of ritual life, and from earlier work of scholars on Punjab and Sikh ritual practice, to locate my own understanding of the “context” of performance and the “universe” of ritual practice. Harjot Oberoi’s seminal work on the emergence of the Tat Khalsa, “the pure” Khalsa (Oberoi 1994), is a critical voice to consider. In an early essay, he argued that ritual existed within a “shared” symbolic universe in the contexts of peasant/agrarian societies and was often a means to resist the authoritarian forces/powers that spoke for or in the name of a single “code” of action rejecting the pluralisms of ritual action (Oberoi 1988). Oberoi goes on to argue that rites of passage were not “demarcated” by religious boundaries. At the level of practice, rites of passage were inclusive of a number of different ideas of auspiciousness, of benevolence and ill will, of dirt and danger, and so on, through a series of ritual “attitudes” that informed and shaped mortuary, marriage, and birth rites. In examining the transformations of mortuary practices, and practices around the treatment of corpses, I draw on the work of Oberoi and other anthropologists for whom the ritual field is paramount. Notwithstanding common Indic practice in the laying out of corpses as if in repose (literally the shava asan or corpse pose), historically speaking, the proliferation of postmortem photography in Victorian England as a form of memorializing6 might have had a bearing on Indic practices. Victorian photography probably influenced the way corpses of heads of princely states in India were photographed. Corpses of rulers were—and sometimes still

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are—photographed7 (Skoda and Lettmann 2011) and a fair amount of effort is expended to make the corpse look “life like” and serene. The corpse in the photograph is seated with legs crossed, in a yogic padmasan posture (legs crossed and hands resting on knees).8 Unlike the seated corpses of renouncers, the princely corpse is seated on an embellished masnad, propped up against the gaddi (literally, carpets and bolsters, but metaphorically and linguistically, the seat of power). The eyes of the seated corpse are ritually closed, the jaw, hair, and limbs bound so that they do not get tangled or appear unwieldy. The photograph replicates the corpse at the moment of muh dekhna, a body that is deliberately devoid of all signs of how the death occurred. However, such photographs of royal corpses are unlikely to be seen by anyone other than close kin, creating an intimate set of viewers for whom these images are special objects of remembrance preserved in personal, sequestered collections. The restricted circulation of the photograph of the sovereign’s corpse marks out the primary mourners from “ordinary” mourners; the latter will view the corpse before cremation but are unlikely to have access to the extended muh dekhna that photographs of the dead sovereign make possible.9 Together photographs and film footage as artifacts enable forms of mourning and remembrance that move away from the principles of disintegration and disappearance of the corpse at cremation and extend muh dekhna well beyond its encapsulation in a ritual moment. By its very nature the still and moving image captures and preserves the present of a moment, but also breaks with the immediacy of a single moment of viewing, transforming the whole process of how we remember. Thus, even though the posture of the sovereign’s corpse mimed the bodies of renouncers and ascetics, the postmortem photograph as a form of remembrance was borrowed wholly from modernizing discourses of death and nostalgia. But precisely because photographs can record the nature of things, they need to be “managed” and “manipulated.”10 The images of the sovereign’s corpse, for example, had the quality of posed portraiture. Modern leaders who meet violent death, or others whose corpses might else be emotive, pose a special challenge. Ritual and medical expertise need to come together to make the corpse look orderly. Media experts must train their lens to “exclude” any signs of injury. Viewers as mourners must forget the actual event of the death and see the corpse only as it is presented in the image. The removal of all signs of violence from the photographs of the bodies of Mahatma Gandhi and Indira Gandhi compels forgetting. The preserved images are of a calm body, headed toward an untroubled utopia in the afterlife. In its public viewing the corpse is also removed from the site of death. The corpse of Indira Gandhi, for example, lay in her father’s home, at Teen Murti House, not at her home in Safdarjung Road where she was assassinated. Her corpse was clothed in garments that bore no trace of violence.11 A great deal of knowledge and

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expertise is thus deployed to be able to forget the violent end of a significant person. The immediate issue that stares us in the face is the fact that bodies of leaders are not the only photographed corpses available to modern mourners. Throughout the 1980s to the mid-1990s, newspapers and television often carried images of corpses of deemed “Khalistani” terrorists or dissenters, or those perceived as threats to the state. An Indian army operation, code named “Operation Woodrose,” conducted in the Punjab countryside followed hard on the heels of Operation Bluestar. Operation Woodrose sought to seal the border and control armed insurgency in the region; it was a period when the most deaths, particularly of young men, were reported. During its two operations, Bluestar and Woodrose, the Indian state was in the forefront of producing photographs of corpses of militants, sometimes circulating them in newspapers or other media as proof of death, and a visual assertion of the power of the state. They were critically different from images of slain national leaders, in that the signs of death were made evident in the photographs of militants. These corpses are shown at the place of encounter in fields or marshlands (Jaijee 1999), the site of death, with all the marks of injury on display. In part, the photograph is a witness report to establish death beyond doubt. However, the absence of the turban, and the uncurled topknot disregarded the rituals of hair so significant in Sikhism. The “disrespect” of male hair in the photographs was very likely deliberate, part of the symbolic language of state domination and retribution. State-generated photographs of dead militants were additionally shorn of all signs of mourning or ritual treatment of dead bodies. They were—and continue to be—the exact opposite of stage-managed sovereign corpses that were made to appear serene and lifelike. The rebel corpse is shown with its hair unruly, limbs splayed, eyes half opened, and the wounds of death unmistakable. The display of rebel corpses in all the untidiness of death is a signifier of the power of the state; indeed, what is on display is a ritual exhibition of state power. As a newspaper image, the corpse appears in the context of a public viewing; its presence marks the newspaper and the field of death as social spaces beyond the familiar rituals of “seeing” the corpse within a home before it is taken for cremation described earlier in the chapter. Viewing the disheveled corpse signifies a moment of a world in reverse of political states of exception that transgress ordinary ritual practice. Rituals of state power deem the viewing of rebel corpses as necessary to the form and display of power as well as to establish “evidence” of death and enforce the illegitimacy of revolt. There is a deliberate orchestration of national sentiment through which the state asserts itself in the public imagination. If the display of corpses of leaders evokes national loss and a national community of mourners, the exhibition of rebel corpses is a mirror in which national threat and

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national revenge is exhibited. The rebel’s corpse is a lens of its own, a darshan, or viewing, through which an individual onlooker is transformed into a citizen, a legitimate member of a state which displays the right to exert violence—and to whom a citizen must surrender the right to exert violence “in the national interest.” How do images of captured corpses acquire the “affective presence” suggested by the Bones Collective? It is precisely the circuits of newspaper circulation that create the possibility of viewers to reassign meaning and reclaim the personhood of the rebel corpse, converting the deemed terrorist to “militant” or “martyr” through re-viewing. The acts of muh dekhna of the newspaper image exist as an active reinscription to make the photograph legible to a counterinterpretation. Viewers in different contexts witness the past in the act of a photographic muh dekhna to simultaneously claim the corpse as belonging to their social world and their right to mourn the passing of socially valuable persons. The corpse becomes a visual sign of that collective injury and must be collectively seen, mourned, and remembered. The corpses of 1984 and its aftermath occupy this terrain of the emotive image. Unattributed counter-photographs, on the other hand, showed corpses laid out in a ritually respectful manner. In one photograph, for example, six corpses killed by security forces in an encounter are laid on charpais, or rope beds (Figure 2.1) simulating the bier,12 covered with sheets or blankets

Figure 2.1  Corpses on charpai-biers, Nathu ka Burj, District Tran Taran, 1991. Cover, Outlook, December 14, 2015.

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and saffron-colored turbans tied on each head.13 The presentation and muh dekhna of such emotive corpses was spectacular and clearly beyond the ordinary. There is no doubt that counter-photographs were also a form of record made explicit by the people who encircled the corpses, to stand as witnesses

Figure 2.2  Cover Art, Sikh Shahadat, Library, Darbar Sahib, 2007. Photograph courtesy of the author. Chopra, Radhika. Amritsar 1984 : A City Remembers, Lexington Books, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5516278. Created from nyulibrary-ebooks on 2020-07-15 08:22:22.

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and mourners around the charpai-biers, looking at the faces of the dead. To my eyes, such photographs of corpses, as in Figure 2.4, are reminiscent of the photographs of the coffin of Blair Peach discussed in the Introduction. Touching the coffin in a gesture of blessing, the women of Southall claimed the young Irish school teacher as one of their own and mourned him as the procession passed by. Like the corpse in the coffin, the affective presence of corpses and mourners in a single frame need to be understood as a claim and a re-inscription, made evident by the attitudes of ritual respect of the mournerwitnesses. Formally laid-out corpses of the slain were reclaimed as shaheed (martyrs) through an amended act of muh dekhna. Such images reached out to potentially the same audience of Punjabi people living under the shadow of militancy, but with clearly different intentions—those by the state as warning and proof, and counter-photographs as establishing persecution and targeted communities. The counter-photographs reclaimed corpses as valuable persons, consolidated further by images of the slain printed as cover art of magazines to visually “describe” and display shahadat, martyr deaths (Figure 2.2), or as images reproduced on posters carried in protests against state action. The images are, more often than not, unattributed; but the likelihood that they were photographs taken by state agencies to establish the fact of death (and then appropriated as poster or cover art for a counter-telling) is evident in the way the photographed corpses display all the indignities of a disorderly death. The reproduction of the images and the movement from newspaper reports to protest posters mark out distinct and competing viewers and versions of death. Holocaust photographs have been understood in just such a multivalent frame, as a form of witnessing and of evidence that shapes and remakes historical memory (Zelizer 1998). Similar visual complexity frames these photographs as well. RECOUPING THE REBEL, REMEMBERING THE DEAD Where are these images preserved? What might the interleaving of location and preservation tell us about the extended muh dekhna of controversial but emotive corpses? Counterimages of the kind discussed above are preserved at two locations in the Darbar Sahib complex in Amritsar—the Kendriya Sikh Ajaibghar (the museum) and the library in the sacred complex. Let me begin with a discussion of images in the museum. Despite the fact that the museum primarily exhibits “historical” paintings and artifacts, many of the paintings are recent works, painted in the mid- to late 1990s, as militancy waned, but its memories remained sharp. Looking at the paintings, it seems as if the photograph was a template for a realist aesthetic imagination, particularly evident

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in the painted images of the martyrs of 1984 and its aftermath. The painted images of main protagonists like Subeg Singh, for example, the army general who fortified the sacred complex, and others, resemble passport photographs and they are hung together as a set. The paintings and artifacts in the CSM have undergone a series of shifts over the course of time. Apart from the actual movements of portraits from one wall to another (Figure 2.6), captions of portraits have also changed. For example, in the portrait of Subeg Singh, the word “Shaheed” (martyr) is a later insertion in the caption. Memory is directed and “adjusted” by such shifts, additions, and deletions, testifying to the continuing problem of how events and persons must be remembered. Memory studies have been particularly attentive to such modifications (Bose 2011; Confino 1997; among others). Equally crucial is the manner in which some portraits make way for others, discussed in some detail in chapter 1. Museum paintings are a fascinating terrain to understand the amendments inserted into memorial landscapes. Other paintings of the museum represent various moments of Sikh history. Some, however, were painted during the period of militant and military violence that devastated the state. A painting by Jarnail Singh in 1996 titled Saka Nankana Sahib (Figure 2.3) is particularly interesting in the way it simultaneously seems to draw on photographed images of corpses that were clearly familiar by 1996 when it was painted, as well as providing a template

Figure 2.3  Saka Nankana Sahib, Central Sikh Museum. Photographed painting, Authors own, 2007.

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for later photograph-collages of magazine covers. The two painted corpses— in particular the one in the left-hand corner of the painting—are uncannily reminiscent of corpses of modern militants printed as magazine cover art and the protest poster (Figures 2.2 and 2.3). They are in situ, at the site of death, their bodies marked by blood and injury; but the turbans of the painted dead remain intact and neatly bound. Together, the painted wounds and the turbans reference a painted (and captioned) discourse of shaheedi (martyrdom) deliberately dislocating the corpses from the photographic “record” of the state and countering the image of the uggarwadi (terrorists). In this particular 1996 painting, the unruffled turban of Shaheed Kaka Darbara Singh, son of Shaeed Bhai Kehar Singh, the captioned central figure is echoed by the bloodied but “intact” corpse in the corner of the painting, with the eyes and mouth closed, presenting the face to be viewed as if at the ritualized moment of muh dekhna. The style adopted by the artist suggests that there was a back-and-forth shift between different visualizations of corpses from state-generated photographs to paintings and back again. This is an important aspect of the way corpses were “seen” and memorialized; the museum became a space where a form of muh dekhna was made possible and unnamed corpses folded into martyrdom. I return to this aspect a little later in this chapter. A second series of images “continues” the story of martyrdom and creates the terrain to view the “emotive materiality” (Fontein 2010) of photographed corpses as political bodies and affective objects. Though chronologically prior to the militant movement of Khalistan, the images in this series (Figure 2.4), hung in one continuous row, allude to the Punjabi Suba14 agitation. The movement created a particular context for martyrdom, of men who died in defense of what at the time was broadly encapsulated in the term punjabiyat, denoting Punjabi culture, most palpable in language. Linguistic identity, however, expanded and became synonymous with religion; Sikhs were “naturalized” as Punjabi speakers and inhabitants of the territory of the Punj-Ab (the land of the five “waters”/rivers) creating a set of exclusions that translated into a communal divide between Sikhs and Hindus. It’s interesting though that these agitations could not fully capture the sense of a faith under threat so evident in the museum paintings of medieval martyrs but were primarily anchored in the idiom of territory and political rights within the overall frame of state reorganization. And this indeed is their significance—the idea of persecution absorbed and converted to political right. In the museum, the images of the Punjabi Suba martyrs portray this ambiguity and conversion. All are newspaper images, reproduced as “portraits” with small passport size photographs inset in the corners and captions that resemble news items. The sepia of faded newsprint steeps the image (­Figure 2.4) as belonging to an archived and visibly remembered past. The key to these martyrs is the fact of their death, and they appear to the viewer as corpses,

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Figure 2.4  Photographed portraits of Punjabi Suba martyrs, Shaheed Bhai Piyara Singh ji and Shaheed Bhai Gurcharan Singh ji Ludhiana. Photograph courtesy of the author.

as a last viewing of a person in muh dekhna, with their turbans intact, their eyes and mouths closed. Captions celebrate the fact of their death, creating an identity of politically charged and “active” martyrs dying in defense of an identity fastened to faith, akin to their medieval forbearers. Images of more recent corpses (which, by 2015, I was not permitted to photograph) follow the styles of the Punjabi Suba martyrs. The caption of one set of more recent images reads “The Martyrs of Tarn Taran Railway crossing, 1982” referring to those who courted arrest in the Dharm Yudh Morcha (fight for faith) through the 1980s as part of the agitation for a separate nation of Khalistan. These images were hung in the museum after 2007, though no one was able to confirm the date of the installation. The act of reclaiming corpses through an extended form of muh dekhna is consolidated and completed in another archive—the records of the library within the Darbar Sahib complex.15 Despite the continuity in the narrative of shaheedi, moving from the museum to the library creates a break in the process of viewing and remembrance. The images in the museum are “open” to view hung on the walls encircled by a series of objects—weapons, spent tank shells, and manuscripts—that shape the viewing. The library continues the ideas of commemoration, but its rooms are set apart, quiet and almost

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colorless by contrast to the museum. Nevertheless, many of the images in the library are specific to the army operations and their aftermath. In a stiffly bound “album” in the library, the destructions of the complex during Bluestar are visually recorded, with small, often single-line, captions under each photograph. Like a personal or family photo album, the one in the library is a collection of unattributed photographs. However, many of the images in the library collection are “reprints” of photographs published elsewhere. It is the sequencing of these unattributed images that provides the narrative driver for the story of Operation Bluestar in photo-album form. The album begins with a reproduced photograph of the Darbar Sahib engulfed in flames. The images that follow are clearly taken at different moments of time, but the inaugural image of the building of the shrine “in flames” frames all the succeeding photographs. Two critical inclusions in the album that follow are the postmortem photographs of the corpses of General Subeg Singh and Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale (Figures 2.5 and 1.3). The image of the general who converted the sacred space into a fortification and clearly marshaled his troops to good effect is shown here as a “captured” corpse. The presence of soldiers of the Indian army in their battle fatigues places this photograph within the category of evidentiary images, to establish the proof of death.16 The caption of this photograph reads “Body of Maj. General Shahbeg [sic] Singh, who was, at

Figure 2.5  Corpse of General Subeg Singh. Photograph of photograph courtesy of the author.

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one time, the hero of [sic] Bangladesh War. The ropes around his feet and the marks on his arms indicate that he was dragged and tortured to death. His family was not allowed to attend his cremation. When his son Prabhpal Singh asked for his father’s ashes, he was told that [sic] government would immerse them in one of India’s sacred rivers.” Unlike the images of the corpses of Mahatma Gandhi or Indira Gandhi, which might more readily “fit” into the frame of bereavement photographs, the displayed corpse of Subeg Singh, lying without his turban, out in the open, arms raised as if in surrender, replicates the way “uggarwadi,” or militant corpses, were photographed. The presence of the soldiers poised over and dominating the corpse are unmistakably meant to make “an example of the dead” (Berger 1968, 43). The position of the corpse and its treatment suggest that this body is a “political warning” (ibid) to rebels and militants. The refusal to hand over Subeg Singh’s corpse to the son (indicated in the caption) and the denial of the right to incorporate the corpse into familiar mortuary rituals to his family suggest a military/state knowledge of the corpse as “active” in converting a traitor to a martyr through the honorific ritual treatment of the corpse. The caption states that the “government” will oversee and conduct the ritual of immersion of the ashes. How or where this will be done is left unspecified. It is the unstated nature of what will actually happen to the corpse that exposes the intentionality of the government ritual. The only thing specified in the caption is the immersion of the ashes “in one of India’s sacred rivers.” For Sikhs—as for Hindus—immersions of ashes and bones in water are a powerful moment of transformation; the dead are no longer part of this world, and through the purificatory power of flowing water, will be transformed from unsettled spirits to benevolent and blessed ancestors. Despite this commonly held belief in the power of water, Sikhs immerse the ashes of their kin at Kiratpur (an important location in Sikh history), on the banks of the River Sutlej, or a nearby river, whereas for Hindus the river Ganga is preeminent though ashes are immersed in most rivers and water bodies. One of the demands of the Khalistan militant movement (which Subeg Sigh died defending) was the constitutional separation of Sikhs from Hindus, through an amendment to Article 25(2)(b) of the Constitution of India, which includes Sikhs as Hindus for a variety of legal recognitions.17 Against this background of political demands, the speculation of where Subeg Singh’s ashes would be immersed would be of paramount interest. Ambiguity would plainly produce discord and anxiety. Only the complete control over the corpse would enable mastery over meaning. Quite apart from establishing death beyond doubt, the photograph and its caption subtly suggest the “incorporation” of the general back into a generalized Indic fold, outlined in the constitutional clause, by the government’s act of immersing his ashes in an unspecified though “sacred” river. Vague words were “read” as a repudiation

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of the militant demand to delete Article 25(2)(b) of the Indian Constitution, in which Sikhs are included in the category “Hindu.” The inclusion of the image of the slain general’s corpse in an album that seeks to preservememory of violation must then be a counter to the army’s act and the indeterminacy suggested by the phrase “one of India’s sacred rivers,” indexing a deliberate effort at obfuscation. It seems to me the inclusion of the photograph in the album becomes an effort at restoring the general back into the fold of “rebels” and martyrs to be celebrated rather than negated. The same photograph then, addresses two different viewers—those who stood against militancy and those for whom the period was an assertion of identity and the restoration of a rightful place in the world. By contrast, the corpse of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale (Figure 1.3) is laid out “in repose,” in shav asana, without any signs of injury. His clothes are not in disarray and his turban cloth is laid neatly at his waist as a cummerbund. Significantly enough, we do not see his face clearly. Though discussed in chapter 1, the testimony of Apar Singh Bajwa, called as witness to identify Bhindranwale’s corpse, bears repetition here. Bajwa is reported to have said that the body was “injured on the right side of the face and had bled profusely in the abdomen” (The Tribune, Chandigarh, May 20, 2001). Clearly, the fact that care was taken to “cover” the injuries and to turn the camera lens away from a direct “muh dekhna” of Bhindranwale’s body indexes the problematic, but powerful, nature of this corpse. Equally it tells us of the affective nature of photographs, as “emanations” (Barthes 1984) of persons, and the emotive materiality of the corpse itself. Unlike the soldiers around Subeg’s corpse, here no “victors” are present. From Bajwa’s testimony, we learn that Bhindranwale’s corpse was covered with a sheet, and before the cremation he was permitted to pour ghee (clarified butter) on it, an act intrinsic to Punjabi mortuary rituals. Clearly too, the permission granted to Bajwa to perform the ritual must have originated from General Brar who led the charge into the complex. Whether the permission was an act of respect or caution is difficult to establish. What is clear in the management of the two photographs of Subeg Singh and Bhindranwale is that all signs of death were expunged from Bhindranwale’s corpse, acknowledging his power even in death and perhaps participating in other Indic understandings of the afterlife: the journey of the dead toward incorporation with ancestors. The deliberately orchestrated unruffled appearance of Bhindranwale’s corpse and the caption in the album implyi that he would move toward a sangat of shaheed.18 The images of the corpses of Subeg Singh and Bhindranwale index new forms of expertise—in this case, the army photographer. It is the “expert photographer” who replaces the ritual specialist to present the two corpses from a particular perspective and with specific intent.

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At this point I would like to very briefly reconsider some of the key elements of the ritual of muh dekhna of the corpse. Viewing the face is an essential moment in mourning rituals and must precede the cremation. The moment of ritual viewing enables a form of remembrance, but the material disappearance of the corpse suggests that the person must now be remembered differently. Viewing the face is an active reinscription, a rewriting, of how the person is remembered. The Indic belief in an individual’s incorporation into the collective body of benevolent ancestors transforms the dead person from a haunting presence as ghost (prêt) to an enduring presence as pitr or merged within the corporate body of ancestors, who bless the living and ensure the continuity of the mortal group. Muh dekhna is the first step in this transformative process. Equally, cremation allows the fading away of the problematic character of individuals and their conversion to benevolent ancestor. Periodic commemoration becomes an act of synchronized forgetting and remembering. The departure and disintegration of the cremated corpse enables this form of rewriting. It allows the living to carry on. The sovereign’s postmortem photograph certainly follows this trajectory to fit the frame of forgetfulness; it is kept sequestered, rarely or very privately viewed, so that it cannot stand in the way of his heir. The power of the sovereign’s presence must fade and his photographic muh dekhna cannot rewrite the arc of ritual amnesia. The question is how a corpse that must be collectively seen, mourned, and remembered (but must also be “forgotten”) is different from the postmortem photographs of dead militants which present a trauma continuously remembered and a refusal to see off the dead. The emotive materiality of the corpse is heightened at the moment of muh dekhna; viewing the face of the corpse in the photograph possibly arouses similar feelings of loss (or horror) making viewing a viscerally intense experience. At the same time, the painstaking preservation and viewing of postmortem images in the Darbar Sahib library seem to suggest that though constant remembrance is intrinsic to viewing, refusal to forget is perhaps just one thread of interpretation. For it does seem as if preservation also allows mourning that was not possible (or not permissible) at the time of death. Mourning was too dangerous and the agency that inheres to mourning (Butler 1995) remained frozen. The library is perhaps the only archive and the only space that makes the muh dekhna of these corpses possible. Literally turning the pages is an act of recovery. The photographed corpses, usurped from a state archive and replaced in an album, enable a form of “visual caring” and an attenuated muh dekhna, framing the viewing as an act that both recovers and restores ritual respect to the dead. When as anthropologists we encounter corpses that are explicitly displayed as photographs, we might be forgiven for thinking of these corpses and their postmortem photographs as signifying political states of exception, suggesting a loss so fundamental that it closes off the possibility of permissible

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forgetting or ritual restoration of ordinary time. But as anthropologists we must ask if the postmortem photograph wholly disrupts the progression toward ritual amnesia. Do we need to relook the library and its adjacent Ajaibghar, the museum, as two critical spaces that enable the move from remembering to forgetting through different forms of visual incorporation? It is important to “see” the sequestered space of the library as a material condition of viewing. The “half-forgotten” space of the library creates a circumstance that enables people to see the faces of the dead and then allows them to step into the museum to view the painted afterlife of these dead persons seen as collections of portraits (Figure 2.6). In my understanding, the movement of viewers from photograph to portrait “completes” muh dekhna as an act. It certainly allows us to imagine the library record as a usurped and rewritten narrative, contesting the state assignment. But equally, it permits the understanding of portraits next door as an installation of ritual logic that moves memory from remembrance to a permissible forgetfulness, the person from uggarwadi to shaheed (terrorist to martyr), from unsettled spirit to divine and recognizable forefather. The museum’s painted portraits are a counterpart to the photographed corpses in the library. They are the sanctified ancestors. If their simultaneous existence within the sacred prescient of

Figure 2.6 The sangat (collective body) of painted Shaheed, Central Sikh Museum, Amritsar, 2007. Photograph courtesy of the author.

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the Darbar Sahib suggests the insistence of remembering, their segregation in adjoining but separate spaces is as striking, something we, as anthropologists mustn’t forget.

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NOTES 1. An earlier version of this chapter titled “Seeing off the Dead: Post Mortem Photographs in the Darbar Sahib” was published in Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory, May 2017, Vol. 12, Issues 2–3 pp. 207–222 (Taylor & Francis, Routledge). 2. The resemblance between the muh dekhna of a new bride and its inversion at the moment before cremation are hard to miss; and therefore, throughout the chapter, I have used the term muh dekhna for the ritual of seeing the face of the dead person. Some scholars suggested the term “antim darshan” or “a last view” to denote the act of seeing the face of the corpse (personal communication). This term is appropriate in terms of actual description of the act. Aakhri deedar (final sight) is another term and does suggest that it is the last moments or final view; however, it seems to be used more in the context of Islamic ritual practice of funeral prayers. The reason I retain muh dekhna throughout this chapter is in part because I have not heard antim darshan, or aakhri deedar (or in fact muh dekhna), used in contemporary Punjab. But I nevertheless use the phrase muh dekhna because I feel that the underlying homologies between entry and exit of members suggested by the phrase more accurately “explain” the collective, public cultural act. 3. In modern ritual observance, this moment of viewing is often abbreviated to the briefest possible period of time, and the body cremated as soon as possible. Hospital deaths do away with virtually all ritual possibilities of muh dekhna, since the corpse is entirely wrapped in firmly tied cloth from head to toe till cremation or burial. Kinsmen may recite a short verse before the wrapped corpse is taken to a hospital mortuary; other than this there remain few or no possibilities of ritual acknowledgement of person in hospital deaths. 4. The Bones Collective is a research network that emerged in social anthropology in the University of Edinburgh. It’s central problematic “has been to query what it is about human bones and bone that provokes emotional, political, visceral and intellectual responses from those who encounter them” (Krmpotich et al. 2010, 371). 5. The necessity of cremation in the ritual universe can also become a focus of contention. David Arnold’s discussion of dissection practices in colonial Calcutta makes clear that corpses were available for dissection, especially important to track epidemics. Availability of corpses was sometimes contested. The corpse of a lowcaste mortuary specialist Budri, who apparently died of the plague contracted while doing the work of dissection on diseased corpses, was carted off for cremation by his friends, who refused to allow Budri’s body to be dissected for the purpose of investigative Western medicine (Arnold 1993, 6). 6. Postmortem photography was a popular practice among the middle class in Victorian England; such photographs were mementos, and, because they served as

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reminders of the person, were usually formal, some with the living kin and dead person posed in a single frame. This was especially true of photographs of dead children. Flowers suggestive of life and sweet smells were common props in postmortem photography (Riches and Dawson 1998). 7. Uwe Skoda and Birgit Lettmann (2011) argue that among the Bonai Rajas of Odhisha postmortem photography dates back to the early 20th century. 8. Corpses of renouncers or heads of religious sects are seated in padmasan and are not cremated but buried or immersed in sacred rivers. Princes, however, were cremated. 9. The images of the corpses of Mahatma Gandhi and Indira Gandhi created a nation of mourners for whom their death was a national loss and many participated in a national muh dekhna of their slain leaders. The postmortem image creates an assemblage of mourners that go well beyond the immediate kinship circle simultaneously extending muh dekhna beyond its immediate ritual moment. Together, national muh dekhna and collectively observed death anniversaries inserted into a national civic calendar (January 30 and October 31 respectively) act in concert to orchestrate collective remembrance, setting these leaders apart in death as in life. 10. Newspapers and television often carry visual images of dead bodies in natural disasters or accidents. These corpses are shown at the locations of death or the immediate aftermath. Raw injury is not necessarily shown, though it is clearly suggested by the destroyed landscape, gaping holes in walls, fire and smoke, debris and dust. Medical paraphernalia of stretchers, ambulances, and paramedics are synecdochical of trauma and violent death. Deflection of the eye onto signs of disaster is a form of knowing death. International news media display or represent injury at a number of different registers. From the virtual silence of the Fox News footage of the Iraq war, to Al-Jazeera’s simultaneous depictions of civilian and military casualties, images of the war dead have been stage-managed as a way of arousing emotions of empathy and patriotism (Rahimi 2003). 11. However, her sari bearing the bullet marks and blood stains of her violent death is preserved in the museum at the site of assassination to evoke another tenor in the sense of continual loss and mourning—outrage against her assassins. The memorial has become a landmark site on the tourist maps of Delhi. 12. Cloth-covered corpses are carried to the cremation ground on bamboo biers. 13. During the militant period, open beards and saffron-colored turbans indicated protest and sympathy with the separatist movement. Using the language of hair, the displays of turbaned corpses by the Sikh community countered state control on the dead bodies of kharkus/uggarvadis (militants/insurgents) that displayed corpse images without the “respect” paid to rituals of hair. 14. Post independence, the declaration of Hindi as the national language was met with unrest across India. Subsequently, linguistic regions became the basis of a reorganization of states based on language. A majority of Sikhs in India were resident in the state of Punjab though they did not constitute a demographic majority at the time. The Punjabi Suba agitation was a demand spearheaded by the Akali Dal party that saw itself as protecting Sikh interests. The Akali Dal demanded a separate state of Punjab without its Hindi-speaking areas/localities, to reduce Hindus to a demographic minority. Finally, in 1966, the old state of Punjab was divided between three states

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of Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, and Punjab. Couched in the idiom of language, the Punjabi Suba movement is seen retrospectively as laying the foundation for a separate Sikh state of Khalistan. 15. Photographs in the library records were photographed by me, and are reproduced here. All photographs of photographs are the author’s own. 16. I read John Berger’s essay on the corpse of “Che” Guevara (Berger 1968) after I presented an early draft of this chapter at the workshop of the Punjab Research Group, SOAS, in June 2015. I am indebted to Amarjit Chandan for the reference. In the essay Berger compares the photographed corpse of Guevara with Rembrandt’s painting The Anatomy Lesson of Professor Tulp, arguing that “the function of the two pictures is similar … both are concerned with making an example of the dead: one for the advancement of medicine, the other as a political warning” (Berger 1968, 43; italics in the text). 17. The clause in the Constitution of India reads “reference to Hindus shall be construed as including a reference to persons professing the Sikh, Jain or Buddhist religion, and the reference to Hindu religious institutions shall be construed accordingly” (Constitution of India https://india.gov.in/sites/upload_files/npi/files/coi_contents.pdf, 13). This was anathema to the Sikhs, who sought an autonomous identity for themselves, their religious institutions and rituals. 18. The caption in Gurmukhi reads “Shahadat paun toh badh Sant Jarnail Singh” (after attaining martyrdom Sant Jarnail Singh)

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Bazaar Divinity

Sacred sites in India are not enclosed behind high walls.1 They open out onto streets and bazaars, with people, sounds, and objects incessantly moving between different spaces of the sacred and the mundane. The faithful walk through gullies or market squares to enter shrines, passing shops or kiosks offering retail therapy to those in need of a spiritual uplift. Coming into and out of the Darbar Sahib, a pilgrim passes by shops brimming with religious souvenirs that reach out to pilgrim-consumers via shop signage in different scripts—Gurmukhi, Roman, and Devanagari—to persuade an assortment of pilgrims to become tourists or convince travelers to experience the sense of the sacred sold in the bazaar. Earmarked shops sell naivedhya and prasaad (offerings and blessings) in highly monetized transactions securing the sacred economy to commerce. Small cafes and fast-food chains—including ubiquitous pizza parlors—tempt pilgrims with specialized local and global cuisines keeping an air-conditioned distance from adjoining open-fronted shops, where large stainless-steel glasses are filled with hot milk from boiling vats on open fires. Everywhere on the urban landscape of sacred centers like Amritsar, the sensorium—visual, olfactory, aural—is excited by spirituality infused with commerce.2 In the previous chapters I paid close attention to the interior spaces of the Darbar Sahib, seeing the shrine as a space set apart, but also a place that directs its gaze inward, looking within itself. But the shrine as public space is ensconced in the midst of its surrounding bazaars. Virtually the entire pilgrimage urban hub of Amritsar orients itself to the shrine. Though the shrine dominates the urban landscape it reciprocally opens outward toward the city. Strolling through the bazaars around the Darbar Sahib, I think about the complex relationship between the sacred order of the gurudwara vis-à-vis the economic cacophony of the bazaar. Standing at street corners of Kapra Mandi, the cloth market, or walking along Guru Bazaar Road toward duppata 47

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bazaar, the market of veils, breathing the fumes of exhaust pipes mingled with the smell of ghee, I realize that despite its name, Guru Bazaar—market of saint-pedagogues—sells more than pious images. It offers an idea. Magnifying the shrine beyond its physical location, the bazaar presents a perspective on reverence that is independent of the sacred experienced in the shrine. The range and juxtaposition of things sold in Guru Bazaar suggest that even within the terms and tenets of Sikhism, the religion toward which the city shops of Amritsar seem oriented, the sacred is multiply located, multiply constructed, and multiply accessed. In its own vocabulary of commodities, the bazaar presents itself as an urban space of ritual observance. The contiguity of bazaar and shrine presents a different perspective of the sacred. As I stand at a street corner, looking up, a segmented slice of the dome of the Akal Takht, the Throne of the Timeless One, appears on the skyline, wedged between hoardings and television antennae. As I look up at the skyline, a segmented slice of the dome of the Akal Takht, the Throne of the Timeless One, appears wedged between hoardings and television antennae. Within the sacred complex, the Takht and the Harmandir, the eponymous Golden Temple are visible from every corner of the complex. Vertically speaking, however, the Takht dominates the city skyline. The fact that I can see the Takht (or at least a sliver of it) from the street corner, literally shows me the significance of the visible sacred. In his classic work Recognising Islam, Michael Gilsenan (1977) points out that a key decision in the planning of Islamic cities is the view of the minaret and dome of the Friday mosque from every corner of the city; the urban plan of the city reflects the preeminence of the sacred that dominates the city skyline, but it also coexists with the suq or the bazaar. In Amritsar, though the principle of visibility outlined by Gilsenan is important, my eyes tell me that the view of the dome isn’t identical from everywhere. From the perspective of the street, the dome is sliced into segments. The slivered segments make it possible to realign perspectives of the sacred, seen through refractions that lines of sight pose to the sacred. Prospect presents “versions” of the whole. I will return to this a little later in the chapter. At this point I want to flag the idea that “seeing” itself is a process through which dissimilar faces/facets of the same thing are observed from different points in space. It is social imaginations that harness several views of the world, “centering” the binocular disparity into a coherent image of sacred things, all the while retaining the “real” binocular disparity as slightly different lines of sight. Looking up at the skyline, the slivered shrine appears as a thing to be reimagined. Looking down, at eye level, even the vestigial sliver disappears, replaced by the religious souvenirs that line the street. At street level, another kind of sacred imagining comes into view. It’s the spatially misaligned but imaginatively aligned relation between shrine and souvenir that presents a unique perspective on how and where the divine can be accessed. It is the binocular disparity version of the sacred that I explore in this chapter.

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THE CITY OF AMRITSAR Before plunging further into the bazaar spaces of Amritsar, let me digress into a brief description of “ways of seeing” the city. From the perspective of Sikhism, Amritsar is at the core of sacred life. Even its name is significant for Sikhs. It is the place of Amrit, the nectar drunk during initiation rituals, and the Sar, the water of the Sarover or sacred pool, around which the Darbar Sahib complex is built, and by metaphoric extension, the sacred pool toward which the city is oriented. As a pilgrimage center, the city is an axis of the Sikh sacred. Often compared to the Vatican because of its centrality to Sikhism, the Darbar Sahib and the its “Golden Temple” are spoken of as the reason to visit the city (Barry 2012; Haynes 2016; Nayar 2012; Pal Singh, 27 June 2012 http://www.yespunjab.com/punjab/item/4147). Corresponding to its religious significance, the city has been a center for trade and wholesale markets in specialized goods stretching back into the medieval period, a history reflected in the names of the bazaars. Even though the walls of the old city have crumbled, the names of streets and segments of the bazaar remember medieval trade and inscribe a historical past. Wholesale market spaces like the Purani Lakkar Mandi (market for wood) or the Namak Mandi (salt market) or the Keseriyan Wala bazaar (the saffron bazaar) stand testimony to their medieval antecedents, marked even today on modern maps of the city. From the 18th into the mid-19th centuries, Sikh rule added its own imprint upon city spaces, constructing institutions like bungas (rest houses), new neighborhoods or Katras, havelis (homes with courtyards), and missionary centers of learning that continue to be part of modern Amritsar (Singh 2011). The city grew vertically during the medieval period, its narrow gullies inhabited by culturally homogenous groups. Part of this urban architecture remains in pockets within the old town, though a great deal of the area around the Darbar Sahib has been dramatically altered3 between 2015 and 2017. As a richly endowed religious center with flourishing trade, it was ransacked on numerous occasions, and sections destroyed by invading armies, chief among them the military assaults of the Afghan, Ahmed Shah Abdali (often cited as the founder of the modern state of Afghanistan). Even today, Abdali’s raid upon the riches of the Darbar Sahib and the destruction of the Akal Takht are chronicled in plaques that commemorate the valor of Sikh warriors in defense of their precious sacred space. The memory of violent pasts, both medieval and modern, are continuously inscribed upon the landscape. The subsequent British colonial imprint on the urban landscape is as apparent as the city’s medieval past. The Town Hall,4 a key colonial institution, remains an important public space of modern Amritsar, as do the Mall Road and Civil Lines, both central spaces of colonial cities in Asia. These locations remain desired and valuable commercial and residential areas for the modern

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“Amritsari” middle class. Before 1947 and the partition of India, Lahore and Amritsar “had evolved to a position of near parity in the administrative and economic configuration of eastern Punjab. The decision to lay down the new international border between Lahore and Amritsar led to massive riots in those cities and destroyed minority neighbourhoods” (Heitzman 2008, 172). The violence of this traumatic event led to a decline both in the population of Amritsar, and the “loss of raw materials, much of its customer base, and a large proportion of its skilled workers” (Heitzman 2008, 172) damaging the city’s importance. Its proximity to an international border with an antagonistic state, Pakistan, meant that it was no longer considered a place for locating heavy industry. Nor did the city receive any substantive state investment. The only significance it retained was as a religious center; and over time the focus of that religiosity became primarily Sikh. The city shot to political prominence during the period of militancy that gripped the state of Punjab during the 1980s through to 1990s. Militants who sought sanctuary in the Darbar Sahib also converted the city and its scared center into their stronghold. In an interview, a young woman whose family home faced the Darbar Sahib told me about the daily bulletins that were issued from within the shrine via outward facing loudspeakers, read out by militants who had taken possession of the shrine. The bulletins cast an aural canopy over the surrounds of the shrine, quite different from the sounds of Ardas that was normally heard. For her, the diktats remain a living memory. The Indian state’s response was militaristic; and in the army operation discussed in previous chapters, the Darbar Sahib was occupied and control forcibly wrested away from those who espoused a separate nation of Khalistan. Signs of battle still mark the spaces within the Darbar Sahib and people still remember the traumatic weeks that led up to and followed the battle. The bazaar spaces of Amritsar also reflect this trauma and memory in grassroots memorials in the vicinity of the Darbar Sahib, like a marble plaque in a narrow gully installed by the neighborhood federation of shopkeepers in memory of the dead. Grassroots memorials find a counterpart in souvenirs sold in the small gully shops. The politics of commemoration is alive and apparent in the bazaars of Amritsar as it is within the Darbar Sahib (Chopra 2011, 2013). Thinking through things as I do here, is not especially new in an anthropological discourse of material culture; the work of scholars (Davis 1996; Jain 2007; Miller 2010; Ramaswamy 2003) on why some things matter is especially interesting for my understanding of religious spaces and things within them. What makes religious souvenirs fascinating is how they are designed to “act” in animating relations between devotee and divine. Souvenirs catch a pilgrim’s attention, drawing the devotee into commercial transactions, all the while emphasizing pious intent. Tourist pilgrims might have an image of the sacred in the mind’s eye that creates a predilection toward buying religious

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souvenirs; nevertheless, souvenirs are in competition with other goods for a pilgrim’s purse. Though highly emotive artifacts, foremost within a hierarchy of commodities, the affective quality of the souvenir cannot be assumed. As a good in the bazaar it needs to reach out to pilgrim shoppers and attract their attention through a play of different strategies: visual, material, and spatial. The souvenir of one shrine appearing in the bazaar around another is common commercial practice. Less tracked is the way aesthetic elements move between souvenirs of different faiths, re-fashioning what is thought of as an elementary form of one religion crossing with another. Pictographic fragments travelling between religious posters network history and divinity. On the streets of Amritsar, a virtual triptych of Guru Nanak, Christ, and Ravidas (Figures 3.1, 3.2, and 3.3) raise their right hand, palm outward, blessing tourist pilgrims but making no distinction between whom they bless (or beckon). In the souvenir shops around the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the conjunction of the halo and the gesture of blessing is associated most closely with the founder of the Sikh faith, Guru Nanak. In smaller bazaars, the halo and outward facing palm are also prominent in images of Sant Ravidas, the cobbler mendicant and saint whose verses are part of the sacred scriptures of Sikhism but whose followers are drawn primarily from among the lower castes of Punjab. Late 20th- and early 21st-century political assertions among lower-caste followers of the saint have created new scriptural and ritual formations. The newly consecrated scripture for example is based on the 40 verses ascribed to Ravidas extracted from the Sikh Granth, creating a new silsila or genealogical connection to distinct forms of worship and different sacred spaces like Banaras. Despite “segregating” the 40 verses of Ravidas from the body of the Sikh Granth, it’s striking how portrayals of Ravidas visually reference Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism. As mentioned above, the raised right hand in a gesture of blessing is a posture identical in the souvenir art of both Nanak and Ravidas. However, it is in the treatment of hair that Ravidas breaks free from Nanak and into other pictorial representations. Nanak’s hair is bound in a turban (as already discussed, uncut but bound male hair is a key symbol of the Sikh body). The cobbler saint’s open hair rests on his shoulders as does the hair of Christ. The visual crossing may have as much to do with the fact that in Punjab, the contemporary converts to Christianity are drawn from among the same lower-caste social group as are the Ravidassis.5 Indexing Christ, however, may also reference the global expansion of the Ravidassi sect among the Punjabi diaspora settled in countries where Christianity is the dominant religion. Ravidas’s half-closed eyes, suggesting contemplation, are reminiscent of Guru Nanak, while the open hair, similar to that of Christ (associated in Indian minds with renunciation) draw a connection between the mendicant outcaste and a global god. Each figure dons a shawl, over long

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Figure 3.1  Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism. Photograph courtesy of the author.

robes, the colors seeping from one saint’s body to another. Seen in passing, each distinct image coheres around the divinity of saints who inhabit the streets, acting in unison to convert the bazaar into a sliver of the sacred. Without in any way losing their particularity or distinction, visual elements like the halo, the outward facing palm and the open hair excite feelings of piety among disparate believers, who understand these elements not as imitative, but as equalizing the holiness of different saints. Though relocated within a new image, the pictographic fragment is both outside the frame drawing from other images beyond itself, but also within it, in its relation to other elements that are part of a single frame. The halo and the hair are more obvious signals of the movement of aesthetic elements—less apparent, but equally significant, are the subtle suggestions of divinity that crisscross between antagonistic or rival religions. The rosary of Nanak and Ravidas, the “offering” of flowers placed at Nanak’s feet and on the takht seat where Ravidas sits in audience, the mantles worn by all, are comprehensible to the devotee’s eye as evocations of divine presence without in any way being misunderstood as mere imitation. Part of this clarity of visualization has to do with a generalized recognition of these symbols as evocations of divine persons, but equally it is an imaginative conversion of distinction into relevant signatures of likeness.

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Bazaar Divinity

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Figure 3.2  Christ in Amritsar. Photograph courtesy of the author.

Figure 3.3  Sant Ravidas, the cobbler mendicant. Photograph courtesy of the author.

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A souvenir inscription that reads “Satguru Ravidas Ji Maharaj,” imparts to the image a cosmologically (and artistically) endorsed correspondence to the Sikh Gurus6 and a colloquial “Christ-Maharaj.” In concert, the configuration of visual elements—inscription, attire, bodily postures, colors—locates the image within its own framework of belief, signifying the distinction of Ravidas from Nanak and Christ, but also allowing a visual cross-referencing. Resemblance is one strategy through which sacred souvenirs act. The other dazzling strategy is the use of lights. Walking through the bazaar in the evenings, religious souvenirs within the deepest interiors of small shops and kiosks catch the attention of passersby by an innovative use of light. Illumination presents the “glowing” character of religious symbols and figurines. The divine light of a halo is sometimes literally lit with battery-operated bulbs placed in the head of a figurine; or fragments of glass embedded around the halo catch the streetlights outside, inviting passersby to purchase the iridescent divine winking up at them (Figure 3.4). Together with illumination, mechanical and electric technologies enhance enchantment. Religious figures raise their hands with metronomic regularity to bless the tourist pilgrim, clocks chime sacred songs at every hour, and beams of light spread radiance from god to devotee. Technologies of darshan (viewing) create a radiant

Figure 3.4  Technologies of divine light, the Ten Sikh Gurus bless Harmandir, Amritsar, May 2013. Photograph courtesy of the author.

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universe of battery-operated signs to stretch the symbol beyond the confines of shrines, crossing into the world of toys or everyday objects while still retaining their connective tissue to the sacred. Acting upon—even creating—a ritual imagination requires harnessing sanctity. To think of objects as active and acting we need to see where they are. Location is definitive in shaping the object—but objects, it seems to me, equally redefine the meanings of space through location.7 In Amritsar, souvenirs are not merely objects of the bazaar. They travel from street to sanctum as fragments somewhat randomly distributed on doorways or near water fountains within the sacred complex, as a form of novelty-sacred but also an aide memoire, to remind us that religion is not archaic but avant-garde. At another level, the eccentricity and the startling nature so intrinsic to souvenirs disturb the order of the complex: the almost random placements of souvenirs seem to orchestrate an incoherent universe with no single point of reflection. Orchestrated movements around the sacred pool and the Harmandir are ritually preeminent. But as worshippers move, they encounter “side shows”: a highly colored statue of Baba Deep Singh recently installed in a glass case along the marbled walkway parikrama, or the embellished memorial for martyrs of 1984 discussed in detail in chapter 1, with the face of a significant martyr printed on a clock face hanging within.8 Such architectural grafts and inventions break up familiar ritual circulations into an improvised choreography that resembles the kinesis of bazaar traffic, teeming with interruptions. Unpredictable materialization of fragments along random circuits change the relations between shrine and bazaar, between devotee and divine, through the idiosyncratic use of religious fragments and their novel incorporations. THE CITY AND ITS SHRINES The municipality of Amritsar plays a critical role in elevating the Darbar Sahib as the core of the city and the center of the sacred. Every evening the streets leading toward the Golden Temple complex are washed by municipal tankers. Washing space is a common and familiar practice across the three major religions observed in Amritsar and Punjab; the movement of the water tankers, however, single out the Golden Temple as the “core” sacred space of the city. Devotees within the shrine washing the parikrama and municipal tankers in the bazaar streets perform the act of washing almost in unison, orchestrating (even unconsciously) the circumambulatory performance of cleansing spaces in time for the late evening prayer. Despite municipal regulations seeking to contain decibel levels within the confines of the city, loudspeakers facing inward toward the shrine and “outward” to the bazaar project the sounds of prayer across the streets of the surrounding bazaar. Municipal benevolence allows every shopper to become a devotee listening to the

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shabad kirtan (scriptural hymns) followed by the Ardas (prayer/supplication/ petition). From about early 2000, if not somewhat earlier, the Darbar Sahib and its institutions increasingly began to be referred to as “the Sikh Vatican” (Barry 2012; Nayar 2012; Shani 2009, 307). The comparison with Rome and the Vatican sought through reference, drew attention to the significance of the city and the Darbar Sahib as its sacred center, placing them on a global map of sacred hubs to make transnational immigrants and “foreign” tourists aware of the city’s and the shrine’s centrality for Sikhs. Increasingly identifying the city along the axis of a single faith, internet searches and tourist maps overlooked the wealth of beliefs and ritual practices that are intrinsic to the city, and of non-Sikh faiths and shrines that leave their own trace upon urban spaces. Despite the Sikh Gurus’ dialogues with and reverence for different faiths, contemporary civic and political practices imprinted a singularity of historical references upon the city’s landscape. A roundabout near the sacred complex was renamed after the Sikh ruler, Maharaja Ranjit Singh, and a statue of the sovereign mounted on a huge many-tiered pedestal replacing the small fountain after which the intersection had been earlier named.9 In the restless street corners of Amritsar’s Guru Bazar Road, the total absence of cigarette shops or restaurants serving the ubiquitous Punjabi chicken make evident the regulation of bazaar economics. The absence has a great deal to do with the politics of purification that underlay militant protest of the 1980s and 1990s. Newspapers reported the destruction of tobacco vending outlets and the violent protests around butcher shops in the vicinity of the Darbar Sahib complex by the Dal Khalsa, a militant organization that professed religious fundamentalism as an ideology.10 Possibly the aggressive stances had as much to do with religious purification and defining the nature of orthodox Sikhism as they did with the usurpation of commercial spaces around a popular shrine. Whatever the intention, current shop signage, especially of food outlets, suggests abstinence and prohibition as the key to defining orthodox religious identity. As I worked my way through the thing-ness of the sacred, epitomized by domes and souvenirs, I began to realize that the bazaar as a cultural space constituted in terms of the spatial layout, things, and people who inhabited bazaar spaces, interrogates the privileged place of the Darbar Sahib in defining the city and the gurudwara as the only source of sacred in the city. In common with many Indian pilgrim centers, Amritsar is dense with smaller dargahs (tombs of Sufi saints) and mandirs (temples) each with their penumbra of souvenir-sacreds. The inclusiveness of Sikh Gurus toward believers of other faiths is well established. Historically, India’s religious landscapes have been heterogeneous, and its cities reflect this cosmopolitan multiplicity. Shared space by different faiths is reflected in the skylines of pilgrimage

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sites. The dome of a mosque, the shikr (spire) of a temple, or loudspeakers mounted on a pole outside a Sikh gurudwara are visible and audible to urban dwellers as they move around the streets of their city, hearing the sounds of a different prayer or passing by the signs of a different faith. Amritsar is no different. Dargah Zaira Pir, located on the edges of the walled city bazaar, is an example of contiguous shrines and shared sacred spaces. The rhythms of the ritual day of Zaira Pir enmesh the dargah into the fabric of the city and the lives of urban inhabitants. The privileging of the Darbar Sahib by the city municipality, acting in a vis-à-vis with the orthodox authorities of the gurudwara, the reshaping of the streetscape to mark out one point in space does not completely obscure critical (albeit muffled) counterclaims by a slew of dissimilar champions of alternate sacreds. Viewed from the lens of souvenirs, city spaces are arranged in networks and nodes that affirm and contest the preeminence of civic and orthodox interpretations of sacred value. Most importantly, in the streets and bazaars of Amritsar where faiths flourish, their material presence endows the city with an ecumenical character that becomes visually manifest in material goods. The bazaars of Amritsar exhibit multiplicity but in a dialogic mode vis-à-vis city shrines.

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SOUVENIR BAZAARS OF AMRITSAR On the face of it, a street-side view of religion presents a landscape of restless, almost chaotic, movement. In discussions of the relation between masjid and suq, the mosque and the market, the sacred and the profane, Gilsenan’s work reminds us that the suq/bazaar is not without its own sense of order, drawing upon idioms of the sacred. But it is subordinate to the ritual order of the masjid which exerts an order over its environs, to impress a ceremonial tidiness upon the chaotic spaces of commerce. Only certain goods can be proximate to the shrine; others are deleted by distance, so that objects are graded by their sacred qualities rather than their commercial value. Elaborate etiquette encloses economic dealing into a ritual fold, and the temporal or aural conversion of ordinary space into ritual space and back again is part of urban spatial inscriptions (Gilsenan 1977). Close to the shrine, the more ritually valued objects like sacred books, incense or ritually prescribed food are abundant; while further away the less significant things become readily available. Some foods like pork, for example, are banned altogether. In relation to Amritsar as a globally recognized sacred center for Sikhs, the prism of religious souvenirs and goods available near and around the Darbar Sahib and its Guru Bazaar endorse Gilsenan’s analysis of urban space and sacred shrines. At the same time, placements of souvenirs suggest a “commentary” upon where the

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sacred is located, and how the bazaar is itself a sacred space. Visually and materially, proscription and permission create a sense of the core and edge of bazaar spaces through objects and signage, with the core scripted by a classificatory coherence of things and the edges defined by miscellany. As much as the sale or prohibitions of appropriate foods might evoke tenets of a single faith, as in purificatory bans on meat and tobacco stalls around the confines of Guru Bazaar,11 the goods of the street corner push the envelope to tell a different story in the sale of religious feeling evoked though marketing religious goods. Here conventionally understood ritual identity jostles with idiosyncratic innovation, deploying the aesthetic styles from numerous sources including—as discussed above—technology, but also in the idiom of general and everyday commodities like toys or self-help books to produce the marvelous. In deciphering the significance of souvenirs, Ranciere’s view resonates: “On the other hand, however, the aesthetic revolution is first of all the honour acquired by the commonplace … it shifts the focus from great names and events to the life of the anonymous; it finds symptoms of an epoch, a society, or a civilization in the minute details of ordinary life” (Ranciere 2004, 33). What is distinctive about bazaar divinity and its souvenir objects are that neither are pure forms; souvenir art does not use a single set of visual or aesthetic codes to make itself sacred, instead assembling a variety of genres and adding interesting twists to become morally attractive and economically competitive. As a mongrel good made up of many things, the religious souvenir merchandizes the symbolic universe in new avatars, all the while transforming the uses of the sacred. As mongrel objects belonging nowhere in particular, souvenirs also dislocate the sacred from its “place” in the shrine to idiosyncratic locations—a trouser pocket in which a religious symbol jangles with house keys, a car dashboard from where a Guru bestows blessing, mobile phone screen savers, even goddesses imprinted on ceramic tiles set into boundary walls to prevent urination; all clearly acceptable spaces for the universe of the souvenir sacred. The expanded sense of place allows radical alteration, including mocking religiosity in the imprint of symbols on profane things. National flags on the soles of rubber slippers sold in Guru Bazaar, or Hanuman images that closely resemble the popular Indian wrestler Dara Singh, bring profanity and sanctity in converse through laughter. To appreciate the subversion (however mild or inadvertent) by souvenirs, I still need to consider the subtle forms of regulation that cast a canopy over the restive, free-for-all commerce of bazaars. Searching for order, I see a peculiar form of restrain upon the arrangement of things that define the core of a particular shrine and its systems of belief, vis-à-vis a deliberately created periphery. So, while the carnivalesque is a prism for the “bazaar” view of religion in its vis-à-vis with the shrine, the other is the creation of homogeneity through exclusion placed

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upon the goods in the bazaar. The lanes that lead to the Darbar Sahib—Gully Number Seven, Bazaar Keseriyan Wala, Katra Ahluwalia—are lined with goods for the Sikh faithful,12 including kirpans (ritual daggers), LED khandas (double-edged iron dagger) mounted in glass cases, steel bracelets, and so on. Souvenirs of other faiths are scarce. Walking through the gullies that connect the Darbar Sahib complex with the Durgiyana Mandir, the latter a manifestly Hindu shrine.13 I begin to see how the changing landscape of goods shapes a politics of segregated sacreds. Between Durgiyana and Darbar Sahib is a distance of roughly two kilometers; but in terms of bustle and urban quickness the two shrines are worlds apart. Durgiyana, though an important shrine for Hindus of Amritsar is not the center of a busy hub. Walking through Guru Bazaar Road toward Durgiyana feels like a walk from dynamism to dilapidation. The shops around Durgiyana are small, resembling spaces in walls rather than securely built commercial structures. There are no coffee bars or chemists of allopathic medicine signaling the presence of well-heeled pilgrims.14 From the perspective of religious commerce, Durgiyana is indeed the peripheral space of the Darbar Sahib’s core. In terms of souvenir selections, Durgiyana materially distances itself from the Darbar Sahib. In the streets around the temple, images of Guru Nanak are in abundance, a proliferation suggesting that Nanak and the bhakti forms of Sikhism he ritually represents do not belong exclusively to Sikhs or Sikhism. But symbols and images of more militant or militaristic Sikhism like kirpans (ritual daggers) or images of Guru Gobind Singh who organized medieval Sikhs into the Khalsa, transforming the bhakti elements of Sikhism into a religion in defense of itself, are not available as souvenirs around Durgiyana. In object selections, the edges turn their back upon the core. The gateway into the Durgiyana complex is a site at which the distance between the two shrines is explicit. Apart from souvenirs on display in the little shops in the lanes, when shutters come down at the end of a commercial day, gods and goddesses make an appearance, plastered on the ridged corrugated iron doors of the shuttered shops. Traders who are “outside” the powerful, prestigious, and commercially valuable space of the Darbar Sahib, make a claim of how the sacred can be seen, or where. In Amritsar, the marginalization of Hindus—and their livelihoods—during the period of militancy is commented on today by shopkeepers and traders as a moment when Amritsar changed into an irreligious city and the Darbar Sahib transformed into a sacrilegious space of violence. The poster souvenirs are a commentary traders and shopkeepers display as a demonstration and a critique. How far their claim of steadfastness is an expression of faith or a political comment drawing from the increasing clout of right-wing politics is left open for a viewer to decipher.

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Claims and antagonisms aside, the bazaars and souvenirs that lie “inbetween” Durgiayana and Darbar Sahib display radically different sentiments and orientations. The souvenirs of the lanes connecting the two disparate hubs suggest nonconformist religiosity. On the streets and pavements between the shrines, the style of calendar art, or the embellishment of sacred portraits draw from a myriad range of sacred representations, crossing from one religious formation to another. Just opposite the Town Hall, near a crossroad stands a statue of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, a jurist who drafted the Constitution of independent India. In modern politics, Ambedkar is celebrated as a hero of dalit or lower-caste liberation. In the lee of the statue sits a pavement souvenir seller. His stock consists of posters that could very loosely be categorized as images from mainstream religions. But a closer look at the posters shows each embellished with a mixture of symbols of different faiths. The visual juxtapositions suggest believers and buyers who, excluded from an orthodox universe, create their own. In and through symbolic slivers, exclusion is overwritten and an intimate familiarity with a variety of ritual worlds expressed. The disparity is “reconciled” into an imaginatively improvised coherence, to make visible what orthodoxy refuses to recognize. I discuss one such souvenir poster below. Interleaved with a conventionally recognizable poster of Christ, is one of a Pir, in Punjab understood as a Muslim saint-mendicant. Lying one upon the other, the two posters of Christ and the Pir presume pilgrims who might be familiar with stories or parables of at least two religious traditions and who might customarily recognize three scripts: Farsi, Roman, and Gurmukhi. In all the posters, it is the visualized narrative that is positioned as primary. Captions are minimal and, rather than being the key to a ritual message, appear as evocations, to recall a well-known scriptural fragment that sanctifies the picture. The script supports the pictorial narrative, acting as an aid to the primary visual language of the souvenir poster, to tell recognizable religious tales (Figure 3.5). The poster of the Pir is especially interesting in its use of pictorial fragments that cross boundaries. It is in fact an archetype of gathered fragments from different sectarian and religious persuasions and historical and/or epic times, orchestrated into a pictorial allegory, exemplifying the manner in which street art allows itself the privilege of discarding boundaries. At one level, the grammar places the poster within an Islamic universe, for it is meant to be “read” from left to right. But even the Islamic is opened out in the juxtaposition of a series of imarats and dargahs (buildings and tombs) and the saint-scholars associated with each, including the Ajmer Chisti Darga, Abdul Qadir Jilani, Khawaja Bakhtiyar Kaki, Bu Ali Qalandar Panipati, Baba Farid, and Nizam-ud-din Auliya, telescoping time and space in the top-right box. The legend in the top-left box reads Piro ka Pir, a reference to Syed Abdul Qadir Jilani, founder of the oldest tariqqa or Sufi order, the Qadriyya

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Figure 3.5  The Pir and his audience, near Longawali Devi Temple, Fountain Chowk, Amritsar, May 2013. Photograph courtesy of the author.

silsila, in AD 1100 and the Sufi order most frequently followed in South Asia. Syed Jelani was Persian (modern-day Iran) but is buried in Baghdad. A fragment of verse recounts a fable of the Pir’s prowess; traders were lifted to safety by the Pir’s cupped hands that stretched into the sea and ensured their safe passage. At bottom right is Baba Taj-ud-din outside his Nagpur Mazar. At the top corners of this box are two framed verses, that act in place of a tawiz (Punjabi tavit/z) or protective amulet containing Quranic verses. Here the two verses refer to the protection offered by Baba Taj-ud-din against the ill rheums occasioned by the presence of ghosts and evil spirits (bhut pret ke hava ka asser) and against gham aur ghabrat (sorrow and worry). It’s the boxed frame at the bottom-left corner of the poster that exemplifies my argument. Here, the Piron ka Pir—Sheikhon ka Sheikh—Abdul Qadir Jelani imparts his teachings to a host of listeners. The Pir is bracketed within the light of invocations, La Ilha, Allah uh Akbar, suggesting the “enlightened” narrative that is being told and heard by assorted listeners of different faiths. These include, among others, Ravidas (the low-caste saint whose verses are included in the Guru Granth, the Sikh scripture), visualized with folded hands, Christ with his arms raised, Baba Taj-ud-din in a familiar pose leaning back against a gaddi (in fact against the knees of another seated figure), the tiger of Ghazhi pir of Sunderban, Mian Mir, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, a man in a turned-up hat, possibly Shamz Sabrez, the mentor of the poet and

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Figure 3.6  The listeners and the Piron ka Pir. Photograph courtesy of the author.

Sufi mystic Rumi, assorted Hindu fakirs and renouncers and Punjabi folk musicians (in the recognizable black waistcoat of qawaals or sufi singers). In establishing the Pir as Prion ka Pir the souvenir poster re-centers a faith that has been banished across a partitioned national border. It works like the loudspeakers turned inward and outward, toward the logic of one faith and simultaneously, the practices of other contiguous domains. Appearing in the heart of a city whose newly rebuilt landscape strongly suggests faith in the singular, this street poster questions the tourist brochure referencing of Amritsar as a Sikh Vatican, proposing in its stead the myriad inspirations for, and the shape of, sacred stories. It might be possible to argue that the poster does not completely turn its back on exactly that which it critiques for in its visual language I see a referencing of the Janamsakhi of Guru Nanak painted as frescoes on the walls of the Baba Atal Cenotaph, part of the Darbar Sahib complex. In the mural landscape, Guru Nanak’s life story unfolds across his travels, his meetings with assorted saints, and his teachings that shaped Sikhism. While in no way an imitation, the street poster does seem to draw parallels between the life stories of two founders—Abdul Qadir Jelani and Nanak. The founder of the Sikh faith is included through reference rather than the immediacy of image—in place of Nanak we see his two trustworthy companions who travelled with him in his quest, Bala and Mardana, seated in the first row of figures. In terms of lines of sight, the two figures are aligned with the large figure of Jelani, subtly creating a conversational possibility of a silsila, a connection and a genealogy, between Jelani and Nanak (Figure 3.6).

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BAZAAR DIVINITY An image with such an amalgamation of beliefs would be hard to find in the bazaars around the “Sikh Vatican.” The visual cosmopolitanism and interrogation of religious boundaries pit this poster against the overtly Sikh religious souvenir art of Guru Bazaar that sets limits on market transactions. If the souvenirs in bazaars around Durgiayana and Darbar Sahib deliberately obscure connections between these two shrines, the spaces in between fragment faiths, their shrines and scriptures presenting creative possibilities of belief. These are also spaces where other smaller and less well-known shrines of Baba Farid, Zaira Pir, Mata Lal Devi, and others are located. Worshipped by the less well-heeled, it’s likely that the believers and purchasers of pavement souvenir art of Christ and the Piron ka Pir are former members of the lowercaste and lower-class groups living in neighborhoods like Maquboolpura or Valmiki Colony on the edges of Amritsar city. It is these poorer believers who are attuned to composite religious life in accessible forms, and for whom variety—in script, scripture, and symbol—is possible within a souvenir universe in which faith is in constant flux. Pictorial and symbolic flux allows for attainable divinity to a group marginalized by upper-caste devotees—or cast-out as belonging to another nation—for whom the hegemonic exclusions imposed by orthodox (and militant) supremacies through successive purifications present faith as a closed system. Souvenir art that reaches beyond the Guru Bazaar seems to suggest a remaking of belief into another format, coherent and complete from one perspective, even if composed of slivers “borrowed” or accessed from other systems. My speculation of the possible cultural and caste contours of the believers and pilgrims in this in-between bazaar space is in part borne out by the slightly run-down air of the streets that traverse the distance between the primarily Hindu shrine of Durgiyana and the unambiguously proclaimed “Sikh Vatican.” My speculative eye rests on other visual slivers that intervene: the statue of Ambedkar near the Longawala Devi Mandir and the Dargah Zaira Pir encountered in the meandering walk through the city, slivers that suggests to me that the statue and the Devi mandir have their own distinct worshippers and tourist pilgrims. I see and experience these bazaars as liminal spaces, somewhat less habited, less frequented by the tourist-travelers who make their way to the splendors of the Darbar Sahib, dole out their dollars into the offertory boxes in the Sikh shrine, then proceed to Guru Bazaar to buy t-shirts proclaiming an allegiance to “Sikhi” or a Sikh way of life, and who they want to be, morally and materially. How should we understand the bazaars of Amritsar and the differences between them? What kind of spaces are these? What is the sense of placemaking that we see in the bazaar? At the most elementary level, it’s clear that bazaars around shrines are intrinsic to sacred spaces—they embellish

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and elaborate the nature of the sacred of the shrine. Religious souvenirs available in bazaars constantly replenish and fortify belief, averting the possibilities of social amnesia, creating a fundamental interface between bazaar and shrine. Souvenirs themselves proclaim the significance of particular ritual practices—selling kirpans and patkas (daggers and head cloths), for example, suggests their essential inclusion in a Sikh ritual universe. At the same time, the availability and placement of goods herald the nearness of the Golden Temple. The placement of souvenirs in specific locations maps the city for the pilgrim, defining areas that are vital to the journey and others that can be overlooked, briefly visited, or ignored altogether. There is, however, more to the relation than one of genuflection of the bazaar toward the shrine. The sheer abundance of continually fabricated forms of sacred souvenirs projects the bazaar as a cultural space in its own right, with its own language and idiom that is far from a mere imitation of the textual grammar or orthodoxies of the shrine. The inroads that souvenirs make into the shrine discussed in this and the previous chapter (the LED khanda discussed above and the clock in the martyr’s memorial, discussed in the previous chapter) suggest that the goods of the bazaar are far from profane—they share in a sacred value that is ordinarily the prerogative of objects within shrines. Sacred value is produced at the intersections of commerce with divinity in the language of goods. Perhaps a more fundamental question that emerges through reflections on urban bazaars of Amritsar is whether the relationship between the heterogeneous shrine-bazaars is hierarchical. There is no doubt that commercial property values, and the throng of pilgrims in the Guru Bazaar, place this space above all other bazaars. A four-generational family engaged in making and selling high-end sacred souvenirs told me that their shop was rented because they were priced out of the property market. Such commercial primacy suggests hierarchy between bazaars. At the same time, we might ask ourselves what the segmented view of the dome allows us to imagine vis-à-vis the hierarchy between shrines and bazaars. Seen in its entirety the dome represents a totalizing faith. The refractions make it possible to perceive versions of the sacred “proposed” by partial visibility. It’s the binocular disparity offered by the fragmented street view that is transformative of the nature of the sacred accessed as slivers and differentiated points of view. The visual portrayals in the Piron ka Pir poster—and others like it—evoke the idea inherent in the segmented, street corner view of the Takht. The slivers are reconciled within an alchemy of the bazaar universe and it is this reconciliation that allows the bazaar view to present itself as vital to expressive forms of faith. In and through things, there is a transaction of ideas, the most fundamental of which is the idea of the bazaar itself as a sacred space. What we see then is not so much a bazaar and a shrine, but spaces joined at the hip in transactions that produce versions that complete the sacred.

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NOTES 1. Part of the ethnographic research for this chapter was funded by the Norwegian Research Council, under the collaborative project between the University of Delhi and the University of Bergen, “Indian Cosmopolitan Alternatives: Ritual Intersections and the Proscription of Religious Offense.” I am grateful to the Norwegian Research Council for the grant that enabled the fieldwork done in 2015–2016. 2. Commerce doesn’t end with shop sales of naivedhya, prasaad, or souvenirs. Gurudwaras own property in the environs of the shrine and within the city and rent and earnings from property are part of economic transactions emanating from, or oriented toward, the sacred shrine. 3. Between 2015 and 2017 the areas and streets immediately around the Darbar Sahib were broadened, paved, and painted in a uniform way. Shop signage had to conform to a set design. Shop frontages were enclosed, unlike their earlier form where the boundary between pavement and shop was indistinct. Part of the effort was directed toward making Amritsar a pilgrimage/tourist site on a global map of sacred centers. The other, perhaps less obvious, intention was to “hide” the chaotic streets behind a decorated facade of blank walls, embellished with cupulas, balconies, and painted motifs. Newly built gateways designed to “look” medieval, are strategically placed to emphasize the orientation toward a single point in space—the Golden Temple complex. 4. The Town Hall was recently—and carefully—restored in 2016–2017. It now houses a newly inaugurated Partition Museum with photograph galleries, recorded narratives, reprinted newspaper reports from national archives, and some objects that refugees brought with them when they fled from west to east Punjab. 5. In posters of Salim Chisti of Dargah Ajmer Sharif, a key Islamic shrine in western India, representations of Ravidas appear along with Ambedkar, a modern leader of dalit and lower-caste groups, bringing together “minority” communities and their systems of belief. Pairings and connections of chronologically separate mendicants, saints and other revered figures are common across north India, creating an entire pantheon to rival more orthodox pantheons (Novetzke 2013). 6. The Granth, the sacred scripture, is referred to in the third person as Maharaj. 7. Redefining spaces is constant and idiosyncratic. Car ornaments of Sikh Gurus travel along with the Eiffel Tower on a dashboard. Images of Hanuman from the epic Ramayan and Bombay movie stars are plastered on the flanks of auto-rickshaws that ply through the city. Pilgrim tourists enfold their religious souvenirs into a set-apart corner of a suitcase and wrap their belief in a handkerchief. 8. As discussed in a previous chapter, the clock was quickly removed but the ejection had more to do with the face of a controversial political leader on the clock than the fact that it imitated a souvenir. Clock souvenirs with the faces of Gurus and martyrs (controversial and otherwise) abound in the bazaar. 9. In its manifesto, the Congress Party swore to pass the Punjab Law of Historical Memory (Gill 2017) to obliterate any memory of colonial subjugation. The fountain itself had replaced an earlier statue of Queen Victoria; older residents of the walled city still refer to the place as “Mallika da Butt” or the Queens Statue, though for most people it is “Fuwara Chowk,” Fountain Crossroads.

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10. Vegetarianism is an Indic indicator of religious purity. Its imposition on public palates, however, is intensely political. In an interview, a leading militant figure who had fled Punjab and sought asylum in the UK detailed an incident between militant Sikhs and shopkeepers whose tobacco outlets and meat shops lay in the lee of the sacred complex. With a peculiar insouciance born of the distance between narrative and event, he described to me the heated arguments (Garma Garmi) and brandished swords resulting in the retreat of the shopkeepers and the dismantling of butchers and tobacco outlets. The interview was part of fieldwork done in Southall, UK, in 2006. However, what is judged to be “proximate vicinity” of the shrine and what is metaphorically judged to be “far enough,” is a matter of some debate. The increasing clout of the Dal Khalsa, a militant and fundamentalist organization that burst upon the political landscape of the city and the shrine from the mid- to the late 1980s, was marked by the clashes between Dal members and butchers that preceded the dislocation of tobacco khokas (shacks) and butcher shops from the area surrounding the Darbar Sahib complex. The municipality then relocated the butchers some distance away from the shrine. From what I was able to establish some moved toward Lawrence Road (now renamed Bhai Veer Singh Marg). By 2015, many butcher shops were relocated along the road to the new international airport, on the outskirts of the city. In interviews in 2015, a man recollected the fresh kebabs available around the sacred complex. One of the few open spaces in the walled city, the area around the shrine was a space for leisure. In such accounts, its clear religion was only one of the many reasons for people to hang around the shrine and its surrounds. 11. Restaurant menus near the gurudwara complex make this prohibition clear. 12. In Guru Bazaar, among the explicit religious souvenirs, the one “non- spiritual” presence is of Bhagat Singh, an important figure in the Indian nationalist struggle against colonial rule. I discuss the significance and politics of Bhagat Singh souvenirs in the next chapter. 13. Durgiyana Mandir was built in the 1930s (though its foundation was laid in 1924) by Pandit Madan Mohan Malviya, a freedom fighter but also a staunch Hindu nationalist. Interestingly, it is very similar in architecture to its more famous rival, the Darbar Sahib. The main shrine is domed in gold and set in a pool, approached by a causeway. 14. In 2013, I saw a board advertising Baba Ramdev’s medications for the first time, signaling his rise to prominence under the patronage of the Hindu dominated, right-wing leaning, national political party the Bhartiya Janata Party. In 2015, 2016, and 2017, on visits to Durgiyana, I saw an effort at urban redevelopment around the complex. This may have had something to do with the emerging emphasis on Hindutva politics that has swept India in the post–Narendra Modi era. The pujari (ritual functionary) however, insisted that this was due to the energies of devotees. This may indeed be true as the municipality might not be the body that has erected the “Coca Cola archway” at the entrance of the Durgiyana temple. It is as likely to be the trader-distributer of the soft drink who is a well-heeled bhagat (devotee) of Hinduism.

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Curating the Sacred

In the previous chapter the intent was to understand the locations of religious souvenirs and how they move through multiple spaces—but more particularly between the shrine and the souvenir shops in the bazaar, layering the way sacred things “reach out” to believers and the way the sacred is experienced by believers in the shrine as well as the bazaar. In discussing the bazaar as a space of ritual transactions, the souvenir as “portable sacred” was the privileged focus. In relation to the shrine, the bazaar around the shrine established its own “sacred” character, not just a space where sacred things are available, but a place which presents its own version of the sacred, and also might be understood as a sacred space. The idioms of the bazaar sacred are not rooted in segregations between mundane and sacred things; the sacred of the bazaar participates, and is intrinsic to, myriad transactions with “everyday” objects. At the same time, bazaar goods like sacred souvenirs move into the shrine, leaving their imprint upon the shrine. In relation to the images of martyrs discussed earlier, the seemingly ad hoc appearance of souvenir stickers on doorways or walls of the shrine rewrite the way people think of sacred persons, and the “appropriate” place for sacred objects. Souvenir ingress reshape spaces within. This is particularly apparent in the images of Bhindranwale that moved from bazaar to the gurudwara, intruding upon official memory, impelling the gurudwara management to acknowledge a sentiment and a memory that refused to go away. I discussed this in some detail in relation to the portrait and memorial of the dead militant-martyr in chapter 1. I bring it up here once again to be able to restate the significance of objects and their movements, as well as how souvenirs as objects fill gaps in memory and create meaning through specific forms of remembrance. In this chapter, I continue my exploration of the shrine bazaar of Amritsar from the perspective of the bazaar as sacred space, elucidated both in its 67

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relation to the shrine and independent of it. In the previous chapter, I analyzed the location of souvenirs and their circulations, to argue that location of things maps the city, creating nodes and networks of multiple sacreds. I continue my reflection of why things matter, and how they come to matter. I pay attention to what seem to me to be deliberate “commentaries” apparent in the exhibition and placement of things. To me, such displays are purposive, and bring the sellers of souvenirs into focus. It is the shopkeepers’ commentaries about the sacred and the shrine that I focus on here. If the bazaar is a space of crossings between faiths (expressed through sacred souvenirs) it is also a space where rituals of religion and rituals of politics intersect. In terms of things, in and through which belief speaks, bazaar goods orient themselves harmoniously toward the shrine. But bazaar goods like martyr souvenirs through which the political speaks, offer both a commentary and a critique of the shrine. There is no single tenor or message to the crossings between sacred and political. The heterogeneity of goods of the bazaar makes possible diverse articulations of opinion or commitment. Standpoints are discernible and made apparent through a careful curation of souvenir art. Central to this curating of the political-sacred are the shopkeepers and traders in the bazaar. Where souvenir objects are positioned, or how they are moved, maps the sacred spaces of the city, placing trader/shopkeeper dispositions literally and metaphorically on display. Nevertheless, crossings are more clearly visible in some things and less obvious in others. A major theme in souvenir art is the depiction of martyrs. I concentrate my discussion on depictions of Sikh martyrs and their iterations. A key martyr of medieval Sikhism is Baba Deep Singh. His image appears large and small in objects that will be carried, like key chains or car ornaments. His image is most dramatically displayed in poster art. The ubiquity of Deep Singh images indicates the significance of the man and of the concept of martyrdom within Sikhism. In Sikh chronicles, he was the warrior who confronted Mughal armies, founded and headed the Damdama Taksal, a medieval school of learning, and produced handwritten copies of the Guru Granth Sahib for distribution. Poster art depict him looking outward, directly at the pilgrim-purchaser. Important elements of the poster portraits and images imprinted on objects of everyday use are the militaristic symbol of the khalsa—the khanda (emblem of the encircled sword and crossed daggers)— on his turban, his open beard and the choga, the long shirt suggesting the kaccha or drawers. He is portrayed as the exemplar Singh—the lion warrior. However, in many popular representations, he is shown seated barefooted and cross legged on the ground, his hands resting on his knees, with an open copy of the scripture resting in front of him, his weapons suggested only by the band across his chest but not otherwise in evidence, a position that speaks of a different “act”—that of contemplative prayer. Seen together, the two sets of

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souvenir posters direct attention toward the khanda on the turban in conjunction with the weapons “at rest.” The outward gaze and the seated position suggest key elements of Sikhism—the defense of faith as an act of prayer, by warriors who demonstrate a restrained force. But what is equally striking is that images of Baba Deep Singh are not set apart; the martyr warrior shares space with mortal men. A seller of brightly printed posters who sits a little distance from the sacred complex includes among his displayed wares posters of the founder Guru Nanak, the tenth and last Guru, Gobind Singh, Baba Deep Singh, and just below these divine depictions, a range of overtly masculine images of muscled wrestlers; plumb, cheerful, and naked baby boys;1 and popular folk singers. During an interview, he told me that he would always prop the Gurus above the heads of others, to catch the attention of passersby; but he also said that all his posters were popular and sold equally well (PS,2 Interview, May 21, 2013). Held together by a pavement seller’s view of customers, the images are a compass of morally directed wares, placing ideals of divine and ordinary masculinities within a single gendered visual paradigm. It’s the way his posters are positioned that leads me to think about two other martyr images evident within bazaars around the shrine. He does not stock them; but other shopkeepers make a point of displaying these martyrs. The first is set of images of Bhindranwale (whose museum portrait I have already discussed). Bhindranwale headed the Damdami Taksal founded by Baba Deep Singh, and sometimes the souvenir posters of the medieval and modern Sikh martyrs are placed side by side. The other modern martyr is Bhagat Singh, who played a brief but critical role in the movement to free India from colonial rule. Both Bhagat Singh and Bhindranwale are part of a political landscape. Synchronic with Baba Deep Singh’s role in medieval chronicles of political assertions against the Mughal regime, both played crucial roles in contemporary Indian politics. What is interesting is that while Baba Deep Singh is everywhere, and shares space with everyone, from Gurus to babies, Bhindranwale and Bhagat are rarely displayed together and, more often than not, are segregated from folk heroes. Both, however, share a visual vis-à-vis with Sikh Gurus. The sale of Bhindranwale souvenirs, rather like the man himself, have a chequered history. Two prominent shops of the bazaar tap into the feelings kept alive by the installation of the controversial museum portrait and the equally controversial memorial, the yadgaar shaheedan in the Darbar Sahib. Bhindranwale souvenirs were not readily available in the immediate post1984 period. However, a shop, though not very popular or regularly visited, located in the Brahm Buta Market in the lee of the Guru Ram Das Niwas (a hostelry for devotees run by the shrine management) was one place where books on Bhindranwale and his images were sold. The Taksali Pustak

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Bhandar bookshop run by the Damdami Taksal—the seminary headed by the controversial militant leader—was an open-fronted shop, though unusually its wares were placed behind glass cases. It was—and continues to be—marked by shop signage that prominently displays Bhindranwale’s photographed portrait, though over the years the images have faded and do not catch the eye as quickly as they did in 2010 and 2013 when I initially photographed them. A sense of unease underlay the early commercial failure of Bhindranwale. Images evoking his memory created a sense of discomfort, goaded by the remembrance of his forcible occupation of the Darbar Sahib, his daily pronouncements broadcast over bazaar-facing loudspeakers, and his subsequent death within the shrine. The Indian state’s prohibitory orders regulating spaces in and around the shrine was part of the reason for the absence of Bhindranwale souvenirs in the general bazaar. Throughout the period of the embargo, his souvenirs were present and available only in the Taksali Pustak Bhandar that promoted his writing and his images. Shop signage however, did not indicate the goods within. In interviews conducted from 2007 onward, I was told by a number of devotees, shopkeepers, and commentators that in the immediate aftermath of 1984, visits to the Darbar Sahib were conducted with circumspection. Apprehension of being identified as a terrorist or Khalistan sympathizer in the eyes of the state inflected ritual visits with a sense of anxiety. The shrine and its surrounds still bore the marks of the violence of Operation Bluestar. Ritual activity was not suspended; but stopping to shop for souvenirs was a hurried affair (SS, Shopkeeper, Interview, April 24, 2015). By contrast, the proprietor of the Taksali Pustak Bhandar said that people “with faith” always came to the shop without hesitation or fear (proprietor DT, Interview, April 24, 2015). The other shop where Bhindranwale is a prominent souvenir is located in one of the busiest market streets that leads from the fountain roundabout (now renamed after Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the Sikh ruler) toward the sacred complex and the northeastern “clock tower” entrance. The shop therefore has a prime location, and its goods stare out at all those who visit the shrine. This street has been extensively altered and realigned, and shop facades dramatically restyled. In 2007, however, when I first walked along the street, narrowly avoiding cycle rickshaws and auto-rickshaws that sped by, nothing out of the ordinary was available in this shop. By 2013, there were small painted images of Bhindranwale hanging right outside the shop, with some of his more famous “sayings” painted below the banner-portraits. In November 2015, large images of Bhindranwale replicated the portrait of the controversial leader hung in the CSM, freely available for sale in the bazaar. In most depictions Bhindranwale is framed by “religious” symbols. From the doorway of the shop in the main street, Bhindranwale stares out at passersby dressed in overtly religious garb of choga and turban, with a bandolier and a

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sword or carrying a revolver. Paintings, photographs, and plaques place Bhindranwale simultaneously within the overarching frame of Sikh martyrdom and pious personhood, but also mark him out as an uber martyr, his image simultaneously appearing in the CSM and in the bazaar. Unlike the Taksal bookshop described above, the main street shop is not devoted entirely to the sale of Bhindranwale memorabilia but is more general in its stock of souvenir goods. It has “incorporated” the sale of Bhindranwaleas-object with other familiar souvenir objects. Despite the miscellaneous collection, the display of souvenirs is a premeditated commentary on the politics of the sacred complex. Between the Damdami dukan (the seminary’s shop) and the main street shop there is visual conversation; each “looks” to the other through its stock of souvenirs. The Damdami dukan is absolutist in its wares and political in its orientation, continuously harking back to memories of a militant past. Over the years, it has faded both visually and economically with brief moments of revival. Its primary purpose seems to be just to be there, rather than the actual sale of goods. The main street shop positions its goods in the competitive spirit of marketplace to attract all comers, tempting them to buy the goods within. To say it is not political would be to miss the point; its displays are a political commentary and have excited the sale of Bhindranwale memorabilia more actively than the Damdami dukan. In its vis-à-vis with the other shops that line the main street, its displays and sales foreground the politics of post-1984 martyrdom promoted by the bazaar. The incorporation and prominence of the controversial martyr, who represents the violent politics of Khalistan (a violence directly and acutely experienced by residents of Amritsar) into displays does not remain uncontested. In the language of popular art combined with commerce in the sale of souvenirs, a shop diagonally across from the main street souvenir shop overturns the significance of Bhindranwale with its own displays and objects. Shop frontages suggest a conversation through the language of things between shopkeepers, their stance on the promotion of martyrdom, the creation and contestation of political-religious discourses. The diagonally placed shop across the main road, which I will call the Picture House, has a more elongated frontage than most of the others in this street. It therefore has the advantage that all its wares are more conspicuously visible and more “openly” displayed.3 Like the other shops along the street, the bulk of the objects or goods on sale are religious souvenirs, many oriented toward a Sikh clientele or those for whom the Guru portraits and Sikh shrine images are important objects to buy and take away. Equally a large number of the objects on sale are devi devta images or idols drawn from Hindu myths and narratives. Bhagwati and Durga images abound; as do small ornamental symbols of Sikhism and Hinduism that can be hung on rear view mirrors or placed on dashboards of cars, trucks, and buses. Among these explicit

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religious souvenirs, the one remarkable “non-spiritual” presence is of Bhagat Singh, an important figure in the Indian nationalist struggle against colonial rule. Bhagat Singh t-shirts, paintings, and posters create a visual orientation toward Jallianwala Bagh,4 a memorial that abuts the Darbar Sahib. It is nationally known as the place where the brutal face of colonial power was demonstrated with all its military muscle. The souvenirs of Bhagat Singh as an adult are a peculiar inclusion in the market streets between Jallianwala Bagh and Darbar Sahib, for Bhagat Singh was only an eleven-year-old child when the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh occurred. The real “hero” of the moment was a man called Udham Singh who is less recognized in the souvenir universe of significance (though a statue of Udham Singh stands at Hall Gate, now an important junction of the modern city, installed by the state and maintained by the municipality). Souvenir memory however celebrates Bhagat Singh in a more timeless way, and this emphasis is important for a number of reasons, primary among them the rewriting of his biography as a person who was a believer and upholder of Sikhism, rather than the Indian state projection of Bhagat Singh as a “secular” hero who renounced the particularities of religion and fought “for” an independent Indian nation against colonial rule. In most state-promoted representations, Bhagat Singh wears a fedora at a jaunty angle, the headgear that he frequently wore before he was jailed; he has a thin moustache, curving slightly upward, akin to styles adopted by dandies or 1940s film stars. Over the years that I have been doing fieldwork in the area, in the elongated frontage of the Picture House a portrait of Bhagat Singh has always been prominently displayed. It is the first image to catch the eye, placed as if Bhagat were stepping out into the streets to join the throng headed toward the shrine. In the Picture House image, Bhagat does not wear the fedora or sport a curled moustache. He is portrayed wearing a saffron turban (kesri5 pag) with a thin growth of beard on his chin and a revolver clearly displayed either tucked into his waist band or held in his hand. Unlike many of the other “portrait personalities” who wear chogas or tunics like Guru Nanak or Ravidas, Bhagat Singh’s crisp white shirt and khaki trousers are reminiscent of modern military uniforms (Figure 4.1). Clearly Bhagat is a modern martyr and though the displacement of his fedora by a turban suggests his incorporation or merging with Sikh belief and symbols, the contrast with Bhindranwale dressed in a blue pag and white choga holding an arrow whom Bhagat metaphorically faces from right across the street, is visually spectacular and very noticeable. Despite his visual conversion to the Sikh body, Bhagat Singh souvenir images do not mimic medieval martyrs of Sikhism, like Deep Singh. In the souvenir universe, Bhagat is recognizably modern, not medieval. More importantly those who “sell” his images do not place his image beside Bhindranwale. The distance between images of Bhagat and Bhindranwale

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Figure 4.1  Bhagat in the bazaar. Photograph courtesy of the author.

is a commentary in exposition form, offered though souvenir placements, both on the Khalistan ideologue and of Bhagat Singh’s political credentials. The “shirt-pant”6 Bhagat Singh of bazaar art expresses resistance to the promotion of Bhindranwale by the Sikh orthodoxy within the Darbar Sahib. Bhagat Singh’s appearance on bazaar streets is one way that the power of the clergy who promote memorials of Bhindranwale is sought to be resisted by those who seek—without overt confrontation—to disengage Sikhism from the militant ideologies of Khalistan and subvert the orthodox celebration of martyrdom and militancy through souvenir art (at the same time distancing Bhagat from any state-promoted secularism). Souvenir politics pits modern militant-martyrs against one another and this tension was, and is, central to Punjabi politics.7 These two martyr images posit martyrdom as central; at the same time, they constitute modern martyrdom differently. Souvenirs of Bhagat in his new garb as a turban wearing, secular hero-turned-Sikh martyr, has been “claimed” by Sikh politics, including the newly formed Aam Aadmi Party which contested national and state elections in Punjab.8 Despite their representational distance, the two modern martyrs do not speak to the Udasi, or ascetic, meditative traditions of Sikhism. The souvenir distance between Bhagat and Bhindranwale is bridged by the joint production of anti-state, militant discourses, aligned more closely with the martial Khalsa traditions. The chronicles of modern martyrdom are being “invented” and produced within the shrine—and in the bazaar.

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In the preceding discussion of martyrdom in the bazaar I have used the word “commentary” quite deliberately to suggest that the placement of objects is neither ad hoc nor unreflective. Classical theories of religion position the sacred hierarchically above, and separate from, the profane (Durkheim 1915/1975; Eliade 1957). Within this framework, the shrine is preeminent, with the power of creating distinctions between sacred and profane and regulating the immediate boundaries and environs of the shrine. On the face of it, the shrine provides the logic for the existence of the bazaar. This logic, however, is turned around by the commentaries and interpretations offered by “bazaari lok” (bazaar folk) of practices within the shrine. I borrow from Geertz’s concept of “thick description” to go beyond factual description, and to enter the “thickness” of social discourses, interpretations, and their expressive forms, to achieve ethnographic understanding of the relation between shrine and bazaar. What is articulated is understandings of “thick sacred” which includes the bazaari folk understanding of where the sacred lies, and where or how the sacred becomes accessible. What I gathered through detailed interviews and more general baat-cheet (conversation) with shopkeepers does not seem to fall into the category of critique in the sense that they are not necessarily detailed analyses or reviews of any theological positions. There is an element of assessment in bazaari baat-cheet (commentaries of the bazaar) but there seems to be no intent or effort to reverse practices and rituals within the shrine/sacred complex. These are not “counter narratives” and in my understanding, cannot be characterized as resistance accounts. At the same time, bazaari comments are more than stray remarks; they are elaborately descriptive accounts, always oral and therefore somewhat contingent, peppered with opinions. Comments may range from discussions on situations or events both current and past within the shrine, in the city, on the state of governance and government in Punjab, and the central Indian state. It almost goes without saying that the context of the conversation or interview is critical to what is said and how it is said. In the presence of shoppers remarks on goods, for example, is presented as innocent of all commentary. When other shopkeeper comrades stop by for a glass of tea, ribald or ludic comments are expressive and revelatory. Whatever the context of bazaari baat-cheet, what is evident in commentary is the enlargement of the sacred to include the bazaar as part of—in fact intrinsic to—the sacred complex. In this, above all, shopkeeper commentaries are “active” and creative. It’s possible to discern two kinds of commentaries. The more conventional are conversational commentaries, gathered through questions and interviews conducted over a period of time. The other are material commentaries that catch the eye. The former is restricted, not always offered up. On the other hand, material commentaries are available to all kinds of viewers: believers,

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buyers, municipal officials, and anthropologists, in the shape of shop frontages, sign boards, displays of souvenirs and books. The visual commentaries generate a series of transactions with viewers/consumers of images and artifacts. The materiality of this commentary is not a free-for-all. It is responsive to what happens within the shrine. It is also governed by the dramatic purificatory drives, of the kind conducted during the 1980s, inflicted by militant supporters of Khalistan upon the goods of the bazaar, or the Public Works Department funded beautification drive that altered shop frontages and displays. Supported by municipal rules and regulations, purificatory exclusions and municipal directive limit bazaar displays. In November 2016, each shop sign had to conform to a particular design of lettering, color, and shape, without quirky, indexical embellishments pointing to the goods within. In the newest municipal modification along the main approach road to the sacred complex, every shop sign was taken down and repainted to conform to politico-religious understanding of scriptural lettering. The regulation was enforced by the Public Works Department of the central government. Both the Pizza Hut Delivery outlet and New Metro Punjabi Jutti (embroidered slippers), for example, revamped their signage in golden Gurmukhi letters on a burgundy background, in accordance with the new regulations. Roman lettering conformed to a style that visually indexed the Gurmukhi script. The monochromatic displays purged the bazaar of the richness of chaos, aligning it with an orthodox view of order and sterility. The only explosion of color was provided by the goods themselves. Limitations and restraints aside, spoken and material commentaries are not discrete forms—in the course of interviews, shopkeepers “comment” on the municipal rules, the reshaping of the street and, most importantly, their relation to the shrine. In my eyes, their spoken commentary is materially evident in the goods they sell. Viewpoints are palpable in the choice and arrangement of material artifacts within each shop. Goods offer a comment on the hierarchies between different nodes of the sacred in the city.9 Underlying these two forms of commentary is the attention drawn to that which cannot be immediately seen: the reconstructions and new displays within the sacred complex. Positioning themselves as intrinsic to the creation of religious feelings though ritual goods, there is a metaphoric “pointing” toward the shrine and the sacred. Shopkeepers offer a point of view on what is sacred, and where and how it can be accessed. In speaking of their location near the shrine, bazaari lok claim the right to comment upon, give voice to, what they allege to be the irreligious practices within the contiguous shrine. The unease around the portrait of Bhindranwale mounted in the museum or the new martyr memorial that has become a new hub for pilgrims and visitors are the twin foci of bazaar commentary. Bazaari lok speak of how they remember the shrine, and the respected ritual specialists who managed the shrine “in the past” (a

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somewhat unspecified timeframe, but more often than not, alluding to the preOperation Bluestar period). There is an innate comparison to what they now see as the present sacrilegious practices adopted in the name of religion that they feel has damaged the sacred space and disrupted “feelings” of religiosity. They see themselves as “different” to ritual specialists, projecting themselves as “mere bazaar people,” humble keepers and protectors of faith and beliefs through the religious goods they sell. In spoken commentary, there is an investment of virtue in each material artifact sold in the shops, because those who sell them are pure and steadfast. The close association between artifact and person is expressed quite explicitly in the conversion of the souvenir as “common” or “commercial” good, to a good invested with ritual value. Without overt criticism, the presentation of the bazaari self is a commentary on the shrine management. The muffled criticism needs to be read—and understood—alongside the more articulate comments on events and acts deemed to be sacrilegious. The exoneration of the head of a dera (establishment) by the clerics of the gurudwara, influenced by the ruling political party in Punjab eyeing the influential vote bank of the dera, was an episode that aroused vociferous comment. In the view of shopkeepers as “humble protectors” of the faith, the dera leader10 had committed an act of extreme blasphemy, adorning himself in the grab of the tenth Guru in an attempt to “pass” into divinity. His pardon by the clerics of the Darbar Sahib and other major takhts was met with public dissent and condemnation of the gurudwara authorities, the political party who managed the gurudwara and the dera leader.11 A sarbat (a deliberative assembly of believers) gathered near Amritsar in early November 201512 to condemn the blasphemy and the pardon. I did not find any shopkeeper who attended the sarbat. However, post the event, bazaar commentary focused on who had the right to decide ritual rectitude and the permissibility of acts. In most commentary, the rights of the sarbat were seen as primary. Bazaari lok inserted themselves into the conceptual community and conferred upon themselves the “right” to speak. Opposition was simultaneously directed toward the gurudwara management and the need to “liberate” the Darbar Sahib from the control of political parties. The gathering of the sarbat, held after a gap of nearly 30 years,13 was a huge event, widely reported and enthusiastically attended. In an eerie repetition of 1984, the government called out the paramilitary forces in November 2015. The presence of troops in the city gestured toward the fierce debates taking place some miles away, and the apprehension that the denunciation of the gurudwara management and the Punjab government would lead to turmoil. All through my fieldwork in November–December 2015, troops were visible everywhere in Amritsar, particularly in the bazaars and street corners near the shrine. The sarbat and the armed presence formed the backdrop of all conversations and underlay a great deal of the commentary offered by shopkeepers during interviews.

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MATERIAL COMMENTARY: SIKH FINE ARTS Let me move to a more detailed discussion of how commentary is produced. In a slightly less prominent street, a small, glass-fronted shop sells more carefully crafted artifacts that are souvenirs but are more “attractively” and uniquely crafted by a family that has been engaged in the trade of selling sacred ritual goods for at least four generations. I decided to concentrate on this shop where I found intersections between the two kinds of commentaries—the spoken and the material—through an elucidation of where the sacred lies. I shall call it Sikh Fine Arts. The use of the word “Art” in its name indicates that the shop owners do not consider themselves or their goods part of the run of the mill, mass-produced souvenirs but rather, as special objects which are invested with artistic value and “feelings” of faithfulness. Sikh Fine Arts is located in the street leading toward the Serai (hostelry); and it is not easily visible since the shop frontage is narrow and set inside a corridor. It is also distinctive in that it is one of the few shops in the bazaar that has a glass frontage, indicating a more “metropolitan” shopping arcade style of separation between shop and street. Its location, in a street considered a secondary entrance to the shrine, secludes the shop and its owners from the bustle of the main bazaar. This seclusion has been emphasized after the post2015 redevelopment of the area, that has turned the axis of the shrine and its entrance toward the city rather than the city oriented spatially toward the shrine. Additionally, the shop is located across the street from the Taksali Bhandar, the Damdami Taksal shop, discussed above. I was told by the owners of Sikh Fine Arts how in the late 1980s the “Damdami dukan” (the shop of the seminary) was part of a larger politics of separatism and militancy, displaying images of the militant leader Bhindranwale. Over time the owners of Sikh Fine Arts have witnessed processions, curfews, and lockdowns occasioned by the fierce, often violent, politics that reshaped the religiosity of the shrine— and in fact seemed to have reshaped the entire area surrounding the shrine. The family of the Singh brothers whose great-grandfather began by making wooden combs to tie Sikh hair under the turban, is now known as a family of nakash (painters). The current owners specialize in documenting the art in the sacred complex, including the murals of the Baba Atal cenotaph, a somewhat neglected building of the Darbar Sabib.14 The grandfather, father, and one of the sons (who is also one of the current owners) contributed to the paintings15 that are exhibited in the Sikh Museum and gives the shop a special leverage, setting it apart from the others that surround it. Recounting the history of their business enterprise, they told me the shop used to be located within the sacred complex in the shadow of the clock tower;16 but after the demolition of the Gothic clock tower, the shop was relocated near

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the Guru Ram Das Niwas (the hostelry) outside the immediate boundaries of the sacred complex. The current shop is in the lee of some of the important and notable institutional spaces of the shrine, though not located in the central spine that leads to the shrine, realigned after 2015. The Singh brothers cite their four-generational “commitment” to the shrine, their “contribution” to the production of religious art, the meticulous documentation of the artworks of significance to Sikhism as confirmation of their continuing and steadfast belief and faith. Even though as shopkeepers they sell sacred objects as souvenirs they see their goods as guided by greater veneration than the way sacred objects and rituals are stage-managed—even manipulated—by the clerics within the shrine. In bazaari commentary in general, and in interviews with specific shopkeepers in particular, the clerics of the sacred complex are condemned as governed by base money-making impulses that have subverted the religiosity of the shrine. Shopkeepers point to the remaking of the shops within the shrine which are allegedly rented to “friends of the powerful.” Tied to the politics of pardon of the dera chief, the enormous amounts of money given to a construction firm to realign the bazaar and redesign shop facades, the allotment of shop space within the shrine takes on an added edge of censure. During the course of interviews, the Singh brothers remarked on the presence of the paramilitary forces posted around the sacred complex, their uniformed presence most prominent at bazaar street corners. This is not an offhand reference. It is a deliberate comment on the coincidence between the present and the past, when the army had occupied the city and entered the sacred precincts in 1984, because of what had been allowed to happen within the shrine.17 This is one point at which commentary turns to critique. Nevertheless, it still retains the tenor of commentary since the speakers do not see themselves as “active” or capable of re-converting current practices into more sanctified performances. My attention was drawn to the reconstruction (what many call “development”) of the shrine over the last decade. In one interview, the excessive use of marble and the spanking new jora ghar (the place where devotees leave their shoes before entering the shrine) as well as the newly paved approach roads and the burgundy signage were pointed out to me as evidence of “drug lord” money coming into the shrine and converting its peaceful “sacred” look to one that closely resembled a mall. “After all, where does all that drug money get spent?” a shopkeeper rhetorically asked; and then told me to look for these and similar “developments” of the shrine. In another conversation, the marking out of “VIP” channels to enter the sanctum of the Harmandir (the eponymous Golden Temple) was pointed out to elucidate the way “money” and “power” combine to segregate believers and break up the sangat (congregation) contradicting “true” Sikh belief that treats of everyone equally. “Paisa joran teh boldah hai” (money speaks very

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loudly) one of the brothers said. Despite dealing in monetary transactions every day, bazaari lok see this “other” money as part of opaque networks that are both tainted and powerful. It seemed to me that in such commentaries money itself is segregated as “earnings” made for livelihood, to sustain the family through honest labor and work—such as running shops of sacred goods—and money which is acquired by “ill means,” spent lavishly on renovations of the sacred complex and material physical “developments,” oriented toward the garnering of power, the manipulation of feeling, and subversions of ritual spaces. Continuing their interview, the Singh brothers said their shop was rented not owned. Despite this, they think of their work not as a “temporary” occupation, but as a proper way of sustaining their family business and keeping alive the fourgenerational inheritance of artistic skill, knowledge, and belief. They point to the displacement of their family business from the precincts of the sacred complex, as well as to those who now run shops within the complex, as part of those powerful networks and the distinctions between money. The controversy around the building of the memorial for the “martyrs” of 1984 (discussed in a previous chapter) is linked to the “two kinds of money” and a “manipulation” of religious feeling. The brothers point to a small plaque commemorating all those who died during June 1984 placed in one of the little lanes of the bazaar by the “ilaque nivasi sangathan” (neighborhood federation) as evidence of true grief. The marbled and frescoed martyr memorial within the shrine is spoken of by some of the shopkeepers as a new site of charava or money offerings, collections they see as propelled by bad faith and the conversion of faith to immoral politics. My interviews with the Singh brothers were critical to my understanding of the relation between bazaar and shrine, and the curating of the sacred in the religious art available in the bazaar. In the course of conversations, I was told of the destruction (in this case by way of literal whitewashing) of the frescoes painted on the walls of Baba Atal. The elder brother, SS, showed me the photographs he had begun taking in 1957 and painstakingly continued for about six years, in an effort to preserve what he called “our own heritage.” Describing his technique in detail, he said he had used self-developed films that required a close evaluation of the pH balance. He used daylight exposure. Though the flash bulb had come by this time, it was a one bulb flash that fused after one flash and a new one had to be used. Color separation was the most difficult; he had to do a DOT formation and vertical printing. Lighting was always a challenge. “I used colour since the frescoes were in colour. We have compiled a book, of the painted Janam Sakhi.” Their meticulous effort began to be known in the city. SS went on to narrate his family biography. “We were a recognized family. People came here, to our shop to visit, to see our work.” Visitors to Amritsar came to their shop.

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Gurmeet Rai, the wife of the well-known photographer Raghu Rai (the latter’s post–Operation Bluestar photographs are a valuable archive and document of the time), was a regular visitor to the shop. The work and effort of SS were encouraged by members of the city elite, among them the writer Mulk Raj Anand18 and Dr. Daljeet Singh, an extremely well-known eye surgeon whose family still lives in Amritsar. “Do this now,” they told SS, “you never know what the future holds.” SS also told me that the frescoes of Baba Atal were not the only things that were destroyed. The old clock tower where he had played as a child was destroyed in 1950.19 Till they brought it up, I had very little knowledge of the tower he was speaking about and none at all of the frescoes to which he referred. In part, my ignorance was structured by the orchestration of ritual movement that maps the vast sacred complex of the Darbar Sahib, networking the hubs within. Most pilgrims, referring to their “Darbar Sahib darshan” (shrine pilgrimage), will actually have been to one segment of the entire complex.20 The abridged pilgrimage maps clear “ritual routes” and focal points; it does not allow for individual memories to be woven into the overall formal plan. For SS and his family, the demolished clock tower and the thara (platform) where they played, the museum where their grandfather’s portrait hangs, and the cenotaph of Baba Atal are spaces that excite their feeling of entitlement toward the Darbar Sahib and their right to express how ritual emotion is sustained. I asked SS what the frescoes were and he began to show me photographs of the murals. Soon after this, both the brothers told me a little of their family biography, pointing to photographs of paintings done by their grandfather and then later, their father. The idea of the family of artists/painters/photographers is so strongly etched in each brother’s mind that, for them, the family tree of achievement is an intrinsic part of any discussion. An extract from an interview: My grandfather started photography a few years before 1919. With a plate camera … my father had a master in photography “practice.” He did not have a formal degree, but he was a “master” in the actual process of taking photographs. Apart from photographs he designed posters for schools (like school charts, I asked? Yes, like that—activity charts) to earn his livelihood. In those days, there was no lighting system. Enlargements were done with the use of sunlight, on POP paper, using gold chloride for developing the image. As a child, I kept learning from them. (Interview, November 17, 2015. Amritsar)

Over the course of a week I went to the shop everyday spending a few hours each day, looking, talking, drinking cups of tea, being introduced to family members, listening to tourists who came to ask about the paintings exhibited in the shop window, friends and neighboring shopkeepers who dropped in for

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a cup of tea, in an ever-expanding universe of shop-keeping and shop keepers of an Amritsar bazaar. Extract from interview: We’re Amarsari (urban residents) from the time of my great grandfather. There were two brothers. One who was a devotee of Hanuman. Aaleh vich Hauman di puja kardeh si. Gulli vich hun dungga Hanuman hai [One brother was a Hanuman devotee. There was a statue in the gully, called the underground Hanuman because over time the road level has risen above the courtyard where the image was]. Dujjah brah Bhairon da bhagat si [The other brother was a Shiv/Bhairon devotee]. Our family had a shop next to the clock tower. After coming back from school, we used to play below the stairs of the old clock tower on the brick floor and then go and sit in the shop for a while. On the left of the tower was a sthan a place where the Granth Sahib was kept and recited. Giani Budh Singh used to teach us how to recite the granth. It’s how we grew up. You could say I grew up blessed by the canopy of the Darbar Sahib.

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In 198421 the Toshakhana (store of treasure) of the Akal Takht was destroyed. There was no exact or accurate record of what treasures were destroyed. Miniatures and other paintings were destroyed. There was always “leakage” (disappearance) of things from the toshakhana; that is why no one ever let us photograph those treasures. Our photography was a record and it would have made it been impossible for things to disappear. But we were prohibited from photographing the toshakana and its treasures, its frescoes, its wall paintings and artwork. The disappearance of all treasures was put down to the fires of 1984. But a lot had already vanished. Apart from the Baba Atal frescoes, I have photographs of six other wall paintings—frescoes—that were in the Ramsar gurudwara near Baba Deep Singh Shaheedan da gurudwara [Gurudwara for Martyrs, formally referred to as Gurudwara Saheed Ganj]. Ramsar dhal gaya; hun tan multi story gurudwara ohdar bannatah [The old gurudwara at Ramsar has been demolished and converted to a multi-storied gurudwara]. (Interview, November 18, 2015. Amritsar)

ARCHIVES, HERITAGE, AND MEMORY: THE PRODUCTION OF THE JANAMSAKHI Memories of their family shop, the city, the heritage buildings, and art work are an inextricable part of Singh brother’s commentary on what they have seen, what they “remember” through their work, and what they view as the sacrilegious “leakage” of sacred heritage. Their collation of the photographed frescoes of Baba Atal is available in a “coffee-table” format. It is an

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outstanding example of bazaari lok commentary on preserving the past and venerating sacred heritage. The collection of photographed frescoes in the book depicts the Janamsakhi22—the life story—of Guru Nanak. The frescoes are painted in the Samadhi (cenotaph) where the remains of Atal Rai (son of the sixth Guru Hargobind) are enshrined, on the walls of the first floor of the nine-story cenotaph. The painted Janamsakhi of Baba Atal is based on the Bala Janam Sakhi. Kang dates the murals to the last decade of the 19th century (Kang 1977, 41); other scholars date them somewhat later. Whatever the period, the style of the frescoes is interesting in that they follow the painting styles of miniatures that were prevalent in North India. More than one artist was responsible for the panels. Each artist in fact had a particular technique or was a specialist in one particular painting style—thus borders or faces were painted by different painters. Jaimal Singh Nakash, Mehtab Singh Nakash, and Hukum Singh are among the many artists of the painted Sakhis (Kamboj 2003, 58; Legha 2011). The style itself is a mixture of Pahari painting, embellishments of the kind found at Sufi shrines, and European styles. Trees and flowers on the borders invoke ornamentation of Sufi shrines with stylized flowers and trees as evocations of the beauty of God (Khan 2015, 43–44). European styles are evident in the backgrounds and building facades familiar to painters of the late 19th century. What might perhaps have been drawn from the Pahari Guler school was the fact that just as the lives and loves of the divine but playful god Krishna formed the bulk of paintings commissioned by the Kangra Mahraja Sansar Chand Katoch, the painted Janamsakhi depicted the events and life of Nanak, albeit without the eroticism that make the Guler school paintings so distinctive. Following from the Mandi and other Pahari styles, the use of inscriptions within the painting is written into the painted text. The written text23 conveys valuable information (the names of characters, for example) as well as verses that was said to be recited by Nanak at various points, or at particular events. The third element that draws from a Pahari lineage is the sense of “far distance” which is stylized by smaller and smaller receding figures to suggest horizon and distance (unlike the Mughal paintings which drew more clearly on perspective). This last element is evident, for example, in the fresco Saccha Sauda or True Business. Words, painted into the fresco, draw attention to the range of trading activities, commodities, and common people of the bazaar, with image and word doubling as a parable and a historical record. The painted narrative conveys abstract ideas of divinity and morality to a range of viewers and believers who visited the shrine, some of whom may have been untutored in the scripts of the written Janamsakhis. Though there is no marked starting point to view the overall pictorial narrative, in terms of the structure of the Janamsakhi narrative, the first panel is the birth of Nanak depicted as an “appearance of light” that is prayed for

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by all the gods, including, most spectacularly, the key gods of the Hindu pantheon, Shiv, Vishnu, and Dharti Mata (mother earth, represented as a cow in the foreground). The next panel is of baby Nanak brought out to see the sun and blessed from above by gods showering blessing and divine light in acknowledgement of the child’s divinity as Nirankar (without form; supreme form). The painted gods “swooping” down from above traverse different myths, but also suggests viewers for whom the presence of gods in the sky was both familiar and essential to any parable or hagiography to index divinity. Numerous frescoes depict ritual thresholds—the ritual of the sacred thread, the marriage feast, the various “passages” into personhood. For example, the learning of Urdu, or learning trade and business, are interspersed with events that signify the “special” or divine character of Nanak. One panel, for example, shows Nanak shaded by the hood of the cobra while asleep in the field (Nag Sarap Chaya), or Nanak greening crops and fields for grateful and awe-struck cultivators, or his encounters with and taming of demons, and so on. The visual hagiography is replete with ritual moments familiar to Indic myths, interspersed with more significant events that constitute the parable. Visually, it draws on a vocabulary that did not confine itself to any one style of painted representation or to any one mythological universe. In the panel depicting young Nanak’s conversation with the maulvi who teaches him Urdu, there is a second “comic frame” where naughty children are being punished or being taught how to use the takhti or slate. The “second” storyline throws into relief the special intellect of Nanak, even in childhood, evident to the maulvi in the painting and made evident to the viewer by the double-layered text. The abstract idea of an endowed divinity is read in the juxtaposition between the mundane and the exceptional. Another panel (Saccha Sauda) includes the “everyday” work of the bazaar, peopled by loaders, traders, moneylenders, consumers, during an ordinary market day; the inclusion of Nanak defines “good” or “honest” trade that is conducted here. Including the ludic and the commonplace within the frame, each panel suggests the multiple registers of viewing and the range of viewers whom the painters “included” in the frescoes through the addition of humdrum figures, including perhaps, those who were unlettered. The painted panels provided a way of reaching out to them to tell a moral tale. However spectacular and gorgeous these painted frescoes, their significance for me resides in the treatment meted out to the frescoes, and what this treatment says about contemporary politics and the fear of aesthetic form. At a time when “new” chronicles of 1984 and modern martyrdom were created by militant discourses emerging from within the sacred shrine, and the tense competition for control of memory and history was evident in religiouspolitical stances, the frescoes of the Baba Atal shrine became objects of

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concern. For here were paintings that depicted the founder being sheltered by snakes, carried on palanquins by Vishnu, in conversation with bhut prêt (ghosts and demons), blessed upon his birth and marriage by gods of a Hindu pantheon (Figure 4.2), creating bridges with a mythological universe that was heterodox. By the various acts that sought to demarcate and control the boundaries of piety (as, for example, the forcible removal in the 1980s of particular foods from the vicinity of the shrine), such heterodoxy was anathema. However, unlike the little shops that could be eliminated, or removed to areas judged to be “outside” the penumbra of sacred space, the frescoes lay at the core of the shrine, intrinsic as the cenotaph of a key martyr. The frescoes told a tale that was inherent to the founding of the faith itself. It was not the story that was in dispute; it was the style of its depiction that was believed “improper.” In effect, this meant the frescoes could not be obliterated. They could, however, be hidden. The only way censorship could happen was by resorting to familiar, common practices of “repair,” cleaning up and “developing” the cenotaph in a manner that would not occasion comment. Censorship was accomplished through the performance of kar sewa, or ritual labor, itself viewed as a performance of piety. The painted frescoes were covered with white tiles or whitewashed by kar sewaks in the performance of post 1984 “restoration.” For years, the frescoes remained hidden to the worshippers, and the Baba Atal shrine itself became somewhat neglected.24

Figure 4.2  The Birth of Nanak, Mural Baba Atal, November 2015. Image courtesy of Surinder Singh. © G.S. Sohan Singh Artist Memorial Trust (Regd.), Amritsar. Used with permission.

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Throughout this period, one of the few places the frescoes continued to exist was in the exhaustive, photographic documentation by the Singh brothers. Their photographs of the panels were one of the few archives in which the frescoes survived in any accessible form. Being savvy businessmen but also individuals who think of themselves as preservers of Amarsari heritage with deep roots in the city, and most of all as members of a family with a special relationship to the shrine, they compiled the photographs of the frescoes into an “art” book form for sale as a limited edition. It is advertised online as an art book, a “special” souvenir. It can be couriered for a price to overseas clients. In its transactional styles, it bears all the hallmarks of souvenirs and material artifacts. The brothers, however, see themselves simultaneously as shopkeepers, archivists, believers, and artists. The interpellations between different portrayals they convey of themselves transfer upon the objects they sell. They “see” the photographed Janamsakhi not as an ordinary souvenir, but as sacred object. They have therefore “enclosed” the book into a wooden case with an inscription on the case indicating the “treasure” within, separating it from commonplace souvenirs and everyday things. Enclosing the Janamsakhi in its embellished wooden case is to endow it with presence.25 Encasing the text is presented as a practice of veneration, for the art book is an “account” of a divine person’s life. It is a purposive object in that it orients itself, and those who purchase it, to the mystic domain. Available as it is in the shop and through online transaction, it is accessed as much by a pilgrim as by a transnational tourist. At the same time, the brothers see the boxed book as an act of preserving a heritage that belongs to Amritsar (and to them), and a treasure which has been neglected. In speaking of the Janamsakhi and their other work, the brothers are in sync with the shopkeepers of the bazaar who sell ritual souvenirs. They regard the specially produced book as sacred art and religious souvenir, a view that is held to a greater or lesser extent by all the shopkeepers in the shrine bazaar. Placed within the universe of sacred objects, religious souvenirs question some of the more recent dogmatic repudiations of material aspects of Sikh religious life, interpreted as a challenge to the omniscience of “the word” in Sikhism. The “value” placed on objects in the bazaar discourse lies in the capacity of the material to demarcate spaces as special and set apart, to create places of veneration, as well as to encourage worship. The mobility of objects creates a system of belief that is complimentary to the scriptural word. Sounds and things travel in the course of a pilgrimage, transported as mnemonic forms. The Janamsakhi is more than coffee-table art; it is a counterpoint to the ideological apparatus and hegemonic interpretation of religion advocated by homogenizing discourses that discount material religion in the truncation of a Sikh universe. The universe of sacred goods and ritual souvenirs makes the sacred accessible and understood though a

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series of transactions involved in making the religious souvenir, selling it, and buying it. At the same time, the universe of souvenir art also reflects and represents contemporary events and political impulses. Souvenirs embody emotions that go beyond what might conventionally be classified as religious, to create a religious polity. Any single shrine and its surrounding bazaar is a complex place where different economies intersect to create new horizons of envisioning and “feeling” the sacred. The competitive poster art of Bhagat Singh and Bhindranwale stand testimony to the contours of political events and how these enter the universe of souvenir art. Equally critically, religious objects sold in bazaars push against the boundaries of the shrine when they enter it in critical ways. While Gilsenan (1977) offers us a way of thinking about the sacred canopy the mosque casts over the suq, the imprint of the market and its souvenirs upon the spaces within the shrine need to be considered, for goods of the bazaar are equally part of the cultures of religion and emotion.

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NOTES 1. Punjabi mothers often leave their baby boys unclothed though the genitals of little girls are covered. The segregation of sexuality is cited in boasts or humor and is fundamental to Punjabi gendering (Chopra 2004; Das 1976; Hershman 1974). 2. Names have been kept anonymous throughout. 3. Post the 2016 reconstruction of the street, goods displayed outside shop fronts have retreated into the narrow confines of the shop. Municipal regulations are more sternly enforced and poster art propped up against windows or shop fronts are confiscated. The proprietor of the main street shop has had to remove many of his more customary posters, like those of Bhagat Singh, placing them in the interior where they cannot be immediately seen. 4. All the elements of commemoration—plaques, a son et lumiere, and a museum—are present in Jallianwala Bagh. Areas within the monument, however, are more or less unregulated, and serve as spaces to saunter, hold hands, or use the public toilets, rather than to remember a traumatic past. There has been an effort after 2016 to make the monument more “memorable” and to clean it up. Residents of the area, however, still use it as an open space for leisure. 5. The popular Hindi film Rang de Basanti, or Colors of Spring (Director: Rakyesh Omprakash Mehra 2006) celebrating Bhagat Singh and other anti-colonial revolutionaries plays on the associations between colors of protest and revolutionary spirit. Basant is the season of spring, associated in Punjab with the colors of the bright yellow mustard flower. 6. The colloquialism “shirt-pant,” is common usage in Punjabi to signal the contexts in which a pant replaces a loose, gathered pyjama commonly worn every day. Its use by the Picture House shopkeeper was striking. It seemed to suggest the conscious interpretation of visual signatures in the portrait of Bhagat he had displayed as well

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as referencing the choga-clad martyr portraits in the Central Sikh Museum, and the distinctions between the two martyr representations. Though both portraits are part of “public” displays, each seems to evoke a distinct public. 7. As I briefly mentioned above, for many years after he was killed, no souvenirs of the militant Bhindranwale were discernible even in the environs of the Darbar Sahib, a shrine to which he fled for sanctuary to escape trial on a murder charge, and a sacred space which he transformed into a fortified bastion from where he and his followers mounted the separatist movement for Khalistan. 8. One of the candidates adopted the style of tying a kesri pag (mustard yellow turban) of the souvenir Bhagat. 9. Despite his association with India’s nationalist history, Bhagat Singh, now claimed as a “hero” and “militant” within the Sikh tradition, is absent in the souvenir universe around the Durgiyana Temple, an overtly Hindu hub of Amritsar. Rather like his souvenir rival, Bhindranwale, Bhagat Singh appears and disappears around particular city spaces. 10. In 2015 and 2016, I could not find any souvenirs of the dera chief in the bazaars of Amritsar an absence as telling as the availability of other, quite controversial, Sants and Babas in the souvenir universe. 11. In 2017 the leader of the dera was arrested and the dera raided by agencies investigating rape and fraud. 12. The deliberative assembly—Sarbat Khalsa—is an institutional confirmation of the community. Historically, it was held in the forecourt of the Akal Takht with the scripture (the embodiment of the Guru) open before the assembly. Decisions arrived at through assembly were viewed as the will of the Guru and accepted as such. In November 2015, the fact that the Sarbat Khalsa was held near, but not in, Amritsar, was itself a bone of contention. The “despoiling” of the Takht by the pardon and the stranglehold upon the gurudwara management by the ruling political party were key issues raised in the 2015 Sarbat. 13. The previous Sarbat had been held on January 26, 1986, in the forecourt of the Akal Takht. At that time, the collective condemned the Indian government’s assault on the Golden Temple, during the June 1984 military operation, and the “government sponsored” repair of the damaged complex and the dome of the Akal Takht. 14. In the general renovations that have transformed the areas around the Darbar Sahib, conservation and renovation work is underway in the Baba Atal shrine, though there seems to be a makeshift air about the process, reminiscent of the improvised renovations of the damaged bungas (medieval palace residences of Sikh chieftains) in the post-1984 period. 15. Paintings in the museum range from portraits of saintly and significant people, to events that chronicle Sikh history. Painters of this religious history are valued and their portraits are also displayed in the museum. Among them is a portrait of the grandfather of the Singh brothers. 16. The redbrick Gothic clock tower no longer exists. Built during the colonial period, it’s construction, begun in 1862, was completed in 1874. Designed to dominate the skyline and face the Town Hall (built on the plinth of the bunga or the palace-residence of one of the chief Sikh misls) the clock tower was demolished in the

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Chapter 4

Kar sewa (ritual reconstruction) post 1947 when the parikrama, the walkway around the sacred pool in the Darbar Sahib, was widened. For older Amritsaris, the shahari log or urbanites, the clock tower remains a remembered landmark. One of the main entrances to the sacred complex is still referred to as the “clock tower gateway.” 17. As discussed earlier, from 1982 to 1984, the militant leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale had taken shelter within the sacred complex and then overthrown the previously elected ritual functionaries, becoming the putative jathedar (the chief officiant of a Sikh institution) of the Darbar Sahib. The Indian Army had entered the shrine to dislodge him and his armed militia, in the process laying waste to large parts of the city and the sacred complex. Both before and after 1984, heavily armed troops were posted in the city. One of the owners of Sikh Fine Arts has documented this quite meticulously, and his archive of photographs is of immense value to scholars of the city and of the militant period. 18. Mulk Raj Anand, one of the early Indian writers in English, was a close family friend. The Anand and Singh homes faced each other across a gully in an older neighborhood of Amritsar near the Mai Seva bazaar, the Bhanda vala bazaar; and the Singh’s grandfather and Mulk Raj grew up together. The author is known in Amritsar as a writer who incorporated Punjabi idioms into English in his fiction. 19. What has struck me throughout the interviews is how carefully the brothers remember the dates of events and the accuracy with which they remember the layout of lanes of the city. The minutia of their accounts maps a city that no longer exists, except in their memory. 20. The octagonal cenotaph of Baba Atal stands at a tranquil distance from the crowded walkway leading to the Harmandir Sahib; the cenotaph and its treasures are less well known within the pilgrim universe. During the course of fieldwork, fewer pilgrims entered the gateway to this segment of the sacred complex than what is thought of as the “main” shrine. 21. During Operation Bluestar. 22. Janamsakhis, both pictorial and written, are important cultural documents as hagiographies of the life of Guru Nanak. Nikki Gurinder Singh analyzes Janamsakhis in general as the “stories” of the janam, life, of Guru Nanak, the first “prophet mentor of the Sikh religion” (Singh 1992, 329). The first Janamsakhis were probably written toward the end of the 16th century and then passed down “through the years in a variety of renditions” (ibid), such as the Bala, the Miharban, the Adi, and the Puratan. All the versions are regarded as critical in the spread and development of Sikhism not merely in its early period but to the present day. Despite their diversity what connects all the versions is that they are told in the style/idiom of allegory and myth. A popular version is the Bhai Bala Janam Sakhi. One account suggests that Bhai Bala travelled with Guru Nanak and Guru Angad, the second guru, persuaded Bhai Bala to write an account of his travels with the founder of the Sikh religion. Other versions contest this arguing that some of the vocabulary and the idiom used in the Bhai Bala Janam Sakhi were not prevalent at the time of Nanak. It’s probable that the Bala Janam Sakhi is an 18th-century text. It was, and remains, widely known and circulated. 23. The written text is not always clear and was likely written by mason painters, who may have been only partly literate. Commenting on the text in panels of early

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Garwhal painting, Kamboj draws attention to the inscriptions incorporated into wall frescoes by mason painters (Kamboj 2003, 59). 24. By 2016 and 2017, the tiles had been removed and “restoration work” was once again in progress. However, those engaged in the task (many of them migrant workers) refused to speak about what they were doing. The obvious and overt nature of the work of painting, masonry, carpentry, and so on, was veiled by silence, or by being presented as “routine.” What made the repairs interesting to me was the discrepancy between the photographed images available in the book I had seen at Sikh Fine Arts, and the subtle shifts in the “new look” that was being given to the frescoes. The color palate was in the latter was softer, tending more toward pastel than vibrant. The Guru’s face appeared in detail, with the smallest features—eyebrows and eyelashes—defined by fine brush strokes. The discrepancy between photographs of the images taken at a much earlier period, and the current restoration needs to be explored at greater length. To me it suggests the making of acceptable aesthetics. 25. To my anthropologist eyes, the decorated case brings to mind the palanquin in which the Granth, the Sikh scripture, is transported; though this resemblance would be vehemently repudiated by the Singh brothers, who see themselves as staunch believers of Sikhism and would never offer a challenge to the tenets of their faith which places the Granth above all.

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Bibliography

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Index

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Note: n denotes notes Abdali, Ahmed Shah, xv, 49 Akali Dal, 44–45n14 Akal Takht, xiv, xv, xvi, xix, 9, 10, 11, 12, 15, 18, 22n2, 23n5, 25n22; Afghan invasion and, 49; ardas in front of, 8. See also Ardas; and Ghallughara commemorations, 5, 8, 10–11. See also Ghallughara Dihara; and Harmandir Sahib, relationship between, 14, 24n16; memory of destruction. See painting in CSM below; painting, significance of placement vs Bhindranwale’s portrait, 21, 22; painting in CSM, 12, 13–14; preeminence of, 9, 10; and Sarbat Khalsa of 1986, 87n13; as seat of temporal authority, 7, 23n10, 24n16; view from bazaar, 48 Ambedkar, B. R., 59, 63 Amritsar, xv, xix, 47, 48, 49–50, 53, 57, 85; Afghan invasion of, 49; bazaars of. See Bazaar(s); colonial imprint on, 49–50;

Darbar Sahib as core of, 54–55, 56. See also Darbar Sahib; marginalization of Hindus post-1984, 59; medieval antecedents of, 49; militancy in, 50. See also Operation Bluestar; non-Sikh faiths and shrines, 55, 56; as Sikh religious center, 49, 50, 54–55, 56, 61, 64n3; as Sikh Vatican. See Sikh religious center above; souvenir bazaars of, 56–62 Anand, Mulk Raj, 80, 88n18 Anti-Sikh riots in Delhi, 4 Ardas xv, 7–8, 12, 50 Baba Atal Cenotaph (shrine), 80, 88n20; destruction of, 79; frescos. See Baba Atal frescos below; Janamsakhi of Guru Nanak, 61, 82, 84. See also Baba Atal frescos Baba Atal frescos, 83–84; documentation by Sikh Fine Arts, 77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 85; renovation work, 87n14, 98n24 97

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Index

Baba Deep Singh, 7, 8, 54, 68–69, 23nn7, 8, 72 Baba Farid, shrine of, 62 Babas (mendicants), 8 Baba Taj-ud-din, 60–61 Badal, Prakash Singh, 1, 6 Bajwa, Mr. Apar Singh, 11; report on Bhindranwale’s death, 16, 40–41 Bala Janam Sakhi, 82, 88n22 Bazaari baatcheet. See Shopkeepers’ commentaries Bazaari commentary. See Bazaari lok; Shopkeepers’ commentaries Bazaari lok (bazaar folk), commentary on: irreligious practices in the shrine, 74, 75–76, 78; reconstruction around shrine, 78–79; Sarbat condemning the Dera head, 76. See also Shopkeepers commentaries Bazaar(s). See also shopkeepers commentaries; bazaari lok Bhindranwale images in, 6, 14–15; as a cultural space, 63; around Darbar Sahib, 47–48, 57. See also Guru Bazaar; divinity, 62–64; of Durgiyana Mandir. See Durgiyana Mandir; and grassroots memorials, 9, 50; in-between spaces, and nonconformist religiosity, 59, 62, 63; intersection of religion and politics in, 68; juxtaposition of the sacred with the everyday, 53, 57, 67; martyrdom in, 68–73; as place of ritual transaction, 67; and politics of commemoration, 50; regulation through exclusion, 58; religious souvenirs. See religious souvenirs;

as a sacred space, 48, 51–52, 56, 57, 63, 64, 67, 68, 74; and shrine, relationship between, 47–48, 54, 56–57, 63–64, 67, 68, 74, 79, 86; as site of visual remembrance, xiv, xvi, xvii. See also Souvenirs; Souvenir art; Souvenir poster; Religious souvenirs; view of Akal Takht, 48 Bhava, 18–19, 20, 22 Bhindranwale, Jarnail Singh, xvii, xviii, 1, 2, 5, 11, 22, 67, 69, 70, 87n7; absence of remembrance in Ghallughara Dihara, 5, 11; absence of souvenirs in bazaar, 70, 87n7; circulation of images in bazaar, 6, 14–15; commemorations, controversy around, 5–7. See also Martyrs memorial; commemorative ritual in the Darbar Sahib, 15; and Damdami Taksal. See Damdami Taksal; death, report on, 16, 40–41; forgetting of, 5, 15; grassroots memorials, 9; Khalistan movement and, xvii, 71; and modern martyr cinema, absence in, xvii; photograph of corpse in library, 16–17, 39–41; and politics of remembering and forgetting, 11–12; portrait in CSM, 14, 15–16, 18–19, 20–22, 69, 75; recognition as martyr, 9, 15, 71; refuge in Darbar Sahib, 70, 87n7, 88n17; remembrance vs Bhagat Singh’s, xvii, 72–73, 86; and sangat of martyrs, 21, 40;

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souvenir images vs Bhagat Singh’s, 72–73, 86; souvenirs of, 69–71, 72; state ban on commemorations of, 5 Bluestar. See Operation Bluestar Bones Collective, 28, 32, 43n4 Brah, Avtar, xxi Brar, K. S., Lt Gen, 17, 40 Bungas, 49, 87n14 calendar art, 10, 59 Cavanaugh, William T., approach to religion, 29 Central Sikh Museum, xiv, xv, xvi, 9–10, 12–13, 34–35, 37, 42, 71, 87n15; Bhindranwale’s official portrait in, 14, 15–16, 18–19, 20–22, 69, 75; display and displacements of portraits, 12, 14, 16, 21, 22, 35; images of Punjabi Suba martyrs, 36–37; martyr portraits in, xvi, 9–10; mazhbi tasveera in, 9, 12; as a memorial, 12–13; muh dekhna of corpses in, 36–37; painting of destroyed Akal Takht in, 12, 13–14, 21, 22; portraits as sanctified ancestors, 42; portraits of Tarn Taran railway crossing martyrs, 37; post-1984 objects and paintings in, 13; preservation of counter photographs, 34–35; restoration of, 12; ‘Sakha Nankana Sahib’ (painting), 35–36; sangat of martyrs, 13, 21, 42; shaheedi tasveeran in, 13; Subeg Singh’s portrait in, 35; as visual chronicle of martyrdom, xv–xvi; wall of Bluestar martyrs, 13, 14, 24n18

99

Chattri (stone umbrella), as symbol of Bluestar memory, xvi, xvii Chauhan, Jagjit Singh, xvii, xxivn5 Chauthi Koot (film), xvii, xxii Chisti, Salim, of Ajmer, posters of, 65n5 Chotta Ghallughara, 13 Christ, religious posters, 51–53, 59 cinema, and making of modern martyrs, xvii–xviii clock, on martyrs memorial, 2 clock souvenirs, 65n8 clock tower, 80, 87n16 Coffin, symbolism in “Never Forget 1984” rallies, xx–xxii commemoration, xiii, xvii, 4–5, 50; for Bhindranwale, controversy around, 5–7. See also Martyrs memorial; for Bhindranwale in Darbar Sahib, 1–2; compression of, and forgetting, xvi, xxii–xiii, 2; of Operation Bluestar. See Ghallughara Dihara; transnational. See “Never Forget 1984.” See also Remembrance commentaries. See Shopkeepers’ commentaries corpse(s): as emotive image, 28, 40; Indira Gandhi’s, Muh dekhna of, 27, 30, 44n9; of militants. See militant corpses; muh dekhna in CSM, 36. See also Central Sikh Museum; muh dekhna of, 27–28, 30, 41; newspaper images of, 44n10; photographs of. See Photographs, of corpses; of renouncers, 44n8 counter photographs xvi, 32, 33–34; of militant corpses, 32–34; of Operation Bluestar, xvi;

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preservation in library, 34. See also library; and reclamation of personhood, 34; ‘Sakha Nankana Sahib’ (painting) as, 35–36. See also Photographs cremation, ritual of, 27, 30, 40, 43n3, 43–44nn4, 5; as act of remembrance and forgetting, 41; and muh dekhna ritual, 27–28, 40; negation through photograph of corpse of, 28 CSM. See Central Sikh Museum Dalhousie, Lord, xviii Dal Khalsa, 55, 65n10 Damdami Taksal, 7, 68, 69, 70, 71; and Bhindranwale souvenirs, sale of, 70, 71; and martyrs memorial, 24n13. See also martyrs memorial; refusal to acknowledge Bhindranwale death, 11, 15; and Taksali Pustak Bhandar, 69–70, 77 Darbar Sahib complex, xvi, xvii, xxiiin2, 7, 10, 49, 50, 56, 59, 62, 63, 78, 87n7; abridged pilgrimage of, 80; Afghan invasion of, 49; Amritsar municipality and, 54–55, 56; bazaars around. See Bazaar; Guru Bazaar; Bhindranwale’s occupation of, 50, 70, 87n7, 88n17; commemorative ritual for Bhindranwale, 15; as core of Amritsar, 54–55, 56; library. See Library; as memorial space, 4; military action in. See Operation Bluestar; post-1984 visits to, 70;

preeminence, vis-à-vis CSM, 9, 10; purificatory drives around, 65, 75; redevelopment around, 49, 64, 75, 77, 78–79, 86n3; as Sikh Vatican, 55, 62, 63. See also Shrine; individual entries Dargah Zaira Pir, 56 Deras, 8 Dera Saccha Sauda, 5, 9, 23, 23n5, 87nn10–12 Dharm Yudh Morcha, 37 Durgiyana Mandir, 58–59, 62, 63, 66nn13–14, 87n9 Durrani, Ahmed Shah, 13 fountain roundabout (Phuwara Chowk), 59, 70, 65n9 Gandhi, Indira, 27; assassination, painted representation of, xviii–xix; corpse, image of, 39; national muh dekhna of, 27, 30, 44n9; state memorials for, 4, 23n4, 44n11 Gandhi, Mahatma, 28, 30, 39, 44n9 Geertz, Clifford concept of thick description, 74 Ghallughara Dihara commemorative ritual, xv, xvi, xxii, xxivn3, 2, 4, 10–11, 12, 13, 14; absence of and Bhindranwale’s remembrance, 5, 11, 15; and Akal Takht, focus on, 5, 8, 10–11; martyrs memorial as a challenge to, 22; and medieval Sikh history, 13; partial quality of remembrance, 3–4 Gilsenan, Michael, 48, 56, 57, 86 Golden Temple, 7, 48, 49, 63. See also Harmandir Sahib

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Index

Golden Temple Complex, xxiii, 11, 13, 51, 54, 64n3. See also Darbar Sahib Goswamy, B. N., 18–19 Granth Sahib, 1, 20, 23n9, 51, 68 grassroots memorials, 9, 50 Guru Bazaar, 48, 57, 63, 66n12; commercial primacy of, 64; juxtaposition of sacred and ordinary in, 48, 57; prohibitory bans around, 55, 57, 65n10; purification, politics of, 55, 57; religious souvenirs in, 57, 58, 62 Gurudwara, 7; Keshghar Sahib, 25n22; Yaadgar Shaheedan (Memorial Gurudwara of Martyrs). See Martyrs memorial Guru Gobind Singh, xviii, 58 Guru Hargobind, 20, 23n10, 25n22 Guru Nanak, 8, 51, 58, 61; Janamsakhis. See Janamsakhis; posters, visual cross referencing in, 51–53 Guru portraits, 71; halo in, 19, 20, 25n23, 51, 52, 53; outward facing palm in, 20, 51, 52; style of, 19–20; visual cross referencing in, 51–53 Guru Ravidas, 51–53, 61, 65n5 Gurus and martyrs, difference, 8 hair, as symbol of Sikhism, 25n21, 31, 44n13, 51, 52 halo, representation in portraits, 19, 20, 25n23, 51, 52, 53 Harmandir Sahib, xxiiin2, 7, 9, 13, 23n7, 48, 49; spiritual authority of, 23n10, 24n16. See also Golden Temple Hershman, Paul, 27 Holla, 25n22

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in-between bazaar spaces, and attainable divinity, 62–63 Indic mourning practices, 27–28, 29s Islamic cities, design of, 48 Jallianwala Bagh, 13, 72, 23n9, 86n4 Janamsakhi, of Guru Nanak, 8, 9, 61, 81–86; compilation as art book, 85; documentation by Sikh Fine Arts, 77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 85; and spread of Sikhism, 88nn22–23; structure of narrative, 82–83. See also Baba Atal frescos Jilani, Syed Abdul Qadir, 60, 61 Kendri Sikh Ajaibghar. See Central Sikh Museum Khalistan movement, xv, xvii, 37, 44–45n14, 50, 71, 73; agrarian dislocation as root of, xiv; and autonomous identity, demand for, 40, 45n17; Jagjit Singh Chauhan and, xvii. See also Bhindranwale; Operation Bluestar Khalsa identity, xxii, 25n21, 58, 68 Kiratpur, 39 Lahore, 50 library, xiv, xvi, 16, 37, 41–42; muh dekhna of corpses, 37, 41; Operation Bluestar photo album, 38–41, 42; photograph of Bhindranwale’s corpse, 16–17, 39–40; photograph of Subeg Singh’s corpse, 38–39; preservation of counter photographs xvi, 34; as space for remembering and forgetting, 42 Mahmood, Cynthia Keppley, xiv main street shop, 70–71, 72, 86n3

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Index

Malviya, Pandit Madan Mohan, 66n13 Martyrdom. See also Martyr(s) Ardas as remembrance of. See Ardas; of Baba Deep Singh. See Baba Deep Singh; and Bhindranwale, 71. See also Bhindranwale; commemoration of. See Ghallughara Dihara; modern, 72–73. See also Bhagat Singh, Bhindranwale; shaheedi tasveeran as painted representations of, 13; visual display in portraits, xv, 36. See also Central Sikh Museum Martyrs memorial, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 10, 12, 54, 69, 24n13; act of brick laying, 1, 3, 4, 5, 10; as counter memorial, 22; as a Gurudwara, 6–7; inscription on archway, 2, 3; legislators protest against, 1, 2, 3, 5–6, 7, 8, 10, 22; prohibition of Bhindranwale photographs in, 1, 6; shopkeepers commentary on, 75, 79 Martyr(s) (shaheed), xv, xix, 7–8, 34, 35, 42; Bhindranwale’s recognition as, 6, 9, 15, 71; chronicles of, 8, 9; depiction in souvenir art, 68. See also Souvenir art; and Gurus, difference, 8; medieval, xv, 7, 36. See also Baba Deep Singh; modern, and cinema, xvii–xvii; modern militant, xvii–xviii. See also Singh, Bhagat; Bhindranwale; memorial. See Martyrs memorial; nationalists. See Singh, Bhagat; and politics, 8, 73; portraits in CSM, xv, 9–10, 13–14, 16, 21, 22, 24n18, 42, 87n7;

of Punjabi Suba agitation, 36–37; reclamation of corpses as, 32, 34; religious persecution and, 8; sangat of, 13, 21, 40, 42; souvenir posters of, 8, 69. See also Souvenir posters; souvenirs in bazaars, xv. See also souvenirs; of Tarn Taran railway crossing, 37. See also Martyrdom Masjid and suq/bazaar, relation, 48, 56–57 Mata Lal Devi shrine, 62, 63 Mazhbi tasveera (religious portraits), 8–9, 12, 18 memorial, xviii, 2, 3; of Baba Deep Singh, 7; built, disruptiveness of, 2–3; CSM as, 12–13. See also Central Sikh Museum; of Delhi anti Sikh riot victims, 4; of Indira Gandhi, 4, 23n4, 44n11; Martyrs. See Martyrs memorial memorial Gurudwara. See Martyrs memorial militant corpses: counter photographs of, xvi, 32–34; Muh dekhna of, 32, 33, 34, 41; photographs of, 31–32, 39. See also Library; photographs of, and state, 31, 39; postmortem photographs, and remembrance, 41; reclaiming of personhood, 32, 37, 42; reclamation as shaheed, 34. See also Singh, Shubeg; Bhindranwale Miri Piri, symbols of, 10, 20, 23n10, 25n22 Muh dekhna, 27–28, 30, 42, 43nn2–3, 44n9; of corpse, emotive materiality, 32, 41; extended, photographs as, 29–30, 34, 38;

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Index

as form of remembrance, 41; of Indira Gandhi’s corpse, 27, 30, 44n9; key elements of ritual, 41; library as space of, 34, 37, 41; of militant corpses, 32, 33, 34, 42; museum as space of, 36–38; of newspaper image, and counter interpretation, 32; of Punjabi Suba martyrs, 36–37; and reclaiming of personhood, 32, 37, 42; of wounded Akal Takht, 14

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Nehru memorial, 16 ‘Never Forget 1984’ rallies, xviii, xix–xxii; symbolism of coffins, xxi–xxii Nishan sahib (banner), 7; of Miri-Piri, 10 Oberoi, Harjot, xxii, 29; Operation Bluestar, x, xiii–xiv, xvi, xvii, xix, xxivn5, 4, 10, 11, 13, 23n2, 31, 50, 70, 88n17; chattri (stone umbrella) as symbol of memory of, xvi, xvii; commemoration. See Ghallughara Dihara; commemorative objects in CSM, xv–xvi, 13. See also Central Sikh Museum; destruction of Akal Takht, 10. See also Akal Takht; destruction of Toshkhana, 81; diasporic memorialization of, xix–xx, xxi–xxii; martyrs memorial. See Martyrs memorial; martyrs’ paintings in CSM, xv, 14. See also Central Sikh Museum; photographic remembrance in Library. See Library;

103

scholarly accounts of, xiv; transnational commemoration. See “Never Forget 1984.” See also Bhindranwale; Khalistan movement; Singh, Shubeg Operation Woodrose, 31 Pahari Guler painting style, 19–20, 82 Pavement souvenir art. See Souvenir art Peach, Blair, xx–xxi, 34 Pettigrew, Joyce, xiv photographs: of corpses. See Photographs, of corpse(s) below; and extended muh dekhna, 30, 34, 37. See also Library; postmortem. See Postmortem photographs; as template of martyrs paintings, 34–35. See also counter photographs photographs, of corpse(s), 28–29, 30, 41–43; of Bhindranwale, 17, 40–41; of Indira Gandhi, 39; of Mahatma Gandhi, 39; manipulation of, 30–31; of militants, 31–32, 39. See also Militant corpses; and negation of cremation ritual, 28; of saints, 30; of soverigns, 29–30; State and, 31–32, 39; of Subeg Singh, 38–39, 40. See also Postmortem photographs Picture House, 71, 72–73, 86n6 Pilgrim tourists, 47, 65n7 Pir, poster of, 59–61, 64; visual cosmopolitanism of, 62 Piron ka Pir. See Jilani, Syed Abdul Qadir Pirs (Sufi mystics), 8 Pitr, Indic belief of, 41

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poster art, 20, 68, 59; amalgamation of beliefs in, 51, 59, 65n5. See also Pir, poster of; of Baba Deep Singh, 68–69; of Bhagat Singh, 86; of Bhindranwale, 86; of slain militants, as counter telling, 33–34. See also souvenir poster postmortem photographs, 29, 30; as remembrance, 29, 30, 41; of sovereign, 41; in Victorian England, 29, 43–44n6. See also Photographs, of corpse(s) above Punjabi Suba agitation, 13, 36–37, 44–45n14

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Qadriyya silsila, 60 Rai, Raghu, 16, 25n20, 80 Rakabganj Gurudwara, memorial to anti Sikh riot victims, 4 Ram Rahim Singh, Gurmeet, 5, 23n5, 76, 87n12 Ramsar Gurudwara frescos, 81 Rang de Basanti film, xvii Rasa, 19, 21, 22 Raula, ix, x Ravidassi sect, 51 Recognising Islam, 48 religion: classical theories of placement of sacred, 74; as constructed category, Cavanaugh’s views, 29 religious portraits. See Mazhbi tasveeran religious souvenirs, xvii, 47, 48, 50–51, 53, 54, 56–62, 65n7, 85–86; affective quality of, 51; in bazaars, 56–62, 85–86; of different faiths, cross referencing between, 51–53; and fortification of belief, 63; location and placement of, 53, 56–57, 63, 68;

mobility of, 85; in Picture House, 71; and remembrance, xvi; and subversion of the sacred, 57–58. See also Souvenir art; Souvenir poster; Souvenirs remembrance, xiii. See also Commemoration ardas as form of. See Ardas; bazaars as space of, xiv–v, xvii. See also Bazaars; of Bhindranwale. See Bhindranwale; of Bluestar, xiii–xiv. See also Operation Bluestar; cinema and, xvii–xviii; Darbar Sahib as space of, xxiii. See also Darbar Sahib; and diasporic community xviii. See also Never Forget 1984 rallies; and forgetting, xvi, xxii–xxiii, 11–12, 42; Ghallughara Dihara as form of, xv. See also Ghallughara Dihara; library as space of. See Library; Martyrs memorial as space of, 2. See Martyrs memorial; muh dekhna of corpse as, 41. See also Muh dekhna; postmortem photographs as form of, 30. See also Postmortem photographs; religious souvenirs and, xvi. See also Religious souvenirs; souvenirs and, 67. See also Souvenirs; visual form of, xiv–xv. See also CSM; Bazaars rites of passage, 29 rituals, 29 Saccha Sauda fresco, 82, 83 sacred art, 12, 16, 24. See also religious souvenirs in CSM. See Central Sikh Museum;

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Index

ethics in display of, 12; Janamsakhi as. See Janam sakhi Saint soldiers xv, 7; and symbol of miri- piri, 25n22 ‘Sakha Nankana Sahib’ (painting), 35–36 Sangat of martyrs: Bhindranwale and, 21, 40; in CSM, 13, 21, 42 Sants, 8 Sarbat Khalsa: in 1986, 87n13; in 2015, 76, 87n12 Sarovar (sacred pool), xiv, 18, 49, 54, 88 Scent of Memory, The, xxi Shaheedan da Gurudwara, 23n8 Shaheedi tasveeran, 13 Shahid Sant Jarnail Singh and Holocaust Commemoration Committee, 11, 15 Shiromani Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee (SGPC), 1–2, 22n3 shopkeepers’ commentaries, xvii, 68, 74; conversational, 74, 75–76; on Darbar Sahib, xvii, 68, 74, 75–76, 78–79; on Dera head, 76; on martyrs memorial, 75, 79; material, 74–75. See also Sikh Fine Arts; on redevelopment around Darbar Sahib, 78–79; on the sacred, 75; on Sarbat Khalsa of 2015, 76. See also Bazaari lok shrine: and bazaar, relationship between, xiii, 47–48, 54, 56–57, 63–64, 67, 74, 86; shopkeepers’ commentary on, xvii, 68, 74, 75–76, 78–79; and souvenir, relationship, 48. See also Darbar Sahib

105

Sikh diaspora, and memorialization of Bluestar, xix–xx, xxi–xxii Sikh Fine Arts, 77–78, 79–82, 85, 88n17, 89n24 Sikh gurus, and martyrs, difference between, 8 Singh, Amrik, 15 Singh, Bhagat, xvii, 66n12, 69, 86n6; absence of posters in Durgiyana temple bazaar, 87n9; films on, xvii; as modern martyr, 72; as a nationalist martyr, xvii, xviii; portrait in Picture House, 72–73, 86n6; poster images, vs Bhindranwale’s, 69, 72–73, 86; as Sikh martyr, 72, 73, 87n6; souvenirs of, 66n12, 72; state promoted representations, 72, 73 Singh, Bhai Kehar, 36 Singh, Gurinder Pal, 20 Singh, Hukum, 82 Singh, Jaimal, Nakash, 82 Singh, Jarnail (painter), 35 Singh, Kaka Darbara, 36 Singh, Maharaja Ranjit, 55 Singh, Mehtab, Nakash, 82 Singh, Subeg, 15, 35, 38–39, 40 Singh, Udham, 72 Southhall riots, xx–xxi Souvenir art, 51, 57, 73, 86. See also Souvenir poster below and accessibility of the sacred, 85–86, 62; Bhagat Singh’s portrayal in, xviii. See also Singh, Bhagat; Bhindranwale’s portrayal in, 4–16, 18; and contemporary politics, 86; curation of, 68; depiction of martyrs in, 68. See also Baba Deep Singh; in guru bazaar. See guru bazaar

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106

Index

Souvenir politics, and Punjab politics, 73 Souvenir poster, 59, 69; of Baba Deep Singh, 8, 68–69; of Bhagat Singh, 69, 72–73; of Bhindranwale, 69–70, 72–73; as commentary on Darbar Sahib, 59; of the Pir, 59–61, 64; of Salim Chishti of Ajmer, 65n5; transfer of authority to Granth Sahib in, 20; visual cross referencing in, 51–53. See also Souvenir art above; Souvenirs below Souvenirs, x, xv, xxiii, 8–9, 21, 50–51, 59; in bazaars of Durgiyana temple, 58–59, 62; of Bhindranwale, 69–70, 71; display as political commentary, 68, 74; as portable sacred, 67; religious. See Religious souvenirs; and remembrance, 67; and shrine, relationship, 48; significance of, Jacques Ranciere’s view, 57. See also Bazaar; Souvenir art; Souvenir poster street art. See Calender art; Poster art Suq. See Bazaar

Taksali Pustak Bhandar, 69–70, 77; and Bhindranwale souvenirs, 69–70, 71, 77 Tarn Taran railway crossing martyrs, 37 Toshakhana, destruction during Bluestar, 81 tourist pilgrims, 50–51 Town Hall, 49, 65n4 transnational commemoration, xviii, xix–xxi urban spaces and sacred shrines, Gilsenan analysis, 48, 56, 57. See also shrine and bazaar, relationship between Vadda Ghallughara, 13 Vars, xv, xix vegetarianism, and religious purity, 65n10 Victorian postmortem photography, 29, 43–44n6 Weber, Max, 7 Yaadgar Shaheedan memorial. See Martyrs memorial Zaira Pir Dargah, 62, 63

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About the Author

Radhika Chopra is the author of Militant and Migrant: The Politics and Social History of Punjab (Routledge, 2011). She has edited Reframing Masculinities: Narrating the Supportive Practices of Men (2006) and co-edited Educational Regimes in Contemporary India (2005) and South Asian Masculinities: Contexts of Change, Sites of Continuity (2004). She has published widely in journals, contributed book chapters, and presented conference papers on contemporary Punjab, gender and masculinities, and visual anthropology. She has been the Chair of India Studies, Indian Council of Social Science Research at Aarhus University, Denmark; a Fulbright Fellow; ­Co-chair, U.N. Expert Group on the Role of Men and Boys in Achieving Gender Equality; and Co-Ordinator, Workshop on “How to Work with Boys and Young Men,” UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs and DAW, Commission on the Status of Women. She teaches at the Department of Sociology, University of Delhi.

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