Violence and Resistance in Sikh Gendered Identity 9781138281493, 9781003036036

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VIOLENCE AND RESISTANCE IN SIKH GENDERED IDENTITY

This book examines the constructions and representations of male and female Sikhs in Indian and diasporic literature and culture through the consideration of the role of violence as constitutive of Sikh identity. How do Sikh men and women construct empowering identities within the Indian nation-state and in the diaspora? The book explores Indian literature and culture to understand the role of violence and the feminization of baptized and turbaned Sikh men, as well as identity formation of Sikh women who are either virtually erased from narratives, bodily eliminated through honor killings, or constructed and represented as invisible. It looks at the role of violence during critical junctures in Sikh history, including the Mughal rule, the British colonial period, the Partition of India, the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in India, and the terror of 9/11 in the United States. The author analyzes how violence reconstitutes gender roles and sexuality within various cultural and national spaces in India and the diaspora. She also highlights questions related to women’s agency and their negotiation of traumatic memories for empowering identities. The book will interest scholars, researchers, and students of postcolonial English literature, contemporary Indian literature, Sikh studies, diaspora studies, global studies, gender and sexuality studies, religious studies, history, sociology, media and films studies, cultural studies, popular culture, and South Asian studies. Jaspal Kaur Singh is Professor of English Literature at Northern Michigan University, Marquette, Michigan, USA. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Oregon. She was a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Gender in Africa, James S. Coleman African Studies Center, UCLA and a Fulbright Nehru Senior Scholar in India. Her publications include a monograph, a coauthored book, and three coedited books: Representation and Resistance: South Asian and African Women Writers at Home and in the Diaspora (2008); Narrating the New Nation: South African Indian Writing (2018); Indian Writers: Transnationalisms and Diasporas (2010); Trauma, Resistance, Reconciliation in Post-1994 South African Writing (2010); and Negotiating Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Turkey (2016).

‘It is rare to encounter a necessary book. Yet here it is. This book goes to the heart of a provocative thesis: the role of violence in the formation of Sikh identity and its impact, through historical, social and political forces, on Sikhs. A study of profound moments of misunderstandings and lost opportunities, this powerful work is a tour de force exemplar of how to examine communities marked by colonization, fear, elision, invisibility, and mystery without falling into the trap of reductionism. Nuances of class, gender, race, sex, and sexuality are brought to the fore, with many once-silenced Sikh women’s voices coming forth, and so, too, the complex dynamics of the internal diversity of Sikhs and the wider worlds in which they live. The result is a portrait of postcolonial challenges reaching beyond the focus community to worldwide challenges of our epoch. A must-read not only for those interested in Sikh and postcolonial studies but also anyone interested in understanding engendered violence in multidimensional ways. Read this book. Re-read it. Learn from it, and share its fecund ideas.’ Lewis R. Gordon, Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies ‘This book provides an eloquent self-awareness and a rare glimpse into the complexities of Sikh identity. It is a remarkable addition to the oeuvre of a respected and leading postcolonial scholar. Singh highlights the predicament of Sikh women within the Indian and global Sikh community concomitant with the violence that Sikhs, particularly the turbaned and bearded males, encounter as represented in historical and contemporary literature and culture. The book analyzes representations of male Sikhs, often feminized and othered as hypermasculine, who struggle to construct a positive identity for themselves and their community in India and the diaspora, while female Sikhs, rendered invisible or voiceless, strive to negotiate empowering identities for themselves in liminal cultural and narrative spaces. Singh’s intersectional critique is courageous and innovative as she excavates personal and historical occurrences of trauma to revise, resist and renegotiate memories for empowering personal and communal identities for Sikhs. The book’s emotional and impassioned power once again demonstrates Singh’s extraordinary scholarly gifts.’ Rajendra Chetty, Professor, University of the Western Cape, South Africa

VIOLENCE AND RESISTANCE IN SIKH GENDERED IDENTITY

Jaspal Kaur Singh

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Jaspal Kaur Singh The right of Jaspal Kaur Singh to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Disclaimer: Every effort has been made to contact owners of copyright regarding the material reproduced in this book. Perceived omissions if brought to notice will be rectified in future printing. The author and publisher apologise if inadvertently any source remains unacknowledged. The views and opinions expressed in this book are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the publisher. The text representations and analyses based on archival, literary, cultural and historical material are intended here to serve general educational and informational purposes and not obligatory upon any party. The authors and publisher have made every effort to ensure that the information presented in the book was correct at the time of press, but do not assume and hereby disclaim any liability with respect to the accuracy, completeness, reliability, suitability, selection and inclusion of the contents of this book and any implied warranties or guarantees. The authors and publisher make no representations or warranties of any kind to any person or entity for any loss, including, but not limited to, special, incidental or consequential damage, or disruption—physical, psychological, emotional, or otherwise—alleged to have been caused, directly or indirectly, by omissions or any other related cause. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-138-28149-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-03603-6 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Taylor & Francis Books

I DEDICATE THIS BOOK TO MY LATE GRANDMOTHERS, LAAJ KAUR AND BISHAN KAUR, TO MY LATE PARENTS, TEJ KAUR AND PRABJOTH SINGH, TO MY LATE SISTER, BINA SINGH, TO SATWANT KAUR, MY SOLE/SOUL SISTER, MY SON, GAUTAM MOHAN SINGH, MY DAUGHTER, GITANJALI KAUR SINGH, AND MY GRANDDAUGHTER, KARINA SINGH CHO.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

ix

1 Introduction

1

2 Mughal India and Colonialism: Revising History, Gender Identity, and Violence in Bhai Veer Singh’s Sundri

33

3 Communal and Gender Violence in Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers

43

4 Gendered Violence and Partition Memory in Postcolonial Novels and Films

54

5 Partition Narratives and Sikh Gendered Identity Construction: Memory of Violence in Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan

73

6 Gender and Memories of Trauma in Amrita Pritam’s 1950 Novella Pinjar and Poetry

84

7 Violence, State Terror, and Gendered Sikh Identity: The Aftermath of Operation Blue Star in Gulzar’s 1996 Hindi film Maachis and Anurag Singh’s 2013 Punjabi film Punjab 1984

97

8 Traumatized Sikh Male and Female Subjects: Representations of Trauma and Memory in Amitoj Mann’s 2003 Punjabi Film Hawayein

118

9 (En)Gendering Nations in Manoj Punj’s 2004 Punjabi Film Des Hoyaa Prades: When One’s Nation Becomes a Foreign Territory

128

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CONTENTS

10 Perpetrator Nation and the Cultural Memorialization of Sikh Trauma in Shonali Bose’s Novel Amu (2004)

141

11 Once Again, the Turban: Terror and Gendered Sikh Identity in Liam Dalzell’s Punjabi Cab, Satdeep Singh’s Taaj, and Sarab Singh Neelam’s Ocean of Pearls

153

12 Gendering the Sikh Diaspora and Transnational Feminism: The Construction of Sexuality in the Poems of Sukhjeet Kaur Khalsa, Sharapal Ruprai, and Rupi Kaur

164

Bibliography Index

177 189

viii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book was supported by a Fulbright Nehru Grant and by Northern Michigan University. I am deeply indebted to them for their support. These chapters have also been informed by discussions and feedback from various conferences and seminars where I presented my research on gender and Sikh literature; I particularly wish to thank the Forum on Contemporary Theory of India, the English Academy of Southern Africa, and the South Asian Literary Association of the USA. Earlier versions and parts of Chapters 7 and 4 appeared in Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory (2006), and Chapters 2 and 4 appeared in the Journal of Contemporary Thought Special Issue: Thinking Territory (2009). I thank them for permission to reprint.

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Part One: Intersections of Sanctioned Historiography and Personal Stories in the Understanding of Sikh Gendered Identity The Public and the Private Violence and Resistance in Sikh Gendered Identity examines violence as constitutive of Sikh identity, analyzing public or dominant constructions and representations as well as private or personal narratives of Sikhs in Indian and diasporic literature and culture from a critical postcolonial feminist perspective. Turbaned male Sikhs have been targets of violence since the early days of Sikhism’s inception as a separate religious community in India: from the Mughal period to British colonization, through two World Wars and the Partition of India, to the 1984 anti-Sikh Massacre and the ensuing 1990s Sikh killings in the postcolonial Indian nation-state.1 After the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, the 2005 bomb blasts in the UK, and in the ongoing Global War on Terror, Sikhs have become targets of hate crimes and violence in the diaspora due to their external appearance. How, then, do Sikhs construct empowering identities within the Indian nation-state and in the diaspora? As a postcolonial feminist critic and comparative literature scholar, I excavate Indian literature and culture to locate empowering narratives in interstitial spaces, seeking to understand the role of violence in the construction of Sikh gendered identity and the subsequent feminization (through binary discourse where Sikhs are constructed and represented as hypermasculine) of baptized and turbaned Sikh men, variously constructed as brave lions, brutal warriors, terrorists, and “billis” (cats or pussies; Brian Keith Axel, The Nation’s Tortured Body 133) and the often violent and aggressive, but then silenced Sikh women, almost erased from narratives or bodily eliminated through honor killings and then constructed and represented in literature as passive or maternal, or rendered invisible. I begin this examination of marginalized and minoritized literature in India and in the diaspora with a number of questions: What role did violence play in the construction of Sikh identity during the Mughal period in India? When were

1

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the Sikhs considered a “martial race” and when did they become known as the “Lions of India”? How did violence transform Sikhs, Hindus, and Muslims from neighbors into warring communities during the Partition of India? What role does violence play for diasporic Sikhs, turbaned males, and invisible and silenced females in the aftermath of the 9/11 violence, and the ensuing and ongoing Global War on Terror? In Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, commenting on Oscar Wilde’s “enigmatic claim that ‘Most people are other people … Their thoughts are someone else’s opinion, their lives a mimicry, their passion a quotation’” (xv), argues that while “identity can be a source of pride and joy … [it] can also kill—and kill with abandon” (1). He remembers the communal violence of 1947 where Sikhs and Hindus clashed with Muslims in the name of the newly created nations, Pakistan and India. According to Sen, when we identify with one or the other group, we become defined by a “fostered,” “singular,” or “solitary” identity that transforms us “into a powerful weapon to brutalize another,” such that “sectarian hatred can spread like wildfire” (xv). Over 1 million people were killed during the Partition violence, and almost 10 million were dislocated from their ancestral homes and became refugees. We abandon any empathic kindness we might have for each other, and the “result,” claims Sen, “can be homespun elemental violence, or globally artful violence and terrorism” (xv). As we can see from the Global War on Terror, communities and nations are being splintered and brutalized. The “powerful weapons” of brutalization, states Sen, are constructed by “commanders of persecution and carnage” and “artisans of terror,” who are then led to kill “others on behalf of their ‘own people’” (2). While in reality a human being has “plural affiliations,” notes Sen, they can be transformed “through the advocacy of a unique identity for a violent purpose … through selective emphasis and incitement” (175). Through distortions, groups are targeted as having only certain qualities in their identities and then are targeted for violence (7). For example, British colonialism, through its “Divide and Rule” policy, constructed the turbaned Sikhs as ferocious warriors, ignoring their multifaceted religious and cultural attributes. Sikhs and Muslims then clashed and slaughtered each other during the Partition melee. Seen as violent beings, Sikh men, with their unique turbans and unshorn long hair and beards, themselves become targets of violence during different historical moments, while women’s bodies, used to wage various wars upon, become objectified, their bodies reinscribed for nationalism or for communalism. Examining Samuel Huntington’s thesis of civilizational clashes that he defines as “conceptually parasitic on the commanding power of a unique categorization along so-called civilizational lines,” Sen critiques the theory that contrasts “‘Western civilization’ with ‘Islamic civilization,’ ‘Hindu civilization,’ ‘Buddhist civilization,’ and so on … [which is then] incorporated into a sharply carpentered vision of one dominant and hardened divisiveness” (original emphasis 10). Can the “relations between different human beings … be seen,” asks Sen, “without 2

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serious loss of understanding, in terms of relations between different civilizations” (original emphasis 11)? He castigates the “reductionist view” and “foggy perception of world history which overlooks … the extent of internal diversities within these civilizational categories … and the reach and influences of interactions—intellectual as well as material—that go right across the regional borders of so-called civilizations” (original emphasis 11). Sikhs were formed by centuries of social and religious syncretism at the crossroads of various cultural influences in Punjab, yet if we only see from the “clash of civilizations” perspective, hybrid and syncretic cultural traditions of Sikhs are reduced or fetishized, leading to communal and gender violence. This study in part examines “cross-border interactions” and “shared human interests” along with violent, including gendered, clashes within the Sikh community and with other communities during the Mughal period, during British colonialism, and in the postcolonial period, while also investigating “artisans of terror” who foment violence by the “imposition of singular and belligerent identity” and “[kill] others on behalf of their ‘own people’” (Sen 2). Through a postcolonial feminist critical framework, I analyze Sikh syncretic identity construction and reconstruction in culture and literature to bring to light the often-violent political and social forces at work in singular identity formation and representation, and their impact on Sikh gendered identity formation. R.S. Sugirtharajah claims that postcolonial analysis bears in mind “postcolonial circumstances such as hybridity, fragmentation, deterritorialization, and hyphenated, double, and multiple identities” as well as “subaltern and feminine elements embedded in the texts” (Sugirtharajah 537). He adds that postcolonial reading “thrives on inclusiveness,” which probes “injustices, [and] produces new knowledge which problematizes well-entrenched positions and enhances the lives of the marginalized” (538). Postcolonial reading examines the contexts of the texts and provides an intersectional critique. A postcolonial reading, argues Sugirtharajah, concerns itself with “liberation hermeneutics;” yet “liberation hermeneutics” on its own “fails to appreciate the historical or political ramifications” of reading certain texts at “face value,” for it neglects to take into account those who are marginalized, displaced, and uprooted in their “own lands and own countries” (539). For example, Sikhs are minoritized and marginalized in India and in the diaspora through violence, as the 1984 statesponsored massacre of Sikhs after the assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards shows. (Gandhi was assassinated for her attacks on the Sikhs’ holiest site, the Harmandir Sahib—the Golden Temple— which she ordered to smoke out Sikh “terrorists” hiding in the temple; I discuss the 1984 Sikh Massacre in more detail in Chapter 1). Postcolonialism thus argues for the “idea of liberation and its praxis [which] must come from the collective unconsciousness of the people. It sees liberation not as something hidden or latent in the text, but rather as born of public consensus created in democratic dialogue between text and context” (Sugirtharajah 539). Repressed stories of violence from the collective unconsciousness, once made 3

INTRODUCTION

narratable by the working through of repression and trauma, through representation, and through sharing, help in creating empowering narratives and identities. In analyzing Sikh trauma narratives through a postcolonial lens, I will locate marginal texts written by Sikhs, including private narratives of trauma, to see how the traumatized Sikh subjects are able or unable to work towards social healing. If they are unable to work through the trauma of various violent periods in history, violence becomes cyclical or reappears through the “repetition compulsion” (Fletcher 238) as, for example, communal violence, or gendered and domestic abuse. Sikh women, along with Sikh men, faced violence and participated in acts of resistant violence during the aforementioned historical periods, but women are simply constructed as self-sacrificial and excluded from dominant postcolonial Indian, and particularly Sikh, literary narratives and representations, as my examination of literary texts will show, thereby disallowing mourning and healing, for “some realties,” as Veena Das argues, “need to be fictionalized before they can be apprehended” (Das 39). If they are not narrated or fictionalized and do not become part of the dominant narratives, traumatic experiences are disavowed, thereby disallowing witnessing to occur. Without a witness, healing is difficult, if not impossible. What role does traumatic memory play in the retelling of stories of violence that individuals and communities face within a nation-state and the diaspora, particularly in how such stories and memories shape identity formation? What language does the traumatized subject use to attempt narration? How does the traumatized subject remember and narrate the story of violence, and for what purposes? Can the hearing or viewing subject(s), whether from one’s own community or from another, bear witness to the traumatized, and do such acts promote healing? Where are the fragmented narratives located and excavated by scholars who bear witness to the traumatized gendered subjects? According to Mieke Bal et al., “Art—and other cultural artifacts such as photographs and published texts of all kinds—can mediate between the parties to the traumatizing scene and between these and the reader or viewer” (x). Readers, viewers, or listeners then “perform an act of memory that is potentially healing, as it calls for political and cultural solidarity in recognizing the traumatized party’s predicament (x). Examining violence, trauma, memory, and representation in Bhai Vir Singh’s 1898 novella Sundri, Shauna Singh Baldwin’s 1999 novel What the Body Remembers, Bhisham Sahni’s 1974 novel Tamas, Vic Sarin’s 2007 film Partition, Manoj Punj’s 1999 film Shaheed-E-Mohabbat Boota Singh, Anil Sharma’s 2001 film Gadar, Khushwant Singh’s 1956 novel Train to Pakistan, Amrita Pritam’s 1950 novel Pinjar: The Skeleton, Gulzar’s 1996 film Maachis (Matches), Anurag Singh’s 2014 film Punjab 1984, Ammtoje Mann’s 2003 film Hawayein, Manoj Punj’s 2004 film Des Hoyaa Pardes, Shonali Bose’s 2004 novel Amu, Liam Delzell’s 2004 documentary Punjabi Cab, Satdeep Singh’s 2012 short film Taaj, Sarab Singh Neelam’s 2008 film Ocean of Pearls, and poems of Sukhjit Kaur Khalsa (2016), Sharapal Ruprai (2014), and Rupi Kaur (2015 and 2017), I locate various 4

INTRODUCTION

historical moments in Indian literature and film where Sikhs, faced with violence, are feminized and represented as having a “unique” (Sen) identity, either as the Lions of Punjab, ferocious warriors, “billis,” or pussies (Axel, The Nation’s Tortured Body 133), and as racial or gender deviants; however, I also show Sikhs’ attempts at selfrepresentations as complex and hybrid beings. In analyzing the texts, I arrive at a unique understanding of violence and trauma and the Sikh woman’s position vis-àvis the Sikh man within the Indian nation-state and the diaspora by locating the texts within the framework of Sikh cultural and political history. In order to define and locate Sikh women in history and literature, it is important to include private narratives, as Jill Didur suggests; for example, dominant narratives of the 1947 Partition of India into two modern nation-states mostly focus on documentary historical forms; they neglect, as Didur claims, “the interpretive function of reading and writing about the partition, the discursive construction of subjectivity, agency, nationalism, and history that are involved in its narrativization” (5). The violence that ensued during the Partition of India and the creation of a majority Muslim nation-state implicated not only Hindus and Muslims, but also Sikhs, who came to occupy a troubling interstitial space in colonial and postcolonial narrative and national memory. Communalism and sectarian violence following the Partition are documented in most Partition narratives, while the gendered nature of the violence is co-opted in the “totalizing logic of bourgeois nationalism” where a more “polyphonic reading of national identity” is not considered (5). “To be more specific,” argues Didur, Reading and writing about literature representing women’s lives involves straddling both these spheres, making visible the binary construction of the public and private implicated in nationalist discourse, patriarchal power relations, and the way in which women’s bodies were singled out as privileged sites of violence at the time of partition. (Didur 7) While national accounts of women (as a group) being abducted, violated, and raped during the Partition received textual representation, individual stories of violence and trauma were not immediately available. Thus, as Didur posits, “a gendered understanding of the partition necessitates a shift in the scholar’s attention from the public to the private, from the high political story to the local, everyday account” (7). Such an approach unsettles a monolithic account (10) and allows for a polyphonic and more inclusive narrative to emerge. How does national historiography differ from everyday ordinary accounts? According to Urvashi Butalia, How families were divided, how friendship endured across borders, how people coped with the trauma, how they rebuilt their lives, what resources, both physical and mental, they drew upon, how their experiences of 5

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dislocation and trauma shaped their lives, and indeed the cities and towns and villages they settle in … find little reflection in written history. (Butalia 9) Since we read only dominant “textbook formulations” or stereotypical accounts of the violence of Partition (Veena Das 2), traumatic events of the Partition can only be really known through the way they have been handed down to us: through fiction, memoirs, testimonials, through memories, individual and collective, through the communalism it unleashed and, only as one of these aspects, through the history it produced [and this history] lives on in family histories … where tales of the horror and brutality, the friendship and sharing, are told and retold between communities, families and individuals. (Butalia 10) Everyday ordinary stories and narratives must become part of the Grand National narrative. In this way, patriarchal and national narratives of male violence will be complicated by stories of female valor or agency, as opposed to seeing or representing women’s bodies merely as sites of terror and violence. As Veena Das notes, and as my experiences affirm, “The memories of Partition were … not in the nature of something gone underground, repressed, hidden away, that would have to be excavated. In a way, these memories were very much on the surface” (Das 11). As my grandmother and my mother’s Partition narratives were always fragmented, I had to learn to listen and hear their stories, spoken with “an inner language” (11), and ask different and difficult questions in my work about gendered violence and its representation in dominant historiography and in published and well-known national literature. Throughout my young and adult life, my parents, who experienced the trauma of Partition, narrated fragmented tales of violence and horror, of lost aunts and dead girls, of ghost trains and riots, and of lost homes and abandoned country. Marianne Hirsch and Valeria Smith argue, “What we know about the past, and thus our understanding of the present, is shaped by the voices that speak to us out of history: relative degrees of power and powerlessness, privilege and disenfranchisement, determine the spaces where witnesses and testimony may be heard or ignored” (12). Indeed, hearing the stories of my parents shaped my understanding of Sikh history and Sikh gendered identity; thus, this book contextualizes published fictional accounts with my personal narrative and re-remembered stories in order to analyze Sikh trauma narratives for a “polyphonic reading” (Didur 5). How are narratives of violence—perpetrated by or against women during nationalist movements and the Partition—rendered in the public discourse? And for what purposes? “The signature of the Partition in both the literary and popular imagination,” claims Das, “has been the violation of women, mass rapes and mass abduction, their expulsion from homes, the imperative to court 6

INTRODUCTION

heroic deaths” (13) with “its associated imagery of social disorder as sexual disorder” (21). These stories become part of the national discourse, particularly as represented and discussed through various “government ordinances (such as the Abducted Persons [Recovery and Restoration] Act of 1949, which remained in force until October 31, 1951),” allowing the state to establish “a social contract between “men charged with keeping male violence against women in abeyance” (original emphasis 21). The “male body was made to stand for the whole community” (13) and thus the “castration (both literal and figurative)” of the male body was “always elided” (13). Male violence, castration, and rape are often left out of dominant nationalist narratives. Here, the nation uses violated female bodies and gendered narratives in dominant ideology to reconstitute the memory of the dismembered and brutalized male, and by extension the nation, as potent. Dominant narratives constructed women as helpless and in need of rescue. Many women in fact resisted and used their sexuality to remain alive. Many abducted and violated women during the Partition chose to remain with the abductors from the enemy communities. As Esther Dror and Ruth Linn argue, “A woman’s chances for remaining alive seemed to be greater if a man took care of her, whether the connection between them was romantic or in exchange for sex” (289). In a similar manner, my cousins and my siblings, as well as myself, remained with our oppressive spouses or incestuous fathers for survival. Our sexuality oftentimes saved our lives, particularly when faced with the unknown in unequal diasporic spaces. “In patriarchal societies,” claim Dror and Linn, “the power of women as agents is often connected to their ability to use their sexuality as a resource” (288), and I suggest that Partition terror and domestic and sexual violence have similar patterns of resistance and compliance for women with limited resources in all patriarchal societies, and particularly so in a minority community like the Sikh community in India, in Burma, and in the US. Since most of the texts located within dominant social spaces represent male Sikhs as protagonists, my attempt in this study is to uncover texts and narratives that show female Sikhs resisting gendered violence. I employ tropes of resistance to gender violence and trauma in mainstream texts and personal narratives to connect the present readers with others, so that a circle is formed and healing for the besieged Sikh community, and particularly for violated and oppressed, albeit resistant, Sikh women, can occur. To expose/explore these narrative silences/elisions, I examine the violation of the female Sikh body and the feminization and transformation of the male Sikh body in literary representations, arguing, in part, that both are constructed through gendered discourse, and as such inhabit a liminal and exilic social space in postcolonial India and the diaspora. The discursive feminization of Sikhs began in colonial India, but found its apogee within the Indian nation-state. Aiming for an empowering and enabling analysis, I examine my selected texts and their authors’ attempts at interpretation of their memories alongside my own trauma through “narrative witnessing” by creating “a circuit connecting the writer[s], the text[s], and [their] present reader” (Kacandes 55). In this way, 7

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a collaborative witnessing occurs with the artists, such as writers and film directors, and myself, as well as other readers, as I bring my own narratives of trauma to the various violent historical as well as personal moments to bear in the analysis. Bettina Stumm, in writing about trauma and witnessing, which is worth citing at some length, argues, It is [the] infinite encounter with alterity that separates witnessing from recognition. Where recognition focuses on what can be seen or known of others in relation to oneself, witnessing focuses on what cannot be seen or known of others in one’s relationships with them. Where recognition implies an awareness of oneself and others as subjects that can be identified and addressed within sociopolitical systems, witnessing constitutes one’s subjectivity in relation to alterity, and stimulates responsibility to another’s personhood, not simply his or her victimhood. From this starting point, witnessing has the potential to invite interactions across political boundaries, power hierarchies, or antagonistic relationships, seeing vulnerable subjects beyond their contexts of trauma, as people engaging with other people. As long as we see ourselves and others as subjects locked into systems of power or wholly determined by our subject positions, our ability to respond ethically will be limited to those systems and positions. Only in bearing witness to alterity can witnesses inhabit alternative positions, undermine oppositional relationships, challenge power struggles, and arrest cycles of suffering to conceive instead of peaceful or transformative interactions. (Stumm xx) In order to create such a “circuit,” where we can bear witness to “alterity,” we must first examine Sikh identity as minorities in relation to nationalism and patriarchal constructions and representations in literary texts, and then add private narratives in order to “arrest cycles of suffering.” Public nationalistic discourses posit national belonging for the privileged few, while minorities and the exilic in the postcolonial heteropatriarchal world struggle to find a place within nation-states. In the production and construction of Sikh identity within India and the diaspora, private and often female narratives are elided, and a masculinist and heteropatriarchal construct dominates. This book examines published accounts alongside private narratives and my own “postmemory” of the traumatic events leading up to and ensuing from the 1947 Partition of India—the 1984 Sikh Massacre, the subsequent violent decade when Sikhs were targeted by the state, and violence against Sikhs in the diaspora during the Global War on Terror—in order to incorporate an alternative interpretation regarding identity and ideas of national belonging for Sikhs, and especially for Sikh women, in a violent, destabilized, and irruptive milieu. While published and public narratives are of paramount importance for this study, the 8

INTRODUCTION

incorporation of private narratives adds an important dimension to the analysis of gender, as they provide unique and unexplored areas for inquiry for the bearing of witness to alterity (Stumm). Nationalism constructs its membership; one belongs to a nation. How, then, am I a Sikh woman and what is my claim to the land of my ancestors as a Burma-born Punjabi Sikh? How do I belong to the nation of domicile, the US, as a diasporic Sikh woman with a full guarantee of rights as a citizen? A personal narrative allows me to address these questions and to examine the complexities of identity formations. Private Narratives and Fragmentary Memories: My Own Traumatic Past and Postmemory as a Diasporic Sikh Woman, Critic, and Scholar As Jill Didur claims, in order to understand the gendered nature of the Partition violence, scholars need to shift their focus from documented history to ordinary everyday accounts in the private realm of the home (7). Therefore, I incorporate my own memory and postmemory into national historiography to locate gendered violence about the Partition and the 1984 Sikh Massacre as represented in literature. Long before 1951, the year I was born, my Sikh parents, Prabjoth Singh and Tej Kaur, born and raised in colonial Burma (now Myanmar), were tired from hiding in the Shan States jungles during the World War II Japanese occupation and the subsequent war with the Allied Army. So, in 1946 they returned to their motherland, or mulk, of India, a land they had never seen before. Laaj Kaur,2 my paternal grandmother, a robust farming woman who migrated to Burma as a young bride from Bhian village in district Chakwal, in what is now Pakistan, brought them back with her to the land of her birth, India. She was married to Meher Singh, a farmer, who migrated to Burma years earlier to earn a living as a lorry/truck driver. Since Meher’s father’s smallholding was not producing enough to sustain the family and pay exorbitant taxes, his mother sent him, along with her brothers, who drove trucks to move goods, to Burma. He learned the trade well, but could not return home for years. He missed his mother and his homeland. When he was 17, Meher returned to Punjab and married Laajwanti, a Hindu woman, renamed Laaj Kaur after the Sikh wedding ceremony when she was just 13, and took her with him to the Shan States in Burma. Laaj was afraid of the Shans; she had heard they were cannibals, and although her fears were unfounded, she remained wary of them for a long time. Many Burmans, too, were suspicious of Indians and stayed away from them. Meher’s sister subsequently married Laaj’s brother in what is known as watna (exchange marriage). They too travelled and settled in Burma. During the war in Burma, and before they left for India, my family—my grandparents, Laaj and Meher Singh, my parents, Prabjoth Singh and Tej Kaur, my one-year old sister, and my three paternal uncles, Nanak, Jaswant, and Saran—survived by bartering salt for food in the Inlay Lake jungles near their hometown, Taunggyi; they had to flee in haste due to the Japanese violence and 9

INTRODUCTION

the constant bombing by the Allied Armies in the Shan States. Inlay Lake is one of the largest lakes in Asia. It is surrounded by the Shan hills and lush green trees, where people commuted on boats and lived on the water in houses with stilts. One day, my mother took a boat to the floating market to barter salt for food, when it overturned. Her shouts and her splashing in the cold water were heard and a Shan Pa-O man rescued her. Once rescued, my mother went silent for days, staring at the pagoda bells, neglecting her infant daughter; or she would suddenly start screaming at her mother-in-law. Laaj was always putting my mother down for being from a lower tailoring caste, and during the tirade my mother called Laaj a village woman. My uncle took my mother to a pagoda, where she would sit for hours and listen to the monks’ chanting, and she slowly recovered her sanity. At a young age (she was 17 when she married and had her first child a year later; my father was 19 years old), she had to cook for the entire family—her husband, her father and mother-in-law, and her three brothers-inlaw. Laaj was a tough farming woman from Rawalpindi who had full control of the household. She talked and walked fast, cooked and ate spicy food, and made a great show of being a religious Sikh woman by reciting the Gurubani, the daily prayer, in a loud and raspy voice. In the evenings, she would read the Ramayana. She was a story-telling woman who knew the power of her voice and her stories. The Allied Army’s planes continued to rain bombs on my parents’ hometown and in the jungles of Shan States. The Japanese, who were occupying Burma at the time, were brutal to the Burmese and Indians. My father had faced earlier Japanese violence and wrath in their hometown, when a Japanese army officer knocked down their shop after my father had refused to accept his torn ten-kyat note; they had kicked his small shop down and had smacked him around. His turban had fallen off and his long hair had been uncovered and unraveled. All these incidents led to Laaj’s desire to return to her country. At the time of their return from Burma to India, first in a boat and then by train, truck, and bullock cart, my mother, Tej, was heavily pregnant with her second child. She was a slender but strong young woman, but the move had unnerved her. However, she felt heartened when the entire village lit diya oil lamps to welcome Meher Singh and his family back home; this village was predominantly Muslim. Their ancestral home, the only concrete double-story building with a well on the land, was Laaj’s joy and pride. My second older sister, scrawny but lusty, was born at home on December 6, 1946 in Punjab. It was cold in Rawalpindi, my mother recounted years later, and Laaj, who heated water for the birth, took a look at the scrap that Tej produced, turned away, and glanced at her four robust sons. Prabjoth, my father, made to feel ashamed for having produced a second daughter, took some leftover roti and saag to the mother of his new child. After a few months, in March of 1947, my parents and the other family members, along with my small sisters, were forced to flee when news of the Partition and the rioting between Hindu/Sikhs and Muslims reached their area. All of them, except for Meher, who refused to leave his ancestral home, escaped 10

INTRODUCTION

at night—the women and children on ponies, the men on foot. My newborn older sister slid from my mother’s weak arms and remained on the ground, unnoticed by anyone until my incredulous youngest (14-year-old) uncle Saran discovered her in the dark and returned her to my mother’s arms. Saran, now in his eighties, and a real Sikh who practices seva (service) in addition to practicing the Buddhist eightfold path, told me recently that the family members carried on as if nothing untoward had occurred. If my mother were alive, I would ask her whether she meant to leave her infant daughter behind in Rawalpindi, a district famous for female feticide. My grandmother, who walked around like she only produced sons, actually had two daughters, but they were both dead. Her third son, my uncle Jaswant, only took care of his own possessions and walked ahead. The family had walked all night long without food and water, saw people fleeing while carrying infants and old people, small bundles of clothing or treasures pressed to their chests, heard terrified and anguished cries, and somehow reached Chakwal railway station. Chaos reigned. Trainloads full of slaughtered people were arriving from India in ghost trains. My family’s train bogie (compartment) was attacked—stones, sticks, and fists hammered on the door—but somehow, they escaped. A few days later, my father, along with a Sikh military escort and an army truck, went back from Chakwal to fetch his father and take him to Burma. Meher told my father about the kindness of his Muslim neighbors, who hid him for days. They traveled from Chakwal to Delhi, and then in Calcutta boarded a ship called Visa that took them all the way (as they were uncertain where the borderlines were going to be drawn) to Burma, the land of my parents’, and eventually my, birth. I was born in post-independent Burma. I have two brothers, one older and one younger, and three sisters, two older and one younger than myself. My appearance after my brother’s birth was unwelcome, but my mother told me she loved my chubby face, as I was one of the fattest babies she produced. However, I was a lusty one who suckled her dry and she became anemic and jaundiced, mother told me, so she handed me over to her sister to be my wet nurse, as my cousin was born 13 days after me. My aunt stopped feeding me after five days, as there was no milk left for my cousin. I paid for that milk, years later, when we were displaced from Burma to India as refugees after the military coup in Burma, and my aunt was diagnosed with schizophrenia; I was the only person she trusted to take for her electric shock therapy. Recounting stories of the death and loss they faced during the Partition, my mother told us how their train was stoned, windows shattered, doors rattled, while they cowered inside with their two small daughters for days. What happened to my aunt, my father’s sister? She had disappeared or died during childbirth, according to the whispered stories I heard. I grew up with fragmented stories in Burma, learning to fear the Pakistanis and the “brutal” Muslims, while valorizing the brave and fearless Sikhs, protectors of the weak—particularly of Sikh women. I heard stories about my two “dead” aunts, my father’s two sisters: one was said to have “accidently” swallowed quinine as a child, while the other “accidentally” 11

INTRODUCTION

fell from the roof of the house—or, in another version, she died during childbirth. My mother’s older sister, in an unhappy and abusive marriage, died just after giving birth to a dead baby daughter. Another maternal aunt, who had eloped at the age of 17 and was forcefully brought back, was discussed in whispers as “the shameful one.” Male relatives, including my father, visited her to sexually harass her at all hours. She was married off in a rush; the only “suitable boy” they found was an opium addict, and my aunt was relegated to the role of sole caregiver to her two daughters and one son. She worked as a seamstress, dishwasher, and, finally, when she relocated to India, as a factory worker. In whispers, she was held up as an example of a fallen woman who suffered due to her perverse sexuality and transgressions. Why was my aunt brought back in shame when the boy she eloped with wanted to marry her? These whispered stories only made some sense to me years later, but when I was a child my questions never yielded any satisfactory answers, and haunted me in silent moments. In Burma, my grandmother’s stories of shared festivals, weaving, dyeing, and embroidering multicolored phulkari designs on shawls with her Muslim neighbor’s wife and other female members in Punjab (in pre-Partition India) still resonate in my memory. As Michelle Maskiell notes: Sikh women could utilize phulkaris to express their agency through enriching their own social relationships—both at the intersection of women’s negotiations and incorporations within their natal and conjugal households, and within their individualized lives among friends. (Maskiell 146) She further notes that women used phulkaris to “celebrate their bonds with one another, connections that required negotiations within and around the patriarchal girders of their family lives” (146). Phulkaris were passed from mothers to daughters and were also exchanged to show love and support between women (146). When Laaj reminisced about the phulkaris, she named her friends, Salma and Najma, both Punjabi Muslims, but never called them Muslims. She told us how they would weave and dye the cloth, embroider phulkaris on shawls and chunnis (long scarfs), and how she weaved the dori, or tape, for the salwars pants from silk threads. In Burma, Laaj would overturn a charpoy, the stringed cot, on its side, and using threads and bamboo stalks she made us beautiful tasseled doris for our salwars. She also recounted many tales of Muslim festivals, such as Ramzan (Ramadan), when Salma or Najma would bring them sweets (sayvian) and they would all perform the phulkari/chunni exchanges as friends and sisters during Eid festivals. Laaj, a formidable woman, kept Meher under her authoritarian eyes, making sure his alcoholic drinks were measured, as he was fond of drinking, and that he had enough money and food when traveling for trade on horseback in Burma. Her son, Prabjoth, or Joth, as everyone called him, had seen my mother at the Sikh temple and shown an interest in marrying her. Laaj took it upon herself to organize my father’s and his younger brother’s marriage to my 12

INTRODUCTION

mother and aunt, my mother’s younger sister, even though my mother’s family was initially opposed to an alliance with her family from the jungles of Burma (they used to live in a remote Shan States town, Mongnai, but had relocated to Taunggyi, the capital of the states). She cooked ladoo sweets with pure ghee and almonds for my mother’s family, who, once they ate the sweets, were unable to say no to the proposal. Once married, however, Laaj made sure my mother never forgot that she rose up from her tailoring caste of Undi by marrying into the Chawla family. Laaj’s husband died of a broken heart—after his return to Burma, unable to forget the carnage in Punjab, and having taken to drinking copious amount of alcohol, he died in his early fifties. Laaj then controlled my mother’s and our lives in minute ways. Prabjoth, who was manipulated the most by Laaj, was himself a trickster and created a topsy-turvy dream-home for children. He had run away from his rural home when he was 13 and enrolled himself in the American Baptist Mission School in Taunggyi, the State capital. He was about to matriculate from high school and had applied for medical school in Rangoon when World War II began. He lamented his lost opportunities, but made sure all his children, his daughters included, were well educated. When my oldest sister was born, Laaj, contrary to Sikh Punjabi cultural convention, distributed sweets to the community; however, when my second sister was born, there was no rejoicing. My older brother’s arrival was celebrated wholeheartedly, while mine was once again subdued. After my mother recovered from my birth, she gave birth to another daughter, and Prabjoth did not see the child for two days. However, once he saw her face, he fell in love with the little one, declaring she looked like the famous Bollywood star Bina Rai. My mother’s last child was a son, so she recovered some of her lost luster as the mother of two sons. Still, my father’s younger brother, Nanak, who was married to my mother’s younger sister, Channa, was always favored by Laaj, as Channa had produced three sons before she had daughters. Before his marriage, Nanak, inordinately fond of my older sister, took her to Madras (now Chennai) for her trachoma treatment. She only remembers that some boys and men used to put rats up her dress in Madras; to this day, she dreams of large cockroaches and rats crawling up her body. When Nanak got married, he started ignoring my sister, and finally began a regime of beating her with his belt and leather slippers, leaving large bruises all over her body. My mother, muttering curses at him, used to sit by her side and cry. My uncle Jaswant is the one who would molest me, along with my two sisters, one older and one younger, years later, in Taunggyi, Burma, in his little room over the back stairs. He would sit us on his lap, feed us chicken liver curry and masturbate.3 When my sister told my mother about uncle’s behavior, she wailed, told us not to say anything to father for fear of his anger, and to stay away from uncle. Laaj would remember that she had left the keys to the locked trunk that contained her silver dishes, most of her phulkari-embroidered shawls, and some of the family treasures—silver jewelry—with Salma, her Muslim neighbor. She brought one phulkari-shawl, a dowry item, with her to Burma, and kept it with 13

INTRODUCTION

her all through the years. When we were finally exiled to India from Burma in 1967, when the army forced us out after the military coup, she gave us the shawl in Delhi. My siblings and I accompanied my mother’s younger sister, Channa, her husband Nanak, their children, and Laaj to India since my parents stayed back to sell the house. They were then denied a visa to travel to India, time and again. We were separated from them for four years. I was 16 years old at the time. After a few hard years as stateless citizens in India, my aunt Channa, who always smelled of “Evening in Paris” perfume and dressed in her fine Punjabi homemade outfits in Burma, went mad in the crazy city of Delhi. She was diagnosed with cancer of her vulva and had both the labia minora and labia majora removed. She was left alone in the hospital for days, as my uncle was traveling to the Burma border for trade and my siblings were busy with school. I was the sole person visiting the hospital and would sit with Channa for hours; touching her wounds, she would mumble about her lost home in Pakistan and Burma, about her lost sisters and left-behind older sister, my mother, in Burma, and about her lost treasures stolen by Muslims and Burmese neighbors. Once back home, she would open her garments and show her wounds to everyone, saying they cut her up and hurt her, as they had before in wartime Burma—implying the time of war and the aftermath during the Japanese occupation. After the psychiatrist diagnosed her with schizophrenia, I would take her for her electroshock therapy. She was the sole cook, caregiver, cleaning lady, and vegetable shopper of the extended family, as my parents were still trapped in Burma. She was used to my mother taking control of the kitchen, cooking, sewing, knitting, and was completely lost without her. By then I was 19 years old and was repaying the debt of her breast milk that she generously gifted me when I was born. As for the phulkari shawl that Laaj gave us, we, fragmented diasporics, unable to understand the meaning of it, could not use it to protect us, as Shauna Singh Baldwin (an author whose text I analyze in Chapter 3) does while writing her novel about the Partition (What the Body Remembers) by putting one around her shoulders (Methot). Instead, we cut it up into pieces, and used them as dust covers for the sofa, the radio, and, most importantly, my grandmother’s new trunk where she kept all her clothes, the old black-and-white photographs from Burma, and her stories. My sisters and I, exiled and fragmented in a hostile land, teased and harassed, pinched and molested in public spaces by men walking in packs on Delhi streets and buses, were ignored and beaten by our uncle Nanak at home. Our Delhi University days were anathema to him. We would sneak out at night from the kitchen hatch to go to movies or to parties in our Burmese outfits. Once we got caught as we got stuck in the little kitchen hatch trying to sneak into the bedroom, and Nanak, staying awake to get us, beat both of us, smacking my face hard, but my brother, barely 20, stood between us and uncle, his fists tight, his face wan, and said, “You dare touch my sisters again!” However, that was not the last time he beat us. I left home for a month after he smacked my face again for bringing home guavas and sharing them with his daughters—he said they were raw. 14

INTRODUCTION

On hot Delhi nights, when the moon rose over the open balconies and flat roofs where we slept under the stars, Laaj, while feeding us chopped watermelons, would narrate stories of making phulkari shawls for her dowry and the shawl/chunni exchanges with her Muslim neighbors during Eid festivals. Poor, and living in a crowded Delhi apartment in Rajouri Gardens without her oldest son and daughter-in-law, twice exiled, grandmother missed her two-story home in the lost part of Punjab. She remembered that when Meher and the rest of the family returned to Punjab, the villagers set out diya lamps to welcome them back home, saying, “Our son is back.” She muttered about her locked truck and enumerated her lost treasures, able to recall the exact details, and dwelled upon them for ages: every piece she left behind. She remembered her land, her fields, and the well. Lying on the charpoi with a wet blanket to ward off the Delhi heat and loo (the hot, dry, dusty wind that blows through Delhi on summer days and nights), I would ask her questions about my “lost” aunts and the violence during the riots. I would get only fragmented stories from her, although she recalled in minute detail the things she left behind, the fear she felt during the long walk at night during the riots, and her anguish at her husband’s decision to stay behind in their ancestral home. My younger sister, who became Bina to us, was destined to retain the identity of a beautiful woman. After achieving her Master of Arts degree in Sociology from Delhi University, she became a model for a brief period. Her marriage was arranged with a successful physician from the US, a mona or clean-shaven Sikh, who said he fell in love with her amazing looks. After marriage, she became his support and social secretary, becoming well-known in the local community as a wonderful hostess. Like myself (after I earned a Master of Arts degree in English Literature and my marriage was arranged with an amritdhari Sikh), she too had a strong and disapproving mother-in-law who didn’t find her Sikh or Punjabi enough, as she too was born in Burma. They found our gurmukhi, our language, dated and awkward, and our cultural mores funny. My husband told me on the third day of our marriage, while we were celebrating my older brother’s wedding, that if I wanted to stay in the marriage I must learn to speak softly, laugh less, and be more dignified. He found my English too Delhi-style and my demeanor too immodest. For seven years in India, after my parents migrated to the US, I tried to adapt to his demands, although I occasionally disappeared from the house for hours, walking in the rain or fiery sun, resisting the urge to return to a place I call home. When we migrated to the US in 1984, I worked in retail for minimum wage so that my family—my husband and two small children, a daughter and a son—could have medical coverage; my husband didn’t have a job and worked as a part-time research assistant for a professor at North Carolina State University. When his control of my behavior or actions became extreme, I would walk out of the house and disappear for hours before returning home to my often angry but befuddled husband. He told me he controlled my behavior and speech for my own good. After working in retail for three years, when my husband got a job as a chemist 15

INTRODUCTION

in a filtration company, we opened a boutique in a mall with my older sister and her husband’s help, as they had boutiques in Chicago. It was in this boutique that I felt I had a voice and a presence, as my husband refused to be part of the venture in any way, except to co-sign for the loan. He said he was a professional and not a businessman. I ran it successfully for four years, going to New York to buy merchandise, securing extended credit, hiring salespeople, taking care of stock, and so forth, but had to sell it when we moved to Oregon due to his new job. It was a wrenching loss for me, as I had to leave friends, supporters, and especially the boutique behind. Our children, one born in India and the other in Baghdad, were by then eight and twelve years old. It was in North Carolina that I spoke to our marriage counselor about his demands three days after our marriage—to speak less and softly, to laugh less, and to walk in a restrained and dignified manner. After we moved, and since he refused to let me work, I enrolled myself, after six tortuous months of trying to get my paperwork in order, in the Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies (English Literature, Composition, and Women’s Studies) program at Oregon State University, since my husband went to work for a filtration company as a chemist in Corvallis, Oregon. My husband threatened to divorce me if I went back to school, but I persevered. During enrollment, I became sick due to stress and severe pre-ulcer pains. Throughout my graduate studies and during my teaching assistant days, I struggled with anxiety and pain. I became a super mom, cooking and cleaning, having large social and religious gatherings at our home, and working through many nights to complete my graduate work. When I earned my degree, I enrolled myself into a doctoral program in Comparative Literature at the University of Oregon with little or no support from my husband. I commuted to Eugene from Corvallis almost daily and continued to take care of my home duties as well. It would be years before I would have the courage to leave the failed marriage, to become an educator, to write books, and to share my stories. Women in my own and extended family suffer from depression, anxiety, and eating disorders, which are not openly acknowledged; however, they discuss extreme dieting and excessive exercise as normal. Gendered violence and trauma in our family are not often discussed openly, although when alone with me, many of my female relatives tell me about childhood traumas and confess about domestic violence and abuse. However, when I bring up these issues in front of my other siblings or family members, they would often change the subject, or become vague. When my daughter and I address our issues of domestic or patriarchal abuse, we are called trouble-makers. Young women in the family are told not to share their secrets with us. The abuse in my own marriage was verbal, emotional, and sexual. Even though we lived in the US for decades, we still abide by the Indian penal code, where marital rape is not an offence. When my siblings, especially my sisters and sisters-in-law, are alone with me, they often share stories of incest and violence, of transgressions and resistance, and of finding escape from oppression through religion. 16

INTRODUCTION

Survivors of rape, abductions, and abortions during the Partition were seen as “shamed” women. When the exchange of “recovered” women was taking place, many families refused to reclaim them due to their having lost honor and due to shame. On the other hand, many women who were abducted by members of the enemy community refused to return to their families, as they felt at home with their new husbands or partners. As noted earlier, Dror and Linn claim, “Part of the reality during war is that sexual availability becomes currency, providing another possibility for survival. Furthermore, in patriarchal societies the power of women as agents is often connected to their ability to use their sexuality as a resource” (288). One of my cousins on my mother’s side, who was being sexually abused by not only her alcoholic father, but also by her father’s brother, eloped with a Burmese man when she was in her early twenties. During an emergency family meeting, one of my other uncles said, “If one of the fingers is infected, it is best to cut it off.” The man she married, a Danu Shan, an ethnic Burmese minority, was her patient, as she was a nurse and saw him as an escape from her father. That insurgents in Burma shot him during the military regime, as he had become part of a militia to save the village from pillage after she had four children with him, is another tragedy and another story. This uncle, the eldest of my mother’s brother, worked for the British administration, and was disowned by his father, my maternal grandfather, an amritdhari from Amritsar, for disgracing the family by cutting his hair. A Bryon and Keats poetry lover, one of the first in the family to learn English and become westernized, he became a raging alcoholic. He used to read Shelley and Byron to my sisters and I from his volumes of poetry, while feeding us toffees and inappropriately touching us. He battered his wife, and it was whispered in our house that he abused his daughters. At the age of 80, after his wife’s death, he became a reformed and an amritdhari Sikh and returned to the fold as the President of the Taunggyi Sikh gurudwara. My cousin, the one who eloped with a Danu Shan man, had returned, after she was pregnant, to see her ailing mother, but was locked up in the coal cellar. She heard them discussing her honor killing, and she remembered being helpless in the face of incest and molestation, so she pretended to go to the toilet, but ran all the way to her husband who was waiting in a truck and didn’t return home until her children were born. She returned again, after a few years, with two children, a son and a daughter. She left her eldest son, a two-year old, as a bridge, she said, and her father and her sister then helped raise him. He remained uneducated his whole life. My cousin cries about her loss whenever she sees her son. She tells me her brother still cautions his daughter about her behavior and her marriage to a Burmese man, calling her a slut and a prostitute. She, however, is the only cousin who appears content and happy, living with her daughter and son-in-law in Yangon, taking care of her grandchildren. Both as a young woman and later as an academic in my sixties, I heard stories of abandonment, abortions, and honor killings in our family, always in the domestic and gendered spaces of the home; many in my own family practiced femicide in North America.4 My maternal grandmother, Bishan, who had five 17

INTRODUCTION

sisters and only one brother, used to narrate her situation as a Sikh woman who married my much older and widowed grandfather. She was married when she was not yet 15. Her sisters used to worry about her going all the way to Burma, but she said that as the youngest of five sisters, she really didn’t have much choice. Since she was already married, she said, she went off with him to an unknown land. In Amritsar, where she hailed from, there was a saying popular at that time: Na chal Burma nu, tere lekh jaan gey naal (Don’t go to Burma, your destiny will follow you there). At a young age, she became the mother of seven children: three sons and four daughters. Her oldest daughter was abused by her husband and his family after she was married at the age of 15, as I discussed above; she used to implore her mother to let her return home. She became weak and listless, and died during childbirth. Laaj, who is from Rawalpindi, used to detail the methods of female infanticide: pushing the baby’s face into a pile of ash, or simply floating them in baskets in the river. Such incidents have been extensively recorded (for example see Butalia and Bhatnagar et al.). With men’s support and encouragement, women have killed themselves or their children, especially daughters, for fear of shame, desire for sons, due to forced conversion to the enemy’s religion during the Partition, or to protect the honor of the family and, by extension, the community, the culture, and the nation. The meaning of woman and nation is conflated, and the violence perpetrated on and by women is seen by heteropatriarchal nationalists as sacred and sanctified in the discourse of nationalism. Women, too, partook in killings and suicides, while others made alliances with the enemy for survival, yet women are seen as lacking agency, as I discuss in chapter seven. For example, during the Khalistani Movement (Sikh separatists), when many Sikhs were demanding a separate nation, many women took up arms and became insurgents. Yet, they are either not seen in many representations or are seen simply as performing their sacred duties. Sikh women, such as myself, “children of survivors of cultural [and] collective trauma” due to the “experiences of their parents” which are “so powerful, so monumental, as to constitute memories in their own right” (Hirsch “Surviving Images”, 8), can re-read and re-remember the past due to a “process of projection backward in time” (15). Re-traumatized by their memories, traumatized by my own molestation in my own home in Burma, in Delhi public spaces as a new exile and then later by domestic and emotional abuse in India and the US, ancestral wounds became my own, yet I must be aware of becoming too closely identified, for that will not only disallow healing but will lead to over-appropriation. However, if personal and collective traumas are not worked through, they reappear in uncertain times in unhealthy ways. In that case, gender and national traumas are repeated in various forms, resurfacing as communalism or state-sponsored violence, massacre of minorities and women, female bride burning, or female feticide. My research and scholarship as a professor of comparative literature at Northern Michigan University, located on the largest freshwater lake in the world, Lake Superior, have incorporated “documented history” as well as personal and private narratives to understand gendered violence within various communities in the 18

INTRODUCTION

Global South. In this particular work, I have turned my focus exclusively to Sikh gendered identity formation and representation through the examination of seminal historical and communal moments of violence and their impacts on personal and individual lives, narratives, and identities. My paternal uncle, Nanak Singh, was born and raised in Burma and did not speak proper Punjabi until much later in life. Speaking fluent Shan, the dominant language in the Shan States, he was coerced, like my late maternal uncle Seva Singh (both were appropriately named—Seva means service; Nanak being the name of the first Sikh Guru; both amritdhari or baptized Sikh) to join the Indian National Army of Subhas Chandra Bose, an army that took up arms against British imperialism with the help (or really, the coercion) of the Japanese. Bose’s fiery speech delivered at Taunggyi, the city of my birth, asked for the sons of India to sacrifice their lives for their motherland with the “Chalo Delhi” slogan. My father, engaged to be married to my mother, was exempt. My uncle Seva5 became an interpreter for the Indian National Army, while Nanak became a coolie.6 They both crossed the Tamu River, reaching Dimapur and Imphal, but had to retreat in sickness and in defeat back to Burma when, after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings, the army was turned back before arriving at its destination, Delhi. The irony is not in this story itself, but in what follows. It was the year 1946. Before the independence of Burma, and after this incident, my paternal grandmother, fed up from the war and the Japanese terror, took her entire family—my grandfather, my father and his three younger brothers, my pregnant mother, and my one-year-old elder sister—back to Punjab in British India near Rawalpindi in Chakwal District. This was where my grandmother was born and raised. The entire family had to flee during the 1947 Partition riots a year later, after my second elder sister was born. They had to walk all night to reach safety. My grandfather, who had refused to leave his home in Chakwal, had to be rescued a few days later by my father, who had taken his family to the Lahore railway station. Grandfather’s Muslim neighbors had hidden him from the rioting mobs. They no longer belonged to their ancestral home and land. After independence, my uncle and my parents continued to live in Burma, finally realizing that they really were, culturally at least, Burmese. All of us, six brothers and sisters and five of my cousins, continued to live in Burma as Burmese citizens (all of us were born in Burma except for one sister), until the day of the military coup in 1962, when military commander General Ne Win announced Indians were not nationalistic enough to be Burmese. My father’s shop was nationalized, as was our English convent school (after which we had to study in a Burmese medium school), we were required to abandon Indian clothes and the Punjabi language for Burmese clothes and language. Most of the Indian citizens who were living and working in Burma were forced to return to India. My father, who had thought that he really must be Burmese after the Partition of India, refused to leave and continued to live under the brutal military regime for seven horror-filled years. Finally, he thought it prudent to “return,” once more, to 19

INTRODUCTION

India—for his daughters’ sake, he said—so, in 1969 we were sent ahead with our uncle and grandmother to New Delhi, India, to resettle amongst our “own” people. Once arrived, though, we were declared stateless until we became naturalized citizens after five years. When I was 19 years old and tasked with the yearly extension of the refugee status, I would wait for hours at the registration office, often harassed and ogled by the sub-inspectors of police, until, finally, after three years I started giving them “gifts” (bribes) as suggested by my college friends. My parents, who had stayed back in Burma, along with our youngest uncle and youngest brother, for a few months to sell our house, were unable to leave Burma for years, as their visas were blocked since the military government attempted to imprison as many “capitalists” as they possibly could. My father began selling watches illegally on the black market to feed all of us, as he continued to send us money on India, and eventually my youngest uncle was imprisoned in the dreaded Mandalay prison for selling contraband goods for almost a year. On the one hand, my siblings and I felt displaced, treated like aliens in India. People made fun of our accents and outdated Punjabi, calling us “imported.” Young men leered at my sisters and I, and made sexual comments, touching us inappropriately on the public buses or molesting us on the streets. On the other hand, as a refugee I was offered free college tuition. My father, once he made it out of Burma, was allotted a plot of land in Delhi by the Indian government, where he built a house. He earned money by selling electronic goods at the Burma border near Manipur, traveling for five days by train and then on trucks. Many times, their shops—shacks really—were burned down by Nagas, an ethnic minority in India, who called my family members foreigners and told them to leave. Once, my father became seriously ill due to smoke inhalation and had to be medically treated for a prolonged period. Soon, we were scattered all over the world, as some married and some traveled for education— trying to find a place to belong. Yet, for my uncle Nanak and uncle Seva, India once again held a surprise. In 1984, after Indira Gandhi’s assassination by her Sikh bodyguards on 31 October 1984, Sikhs were massacred by state-sponsored violence in Delhi and many parts of India. When the mob, goons, and Hindu fundamentalists, hired by corrupt Hindu politicians, came near Nanak’s house in sector B of Ashok Vihar, his Hindu neighbors hid them, and diverted it. The family—two daughters, three sons, a daughter-in-law, and grandchildren—hid for days in their neighbor’s storeroom. Over the next three days, their Sikh neighbors were thrown from multistory buildings, their daughters raped, their houses burned, and Sikh men’s heads stuck in car tires and burned alive, or they were simply chopped off. They heard about a group of naked and ravaged Sikh women in a nearby park in the Model Town area, who were threatening Hindu men (or any men, for that matter) who dared approach them with sticks and stones. On the fourth day, when a strange calm pervaded over New Delhi, a sadhu from a nearby mandir rescued the crazed but resistant women and returned them to their family members, if any were left. 20

INTRODUCTION

Nanak moved to Chandigarh, Punjab, hoping that he and his family would finally be safe. It was not to be, as they saw daily terror in motorcycle drive-by shootings, police brutality, and utter fear. His sons, having cut off their hair for fear in Delhi, now grew it back and wore turbans. The decade of terror, the 1990s, saw them living in fear and trepidation in Punjab; a whole generation of young Sikhs tortured and brutalized, disappeared. Many women, some raped and violated, became rebels and revolutionaries. Nanak finally moved to Stockton, California, with his married daughter, who, along with her husband, runs a gas station and convenience store. They were the unfortunate ones, harassed by racists due to their turbans in the aftermath of 9/11, the Global War on Terror, and still today. Seva was living in one of the worst affected Delhi neighborhoods, Janak Puri. They saw their neighbors’ houses burned, looted, women raped, and children brutalized or killed in 1984. The horror of those days forced him to move to Punjab, where at the age of 96 he lived in a small rented apartment with his amritdhari son, his Sikh daughter-in-law, and granddaughter. In 2014, he died in near poverty in Punjab. When I had asked Seva about the violence they or the women in my family faced during the Partition or during the 1984 Sikh Massacre, he instead told me about the brutality he and Nanak had faced from the Japanese army. The stories about gender violence are elided in these narratives. My paternal grandmother told me a fragmentary story of gendered violence during the Partition, and my maternal aunt and cousins also shared their stories of violence during 1984, although they too are fragmented and often incomplete. My sisters and cousins tell me graphic tales of gender violence, often when we are alone, away from the patriarchy. Through these crocheted narratives, I have begun to hear clear accounts of Sikh ideas of masculinity, gendered violence, and the cyclical nature of it. For her ethnographic study, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India, Butalia claims that to “hear” women’s stories, she had to “listen: to their speech, their silences, the half-said things, the nuances [by posing] different questions, to talk in different situations,” especially if they were stories of “violence, rape, murder” (126). Where are the stories of the 1984 violation and rapes of Sikh women? Although there are narratives on selected Sikh websites, where are the dominant narratives and news of diasporic Sikh men and women brutalized and discriminated against in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror? Where are the stories of domestic violence and rape of women in India and the diaspora? Very few films and books are available about this apparently taboo subject in Indian literature and culture, although some excellent novels and short stories are surfacing in the contemporary period, which I examine in this study. I examine fictional accounts and films by Sikhs and non-Sikhs about Sikh violence, and analyze their use of certain narrative forms that examine traumatic memories of both men and women. Since there is such a dearth of published accounts, I connect the private narratives to the available ones to reconstruct the history of gender violence, and resistance to it, in both public and private spaces. 21

INTRODUCTION

Sikh women in my family and community construct identity through a process of socialization that includes stories of violence, such as honor killings and rape; they recreate and retell these stories. I attempt to analyze and critique these narratives of Sikh women for alternative readings, to perform or create a bond with the oppressed other, and for individual and communal empowerment. I re-remember, recreate, and re-read stories of the past in order to connect with my chosen texts and act as a witness, which can lead to mourning and then healing—for the individual and for the community—through empowered reading and critique. I examine the dominant idea of women as nation and the idea of gendered violence and its narration and representations, and my own role as critic and scholar, in this book. As a child and then as a young woman, I heard stories of honor killings and rapes in our family, always in the domestic and gendered spaces of the home. I heard stories of elopement, of shame, of threats of death, of honor, and of purity. Incidents of this type have been recorded extensively (see Butalia, for example): during violent moments in history, when men are not around to protect them, women have killed themselves for fear of forced conversion and to protect the honor of the family, and by extension, the nation. As Gandhi’s “Speech at a Prayer Meeting” on 18 September 1947 states, I have heard that many women did not want to lose their honour and chose to die. Many men killed their own wives. I think that is really great because I know that such things make India brave … They have not sold their honour … they felt it was better to die with courage than be forcibly converted to Islam by the Muslims and allow them to assault their bodies. And so those women died. They were not just a handful, but quite a few. When I hear all these things, I dance with joy that there are such brave women in India. (qtd in Didur 3) Indian women’s bodies are not dishonored if they are killed; if their bodies are not assaulted, then the honor of India and Indian men is saved. Thus, woman and nation are conflated, and the violence perpetrated on and by women is seen as sacred and sanctified in the discourse of nationalism. Women, too, partook in violence through killings or through suicides; however, women are not seen as violent agents; rather, their narratives are contained so that they remain within their “aukat:” their “ordained boundaries” (Butalia 216). Sikh women, such as I, whose memories of the traumatic past are mediated through published accounts and through parents’ and grandparents’ experiences, can re-remember the memories of traumatic past as if they are their own; however, this must be an “ethical relationship,” as Hirsch argues (“Surviving Images” 9). If collective trauma is not worked through, there is danger of repeating it, and since “trauma undoes the self,” and the “self can be undone by—and remade with the help of—others,” there is a need for “confirming witnessing” and 22

INTRODUCTION

integration (Bal et al. xii). Otherwise, gender and national traumas resurface through communalism, state-sponsored violence, the massacre of minorities, or domestic abuse and violence. There are many forms of narrative witnessing that may occur for the traumatized, but as a critic and an artist, as a member of a minority community, how do I negotiate between the text and the reader? According to Bal et al., The cultural nature of this process can become even more perspicuous when the second person who bears witness or facilitates self-witnessing is an artist or critical reader whose work functions as mediator. Indeed, witnessing can become a model for critical reading. Art—and other cultural artifacts such as photographs or published texts of all kinds—can mediate between the parties to the traumatizing scene and between these and the reader or viewer. The recipients of the account perform an act of memory that is potentially healing, as it calls for political and cultural solidarity in recognizing the traumatized party’s predicament. This act is potentially healing because it generated narratives that ‘make sense.’ To enter memory, the traumatic events of the past needs to be made ‘narratable.’ (Bal et al. x) As a critical reader, I attempt to perform narrative witnessing in this book by making the traumatic events of the past “narratable” for individual and communal healing to occur. What happens to trauma that is not narratable, or does not get cultural space for narration or representation? Since repressed memories and traumatic moments can return or erupt through various forms of violent and deviant communal or individual horrors, through honor killings and through domestic violence, it is important for trauma to be made narratable and representable. Sikh artists, male and female, are struggling to provide narrative space for Sikh trauma. These published works and private narratives will form part of my analysis for this study. In this book, I critique the “translation of traumatic memory into narratable memory” (Kacandes 55) for many of the artists from within the Sikh community. Hence, the significant role of literary analysis in my book—“a story may be written in isolation, but to be considered ‘told,’ it must be received through the act of reading. Like circuits, reading and witnessing only flow when all elements are connected” (56). However, not all forms of witnessing are successful. According to Kacandes, “texts can also ‘perform’ trauma, in the sense that they can ‘fail’ to tell the story, by eliding, repeating, and fragmenting components of the story” (56). I examine successful and failed attempts at narration of trauma by Sikh community members, artists, and writers, both Sikhs and non-Sikhs, as I aim to illustrate successful or failed witnessing for the Sikh community, both males and females, through various literary texts. 23

INTRODUCTION

Part Two: Narrative Witnessing and the Circuit of Communication My analysis of the novel constitutes a performance of the kind of memory work I suggest we call “narrative witnessing,” a circuit connecting an individual writer, her text, and her present reader. (Irene Kacandes, “Projected Memory”)

This book examines trauma and memory in a number of fictional texts to arrive at a unique understanding of the construction and representation of Sikhs’ gendered identities—both male and female—within the framework of violence that they faced during various turbulent times in Sikh history. During the Partition of India, for example, Sikhs were constructed and represented as ferocious and violent during the communal riots. In the ongoing War on Terror, the “feminization of the turban” worn by amritdhari Sikhs, as Knut A. Jacobsen and Kristina Myrvold argue (36), lead to their Othering, and I claim, along with Jasbir Puar and Brian Keith Axel, that such measures lead to the feminization of the amritdhari male body—as violent and dangerous. In dominant binary discourse (Edward Said, Orientalism), then, they are constructed in opposition to the civilized and sane citizen. How does this feminization impact gendered identity formation and representation within the Sikh community, the nation, and the diaspora? Since Sikhs themselves have faced violence throughout their brief history, I argue that the trauma and memory of the past are either repressed or recalled in fragments. I analyze gender and representation of the Sikhs through an examination of traumatic memory in various texts and personal narratives to consider “alternative ways of recalling and narrating the past” (Angel G. Loureiro, The Memory of Pain, “Guest Forward” xvi). If the recall of the traumatic past is fragmented and conflicted, the critic and reader, in order to fill in the gaps, must attempt alternative approaches to reading the past. If one sees memory sites as “sites of resistance,” one would approach traumatic memory and its representation in such a way that recognizes the altered ideological contexts of the present, the fragmented and conflicted nature of experience and subjectivity, and the difficulty of retrieving knowledge from the past, while using the events of the past to produce new knowledges and greater awareness in the present … (Apel 7) As Sikhs were the target of genocidal violence through various historical periods, their representations of the trauma and violence necessarily are conflicted and ambivalent. In analyzing my chosen texts, I keep in mind the writer, the text, and the reader, but also my positionality for the literary analysis I provide as a Sikh woman, critic, and scholar.

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INTRODUCTION

“Memory,” according to Loureiro, writing about the Holocaust, must be understood … not as the usual individual or collective memory of the past, but as a memory shared between writer and readers who are compelled to vicariously remember the past, to make theirs the memory of the Holocaust. (Loureiro xv) I, as a reader, and my book, that will be read, will add to memory work of the Sikhs, and particularly the silenced Sikh woman. I aim to create a connection through “shared memory” with the collective and individual, with the personal and private, and through trauma narratives, to join the past and the present as an “ethic of responsibility toward the silenced other” (Loureiro xv). Many texts represent the violent or violated Sikh men, but when it comes to the representation of the violated or violent Sikh women, either the narrative is fragmented or the text elides such moments. I, along with my readers, must actively participate in the critical analysis of the texts. The remembered narratives, argues Loureiro, must make readers co-participants in the past, not through a merely empathetic solidarity but through a will to remember and commemorate, through a memory that does not pertain only to the past, but one that is alive and present as opposed to historical accounts that put the past in its place in the temporality of a narrative. (Loureiro xv) In order to define and locate Sikh men, and particularly Sikh women, in Indian history and literature and in private stories, it will be helpful to situate my personal and intergenerational “remembered” and mediated narrative in relation to national historiography, as it will not only fill the gap in dominant history, but it will also add a feminist and gendered perspective to the analysis as a “secondary witness” (Apel). As Apel claims, “Secondary witnesses, or those born later, often view themselves as links to an obliterated past” (7) who “relate to the victims” in intimate ways. As such, they may be able bear witness to a traumatic past and ask important questions, in the manner of Hirsch and Kacandes, such as: Where is the line between fiction and truth? How can trauma be told; how can it be heard? What will enable us to imagine the extent of the atrocities even as we acknowledge our distance from the event, evading exploitation, appropriation, trivialization? … What are acceptable forms of identification, empathy, active listening? (Hirsch and Kacandes 7) While I relate to the victims of trauma in intimate ways, since I belong to the Sikh community and my own family members have borne the violence on their 25

INTRODUCTION

bodies, their psyches, and within themselves—in their unconscious—my own traumas and their memories, felt or recovered over the past few decades as a survivor, feminist, poet, scholar, academic, and critic, will also be included in this study. While my approach examines the Sikh community as a whole, my emphasis is to attempt to give voice to the voiceless and invisible Sikh women. One question riddled with gender politics and communal complexity is: When the Sikh community as a whole faced genocidal violence, and continues to be marginalized in India and the diaspora, why does gender matter? In “Fossil and Psyche,” Kirsten Holst Petersen and Anna Rutherford, who attempt to complicate colonialist and feminist oppression and emancipation in Africa, ask, “Which is the more important, which comes first, the fight for female equality or the fight against Western cultural imperialism?” (252). When Sikh men and women face genocidal violence, and are threatened as a community, the question of female representation and empowerment appears troubling; however, what is more troubling and worth addressing is gender-based violence against women during violent moments in history and the cyclical violence that Sikh women face, within the community in India and the diaspora. To address the question of violence against women, I will locate violent acts performed on the bodies of women in the name of community and nation within an intersectional framework. Veena Das notes, Partition narratives in literature and ideology are replete with violated women with “its associated imagery of social disorder as sexual disorder” (21). Men from all communities, Hindus and Sikhs on one side and Muslims on the other, slaughtered each other and the women and children from the other communities. Men, too, suffered untold violence. Within this scenario, Sikh men were then named violent and brave warriors who were relentless in the killing of others and courted death courageously. After the Partition, women who were raped and abandoned, were exchanged by the Indian and Pakistan government through the formation of a “social contract” (Veena Das 21), thereby keeping men from further violence and damage. Thus, the male body became synonymous with that of the community and the nation and the “castration” of it was “always elided” (Veena Das 13); women's bodies, on the other hand, stood in for the honor of the family, community and the nation. Sikh males, constructed as hypermasculine in various discourses during the Partition, stood in for the Sikh nation, while women’s bodies were used to inscribe national and familial honor or loss of it. A similar scenario occurred during the state-sponsored 1984 Sikh Massacre; it followed the assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards for violating the sanctity of the Golden Temple, the Amritsar Harmandir, the Sikhs’ holiest site, and for killing innocent pilgrims with tanks and arms when the army was ordered to attack to smoke out Sikh terrorists hiding in the temple. Thousands of Sikhs were slaughtered with the support of the central government, which became part of Sikh and Indian historiography, but the violation of Sikh women’s bodies was elided in most accounts, while the amritdhari male tortured body came to signify the tortured Sikh nation. 26

INTRODUCTION

Brian Keith Axel, for example, writes about Sikh “terrorists” or “separatists”— in the decade following the assassination of Indira Gandhi and the Khalistani Movement (Sikh separatists)—tortured by the Indian police. Since they became synonymous with the Sikh nation, it was imperative for the central government to make sure that more “terrorists” were not born. Indian police mutilated the testicles of Sikh men so they would not produce future generations of “terrorists” (Axel). What were the police and the Sikh community doing to the female Sikh bodies during various violent historical periods? I’ve heard stories from my community members about violated and raped Sikh women during the 1980s and 1990s, and have also located some texts dealing with rapes and torture but also with resistance; however, most accounts almost only discuss the violated and tortured Sikh men. Does it matter that women, no longer seen as standing in for the nation, now raped and brutalized or resistant and fighting, disappeared from the dominant narratives? In relation to the Jewish holocaust, Hirsch and Kacandes ask, “Does gender matter when an entire people is targeted for extermination and the first step in that process is a form of dehumanization that removes subjectivity, agency, and thus also gender from the victims? (Hirsch and Kacandes 19). What do we make of women’s bodies as politicized sites of violence during the Partition by other communities, while at the same time the individual woman who is terrorized but resistant remains “invisible” and “voiceless” when it comes to narrating memories of violence? While there are a number of texts and films about violence against Sikh male bodies, there are only a handful of texts representing female violence. Where does the violence that is not dissipated disappear into, once it enters the Sikh community? In my discussion of the Partition narratives in this study, I analyze the violation of the female Sikh body and the feminization and transformation of the male Sikh body in literary representations to argue, in part, that Sikhs, both female and male, are constructed through gendered discourse and as such inhabit a liminal and exilic social space as minorities in colonial and postcolonial India. More importantly for my project, I discuss women and their memories of trauma, but to emphasize gender in terms of the terror that women faced during the Partition and the 1984 Sikh Massacre and Genocide is to face the accusation that one is disregarding the trauma of communal and state-sponsored violence by emphasizing patriarchal and gender oppression. Is that why my grandmother and mother remained silent about women within my family who disappeared during the Partition? My uncle Yuvaraj, Seva’s brother and my mother’s youngest brother, 88 years old in 2020, recounted the 1984 violence, rape, and massacre in Janak Puri, and pointed to each and every house in the neighborhood that was impacted. He pointed to a mad person who lost his mind after 1984 walking with his parents in the park. But when I asked him about his own daughters and daughter-in-law, he remained silent. One of his middle-aged daughters, who is mentally challenged, sleeps with her father in his bedroom. This silence replicates other moments from my childhood; when my 27

INTRODUCTION

aunt eloped, it was only in hushed tones we heard about the shame, and when she was dragged back, and the men in our family and community made a beeline for her house to harass and assault her: sibilant silence permeated the domestic spaces. Sikh women who faced physical and sexual violence remain “imprisoned by memories they cannot share. They may feel obliged to stay silent about certain aspects of their experiences for fear that they do not belong to the history of the [massacre], or that the experiences will not be easily understood” (Zoë Waxman 128). However, to arrive at an inclusive account of the 1947 Partition violence and the 1984 Sikh Massacre and their aftermath, we need to uncover women’s private narratives as well. As others (particularly the Jewish Holocaust writers) who examine female narratives from times of terror, I, along with Kremer, too have “no interest in favoring, nor do I consider it morally appropriate to favor, discussion of comparative male/female martyrologies or competing victimization” (Kremer x). I am interested, rather, in studying “gendered differences in their suffering and response” (x), and argue that the construction and representation of women’s experiences must become part of the dominant historiography and ideology for an “inclusive canon” (x) and for healing to occur. Women were specifically targeted during the Partition of India. According to Butalia, over 75,000 women were sexually assaulted during the Partition (3). Although the same occurred during the 1984 violence and in its aftermath, their stories are either co-opted for political reasons, or subsumed in the overall narrative of terror, or repressed and altered for an alternative reading—a reading where only the women from the other side are represented as violated. In such a scenario, according to Joan Ringelheim, we “lose the lives of women for a second time” (qtd in Kremer 2). Public nationalistic discourses construct ideas of national belonging for the privileged few, while minorities and the exilic struggle to find a place within nation-states in the postcolonial world. In the production and construction of nationalistic discourse and identity, private narratives, often gendered accounts, are elided, and a masculinist and heteropatriarchal construct dominates. Within the Indian nation-state, which, when it was born, grappled with colonial violence and its aftermath—communalism—violence became constitutive of identities in a postcolonial world. In this study, published accounts along with my own postmemory of the traumatic events will be employed in order to incorporate an alternative interpretation regarding identity and ideas of national belonging for the Sikhs, and especially for Sikh women in a violent, destabilized, and irruptive milieu in India and the diaspora. From Trauma to Narrative: Translated Memories Communalism and sectarian violence in the years following the Partition are documented in much of the Partition narrative, but the gendered nature of the violence is co-opted in the “totalizing logic of bourgeois nationalism,” which 28

INTRODUCTION

lacks a “polyphonic reading of national identity” (Didur 5). Many Sikh women were protected by Sikh men, either through honor killings (where women were killed by Sikh men or were asked or coerced to commit suicide; see Chapter 4; also see Butalia), or through the killing or raping of women from Muslim communities. According to Didur, With the introduction of the issue of gender into a discussion of the history and politics of the partition, a very different kind of story has emerged—different in terms of the understanding of partition it provides and of what it means to write history and read literature about the period. When the trope of ‘the citizen’ is tracked through the story of partition it becomes apparent that events have a particularly gendered character; the economy of meaning within elite, patriarchal, and racist national imaginaries circulating at the time conflated sacredness of the nation with the sacredness of the Women, making women both an object of protection and target of violence—both physical and discursive—in the struggle of independence. (Didur 7). Since the nation was sacred, women, whose bodies came to stand in for the nation, were also deemed sacred and in need of protection. They were not seen as having agency. Their voices and stories were repressed. How does national historiography differ from everyday ordinary accounts? How do Sikh women, who lack the language “to articulate their experiences [of violence]” (Didur 11) work towards healing? I argue that women use liminal spaces to rearticulate gendered violence even if their rearticulating and narratives are fragmented and incomplete. These ordinary everyday accounts do not find narrative space in the dominant epistemology of the Partition. According to Butalia, The stories of how families were divided, how friendship endured across borders, how people coped with the trauma, how they rebuilt their lives, what resources, both physical and mental, they drew upon, how their experiences of dislocation and trauma shaped their lives, and indeed the cities and towns and villages they settle in … find little reflection in written history. (Butalia 9) We are left with only “textbook formulations” of the trauma and violence of Partition (Das 2). As Butalia claims, the traumatic events of the Partition can only be really known through the way they have been handed down to us: through fiction, memoirs, testimonials, through memories, individual and collective, through the communalism it 29

INTRODUCTION

unleashed and, only as one of these aspects, through the history it produced … [and this history] lives on in family histories … where tales of the horror and brutality, the friendship and sharing, are told and retold between communities, families and individuals. (Butalia 10) Everyday ordinary stories and narratives must become part of the Grand National Narrative; I argue that although the stories and narratives are shimmering on the surface, memories of Partition violence were spoken in an intimate and secret language, in whispers, or in fragments/puzzles and not easy to understand or recount. Das calls the language of trauma “an inner language (as distinct from a private language)” (11), and I, too, claim that to “hear” women’s stories, we have to “listen: to their speech, their silences, the half-said things, the nuances” by posing “different questions, to talk in different situations,” especially if they were stories of “violence, rape, murder” (126). In order to understand women’s stories, critics and activists must understand that they occupy a space of “cultural uncertainty” and “significatory or representational undecidability” (Bhabha 155); we, as critics, must therefore descend into what Fanon calls the “zone of occult instability” (original emphasis 168). Fanon’s zone is similar to Mary Louise Pratt’s “contact zone,” “where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths” (34). We must descend into such places, since that is where we learn to understand the “arts of the contact zone:” “autoethnography, transculturation, critique, collaboration, bilingualism, mediation, parody, denunciation, imaginary dialogue, vernacular expression” (37). Although we may also experience “miscomprehension, incomprehension, dead letters, unread masterpieces, absolute heterogeneity of meaning,” we also encounter exercises in storytelling; identifying with the ideas, interests, histories, attitudes of others; experiments in transculturation and collaborative work and in the arts of critique, parody, and comparison (including unseemly comparisons between elite and vernacular cultural forms); the redemption of the oral; ways for people to engage with suppressed aspects of history (including their own histories), ways to move into and out of rhetoric of authenticity; ground rules for communication across lines of difference and hierarchy that go beyond politeness but maintain mutual respect; a systematic approach to the all important concept of cultural mediation. (Pratt 37) In the “contact zone,” we may encounter colonial and postcolonial Indian and particularly Sikh split subjects, whose recovered memories of traumatic events take the form of narratives—“critique, parody, and comparisons” or through oral narratives—told to the readers/audience through a “powerful form of 30

INTRODUCTION

memory,” a memory “mediated not through recollection but through projection, investment, and creation” (Hirsch “Projected Memory” 8). How, then, do fragmented remembering subjects, particularly displaced and oppressed subjects, connect to traumatic events of the past and make them their own, recreating them through acts of witnessing to work towards reintegration of their fragmented psyches? Hirsch, in her discussion of “Postmemory,” argues for interconnections between generations whose traumatic memory can be felt as one’s own, but only through an “ethical relationship” (original emphasis 9); she states that Postmemory is not an identity position, but a space of remembrance, more broadly available through cultural and public, and not merely individual and personal, acts of remembrance, identification, and projection. It is a question of adopting the traumatic experiences of—thus also their memories—of others as one’s own, or, more precisely, as experiences one might oneself have had, and of inscribing them into one’s own life story. It is a question of conceiving oneself as multiply interconnected with others of the same, of previous, and of subsequent generations, of the same and of other—proximate or distant—cultures and subcultures. It is a question, more specifically, of an ethical relation to the oppressed or persecuted other for which postmemory can serve as a mode. (original emphasis 9) I feel interconnected with generations of Sikhs who have gone through violence and trauma, as I was able to interconnect with South Africans who went through the trauma of apartheid violence.7 Thus, my research and publications on South African trauma narratives connect with and create an “ethical” relation with issues of violence within Sikh communities. Such identification, with the traumatized others, through witnessing, and through a “circuit of communication” (Hirsch 9) can lead to mourning and then healing, and finally to restorative and not retributive justice for the oppressed and violated Sikh communities, and particularly for the Sikh women who face gendered violence and narrative erasures.

Notes 1 As recently as December 16, 2019, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi stated that those involved in violence over the Citizenship (Amendment) Act could be identified by their clothes. In this way, fundamentalism is rearing its ugly head again after 1984 (Vijay D. Rao, The Telegraph). 2 All the other names of my family members have been changed or omitted, except for the deceased. 3 When her older cousin, a 15-year-old boy, my then husband’s older brother’s son, sexually molested my daughter at the age of five, I went crazy with grief and showed my anger in no uncertain ways. My husband said it was just children playing. 4 For more on female femicide in India, see Bhatnagar et al.’s Female Infanticide in India.

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5 At the age of 90, Seva told me a story that stayed with me long after he passed away. During the war, he was in the barracks with one of the injured Japanese men, when the war sirens sounded. The Japanese officer in charge told him to run with him to the trenches. My uncle attempted to return to the infirmary to help the injured soldier, but the officer told him he had no time and must run for his life. My uncle, however, returned to help the injured man, who could not walk, while the officer ran off to the trenches. The bombs struck the trenches and killed the officer, while my uncle and the other injured man survived. 6 The word “coolie,” originally from China, means a laborer or a porter, but was used in a derogatory manner by the colonizers. 7 For more, see my published co-edited anthology: Trauma, Resistance, Reconstruction in Post-1994 South African Writing.

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2 MUGHAL INDIA AND COLONIALISM Revising History, Gender Identity, and Violence in Bhai Veer Singh’s Sundri

In violent times, the question of identity takes on new meaning. During British colonization of India, colonialism defined Indians and, of particular relevance to this chapter, Sikhs, as the Other. Sikhs were constructed in masculinist language as the “Lions of Punjab” during the Anglo-Sikh wars of 1845–1846 and 1848–1849. In this chapter, I examine the construction and representation of gendered Sikh identity in cultural productions written and published by Sikhs during British colonialism, showing that the imposition of a “unique” Sikh identity during the British colonial period points to a troubled past. Sikhs, remembering the Mughal period and the violence unleashed on to them by the Muslims, react to the trauma in complex and troubling ways. In this chapter, I argue that Bhai Vir Singh, in his 1898 novella Sundri, attempts to construct the colonized Sikhs, once again, as brave warriors and the Lions of Punjab, as colonialism and modernity are seen as threats to the “virility” of Sikhs, thereby weakening the power of Sikhism. In Sikh historiography, scholars have approached Sikh identity formation from the Sikh Gurus’, the Mughals’, and the British perspectives. For example, in Between Colonialism and Diaspora, Tony Ballantyne provides five divergent approaches to locating Sikh historiography: “the ‘internalist,’ the ‘Khalsacentric,’ the ‘regional,’ the ‘externalist,’ and the ‘diasporic’” (4). The “internalist” approach, according to Ballantyne, prioritize[s] the internal development of Sikh ‘tradition,’ the authority of its sacred texts, the social composition of the Panth (the Sikh community), and the political struggles within Sikh communities rather than broader regional, political, and cultural forces that shape the community from the outside. (Ballantyne 5) Thus, the “internalist approach” of the Tat Khalsa Movement, or the “True Khalsa” movement, which “developed out of an urbanized late-nineteenth century discipline” (5) in opposition to British colonialism, is differentiated from the

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other traditions. The “regional” approach asks for a regional context, that of the Punjab, in the examination of Sikh history, while the “externalist” approach “privileges imperial power relations over regional structures as they emphasize the centrality of colonialism in the making of Sikhism” (18). The diasporic approach highlights diasporic Sikhs and their cultural productions in the reimagination of a Sikh homeland. Was British colonialism “the major rupture in Punjabi history” (18)? While the internalist approach defined by Ballantyne suggests that the struggle to define Sikh identity came solely from within the Sikh community, and is opposed to the externalist approach, I find that the two are intimately interconnected, as both British colonialism and the Sikh community altered the meaning of what being a Sikh meant. A few reform movements (Baba Dayal Singh—1783–1855; Bhai Balak Singh— 1799–1862, for example) occurred prior to the re-emergence of the Tat Khalsa Movement (which dated back to the early eighteenth century) from the Singh Sabha Movements (1873–1879), whose aim was to consolidate the Sikh identity and to “restore moral order of the faith” in the face of Christian missionary activities that saw all religions as “either backward or barbaric.” However, it was the Tat Khalsa Movement that removed all “un-Sikh” and “Hinduized” forms of worship and cultural practices and ordained that the “faith of every Sikh had to rest on Guru, Granth and Gurudwara” (P. Singh, The Sikhs 185). It was during the colonial period that Sikhs began to include Sikh women to suggest an egalitarian ethos (Oberoi; Jakobsh), including baptism of women and the bestowal upon them of the last name Kaur (meaning princess), rather than the male Singh. Before this event, many Sikh women were either called Kumari or Devi (my maternal grandmother, a Sikh, was named Maya Dai or Devi, but after she was married to a Sikh man, she was renamed Bishan Kaur). The Arya Samaj Movement (1888) was also very strong at this time; it comprised “fallen” Hindus—meaning Sikhs—“returning” or being “returned” by force back to the fold of Hinduism (Baldwin, What the Body Remembers 42). In other words, Sikhs, seen as fallen Hindus, were being forcibly reconverted into Hindus through the violent cutting of Sikhs’ long hair by the zealous Samajists. The founder of the Arya Samaj movement, Swami Dayanand, “simply considered Sikhism as part and parcel of the larger Hindu milieu” (Jakobsh and Nesbitt, 1). Due to the threat to Sikhism, the Tat Khalsa Movement also became stronger and more powerful, and the dominant idea of Sikhs became more orthodox—the amritdhari with the turban became the iconic Sikh. On the other hand, British colonialists began to impose a rigid form that reduced the Sikhs into one shape, the turbaned amritdhari, in order to recruit them to the colonial army. Before the colonial recruitment moment, as Baldwin writes in What the Body Remembers, Turbans of Sikh men from different regions, sects, orthodoxy and caste stood out in the crowd: a beaked printed turban of an ordinary Sikh from ‘Pindi;’ a horizontally tied white turban of a Namdhari Sikh; a steel kara glinting on the wrist of a shorn Sikh, a Sahajdhari; an 34

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untouchable Sikh man plying his father’s sweeper trade; the cobalt-blue turban, long sword and spear of the Nikhang Sikh. (Baldwin 184) Various forms and figures were known as “Sikh” before British colonialism. Although Harjot Oberoi in The Construction of Religious Boundaries: Culture, Identity, and Diversity in the Sikh Tradition argues that historians “rarely pause to consider if … clear cut categories” such as “Islam, Hinduism and Sikhism” find “expression in the consciousness, actions and cultural performances of human actors they describe” (1), it is worth noting that the construction of a unique masculinized Sikh form—an expedient form during the Mughal battles—was highlighted and doubly imposed by the British through the Khalsa initiation ceremony as a recruitment tool (Cohn; Fox; McLeod, Who is a Sikh?; Oberoi; Axel, The Nation’s Tortured Body). Guru Gobind Singh used the masculinized Sikh form to fight against Mughal oppression, but during the colonial period, this form was co-opted by the British to fight colonialist wars. One particular form of turban became predominant due to colonialist intervention. We saw the transformation of the Sikh subject from the time of Nanak to the postcolonial era in Chapter 1—from the hybrid and syncretic Sufi Sikh, to the saint soldier, to the Lion of Punjab. One of the most important markers of what makes a Sikh within the Sikh community became the masculinized amritdhari Sikh man along with the five Ks (kesh—uncut hair; kanga—comb; kacha—long underwear; kirpan—sword; and kara—steel bracelet). As Brian Keith Axel notes (along with Doris Jakobsh and Khushwant Singh in The Sikhs), the amritdhari “is most commonly recognized through the image of the Sikh man with a beard and a turban” (The Nation’s Tortured Body 35).1 While there were many other forms that a Sikh man might take, the amritdhari with all the five Ks and the turban became predominant, as “all who were inducted into the Indian army as Sikhs were required to maintain the external insignia of the Khalsa” (McLeod, Who is a Sikh? 70) through the Khalsa initiation (baptism) ceremony or the Khande di Pahul; it is often called a baptism, since amrit, holy water, prepared by five amritdhari Sikhs, the Punj Pyaras, is partaken by the initiate, who then becomes an amritdhari Sikh. In order to join the British colonial army, which many of the poor colonized desired, many Sikhs, who were not amritdharis, had to go through the initiation ceremony in order to be considered true Sikhs by the British. As one of the characters in What the Body Remembers states, “the British tell us now who is a Sikh and who isn’t,” particularly in terms of joining the “Sikh Regiment” (Baldwin 42). And according to Axel, “four sites of Sikh subjectification” lead to four kinds of Sikh subjects “(1) the colonial Sikh subject, (2) the Sikh subject constituted by the nationstate, (3) the Khalistani Sikh subject, and (4) the Sikh subject constituted by Sikh Studies (in the diaspora)” (The Nation’s Tortured Body 35). In many of the chapters in this book, we will see these distinct subjectification processes, 35

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particularly the Khalistani Sikh subject and the Sikh subject constituted in the diaspora. According to Richard Fox, British colonialism forced indigenous society to evolve according to British beliefs … At the very moment they thought they were helping the Singhs (Sikhs) maintain their specific traditions, [they] were forcing those traditions to adapt to British beliefs about them. The cultural selection to which the Lions of the Punjab adapted was a colonial one. (Fox 4) British “selective policies” reconstructed the Sikhs according to British beliefs, and thus the Sikhs themselves came to internalize British cultural concept of them as the “Lions of Punjab” and as a martial race (4). The Sikhs (along with Muslims and Hindus) defended the Punjab from the British until 1849, when the John Company finally annexed it. While many differing religious Sikh beliefs existed at that time, “the British usually treated one Sikh identity, the Singh or Lion one, as the only true Sikhism, and they often used labels ‘Sikh’ and ‘Singh’ interchangeably” (7). Before the British used the phrase “Lions of Punjab,” Maharaja Ranjit Singh was known as Shere Punjab, the Lion of Punjab. However, it was the British who revived the term after the Sikhs ferociously defended the Punjab during the Anglo-Sikh wars. Fox goes so far as to maintain, “The British Indian army nurtured an orthodox, separatist, and martial Singh identity among Sikh rural recruits to its regiments and companies. They served as the Lions of British India” (10). Thus, while Sikhs were first formed as Sufis through Nanak’s teaching, and reconstructed to be militaristic as warriors and saints (saint-soldiers) under Guru Gobind Singh and through the Sikh initiation ceremonies or the Khande de Pahul, British colonialism re-constructed and represented the distinctive form of the turbaned Sikhs as a martial race and as violent war machines in colonial literature and culture, as Fox and Ballantyne argue. The reconstruction of Sikhs as the “Lions of Punjab” would be utilized by the Sikhs themselves during the Sikh reform movements, particularly the Singh Sabha Movement (1873), as can be seen from Vir Singh’s Sundri, discussed below.

Bhai Vir Singh’s 1896 Novella Sundri and the Reconstruction and Representation of a Masculinist Sikh Identity during the Tat Khalsa/Singh Sabha Movement of 18792 Sundri, published in 1898, helped define a distinctive Sikh identity. Bhai Vir Singh was born on December 5, 1872 and died on June 10, 1957. In the Foreword to the volume published in Singapore in 1983, Harbans Singh, Honorary General Secretary of the Bhai Vir Singh Sahitya Sadan, writes, “[Sundri] was conceived during the period when it was imperative to boost the morale of the 36

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Sikhs after the downfall and subsequent annexation of the Kingdom of Punjab” (iii). As Sikhs, who lost the Second Anglo-Sikh war (1948–1949) and the Khalsa Kingdom, and as colonial subjects who submitted to the British, their position in colonial India was insecure. As the Arya Samaj—a reform movement of modern Hinduism, founded in 1875, aiming to bring “wayward” Hindus who converted to other religions (such as Sikhism) back to its fold—was becoming forceful, the Sikhs began in earnest to revive Sikhism and themselves as warriors and as the Lions of Punjab, as the Tat Khalsa movement (1879) attempted, and these changes are represented in Bhai Vir Singh’s Sundri (1898). Vir Singh’s novella, written during the British colonial era and set during the tail end of the Mughal period, highlights the precarious positions of the Sikhs during British colonialism. However, the memory of the fear of the Mughal terror in the novella, and Sikhs’ own valorization as warriors during the colonial period, are represented by Vir Singh in order to resist colonialism. Bhai Vir Singh, a poet and a scholar, and an active participant in the Singh Sabha movement (1873), which attempted to revive Sikhism’s purity, amply demonstrates Sikhs’ internalization of the notion of themselves as a martial race. The story of Sundri is set in Mughal India when the Sikhs, persecuted by the Muslims, were hiding in the jungle. It is a simple and straightforward folkloric narrative. Surasti (or Saraswati), a young married Hindu woman, is kidnapped by a Mughal soldier. She is renamed Sundar Kaur when she embraces Sikhism, and is then known as Sundri. In spite of entreaties by her relatives and community members, the soldier refuses to release her. Self-immolation seems to be the only escape for Surasti, but at the last moment, her brother, who had embraced the Sikh identity, appears and rescues her. Many rural Punjabis were embracing Sikhism in order to fight the Mughal terror and violence. Sikhs, during the Mughal era, came to represent the valor of Indians who fought back ferociously against their forceful conversions to Islam. Subsequently, Sundri, too, embraces Sikh identity and becomes a soldier and a warrior. Together, brother and sister then join a “roving” band of Sikhs to protect themselves from the Muslim rulers who had put a bounty on Sikhs’ heads. Thus, the plot points to the complexities of representing Sikh identity and gender during British colonial period while examining the violence and trauma that Sikhs had faced during the Mughal rule. Historically, in the time of Zakaria Khan, the last Mughal Governor of Punjab (1726–1745 AD), the Sikhs were hiding in jungles and forests due to religious persecution. After Zakaria Khan’s death in 1745, and during the Afghan incursions of Abdul Shah Durani’s forces in 1762, Sikhs were massacred en masse. The period came to be known, according to B. Singh, as the “Ghalughara or Holocaust” (Sundri ix). In 1762, over 50,000 Sikhs died due to Mughal violence. However, Vir Singh wrote the novella during the Singh Sabha Movement, and thus, he harkens back to a time when Sikhs were known to be ferocious warriors fighting the Mughal terror until death. Take, for example, Vir Singh’s description of the battle between the Mughal soldiers and the Khalsa: “The Khalsa [act] with such fury 37

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and alertness that no one could even dream that a thunderbolt would come down through the clouds. This was the special skill and strategy of the Khalsa and their sharp shooting rifle-men” (37). The Sarbat Khalsa (Sikh army) is represented as full of “great warriors and ideal Sikhs” who would “sacrifice themselves for religious causes and advancement of the Panth” (72). They are the fearless lions who protect the Hindus and the poor Muslims from Mughal terror (23), and are represented as a martial group and “fearless lions” (23) in the jungles. Persecuted, they roam in bands, fleeing to the jungles in order to survive and practice their faith. Vir Singh writes, There was joy and hectic activities in the jungles. Under the shade of trees, these spiritual warriors were quite busy, but on the alert. They followed the daily chores of camp life … They had forgotten about their parents and their families. Their spirits were imbued with love for and devotion to Guru Gobind Singh. They regarded the preservation of their faith as the goal of their lives … [and] feeling mentally free like fearless lions. (23) As this text is written during British colonial rule, the influence of imperial rhetoric regarding Sikh identity, visible in the representation of Sikhs as fearless lions, and the attempts at reformation of Sikhs as spiritual warriors in the ethos of Guru Gobind Singh, is clearly visible in the text. Although the Singh Sabha Movement appears to be internalist in its approach to reconstructing Sikhism, the influences exerted by British colonialism are amply demonstrated, as I discuss below regarding modernity, women, and Sikhism. While the reforms coming out of the Singh Sabha Movement appear internalist, I argue that imperialism’s impositions of modernity and the reconstruction of Sikhs, particularly in the form of turbaned amritdhari Sikhs as the Lions of Punjab during the British recruitment in the army, had a major impact on the reconstruction of Sikh identity. Sikh men and women were becoming modernized under British colonial influence; many were being educated abroad, as Sikhs were favored by the British (see Chapter 3). The Arya Samaj Movement was gaining force. The Tat Khalsa insisted that Sikhism was an independent faith, distinct and separate from Hinduism; they called themselves the “True Khalsas.” All other forms of Sikhism were seen as moving toward the True Khalsa form. To wit, Sikhs are not Hindus; all Sikhs must aim to join the True Khalsa and they must obey the Tradition. The Tat Khalsa’s rhetoric echoed British colonialism’s imperative that only true Sikhs be part of the British colonial army. Generally speaking, Sundri is a work of fiction, yet there are moments in the text that suggest the essay format, personal as well as didactic, while at other times the text seems like a critical piece, with references and citations. Sundri is represented as a brave woman who picks up the sword to defend herself. She is quick to draw blood if need be. She has agency and she can be violent. She is 38

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also shown as a compassionate person who helps the wounded, even if they belong to the opposing group of Muslim fighters. However, in terms of her role in the Sikh community, she is represented solely as the cook of the Sikh camp, and ultimately it is this role that seems to define her and Sikh women in general: the role of server, along with the idea of service, or seva. Her agency and her acts of violence become merely anecdotal. In one episode, Sundri rescues a wounded Mughal man, and, after he is healed, he is sent back blindfolded to the outside world. However, he returns with five other sepoys or soldiers to the place where Sundri rescued him, and ambushes her. When they try to capture Sundri, “with great agility and promptness, this brave lady,” writes Vir Singh, “drew her dagger and pushed it deep into the neck of her grappler. It was almost a miracle: even lightning could not act faster. The wounded sepoy bled on the ground and he struggled between life and death” (48). Yet, in spite of such valor, throughout the novel Sundri, the “pious lady” (27), is relegated to the kitchen and is represented as a langar sevadar—kitchen and food server. Vir Singh writes, Sundri “[cooked] food in the free kitchen and later all shared home-made delicious food with joy” (27). Much later, a wounded Muslim attacks Sundri while she is busy healing the injured in the battlefield, Muslims and Sikhs alike. When the Pathan finds out that Sundri is a Singhni, he “[takes] up a sword from the ground and thrust[s] it with great force against the helpless Sundri—the goddess of compassion” (98). At this point in the novel, Bhai Vir Singh, the great reformer, interrupts the narrative flow to beseech Sikh women to embrace an orthodox form of Sikhism, which is worth quoting in its entirety: Sikh maiden of today, born with a silver spoon in your mouth and living in luxury and comfort … [you are] damaging the Sikh community … Abandoning your Gods and Satguru, you worship stones, idols, trees, monasteries and spiritual guides. Being indifferent to Sikh religion, you stray into other religions. Being unresponsive to your Gurus, you are imparting knowledge of alien religion to your own children. Your children when they grow up will be half-Sikhs. They will be outwardly Sikhs but argumentative like Brahmins and even dressed as Muslims … You have kept your sons away from Amrit (holy water) and made them wear the sacred thread and dhoti … You have become the butt of ridicule by replacing clean and thick garments with thin and flashy dresses. The true and unique Immortal God has been abandoned and you have taken the road to hell and persuaded your husbands and sons to follow the same foolish path … Be true and truthful Sikh ladies like Sundri; be virtuous like her and make yourself and children true Sikhs, otherwise you will prove to be, for your husband, the pernicious creeper which dries up the plant and then itself perishes. (100)

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The anxiety felt by the Sikhs, fearing the demise of their Sikh faith and Panth due to colonialism’s influence, seems to echo that of the British, who were also worried about the Sikhs becoming extinct, or swallowed up by Hinduism. According to Ballantyne, “Tat Khalsa reformers conceived of Hinduism, especially in its popular forms, as an all-consuming jungle or as a boa constrictor capable of crushing and consuming religious innovation through its supposedly stifling weight and incessant expansion” (7). However, instead of examining the political situation for the fragmentation of the Khalsa Panth, Bhai Vir Singh locates the blame on the physical body of the Sikh woman, who is likened to a “pernicious creeper.” Sikh women might convert to other religions and dilute the stock, or indeed, the Panth, like the plant, might dry up and perish. Thus, women and their bodies, in this scenario, take the brunt of the Sikhs’ anxiety and are forced to become only the bearers of the Sikh nation, its culture, and tradition. The wounded Sundri is rescued by the Nawab, the Mughal governor, but she escapes again. Yet again, she is wounded in battle, and ultimately dies. Sardar Sham Singh, one of the Sikh group leaders, says at the time of her demise: “O my daughter, you are not a woman, you are a goddess. The Panth is proud of pious and excellent ladies like you. The way you have justified your Amrit (baptism) is an example which everybody should follow” (112). Even though women are capable of being agents of valor and of violence, the dominant narrative quickly shifts from “stories of heroism and valor” to stories “of sacrifice and honour” as “women could not … be named violent beings” (Butalia 216). Butalia claims that women’s violent actions are then “narrated and sanctified” to keep them within the “ordained boundaries” of the “home” (216). The “women question,” as Partha Chatterjee, writing about nationalism and the construction of Indian women as modern during British colonialism, notes, was proving difficult for the colonized male. On the one hand, nationalists wanted to modernize the Indian women; on the other, they didn’t want them to lose their “essential” “spiritual” qualities. Thus, their modernization was becoming selective and was producing anxiety in the males’ psyche.3 Such conflicts, too, are reflected in the representation of Sikh women during the earlier colonial period in the writing of Vir Singh’s Sundri, as the “thin and flashy dresses” of the above quote indicate. And although the construction of Sikh women as pure and virtuous seems to harken back to the memories of past violence and traumas when Sikhs were threatened by Mughal violence, in reality, this reconstruction occurred during British colonialism and in fact points to the alteration and modernization of Sikh women. The intersectionality of Sikh gendered identity construction and representation includes memories of Mughal violence, British colonialism, and Hindu encroachment into the cultural and spiritual realm of the Sikhs. Sikhs then displace the anxiety—produced in their psyches due to the memory of Mughal violence during the oppressive colonial period—on to the modern Sikh women. And even though Sundri is from another generation, Vir Singh, who seems to be writing about her courage and valor, deems her a goddess; according to Chatterjee, such naming erases women’s sexuality and makes them less dangerous in the 40

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males’ eyes (248). Sundri, who is first represented as courageous and violent, is then suddenly converted to a harmless goddess, someone who the modern Sikh women should emulate. Additionally, as Butalia argues, Indian males cannot see women as violent beings with agency. The potential for violence on the part of … women, or their agency in this respect, had to be contained and circumscribed. The women could not, therefore, be named as violent beings. This is why their actions are narrated and sanctioned by the tones of heroic, even otherworldly, valour. Such narratives are meant to keep the women within their aukat, their ordained boundaries, which is one that defines them as non-violent. (Butalia 216) And even though Sikh women are supposed to be equal to Sikh males within Sikhism, as they do not have to take their husbands’ names after marriage and do not have to adorn themselves to prove their marital status and can be priestesses, they are still coerced to be pure and “pious.” Christine C. Fair, writing in 2010 about Vir Singh’s Sundri, argues, “While men who mistreat women and consider them their inferior are discredited in the novel, Vir Singh forcibly exhorts women to be pure and faithful” (120). While gender equality in Sikhism is lauded, in the same breath, women are forced to be “pure.” What makes Fair’s argument so troubling is that she sees Sundri and other novels by Vir Singh (listed below) as feminist novels that will simultaneously teach young girls in the diaspora to be feminist and to be chaste. Sundri [and other Vir Singh novels, namely Bijai Singh (Parts I and II, 1900) and Satwant Kaur (Parts I in 1900, Part II in 1927)] provide young Sikh women and girls with apparent evidence that once, in the days of the Khalsa, men and women were equal. Moreover, Sundri et al., when taken in moderation, are characters by which second generation Sikhs (in the diaspora) can have their feminism and their chastity too. (Fair 130) Through such contradictory ideas, where Sikh women’s sexuality is seen as “unchaste” and through rhetorics of erasure, where women’s agency is co-opted and domesticated, women lose power and become second-class citizens, not only in the nation of domicile, but also within their own communities and families, and within the diaspora. Due to memories of trauma and violence, and due to the ongoing oppression within colonial and postcolonial India, such contradictory and ambiguous ideologies of Sikh gendered identity continue to play out on women’s bodies in Indian, and particularly Sikh, literature. We need to be intersectional in the understanding and analyses of Sikh gendered identity construction and representation, set during various violent and oppressive historical periods in 41

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colonial and postcolonial India, and we also need to keep in mind the cultural crossroads Sikhs have traversed, and continue to traverse, and their attempt at narrating memories of trauma in various texts, as I discuss in the rest of this book.

Notes 1 Axel, citing McLeod’s many studies of Sikhism, explains the numerous forms of Sikhs that exist, such as the namdhari, nirankari, sahajdhari, and mona, but notes that they are not considered the true Sikh and are constructed in opposition to the amritdhari. “Namdhari and nirankari may follow an interpretation of the teachings of Sikhism and may maintain the practice of leaving their hair uncut” (36). However, since they believe in a living Guru, they are considered “heretics” (36). The sahajdhari may have uncut hair but is not yet a member of the Khalsa, and is thus seen as an “easy” or “simple” Sikh; mona refers to people who believe in the teaching of Sikhism but have cut their hair and shaved their beards (36). See also Patwant Singh’sThe Sikhs (56); McLeod’s Who is a Sikh: The Problem of Sikh Identity. 2 Part of this chapter was previously published as Jaspal Kaur Singh, “The Construction of Sikh National Identity in Bhai Vir Singh’s Sundri and Anil Sharma’s Gadar: Ek Prem Katha,” Journal of Contemporary Thought (Special Issue: Thinking Territory: Some Reflections), 2009, pp. 250–261. I am thankful to Prafulla Kar for permission to reproduce it here. 3 For more on the selective modernization of Indian women and the ambivalent outcome for them, see my discussion of Partha Chatterjee’s essay in Chapter 2, Representation and Resistance.

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3 COMMUNAL AND GENDER VIOLENCE IN SHAUNA SINGH BALDWIN’S WHAT THE BODY REMEMBERS

The narrative in Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers, which spans from colonial to postcolonial India (1895–1948), memorializes the Partition of India and the ensuing communal and gender violence from the perspective of a diasporic female Sikh writer. Baldwin, born in 1962 in Montreal, Canada, went to India with her parents in 1972, where she was raised and educated. She then went to Milwaukee to earn an MBA degree at Marquette University, returned to Canada in 1983, but eventually migrated to North America, making her home in Milwaukee with her Irish American husband, David Baldwin. She remembers hearing fragmented stories of the Partition trauma and gender violence during her childhood, but years later, they became part of her own memories. Thus, as a second-generation diasporic Sikh Canadian-American-Indian, Baldwin writes about her community, her quom, and the Partition of India through “postmemory:” a memory that children or grandchildren of “survivors of cultural or collective trauma,” according to Hirsch, experience in “relationship to their ancestors,” experiences they “‘remember’ only as the stories and images with which they grew up, but that are so powerful, so monumental, as to constitute memories in their own right” (“Surviving Images” 8). I argue her writing creates a “circuit of communication” between her, the text, and her “two audiences—one for whom they are written, the other at whom they are written” (Baldwin “Message to Bookclub Readers”), so that narrative witnessing can occur and healing work can ensue for the traumatized Sikh subjects. Since Baldwin had only partial accounts of some of the incidents that occurred during the Partition, particularly in regard to stories of violence against women, she had to dig deeper to uncover women’s suppressed memories. In an interview with Anjana Rajan, Baldwin states: My nani (maternal grandmother) came to visit me in Milwaukee … and I asked her to write her memoir. She was kind enough to write about 60 pages … Though I had grown up in India and met her almost every day, I realised I didn’t know her story. I knew only the story she was authorised to tell. (Rajan n.p.) 43

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Here we encounter what Ringelheim calls “split memory” (20) wherein women’s experiences are lost as private and personal to be forgotten or rarely mentioned. Baldwin decided to write her grandmother’s story on her own, and it was only after her book was published that she, her grandmother, gave her “permission … to acknowledge it as her story” (Rajan n.p.). Through witnessing, Baldwin provides space for the traumatized subject to create a circuit of communication with her readers. Following Baldwin’s belief that “If you want to talk about memory, love, anger, complexity, ambiguity, nuance, often fiction is much more effective,” the genre is a fitting choice for translating her grandmother’s forgotten or repressed traumatic memory into narrative memory (Rajan). However, due to the generational nature of the traumatic memory, her grandmother’s narrative impacted her body in troubling ways. In another interview, she notes, “This book moved into my life. It had to be fed in the morning and cleaned up in the evening … My husband would come into the room when I was writing and not know whether I was going to be curled up into the fetal position, or in tears. This book was a whole-body activity. I had to feel it to write it” (Methot n.p.). The story of a Sikh woman, born in the crossroads of different cultural influences (Hindu, Mughal, and British), must be told in a language that, too, is enriched by various cultural influences—English— and can do justice to the complexities of the tale, but the ethos of the story is Punjabi-Sikh. Therefore, Baldwin chooses to write the novel in English, although it is “written outside the English language’s Judeo-Christian symbology … [and] employs a different set of symbols – Sikh, Muslim, and Hindu – and wields a different language” (Methot). Baldwin, while hating “purity with a passion … loves the hybrid world” and sees Sikhism as a “hybrid” religion that took from “Hindu and Muslim faiths” (Methot). As such, her novel, according to Harveen Mann, draws on the “Punjabi literary genres of medieval Gurmat, Bhakti, and Sufi poetry in the Guru Granth Sahib and on the kissa (romance narrative) and daastan (popular folktale)” (Mann 99). Using hybridity to tell the story of Sikh women, themselves hybrid creatures melded from various symbologies and cosmologies, and looking for a “circuit of communication” (Kacandes) to work through Sikh cultural and personal traumas, Baldwin “had to pull Sikh women’s history out from under Sikh men’s history,” a history that is not “silent, only undiscovered” (Methot). In other words, since females in heteropatriarchal cultures, such as the Sikhs, are not provided cultural space to tell their stories of gendered violence, or they lack the language or words to tell them due to repression, an artist such as Baldwin can bear witness and create a circuit of communication through uncovering and retelling the accounts for her readers. Sikh women writing about the Partition trauma and gendered violence validate women’s viewpoints and memories through female-centered narratives. The narrative in What the Body Remembers highlights the story of two Sikh women, Satya and Roop, the first and second wives, respectively, of Sardarji, a turbaned Sikh man and dam builder for the colonial administration. Since Satya cannot bear a child, as she is considered barren (6), Sardarji marries 16-year-old Roop 44

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(whose 42-year-old father Bachan Singh is the same age as Sardarji) to act as a surrogate. The private stories of these two women become intertwined with that of Sardarji and his Indian-born English boss, Mr. Timothy Farquharson, in the public realm of colonial and postcolonial India. Sikh women’s positions within domestic spaces were slowly being revised and transformed through colonialism. While Roop is a considered a new Sikh whose hair has been cut at least once (3) and is more western-educated than Satya, the latter comes from a long line of Sikhs where women were nurtured to be malleable but still speak with strength and purpose (7). Satya has a critical voice and chooses to use it in the first half of the narrative; yet, as a childless woman, schooled as she was by holy men to have all the attributes deemed feminine by the Indian patriarchy, such as submissiveness and gratitude for the protection provided for her safety by her spouse (7), she seems to lose some of her power in the second half of the novel. Sardarji, a turbaned and bearded Sikh and a split colonial subject, created by the oppositional rhetoric of modernity and tradition, and who is described by the narrator as “almost, but not quite, English” (293), talks of the rationality and order of the British and writes about technology and progress brought by the British, yet continues to contribute to the anti-colonial movement of India, namely the Akali Party (9). In other words, while in the public spaces of colonial India he appears as the westernized and educated Sikh man who supports modernity and, by extension, colonialism, his actions of supporting a nationalist party fighting for the freedom of India shows him as a split colonial subject. Roop, schooled to be pleasing and soft-spoken, to show no feelings or emotions of irritation or anger no matter how her husband treats her (76–77), knows that she must silently hear and “obey” (101); taught to feel shame and to be apprehensive about her own body, as she will be blamed for the reaction of strange men towards her, she is nonetheless educated that Sikhism teaches equality towards women (109). And since Sardarji, a modern but hybrid Sikh man, was looking for an educated Sikh woman, Roop becomes qualified to be his wife. However, Roop, unlike Satya, has what Alice Walker calls “contrary instincts” (667), since her father, Bachan Singh, a landless farmer beholden to Sardarji, who loves his daughter more than any other men in the community (103) allows her freedom to be like his sons (86) when he lets her ride a horse without a chaperone (91). When Bachan looks straight at Roop for the first time after promising her hand in marriage to Sardarji, he looks at her unlike the men in the village—directly, and sees that she is not the docile daughter that he thought or hoped he raised, but she was also “ambitious, slightly vain, lazily intelligent” (110). Disturbed by the vision, Bachan Singh returns to looking at her sideways (111). Seeing her fragmented image reflected in Bachan Singh’s gaze, Roop commences her struggle to define her identity. As for Sardarji, the fragmented colonial subject, it is only after his marriage to Roop that Cunningham, “his English-gentleman-inside,” his alter-ego, appears in the narrative, although he manifested himself many years ago when Sardarji first 45

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sojourned to England for his engineering degree (132). Initially Sardarji, a new arrival in England, unsure and insecure, needed Cunningham as an adversary— “to know your adversary, you enter his mind and see from his eyes”—and so “like an actor in a play, he donned the suit and pants and made [the English] believe he was just like them—only with a turban” (132). He could camouflage his Sikh identity by pretending to be like Cunningham, using his English language and western style, but keeping just enough of his own identity, his turban, to survive England and Englishness. Years later, once back in Punjab, Cunningham, who has become an integral part of Sardarji, watches from the periphery and doesn’t dispute his actions, as long as Sardarji acts the way he has been schooled. Sardarji’s words and sentences appear from his mouth as if Cunningham speaks them, yet Sardarji keeps his “ten percent,” his turban, his faith, “the untranslated, untranslatable residue of his being” (133) to himself. Cunningham represents Sardarji’s “logic and ambition,” the dominant part of him that lets him “think without feeling,” for England “took the passion from his heart and replaced it with a seeking that spans lifetimes, a cold seeking [that] talks about bringing India into the modern world instead of making India free” (186). The clash of modernity and tradition and its impact on the Sikh colonial subjects in the domestic and public spaces is amply demonstrated in the novel. The struggles of colonial India with the advent of modernity—the construction of the canals in Punjab along with the imminent Partition of India and the ongoing communal riots between Hindus and Sikhs, on one side, and Muslims, on the other—is reflected in the battles between Satya and Roop regarding Sardarji on the one hand, and between Sardarji/ Cunningham and his superior, the Indian-born Englishman Mr. Timothy Farquharson, on the other. For example, once, when Sardarji’s turban comes off accidently during hunting, Farquharson watches him tying his turban with academic interest, as if Sardarji was a “rare animal [cavorting] in a cage” (194) and who “draws the circle beyond which Sardarji cannot go” (209). In the public spaces, Sardarji has to adjust, no matter how uncomfortably, to the colonizer’s edicts, while in the private spaces, Sikh women are restructured and have to adjust to Sikh males’ demands. Baldwin’s narrative strategy showcases the trauma of violence and its impact on Sikh gendered identity construction during British colonialism through the struggles Sikh men face in the public and modernized spaces of colonial India and their effects on Sikh women in the domestic spaces. Forty days after Roop’s daughter Pavan is born, Sardarji asks her to place the baby in Satya’s lap. Roop has by now learned to create a mask over her own face to hide her true self (183) in order to adjust to Sardarji’s ongoing intimate relationship with Satya—and she does not give any trouble over the situation and complies, for she was taught, “Above all else, give no trouble” (182). Satya, as the senior wife, is accorded all the power in the domestic spaces while Roop becomes the painted English doll, who makes Sardarji look good in the public colonial spaces. She wishes Satya and herself—“Birds in the same cage” (240)—can be like two women sitting together, one playing a musical instrument while the other 46

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listens (240), but that is not to be. For after Roop’s son Devinder, nicknamed Timmy (in honor of Sardarji’s English boss), or Timcu, is born, Sardarji once again places the baby in Satya’s lap and returns her daughter Pavan to her. Roop is shattered when her son is taken. Earlier, she molded herself to please Satya, even though her daughter was taken. Now, she is fearful of Satya’s power to hurt and becomes extra vigilant. The mirage of women’s community fades and fear takes its place (244). Decades earlier, in pre-Partition India, women, unaware of the idea of individualism, had community with each other, as I discuss in Representation and Resistance (Singh 2008); but, when modernity and individualism, along with ideas of romantic love and monogamy, were imposed, women’s community in polygamous familial spaces was shattered. Fear teaches Roop to be careful of gender queering. Gender in heteropatriarchal societies is constructed through strict binary discourses of feminine and masculine, and when these attributes become mixed in a body, the body is seen as queer. This body, seen as threatening to patriarchal norms, can then face violence. Roop notices that her daughter Pavan behaves like a boy when Pavan looks at her sideways, as the men in the community do. Yes, thinks Roop, Pavan sees herself and her mother in the reflexive surface of society, but she also looks at her mother as a man does—directly (229). She turns her daughter’s body at an angle in the mirror and realizes that he daughter still looks at her like men look at the women in the community, sideways (229). She then teaches her daughter to be subtle, to avert her eyes, and to be subversive, for if they are not perfect, mother and daughter, they might be sent home, disgraced (229–230). In order to ascertain that they never dishonor Papaji, her father, by being sent back home in disgrace, she slaps the two-year-old Pavan. When Pavan cries, What did I do?, Roop, remembering her grandmother’s words, tells her to learn what women are for (231) and teaches her daughter the same lesson. Yet, here is the fragmented gendered subject, one who has not only internalized patriarchal gender notions but who is also exposed to Sikhism and western education, for she had previously taught the new-born Pavan to remember the taste, smell, and touch of her body, to “suck from [her tongue] all the words it should have spoken, the words it wants to say … Say them for me” (original emphasis 180). For Roop, it is the fear of being alone—“Which is more terrible, being left behind or being left alone?” (original emphasis 96)—that makes her initially comply to gender roles—“above all, give no trouble” (182). Satya, on the other hand, “raised to bend” like a sapling, but who speaks “with a voice of authority” (7), is unable to tolerate Sardarji’s marriage to Roop, even though he gives her Roop’s and his children to raise. When she keeps her grey eyes, like mirrors, open during sex and lets him see his reflection, she highlights how small he really is— “So very small that he could not bear the image of himself” (276). Satya controls her own sexuality and has power in the household. Roop wishes her daughter to have similar kind of power and learns to teach her daughter in new ways. When her daughter Pavan is returned to her after her son Timcu is born, Roop, trying to renegotiate her identity and empower her daughter, now teaches 47

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her how to subvert gender construction, for she tells her daughter to resist patriarchal injunction, to be silent, and to learn to articulate her needs and desires (181). Devoid of voice herself, Roop, writing to her father Bachan Singh, asks him to take her away from Satya’s manipulation and Sardarji’s powerful presence, beseeching him to understand the context of the words and to read the silences in-between to locate his daughter (255). Thus, Roop, whose name means form, or physical manifestation of truth, wishes to be seen, to become visible like Satya in the abstracted voided spaces of patriarchal written form, while Satya, whose name means truth, will eventually void herself through suicide to become space—the unspoken, unwritten, voided space of silence which Sikh patriarchy views as eternal truth. Roop learns new methods to empower herself. Now a mother, she uses her children, taking them back to her father Papaji’s place without her husband’s permission. Her Bhua or aunt, Papaji’s sister, declares that she dishonored the family by bringing the children back without Sardarji’s knowledge, and “that death should be preferable to dishonor for good-good Sikh girls” (261) because for Papaji, izzat, honor, is more valuable than life (264). In this scenario, Sikh men have all the power and control, and an act such as Roop’s is tantamount to committing a customary crime. Yet, Roop, who has learned passive resistance—for she does not do Sardarji’s bidding immediately, and having learnt that men may not notice what is clearly visible to others (265)—in the domestic spaces resists her secondary position to Satya by bargaining: she will only return when her husband sets up a separate residence for them and the children (284). Sardarji appears to favor Roop over Satya (286)—because “Satya has never lowered her eyes before him and carries herself far too confidently,” and Roop is much more refined and would be suitable for him in the urban spaces—a ploy used by the colonized Sardarji, who employs British Divide and Rule (372) policy within his household: he uses Satya against Roop and then he would stand aside, stating women could never get along, that he is never at peace, but he also uses Roop against Satya (325). Roop and Satya become patriarchal tools, pitted against each other in the domestic spaces of the colonized and partially modernized nation, and become further marginalized. And although she is given Roop’s children to raise, Satya does not relish being relegated to a secondary position as the uneducated traditional woman, or to bear what she sees as Sardarji’s indifference (311) when he chooses to flaunt Roop in the city to meet his colonial masters. Satya, having asked herself how to bear the news of Roop’s third pregnancy and Sardarji’s seemingly unsympathetic stance towards her needs, muses that she is not a wife, as her husband has abandoned her. She is also not a widow, because her husband is still alive. She is also not a mother, for although she was allowed to care for Roop’s son, he is back with his mother. She is not a sister, for she is a single child. As a fatherless daughter, who only has a mother, she feels like she is “no one” (original italics 308). She considers herself Sardarji’s colony, and Roop and herself as “birds in the same cage” (240). Satya feels powerless, as she doesn’t see herself as worthy. 48

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Roop, on the other hand, thinks that Satya’s problem is that she desired to be loved within the traditional Indian marriage (323). Sardarji had shown romantic ideas of love to Satya when he first returned from England, so once they are taken away, she fights back in her own way to regain her love; but she also fights to regain control of her destiny. She commits suicide by using a western tool, a European-style kiss (313) with a woman infected with tuberculosis. Satya wants Sardarji to know that while Roop can birth children and bring life into this world, she, Satya, can “call forth death” (308), and in order to find agency, which she had begun to lack, uses a violent act, suicide. And even though she becomes a violent being, a being with an alternative agency, Sardarji still sees her as a broken animal, a thing to be pitied (323). The turmoil of the domestic spaces, seen in the conflicts of Roop and Satya, reflected in colonial and Partition violence, unfolds in the public domain. India is tense as the Partition of India is imminent. With the Gandhian anticolonial movement gaining strength in 1941 colonial India, Sardarji thinks of subversive men who are being imprisoned and tortured, and the divisions between the Indian National Congress and Muslim League (275). Long before her suicide, Satya had, with her remembrance of a long-ago past of the lost Khalsa/Sikh kingdom, understood that Jinnah will be given Pakistan and Hindus will be given a Hindu Raj after the English leave, but Sikhs, she wondered—who will care for the Sikhs? (294–295). And Sardarji, afraid of what will happen to Sikhs after independence, yet aware of Cunningham within him and still internalizing colonialism’s civilizing mission, thinks that the English will never totally leave, as colonialism’s hybridity cannot be undone. Indians, he thinks, can get a modicum of progress, but they will always need the English, and the English will always need them as raw material and labor, as they are both locked in a codependent relationship (295). But when Partition riots begin in Punjab, Sardarji realizes that in the aftermath of the violent division of India, a person’s worth will no longer be gauged by his accomplishments, but by “blood,” and by the clothes they wear, and by Hindu or Muslim rituals, such as circumcision for boys and men from one community, Muslims, and the lack thereof for Hindus (373) When the British decide to divide India, the politicians in India, some opposed to the Partition and some for it, stand by to see the division. On August 14, 1947, Sardarji sees his homeland fragmented, states divided, borders constructed on maps as the lines demarcating the nations (392). India is being fragmented, and this fragmentation lodges inside the colonized psyches, as the situation in Sardarji’s household reflects. Each person will become a modern subject, a Pakistani or an Indian, with individual desires and needs. Yet, within colonial India, all religious communities lived together; what will happen when the division takes place? Sardarji begins to ask questions about communal identities and becomes concerned for his community, and thinks about Gandhi and Nehru and all the other Hindu congressmen who do not understand that “if you build dams between all religions, Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims, Christians,” what will happen 49

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when a there’s a “fissure” in the dam keeping “this pressure back”? (397). He is horrified at the implications. If there are divisions within the land known as British India, where will the division be? Where will the different communities, coexisting for centuries, go? Sardarji realizes he needs to become an Indian, a nationalist, who must forsake his “treasured ambivalence” and hold back what he thinks of as his hybridity, which allows him to weave in and out of various cultures and communities (385). In order to belong to the new nation, but as a Sikh and not a colonized Indian, he must categorize himself solely as a Sikh (385). He critiques the British policy of Divide and Rule to Cunningham, reminding him of its egregiousness. He says that it was the British who created different electorates for all the different religious communities, divided all Indians along communal lines, and then despaired that Indians couldn’t get along (372). Sardarji knows that Sikhs will have to organize as a community, or they will all perish (373). However, he also knows that to demand a Sikhistan, a nation for the Sikhs, would be a mistake, for he doesn’t think that all the Sikhs would want to live behind some border (385). No, he thinks, a Sikhistan would become a “prison” for modernized men like him (385). The horror of such a “Divide and Rule” policy can be seen when the HinduSikh/Muslim riots escalate and Sardarji has to make a decision to send his family to safety. As such, he sends Roop, along with her children, her daughter Pavan and two sons, Timcu and her last son, Aman (meaning peace), from Lahore, which was going to be in Pakistan, towards Delhi, which was going to be in India; the rest of the Partition line was unclear and uncertain at the time. Sardarji reminds his sons, dressed in Sikh underturbans, “Remember you are Sikhs” (390), who are forced to flee towards Delhi, as their ancestral home now belongs to Pakistan. Roop thinks that India is “like a woman raped many times she has lost count of the trespassers across her body. Who will rescue and pyre the bodies of my quom [community]? What use now to be Hindu, Sikh, Muslim or Christian, what use the quom, the biradari [family], the caste, the compartments that order our lives” (426)? As Roop flees from Lahore to India, she feels that the names Pakistan and India have no meaning for her, as language has become meaningless during the violence of the Partition (389). She wonders how Sir Cyril Radcliffe, an English man, with little knowledge of India, tasked with creating the boundary between India and Pakistan, will accomplish his task as the names, ahistorical, will be meaningless (389). There was no clear indication where the Partition line was going to be. My own parents and family members had fled back to Burma as they were unsure where to stop, as the line of division was unclear to them. Confusion reigned. Violence ensued. During this time, it was men against men, and men against women, and the bodies that were butchered and raped were individual bodies belonging to different communities. Yet, in communitarian thinking of the time, when one community, the Muslims, was provided a country, Pakistan, and communal violence erupted, Sen notes that “one’s identity with one’s community [becomes] the principal or dominant identity” (Sen 33). Muslims, Sikhs, and 50

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Hindus acted as though they had no choice but to perpetuate sectarian violence. Bodies became marked by religious identities, but how to ascertain who belonged to which community? Muslim men were identified by their circumcised penises, Hindu men by their uncircumcised penises, and Sikhs by the same and by their turbans, but most women’s bodies became fair game for all communities. Roop’s brother Jeevan finds his wife Kusum’s dead body with each limb severed from the body and then rearranged to look whole (446). It was an honor killing perpetrated by Roop’s father and Kusum’s father-in-law, Bachan Singh. A woman’s body is severed and rearranged to appear whole. Women’s bodies become symbols for the truncated and parted nations. Jeevan notes that Kusum had not been raped before being butchered; he muses that to butcher a woman without raping her is useless, for the message of rape is about revenge and reciprocity (447). And in this zero-sum game, played by patriarchal men on both sides, women’s bodies are simply a pawn to be used as and when nationalism needs. Over 75,000 women were sexually assaulted during the Partition and many, like Kusum, were killed by their own communities in order to save the community’s honor (Butalia). Much later, when Roop is reunited with her brother in Delhi, she finds out the real details about Kusum’s death. When the aggressive Muslim mob came close to their family home, Bachan Singh made a decision to save the family’s and quom’s izzat (communal honor). Saying he has to do his duty (455), he slaughters Kusum. And with the stroke of his sword, Bachan Singh had severed Kusum’s head for, according to him, she bared and offered her head willingly (456). The dead body, later discovered by the other quom, the Muslim community, is then dismembered and disemboweled (457). Veena Das claims that “Such sacrificial deaths are beautified in family narratives” (53) and the male members become the recipients of honor and sympathy. However, Roop knows she must tell the next generation Bachan Singh and Jeevan’s words as she heard them from them: a gendered account of the brutality. Will they know Kusum’s pain and her story when her actions are interpreted by the males of the family (457)? Will she simply be represented as one who willingly went to her death to sacrifice for the honor of her family? When Muslims discover Kusum’s dead body, they rip her womb out of her neatly rearranged cut-up body, and Jeevan deduces the enemy’s message—we have erased your kind by taking the womb and leaving only the skin, as this is war against your community (447). The wounding, mutilating, and cutting of genitals took a different form during the 1984 Sikh Massacre, as I discussed in chapter one: then, Indian police mutilated male genitals so no further Sikh terrorists would be born (Axel). In the case of gender violence as seen in What the Body Remembers, a woman’s body is made to “bear the signs of its possession by the enemy” (Veena Das 53). “Fragmentary logic” (Das) is at work in the sorting of the bodies, dead and near dead being sorted out according to various religions (What the Body Remembers 463). Roop, along with her children, crosses the border of India towards Delhi through terrible chaos and brutalization, and waits day after day at the railway station for Sardarji to arrive. She realizes that without a man from her family to 51

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come and find her, the state will take possession of her body (436), and then what will happen to her? It is estimated that 75,000 to 100,000 women were abducted and raped, their bodies inscribed by communalism and nationalism. After the Partition, over 22,000 Muslim women and 8,000 Hindu and Sikh women, who had been raped and abandoned, were recovered by various government agencies on both sides of the border (Butalia 123). Roop wonders why a woman chooses to die (461). Do they tell stories? Can we hear their words from beyond the void? Violence creates void, and in the void silent voices can be heard, for it is in such spaces of void that words take shape and “[drowned] out silences” and “frozen words” (Das 9) are heard again. When gendered violence occurs, narrative space is not allowed to women, so a void, a gap, in the narrative occurs. It is in the voided space, in the ellipses, that one can recover women’s lost voices. Satya had descended into a void similar to the kind that Homi Bhabha calls the “Third Space” (157), which is where she reconnects with Roop. Bhabha, writing about the postcolonial and hybrid “Third Space,” argues that literature and language that occur in this space, “thought unrepresentable in itself … constitutes the discursive conditions of enunciation that ensure that the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixidity; that even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized, and read anew” (Bhabha 157). Women’s repressed and suppressed stories and voices, when they find liminal narrative space, can also be read “anew.” Satya is part of Roop’s self now, as Roop hears Satya’s words spoken to her in the silence, saying that sometimes women have to choose to die so that they can be heard (460). For, after her death, Satya, Truth, speaks from across the void as she, like the formless energy of Sikhism, resonates in the silence (349–350). “Ek onkar, sat naam, kartaa purukh, nirbhau, nirvair, akaal murat, ajooni saibhang” (the first composition from the Gurugranth, which I know from Punjabi oral tradition): Truth— the created is not separated from the creator; like the divine energy, which Sikhs believe is formless, beyond time, beyond fear, beyond birth, beyond death, and is neither created nor destroyed—Satya, the truth, too has merged with this space. From this void, Roop must learn anew in order to exist and survive. In the manner of gendered violence and the creation of a void, communal violence led to the formation of modern Indian nation-state and postcolonial subjects, and then descended into Bhabha’s “Third Space,” where identities are being constructed anew. Sardarji, finally without Cunningham (395), as he no longer has internalized racism, is also being reconstructed anew. Earlier, Sardarji had needed Cunningham, as he, Sardarji, was a colonial subject formed by colonialism and colonial education. During the Partition, he had been feminized, deprived of his land and his ancestral home, and felt like a woman (405). So, when Roop and he are reunited in India, and knowing his condition, she gives him a gift—the knowledge of her damaged ear, which she was born with and had hidden from Sardarji during their wedding—so that his identity as a man can return and rise again (467). Sardarji takes her gift and goes about the business of reconstructing their identities and their lives again in new India. 52

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As discussed in the Introduction to this book, Sikhs, who had earlier been feminized by the British during the act of submission after they lost their Kingdom, attempted to recuperate their identity through various means, such as recruitment into the colonial army or, if possible, like Sardarji, to go abroad and study; yet, in an instant, through the act of Partition, they were once again displaced and fragmented—in need of a center, something to hold on to, to belong to, to feel at home in, to reconstruct themselves as a community. Roop’s damaged ear represents colonial India’s truncated subjects—who had to learn English and English cultural attitudes, leaving behind many precolonial cultural aspects, some of which had been empowering for women. Yet, in postcolonial India, Roop bequeaths the feminized and fragmented Sardarji, without the presence of his colonial self, Cunningham, the knowledge of her own fragmentation, so that together they can begin the task of reintegrating their fragmented psyches. As Petersen and Rutherford argue, colonialism’s violence fragmented the colonized psyche, and in postcolonial spaces the reintegration of that fragmentation is a “ceaseless task” (original emphasis 142). The knowledge of fragmentation and the task of reintegration had begun for the postcolonial Sikh subjects. For Sardarji, his fear leaves him and he feels renewed (469). The fragmented postcolonial subjects feel hope. However, for females who are born in postcolonial India, they will inherit and remember the narratives of patriarchy and the Partition (470). But, they will, like Baldwin, recreate, reconstruct, and narrate those memories as testimonies for their readers and the community, thereby creating a “circuit of communication” (Kacandes) in order to work through cultural and personal violence and traumas, and to work towards empowering gendered identities. As the birth rate for female babies continues to drop in Punjab today, and within the Sikh communities, and as domestic violence and gendered violence against Sikhs, particularly Sikh girls and women, continue to rise, narratives such as Baldwin’s are extremely important. As Mieke Bal argues, and I agree, texts such as What the Body Remembers can mediate between the parties to the traumatizing scene and between these and the reader or viewer. The recipient of the account performs an act of memory that is potentially healing, as it calls for political and cultural solidarity in recognizing the traumatized party’s predicament. This act is potentially healing because it generates narratives that ‘makes sense.’ To enter memory, the traumatic event of the past needs to be made narratable. (Bal et al. x) For a marginalized, threatened, and violated community such as the Sikhs, and particularly Sikh women, Baldwin’s text provides a means for witnessing, for healing, and for reintegration through the creation of a “circuit of communication” by sharing narrative memory of past and present traumas. 53

4 GENDERED VIOLENCE AND PARTITION MEMORY IN POSTCOLONIAL NOVELS AND FILMS

Sexual violence against Sikh women is often elided in fictional representations in the genre of the Partition narratives, while violence against male Sikhs appears through hyperbolic and hypermasculine tropes. When violence against Sikh women does appear, it is only through tropes of saving Sikh communal honor; in many Partition narratives, sexual violence against Muslim women primarily aims to show Sikh men as brave warriors saving them from communalist and sexual violence. In Bhisham Sahni’s novel Tamas (Darkness),1 published in 1974, Sikh women committing mass suicide for Sikh communal honor is represented in chilling ways. Sahni (1915–2003), a Hindu “born into a staunch Arya Samajist family” (Nihalani), witnessed the traumatic events of Partition first hand, but waited 23 years to narrate it. Even then, he found it problematic to write this text. When it was published, the book did not arouse much response, but when Govind Nihalani made it into a television series in 1987, it evoked emotional, post-traumatic response across the nation. Communal riots broke out between Hindus and Muslims because of the film. According to Joshi, “the film triggered violence from Hindu militants, including threats to Nihalani.” One of the allegations from fundamentalist Hindus was that the text was biased against Hindus, unjustifiably glorified the Communists, and thus distorted history. Many Hindus and Muslims alike also expressed fears that the uneducated, poor, and insecure “common man” might find it highly inflammatory, and that a fresh wave of communal strife might sweep the nation (Nihalani 6). Firoza Jussawala, a well-known postcolonial scholar and literary critic, accused Sahni of sparking and perpetuating “new religious tensions,” “unfortunate stereotypes,” and “sectarian interests,” as well as building “barriers to the creation of national and international understanding and peace” (194). Questioning the author’s and film-maker’s “moral responsibility” and the “ethics of fiction,” Jussawala wondered, “A writer must be outspoken against totalitarian regimes, but where there is no particular reason must he create a situation of communal violence?” (194). Thus, Jussawala inadvertently favors censorship regarding the Partition violence and seems to prefer silence over the (mis)narrativizing of the Partition violence and trauma. In particular, since the narrative relates to communal violence and the representation of Sikh gendered 54

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identity, for the wounded viewing Sikh subjects, who experienced the Partition violence first-hand, as my grandparents and parents did, or due to the post-traumatic memories of the generations that came after, such as myself, or Shauna Singh Baldwin, discussed in Chapter 3, retraumatization can occur. These responses are about the anxiety of retraumatization due to audience misreading of the text and the fear that the remembering subject might distort the past by “eliding, repeating, and fragmenting” it; according to Kacandes, if the remembering subject, often unable to “reconnect what was short-circuited” (Kacandes 56) due to lack of self-reflexivity, may misremember the past or leave out crucial material from the narrativizing of the traumatic moments. Sahni was in his early twenties when he witnessed the Partition violence. In the discussion below, I concentrate on the idea of Sikh communal honor and mass suicides by Sikh women, and their representation as honorable or desirable in the novel, to discuss Sikhs’ gendered identity construction during the flare-up of communal violence at the time of the Partition of India. Based on true events, the story is set in a small northwest frontier town (in an area that is today part of Pakistan) during the Partition period. The political and communal situation in a town in Punjab is tense, as Partition plans are in the air, and each community is worried about losing their homes, businesses, or lands. Rumors are rampant that violence is imminent, and people from all communities are preparing to protect themselves in the event of a riot breaking out. A pig, considered unclean by Muslims, is found slaughtered on the steps of the local mosque. Murad Ali, a Muslim, had bribed Nathu, a sweeper, with a five-rupee note to kill the pig; Murad Ali misinformed Nathu that the animal was for a British veterinarian to conduct some experiments (Bhisham Sahni, Tamas 62–65). As Murad Ali intended, the slaughtered pig is found on the day the Congress demonstrators and the Muslim Leaguers were supposed to meet to discuss peaceful means to resolve the tense situation of the imminent Partition and to avert the division of the nation, if possible, and suddenly, due to the discovery of the dead pig on the mosque steps, communal violence erupts. Nathu, suddenly aware of his own complicity because he slaughtered the pig, recoils from terror and hides in his room—he does not confront Murad Ali, the true culprit, as he is just a lowly sweeper from the “untouchable” caste, while Murad Ali is a prominent Muslim man from the community. Hindus and Sikhs become the targets of Muslim wrath, as Muslims feel that the Hindus and Sikhs have purposefully desecrated their mosque, and particularly as the talks with the British colonizers favor the Muslims in the creation of a Muslim nation, Pakistan. As tension mounts, some Sikhs take refuge in a gurudwara, the Sikh temple, while the men shout jo bole so nihal, sat sri akal (who ever utters the phrase— truth shall prevail—will be blessed with glory) and women recite the gurbani (prayer) under their breath. Nihang Sikhs,2 long hair loose, position themselves on the roof of the gurudwara, brandishing their swords.3 As the barricade gives way, Muslims storm in, shouting Allah-o-Akbar (God is Great), while Sikh men, raised swords in hands, disappear into dark lanes (180). The riot explodes, buildings burn, rioters roar, doors crash. 55

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A silent line of white-clad Sikh women emerges from the temple. Jasbir Kaur, at the head of this line, has eyes “half-closed with excitement, emotion and religious ecstasy” (199). Many women follow her in a similar vein, crying, “The Turks have come! The Turks have come!” Others, with children in their arms, recite lines from the Gurugranth, singing, “I go where my warrior goes!” (199). Many appear silent, chanting under their breath. The loud and colorfully attired Nihangs contrast with the silent white-clad women. In the representation of the violence, we see the example of the “limits of representation” reached by our author when faced with communal violence (Veena Das 79). Often, claims Das, the arguments regarding gender violence and the idea of the “limit of representation” are “staged through the trope of horror” (79). Here, the Nihangs—with raised naked swords and long loose hair streaming behind them—are represented as “simply ‘hotheaded’” due to the Hindu author’s own “notions of [Sikh] masculinity” (81). In this reading of Partition violence, the “circuits of communication” crash for Sikhs, and particularly for Sikh women, as the narrative slows almost to a halt, with the silent chanting women on the one hand, and the horrendous Nihangs cavorting around them on the other, for like “circuits, reading and witnessing only flow when all elements are connected,” and thus, this text performs trauma, in the sense that it fails to tell the story in its complexity—it only tells the “short-circuited” (Kacandes 56) version, that of silent, self-sacrificing women, of the Partition violence. The violent, aggressive, and dynamic behavior of the hypermasculinized Nihangs represents them as agents of their own destinies, while the quiet and chanting women represent the idea of purity and passivity, their bodies representing clean spaces to be written by patriarchal and religious nationalism. As the Muslims crash through the gates with shouts of Allah-o-Akbar, brandishing swords and sticks, the Nihangs jump on them with their own swords and daggers. The women, in the meantime, are represented as orderly, quiet, and resolute in the goal to protect the honor of the Sikh community: The women are now within sight of the well, where they normally came to bath, wash their clothes and gossip. They looked unearthly in the light of the fires and the moonlight. They made no sound as they advanced, oblivious to everything around them. Jasbir Kaur was the first to jump. She did not raise a slogan, or address any one. She simply said Vah Guru! quietly and leaped. As she fell, many more women climbed up on to the parapet of the well. Hari Singh’s wife pulled her four-year-old son after her and they jumped into the well together. Deva Singh’s wife followed next, her infant son kept standing where he was looking down in utter bewilderment. Then Gian Singh’s wife pushed him in, ensuring that he joined his mother. Scores of women, with their children, followed. (Bhisham Sahni, Tamas 199) Except for Jasbir Kaur, the other women are simply represented as wives and mothers. Literally and figuratively, the women disappear. In such cultural 56

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production, Sikh women such as Jasbir Kaur, although violent, appear selfsacrificing and as protecting the honor of the community. According to Das, “Such stories frame the violence in a manner that can be assimilated into the culture’s experiment with the edges of human experience. Even in the face of horrific death, men know how to behave according to the norms of masculinity—women know what it takes to preserve the honor of the men” (87). Sikh women have partaken in violence in various forms, including picking up the sword and fighting in battles, suicide and self-immolation, but their acts are oftentimes framed through the notion of honor (as can be seen in the example of Sundri, see Chapter 2) and self-sacrifice (see the female Sikh character Veeran in Maachis, Chapter 7) for the community. They are not seen as agents capable of choosing violence as a means to create an empowering identity, as Sundri or Veeran do. Most Partition narratives, with a few exceptions, show women as victims of violence, as in Amrita Pritam’s 1950 novel Pinjar, set during the Partition violence of 1947 (discussed in more detail in Chapter 6, as it has to do with successful or unsuccessful narrative witnessing by the author and her characters), where an abducted Hindu woman chooses to stay back with her Muslim “husband” (she was forced to marry her abductor, and didn’t necessarily accept him as such in the beginning) to save the honor of her family. In Pakistani filmmaker Sabiha Sumar’s 2004 film Khamosh Pani: Silent Waters, an abducted Sikh woman, represented decades later as a Muslim widow who makes a home with her son in Pakistan, suddenly jumps into a well and commits suicide when her Sikh brother comes back to reclaim her. Although hundreds of women partook in violence, in the imagination of the heteropatriarchal nation, Sikh women, pure and self-sacrificial, came to occupy a negative space, yet in its negative presence, or loud silence, the subjugated and repressed narrative of the violent women must and can be made narratable, as seen in Chapter 3. While women’s stories of resistance, violence, and agency have to be uncovered, mostly by feminists, reports and political documentation of the Partition’s abducted, raped, and violated women abound. According to Das, the “foundational stories” of violated and recovered women (abducted women from the enemy communities who were recovered and returned to their families at camps set up by the Indian and Pakistani authorities at various locations) “authorizes a particular relation between social and sexual contract—the former being a contract between men to institute the political and the latter the agreement to place women within the home under the authority of the husband/father figure” (21). The stories of recovered women, where raped and violated women are handed back to the male relatives, instituted the “nation as a masculine nation” (25). For example, as the ending of Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers shows, Roop, who appears disoriented without Sardarji after she reaches Delhi, is rendered weak, but upon seeing Sardarji, representing the new nation, she becomes empowered enough to give him a “gift” (the knowledge) of her lack (her one deaf ear) in order to masculinize him (see Chapter 3). He then takes over the business of looking after his wife and his children, renewed and reinvigorated. Satya’s 57

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agency in the earlier part of the novel as the stronger first wife, or her violent act of committing suicide, are seen as empowering, as she is rendered a “wounded bird” (What the Body Remembers 323) by Sardarji, a broken thing to be pitied. Due to representations of women as victims, albeit violent ones, the dominant narrative space that the Sikh woman came to occupy during and after Partition became a conflicted and ambiguous space. She is at once weak and violent, to be protected through her own bodily destruction, and at all costs, through honor killings or mass suicides. If this is the space that the Sikh woman occupies, then it leads to anxiety, communalism, sectarian violence, domestic violence, and female feticide in India, as they are reflections of male Sikhs’ angsts. In the construction of Sikh national identity, amritdhari Sikh men are often gendered and queered (see Jasbir Puar) mostly as hypermasculine through being represented as the violent “Lions of Punjab,” although in some narratives they are seen as pacifists while women are rendered mute, their stories told from male perspectives, as seen from the example in Tamas; such representations disallow “narrative witnessing” (Kacandes 56). In Vic Sarin’s 2007 film Partition, the director attempts to give voice to the queered Sikh men while silencing Sikh women. Is Sarin, as a diasporic Indian, who took 20 years to complete the project, able to provide space for traumatized Sikhs that allows “narrative witnessing” through creating a “circuit of communication” (56), or does his attempt fail, leading to retraumatization? Sarin, born in Kashmir, India to Hindu-Buddhist parents, is an award-winning director, producer, and screenwriter who immigrated to Canada via Australia as a teenager in 1963 (Onstad). He does not remember specific incidents of the Partition carnage, but he does remember hearing “sounds, shouts, and [has] murky memories” (Sarin)4 about the violence from the night his parents took him to Delhi in August 1947. He also recalls the ongoing Kashmiri violence that triggered his traumatic memory of the Partition before he left for Australia. These, and other memories from his past, play a role in the making of the film about the Partition. Sarin’s 2007 film Partition showcases a love story set during the Partition and inspired by true events, according to the film’s production notes (Sepia Films). A similar version of the same story appears in Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence, a “story of love and hate … the story of Zainab (a Muslim woman) and Buta Singh (a Sikh man);” there are “many different versions to the Buta Singh-Zainab story now, particularly as it has acquired the status of a legend,” notes Butalia (130). Historically, Zainab was a young Muslim woman who was abducted during the Partition march, and eventually sold to Buta Singh, a Jat Sikh (an ethnic group from Punjab who practice Sikhism) in Amritsar district, who “performed the ‘chaddar’”5 ceremony and married Zainab (Butalia, The Other Side of Silence 126). Soon, they learned to love each other and had two children, but due to property matters in Pakistan, both of their family members intervened, and a relative who wanted to appropriate her inherited land informed her 58

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family in Pakistan about Zainab’s whereabouts (127). According to newspaper reports, when Zainab left for Pakistan, everyone from the village witnessed her departure. She was carrying her child and holding a small bag of clothes. As she climbed into the waiting jeep, she told Buta to take care of her older daughter, promising to be back soon (128). Zainab’s uncle wanted her to marry his son for the property, but the son was uninterested, as she had lived with a Sikh man for years. Buta Singh unsuccessfully attempted to travel to Pakistan to fetch Zainab, but finally, when he received news that her relatives were forcing her to remarry, he quickly made arrangements to sell his land and get his travel papers in order. But first he converted to Islam, changing his name to Jamil Ahmed, and applied for Pakistan citizenship. His application was rejected but he received a short-term visa. Upon his arrival in Pakistan, he found out that Zainab was already married to her cousin. Additionally, having failed to register with the police as required for visitors, he was hauled to court, where he told his story to the magistrate. The court ordered Zainab to provide a statement. “Closely guarded by a ring of relatives, Zainab rejected him, saying: ‘I am a married woman. Now I have nothing to do with this man. He can take his second child whom I have brought from his house …’” (Butalia 130). Following this incident, Buta Singh threw himself in front of a running train and committed suicide, leaving a note in his pocket requesting to be buried in Zainab’s village, which was refused. His body was brought back to Lahore for an autopsy, where a large crowd had gathered, some crying, and at the scene, “a film maker announced that he would make a film on the story” (130).6 The story of the sacrificial Sikh man became legendary in the Indian subcontinent. In India, Manoj Punj, a Hindu Punjabi, directed a Punjabi language film, Shaheed-e-Mohabbat Boota Singh, released in 1999. Since it was regional cinema and in the Punjabi language, it had a limited viewership. In the film’s subtitles, the name Buta is spelled Boota. The narrative follows Zainab and Boota’s story to a large extent. During the Partition, Boota, a mona or cleanshaven Sikh, a Jat, returns from World War II after fighting under Lord Mountbatten of Burma, to a rundown farm. The signs of the trauma of war violence, his lost years, and his betrothed’s marriage to someone else are shown as flashbacks, signifying his hopelessness. His uncle hopes to annex Boota’s land. However, Boota rescues, pays a ransom for, and marries Zainab, a Muslim refugee, at the behest of the panchayat (five elected representatives from the village providing council) since she refuses to go to Pakistan. The representation of the wedding ceremony with Zainab in a colorful red salwar kameez and Boota in a pink turban is in Bollywood style, complete with songs and dance. After the ceremony, it is Zainab who takes Boota in her arms, and as she does so, the narrative quickly shifts to a dance in the fields. Zainab cavorts with a number of young girls, all in colorful outfits, with their dupatta scarves fluttering in the wind. Soon, a daughter is born. All the narrative movements happen during the enactment of a song (as in Gadar and in Partition, as I discuss below). Boota’s uncle’s 59

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hopes of annexing his lands are dashed, but he persists. A few years later, the government makes an announcement regarding the exchange of abducted women and the uncle, taking advantage of Boota’s absence from the home, forcibly removes Zainab and sends her back to Pakistan. Boota, upon returning home and finding his wife missing, sells his house and takes off for Pakistan to bring her back. He is arrested for being illegally in Pakistan. When he tells the court about his wife, she is brought in, but denies having married him, due, as we learn, to her father’s death threats against her, Boota, and their daughter. Boota commits suicide by throwing himself on the tracks in front of an oncoming Indian train, requesting to be buried in Zainab’s village. Their daughter survives. He is buried in Lahore, where his mausoleum becomes a Sufi pilgrimage site. The resolution portends a positive outcome—there’s hope of hybridity—Sikhism and Islam through Sufism and love—Ishq—in the end. His grown daughter and her fiancé ask blessing for their union from the shrine of Boota. However, as a very young woman of perhaps 16 or 17 who barely escapes brutal and marauding Sikhs, sold off to Boota, Zainab appears too eager to embrace him and marital bliss. In fact, she is the one who teaches Boota the mysteries of sex. Boota, a war veteran seen as a saver of Muslims, always ready for bloody fistfights, is given to copious tears at tragedies. While Punj may be attempting to showcase a sensitive Sikh man, Boota only appears weak. These “lacunae in the story draw attention to the impossibility of telling” (Kacandes 65). While Punj attempts to narrate the Partition violence and the role of Sikhs through another lens, and to provide an alternative narrative to the “Lions of Punjab” and the hypermasculine Sikh, the text fails, as does Tamas, to create a “circuit of communication” (Kacandes 56) with the audience, the text, and the viewer. Boota doesn’t come across as a sensitive and caring Sikh; he appears weak and passive. For example, on his wedding night, he comes to the marital bed inebriated. He tells Zainab he’s old and doesn’t know what to do or how to behave with a new bride. She is the one who takes him in her arms and cradles him. The Muslim woman is sexualized for an Indian audience. Besides, the text does not provide any space for the representation of Sikh women. In fact, Boota’s earlier laments about not having the joy of a wife’s intimate touch at home is mostly represented through his performance of domestic chores, such as washing the dishes or cooking for himself, as well as other men’s comments on his feminization. Although it is refreshing to see a Sikh man as a poet and a lover, and not as marauding or violent, Boota’s desire for a woman is represented solely through references to the presumed domesticity of the Muslim woman. His grown daughter, too, looks for the joys of domestic bliss as she asks the Sufi shrine of Boota to bless her marriage. Thus, although the film seems to have succeeded in the Punjab region, I argue that narrative witnessing fails as the “circuit of communication” (Kacandes) jams, particularly for Sikh women such as myself. In the following section, I further analyze Sarin’s 2007 film Partition, produced and released in Canada in 2007, about the same subject matter—communalism, 60

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inter-communal, or inter-religious love. The narrative begins with a British colonial setting. While the director of Partition, Sarin, born to “Hindu-Buddhist parents” in Kashmir in 1945 “didn’t lose any family members during Partition,” he remembers “the neighbour-on-neighbour vitriol and violence it provoked” (Onstad). In an interview, Sarin states, “I was very young, but I have clear memories of my aunts and uncles talking. You would hear remarks made by different sides: ‘Those Muslims, those Sikhs, those Hindus’” (Onstad). Sarin clearly recalls, as a nine-year-old boy, his father’s friend’s story about a Sikh man and a Muslim woman and their secret love for each other. He recalls their hopelessness in the face of religious divisions and their attempted suicides. His father’s friend survived the attempt and was devastated. He soon attempted suicide again and succeeded. Sarin’s father was heartbroken. Decades later, Sarin directed a film about the star-crossed lovers with the Partition as its setting; it is obviously also influenced by Zainab’s and Buta Singh’s story as detailed in Butalia’s text. Sarin remembers, when he was just a boy, his father asking him to go outside and play every time his Sikh friend arrived at their home, followed soon by a Burqa-clad figure of a woman. His father would make himself scarce as well, allowing the lovers to spend time together. Sarin’s nine-year-old body remembers the sensation at hearing about the suicides from his anguished father. Years later, he realized religious differences and communal divisions led to the tragedies. Sarin states, “At the end of the day, only one thing matters. Who is left holding your hand? Nothing else matters. Religious divisions. Caste divisions. Only love matters.”7 The film about Punjab directed by a diaspora filmmaker is shot mostly in “the dry hill country” in British Columbia, with a stint in India. It boasts a multiracial and multicultural star cast, including Jimmy Mistry of England—his mother is Irish Catholic and his father a Hindu—as Gian Singh, a Sikh, and Canadian Smallville star Kristin Kreuk, an “ethnic mix of Dutch and Chinese” as Naseem, a Punjabi Muslim woman. Avtar Singh, a friend of Gian Singh, is played by Oscar-winning actor Irrfan Khan, a Muslim. Gian’s mother, Shanti Singh, is played by Madhur Jaffrey (Madhur Bahadur before her marriage to actor Saeed Jaffrey), who according to Bob Batz Jr., is “South Indian by marriage [and has a] … Hindu but Muslim-flavored upbringing in Northern India” (Batz). According to Sarin, the casting works for Indian audiences who have seen the film, as a lot of people think Kristin Kreuk comes from the West Pakistan area (Schaefer). He also notes that the multiethnic cast, a powerful medium, works because at the end of the day all that matters is love, and not the divisions and barriers created by society,8 although the awkwardness of the actors playing Sikhs and Muslims and their critiques by film critics will be analyzed below. Sarin painstakingly recreates Punjab and Punjabi landscape for the film, yet it is not Punjab. Punjab is famous for its mustard fields, and all films by diasporics feature them in their films. Sarin states, “The yellow mustard fields were in Creston, (B.C.) … [and] were rapeseed, but I looked at the texture and they were very much like mustard seed” (Schaefer), a crop grown 61

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and romanticized in Bollywood films. Some scenes were shot in India during the end of the monsoon season, but most of the set was constructed in Canada. Thus, the multiethnic cast, set in the studios and landscape of Canada, replicating Partition trauma, is supposed to bring healing through the portrayal of inter-communal love, particularly for the Sikh community in India and the minoritized Sikh Indian diaspora. The narrative begins in 1941 in Delhi. Two Sikh army recruits, Gian and Avtar Singh, play polo with their British officers, one of whom is young Andrew. English men and women in colorful period costumes watch the young British soldiers, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and Englishmen on horses, with women shouting encouraging words, framed by green fields. The pounding of horses’ hoofs ring in the air. Yet, the setting rings hollow. As Susan Walker notes, The film starts off on the wrong foot. Opening on the manicured greens of the Delhi Polo Club in 1941 sets up an expectation that the film will be some kind of Jewel and the Crown-type critique of the British Raj. Three polo team-mates, Andrew Stilwell, Gian Singh and Avtar are about to go to war, to fight with the Indian army in Burma. They are seen off by Stilwell’s sister Margaret, played by Neve Campbell poorly executing a plummy English accent. (Susan Walker n.p.) The scene shifts to a railway station. The Sikh recruits, Gian and Avtar, are off to wage a war in Burma on behalf of their colonial masters. Gian makes a promise to Margaret Stilwell, an English woman “secretly in love with [him]” (Sepia Films), that he will protect her brother Andrew, the polo-playing officer, at all costs. However, during the war in Burma, Gian fails to save the drowning Andrew, who is pinned under a fallen log in a rapidly flooding trench; at Andrew’s request, Gian shoots him to prevent him from a horrible death. Gian has recurring nightmares after this event. Gian, symbolizing the brave warrior Sikhs favored by the British and recruited into the colonial army, is indirectly responsible for the death of the wounded Andrew, symbolizing the weakened colony after World War II.9 The death of Andrew portends the imminent end of British colonial regime in India, with, of course, disastrous results for the Sikhs whom the British had always “protected” (or used in its “Divide and Rule” policy). At the end of the war, when Gian returns home to Sirsa, Punjab, and picks up the shovel in place of the rifle, Partition mayhem is already occurring. Sikhs, having failed to safeguard the empire’s investment in India, symbolized by the death of young Andrew, find their very existence as a community jeopardized. When, during the 1857 Indian revolution, Sikhs had forsaken their fellow sepoys (soldiers, Muslims and Hindus, who were revolting against the British) and had protected the British, they had found a special place in the empire; however, at this juncture, represented by Gian’s return to Punjab after the war, with the Partition of India being imminent, Sikhs were being sidelined as they 62

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had chosen to remain in India with the majority Hindus. Muslims, who are granted a nation, traverse Punjab towards Pakistan, as they had become refugees fleeing the communal riots. At this point in the narrative, a band of rampaging Sikhs, on horses and on foot, loot and massacre many of the Muslims. Naseem Khan, a young woman, escapes and hides in the cane fields. She is separated from her family. As she crouches behind the tall cane plants, shaking and cowering, Gian, who refuses to participate in the killing and looting, finds her. Unknown to Naseem and Gian, a Sikh man slaughters Naseem’s father. Her distraught brothers and mother, who witness the murder, escape to Pakistan. Gian shelters Naseem in his home by turning her into a Sikh boy, complete with a topknot. His action recalls the solidarity and communal harmony between Muslim and Sikh communities in precolonial India, which occurred despite periods of political conflict, as the discussion about my grandfather sheltered by his Muslim neighbors shows (see the Introduction to this book). Gian’s protection of Naseem also represents the “saviors” (Nandy) during the Partition, who saved individuals from the enemy community. According to Nandy, There was also no concept till then that the followers of two religions were two different species. One psychoanalyst – I think it was Erik Eriksson – used the term pseudo-species (which is how people imagined the other to be). But this idea wasn’t there in the subcontinent, where inter-species relationship wasn’t of the kind as it was in the West. In the German Holocaust, scientists were speaking of eliminating life that was not worthy of life. So, they started with homosexuals and the insane, and then went on and on. (Nandy n.p.) While I am not trying to romanticize the communal situation, I am suggesting that not everyone participated in the terror. However, colonialism’s divide and rule policy had weakened the bond, as the riots and terror that my grandparents, parents, and sisters faced show, leading to Partition massacre. As mentioned regarding my grandfather, who was saved by his Muslim neighbor (see Introduction), there were saviors on both sides of the divide. Hence, when the Hindu and Sikh villagers, many of them refugees from Pakistan, find out about Naseem, they become angered and betrayed. They immediately demand her eviction. Gian tries to buy time by donating his entire savings to help the refugees, who are angered and bitter at their loss, promising to locate Naseem’s family in Pakistan so she can be relocated. Toward that end, he seeks Margaret’s help, as she works for the Ministry of Unification of Families. Soon, however, Naseem and Gian fall in love and marry, with the reluctant support of Shanti, Gian’s mother. The wedding scene replicates the mise-en-scène of Shaheed-e-Mohabbat Boota Singh: As a wedding song plays in the background, Gian, in red turban, pink scarf, and gold outfit, sits on a decorated horse; Naseem, henna on her hands, dressed in a crimson salwar kameez, her head covered by a 63

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tinsel-trimmed dupatta, waits for the groom; guests and children in colorful outfits dance. During the wedding night, Naseem appears eager and takes initiative in the sexual scene; she takes off his turban, one fold at a time, showing his long hair, and then she takes off his shirt, exposing his naked torso. The next scene is of Naseem on top of him with her white bra exposed while Gian lies down on the bed. As the lovemaking scene slowly fades, the camera pans on an overhead shot of “mustard fields,” with the smiling couple, accompanied by their four- or five-year-old son Vijay (played by Sarin’s son), dancing and swaying to the song. In the meantime, Margaret locates Naseem’s family in Kasur, Pakistan. Naseem and Gian Singh decide to journey to Pakistan, but since he does not have his travel papers, Naseem leaves on her own, with Gian Singh’s promise that he and their son will soon follow. Her family members are overjoyed to see her, but when they discover that she is married to a Sikh, they angrily inform her that a Sikh had slaughtered their father. Although Naseem responds that a Sikh man had saved her life, they forbid her to leave the house, locking her in her room. When she fails to return after three months, Gian travels to Delhi with his son to obtain a visa, which is denied. The immigration officer informs him of the difficulty for Sikhs to procure a visa and says Muslims could simply walk across the border. On the spur of the moment, Gian decides to convert to Islam. Gian sits on the floor, his long hair loose around his shoulders, in front of a Mullah, a Muslim priest. The priest proceeds to cut Gian’s hair with shaking hands. Seeing his discomfort, Gian, his eyebrows scrunched, his eyes narrowed, takes the scissors and calmly cuts off the remainder of his long hair. With papers that state his new name, Mohammed Hasan, he makes another attempt to cross the border. After he is again denied entry—his papers, he is told, are inadequate—he and his son sneak across the border. After meeting with Margaret, he sees Naseem, who runs out of the house to greet him before her brother tears her away and locks her up. Gian Singh informs them that his name is now Mohammed Hasan. He tells them that he fought for the freedom of India, returning an emotionally ruined man, and that Naseem had saved his life. In this scenario, the trauma of the war felt by the Sikh community and the Sikh soldiers is displaced onto the body of the Muslim woman, as the Sikh woman is missing from the narrative. Naseem, representing the Pakistani nation-state, as Indians treat her body as an extension of Pakistan, will save the Sikh nation. However, as Walker notes, “The emotional damage of his war experience is supposedly behind his love for Naseem, but his hurt never rings true.” I argue that his desperation to have Naseem back is to help him repress his memory of the war trauma. As Avtar had earlier said to him, “Let go of old memories, Gian …You’ll lose yourself.” As he himself says, he came back a ruined man from the war, but Naseem helped restore his manhood. The representation of Sikhs in the film harkens back to their status in colonial and postcolonial India. Sikhs never lost sight of the lost Anglo-Sikh wars, nor the status they “enjoyed” under the British. Once the Sikh Kingdom was lost, many 64

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put their faith in the British, but since they too left behind the chaos they created, the Sikhs transferred the angst, memory of trauma, onto women, be they from the Sikh nation or from the opposing nation, Pakistan. Some, like Gian and Boota, transferred them onto the Muslim woman’s body, and some onto the Sikh woman’s body, as in Pinjar and Khamosh Pani. The film dwells on the death of the Sikh man and the destruction of his body in some detail. After a few days, with Margaret’s help and her mother’s reluctant support, Naseem leaves for the railway station where her son and husband await her. Gian Singh leaves his son for a moment with Margaret to walk to the other platform to buy him some sweets. Naseem arrives and is joyously reunited with her son. Gian Singh and Naseem see each other from across the tracks. A train crosses. They run towards the passenger bridge and are reunited. Her brother enters the frame. A fight ensues. Gian grabs the brother from the back. The brother throws Gian off the bridge. He lands in front of the slowly approaching Indian train, which crushes him to death. Naseem watches in horror. Margaret, seeing her other brother arriving on the platform, quickly gathers the anguished Naseem and Vijay so they can board the train and leave. The next shot jumps to England. A restored Naseem, along with Margaret and Vijay, are represented sitting in an English garden. Naseem’s voiceover indicates that Walter, Margaret’s friend, had scattered Gian Singh’s ashes in Sirsa, now nourishing the land where a pipal tree, whose roots are deep, will sprout new trees. Symbolizing the defeated Sikh nation, Gian is first feminized as a British recruit, a servile servant of the British Empire, whose main job is to protect his officer. He suffers from post-trauma after the brutal war in Burma, as his recurring nightmares indicate. He is then abandoned by the departing British, embroiled in communal violence during the Partition, and then minoritized in the nation-state of India. Sikhs thus fall into a liminal national space. Gian’s conversion to Islam suggests Sikhs turning to Pakistan for support, particularly as Sarin, who is from the Indian diaspora, must have been aware of the 1984 Sikh Massacre and the subsequent Khalistani (Sikh separatist) Movement. As Zeeba T. Hashmi reports, Sikh separatists purchased weapons from Pakistan and many were allegedly trained by the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, the largest terrorist organization, operating mainly from Pakistan. However, Gian Singh being thrown in front of an oncoming Indian train by a Pakistani Muslim suggests that Sikhs are once again being sacrificed for political reasons, this time by Pakistan. Gendered and feminized in the film’s depiction, Sikh masculinity, represented by Gian, has no space for Sikh womanhood, and even though Shanti, Gian’s mother, who at first appears as a strong matriarch, opposing and then supporting her son and his wife, is soon reviled by Rani, a Hindu woman, for harboring a Muslim daughter-in-law. There appears to be no space for any other representation of Sikh women in the narrative, empowering or otherwise. Sarin attempts to give voice to repressed and traumatized subjects of memory, but since the available narratives continue to show Sikhs as either brutal murderers, or feminized victims, they disallow witnessing. 65

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Sarin, I claim, is unable to provide a “circuit of communication” and is unable to bear witness to the trauma of Partition, as his narrative, fragmented and dislocated, only leads to melancholia, and not to mourning. It creates a “short circuit” (Kacandes 56). The location at the end of the film in an English garden is tragic, as it displaces the trauma of Indian, and particularly Sikh, wounds on to an idealized location, that of England and Englishness. Working through traumatic memory involves critical thinking and self-awareness, which, I argue, Sarin lacks due to his idealization,10 as his narrative shows people as all good or all bad, but not as complex individuals. Thus, even though, as Susan Walker states, “Partition is the movie Sarin has been nurturing for decades, driven by his childhood memories of things he heard and saw,” his attempts appear only as repetition of the unresolved trauma. Walker adds: “Sarin was aiming for an epic and arrived at episodic. That might have been okay if the episodes weren’t so partitioned from each other, the flashbacks failing to illuminate the present action and the story suffering from too many disconnected narrative threads” (The Star). I argue that the fragmented narrative is due to Sarin’s own inability to work through the Partition and the 1984 traumas, and therefore the film and its representations, too, disallow resolution for traumatized Sikh viewing subjects. Jimi Mistry, in his role as a Sikh who is forced by circumstances, or for the love of a woman, to cut his hair and convert to Islam, fails to convince the audience, as his acting is wooden in most instances, and particularly so during the conversion scene when he cuts off his hair, which would be most traumatizing for a Sikh man. In a review of the film, Walker, noting the “artificiality and wooden acting” of the actors, writes: Jimi Mistry … wears the same pained expression on his face, whether he’s enraptured by Naseem or thinking back to his time at war … Strangely, with so many fine South Asian actors around, Sarin cast Kristin Kreuk, of Smallville, as the Muslim ‘child’ who becomes a woman and mother overnight. She too is given few dimensions and save for a couple of love scenes, is generally in a state of near-collapse. (Walker n.p.) In a similar vein, Naseem’s shock at her brothers’ violence and her ensuing confusion appears naive. When Gian is crushed under the moving Indian train, the audience—especially Sikhs—undergo “retraumatization” due to “over identification” (Hirsch, “Projected Memory” 16), as the Partition wounds and the violence of 1984 Sikh Massacre remain open for most Sikhs. In a review, Travis Mackenzie Hoover writes: “[Partition] is mostly a soap opera played at the wrong speed, with uselessly turgid situations facilitating whatever limp sensationalism can be had while the white tagalongs look on in condescending sympathy.” Thus, while the trauma of Partition is displaced onto the bodies of Sarin’s father’s Sikh friend and his Muslim lover who drowned, and is “subjectively lived” and “culturally shared” (E. van Alphen 37) by Sarin, he appears to be still “living in it,” precluding a “possibility of a 66

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distance from it,” thereby disallowing the possibility of providing a “narrative framework that makes use of the sequence [of] past, present, and future” (35). Such a narrative framework, as seen in the film, disallows working through and leads to retraumatization, particularly for the wounded Sikh audience. Released in 2001, Anil Sharma’s film Gadar: Ek Prem Katha,11 also inspired by the story of Boota and Zainab, and set during the Partition, represents the gendered identity of Sikhs, wherein the Sikh man is represented as hypermasculine, indeed supermasculine, as opposed to the “sensitive” and “self-sacrificing” Boota Singh and in opposition to the unassimilable Muslim, particularly Pakistani men, while Sikh women, once again, are missing within the film’s narrative space. Muslim women, or in particular one woman, appear merely as a conduit to be used by both patriarchies. Gadar is the story of a Jat Sikh truck driver, Tara Singh, who rescues and then falls in love with a Muslim woman, Sakina, who is accidentally separated from her parents during the Partition riots. The rest of the narrative mimics Boota Singh and Zainab’s story, but with a twist, as Tara, no self-sacrificing Sikh, enacts a terrifying fight to regain Sakina from her parents. While the narrative of the film, especially its depiction of violence, is long and drawn-out, it was a hit in India. It was reported that the film grossed around 70 crore rupees (it cost 18 crore rupees to make; one crore is roughly equivalent to $150,000 today) at the box office, making it one of the highest-grossing films in India. India’s Muslims protested against the anti-Muslim sentiment portrayed in the film. A news article reported that in Mumbai “the Maharashtra government refused to ban the film Gadar – Ek Prem Katha. On the demand for a ban on the film by certain religious groups and Janata Dal (S), the Maharashtra chief minister, Vilasrao Deshmukh, told that the government has no authority to do so” (Times of India, “Mumbai Cinema Halls”). As the sporadic protest against Gadar reached Mumbai, police were kept on alert. The joint commissioner, Y.C. Pawar, asked all police stations to heighten their vigilance following a protest note to the chief minister by the Muslim League’s Mumbai unit demanding a ban on Gadar (Sanjeev Srivastava). The Tribune online edition reported on June 25, 2001 that “miscreants set afire the cinema screen during the screening of the film ‘Gadar’ and damaged seats and furniture at a theatre in Sarkhej (in Ahmedabad) in city outskirts last night, protesting against some ‘objectionable’ dialogues, the police said today” (“Protest Against Gadar”). Such reports abounded during the showing of the film, yet the film was a resounding success in India. The audience loved Tara as the “ultraviolent” protagonist. According to a review by Shubra Gupta, “[the heroine’s] lissome look and her relationship with her burly Sikh caught the imagination of the audience, which was also wowed by the Pakistan-bashing lines mouthed by Sunny Deol [who plays Tara] and his sidekick.” Anil Sharma’s Gadar represents Tara Singh, the main character, played by a turban-wearing mona (clean-shaven) Sikh Sunny Doel, an enormously popular Bollywood actor, constructed in opposition to the bumbling Muslims. The film, I argue, is not so much about communalism or religious nationalism as it is 67

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about patriotic nationalism and patriarchal oppression, as represented by a hypermasculine Sikh man. Tara, a simple, sweet-natured, kind, and indeed poetic truck driver, who is overseeing transporting of goods to the Shimla’s New Era Women’s College, falls in love with one of the students, Sakina. She is from a rich Muslim family in pre-Partition India. After a few interactions, they exchange gifts upon parting when Sakina leaves for home from the hostel. When news of Partition reaches Pipla District, Miya Wali, Punjab, now in West Pakistan, Tara Singh’s parents and sisters, urged to leave for India by the army, unwillingly prepare for the journey, lamenting that they were not with their son in Amritsar, India. Communal riots are breaking out in the area. Tara Singh’s mother reluctantly gives packets of poison to his two sisters but breaks down crying and snatches them away from their hands; her husband, Gurdeep Singh, an amritdhari Sikh, gives the packets to his daughters, tearfully beseeching them to take the poison before the Muslims can defile them. Here, the honor of the community once again relies on the purity of the Sikh women’s bodies. A voiceover narrates the horrors of communal violence. A slowly moving line of refugees, with their meager belongings on their heads, is seen through a long shot. Their train, however, is attacked. An overhead shot shows the slowly snaking train suddenly surrounded by yelling Muslim men. The close-up of widened eyes of Muslim men, their swords aloft, yelling Allah-o-Akbar! is juxtaposed with the scared eyes of Tara’s father. An arc shot shows Muslim men running towards the train, swords aloft. They gruesomely slaughter Sikh men. A medium shot shows the image of his face framed by his daughters, cringing and cowering, holding on to their mother. A foreground shot focuses on the helpless parents’ faces. The door to their carriage opens and Muslim men, swinging their swords, slaughter Tara’s father. A Muslim man grabs at Tara’s sister. A close-up shot shows Tara’s sister’s face, her mouth wide open, a high scream filling the air. A high-angle shot shows blood gushing everywhere as red color fills the screen. The train slowly moves into the Amritsar station. It is filled with dead and bloodied bodies—a ghost train. A close-up of Tara’s eyes slowly widening and then filling with tears suggests he’s seeing the horror. A slow-motion shot shows Tara swinging a sword, slaughtering Muslim refugees at the station, yelling at the top of his voice. His face is contorted with anger. The camera cross-cuts to Ashraf Ali Khan, Sakina’s father. As a rich businessman, he is furious at being thrown out of India. He can’t believe he is losing his power. The shot composition shows Sakina’s ornately decorated and grand home. Khan reluctantly leaves for Pakistan along with his daughter, his wife, and a number of relatives. At the railway station, a medium shot is seen of Sikhs, swords aloft, running back and forth, Tara among them. Sword aloft, about to swing it, Tara sees that Sakina is hiding her face in terror, and freezes. Khan drags her to the waiting train. However, in the panic and rush, as she attempts to board the train, Sakina is separated from him and the rest of the family. Tara, waking on the train tracks, spots the wounded Sakina being chased by Sikhs. He protects her from the crazed crowd by lifting people up and flinging them across the station, as if he has 68

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superhuman strength, as if indeed he is a “Lion.” When the Sikhs persist in their attempt to rape Sakina, Tara Singh, charging like a bull and letting out a bloodcurdling bellow, grabs the sharp edge of the sword thrust at him by a Sikh, as blood drips from his wounds. When the Sikhs remind him that she is a Muslim and that her community had slaughtered and raped his family members, he smears his blood on the parting of her hair, declaring her married: a Sikhni; the word is a recent addition, as the term Sikh is gender neutral and applies to all genders. It is only with the Tat Khalsa/Singh Sabha reform movements that the term Sikhni has come into use. The blood on her forehead represents sindoor, the vermillion powder used by most married Hindu, and some Sikh, women, generally placed there the first time by the husband. In this representation, the hypermasculine “Lion” and “warrior” Sikh protects the weak. A few days later, Tara Singh yet again singlehandedly fights a band of angry Sikhs outside his home. He tells Sakina, who is now living in his home as his wife, that she need not fear him, as the marriage was an honor-saving act. Besides, he reminds her, she was too far above him in social rank, being from a rich and educated family, and was beyond his reach. He then recounts the tale of his family’s slaughter, flashing back to the dead bodies in the train. A few days later, Sakina, framed by the window grills, seemingly imprisoned, finds a red rose that she had given him months ago at their parting pressed between lines of a love poem. A medium shot shows her face, which is partly in shadows. The next shot, an overhead one, shows her face filling with light. Soft music is heard in the background. Sakina falls in love with Tara. However, still facing resistance from the community, Tara, at Sakina’s request, takes her to the Pakistani border, so that she may leave for Lahore. A song, partly sung by Tara, partly playing as background music, is heard as they make their trek: Musafir janey waley (Traveler, who is leaving). Sakina, visualizing her departure and separation from Tara with tears streaming down her face, puts her foot on the brake of the truck and stops it. Once at the border, Sakina refuses to leave for Lahore. “I will not go to Lahore,” she says. When he asks her why, saying that maybe she’s worried about her family, she bursts out crying, saying in English: “Will you please keep quiet? What do you think of yourself? You go on talking and talking without caring for anyone else’s feelings!” Then the dialogue continues in Hindi and she says, because you are a Jat, you want a traditional wife; I’m willing to be that traditional wife who will cook for you, do seva (service) for you, and if you wish, and here she smiles, once in a while, you can beat me as well. She then reaches her hand out to him, which he accepts. Wedding music plays in the background. As women sing wedding songs, a Sikh wedding ceremony commences and soon the marriage is consummated, and a son is born. While the song goes on, the son, now seven years old, sings Tara’s song that he used to sing to Sakina, years ago, in Shimla. In this film, as in Sarin’s Partition, the episodic nature of the narrative jars as the scenes of the wedding, childbirth, Sakina’s discovery of her parents’ whereabouts rush from frame to frame. As the wedding song ends, 69

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Sakina reads in a newspaper scrap that her father is still alive in Pakistan. She telephones Ashraf Ali Khan, now the mayor of Lahore, who arranges for her visit to Pakistan. As the travel paperwork for Tara and Charanjeet, her sevenyear-old son, appears incomplete, she reluctantly leaves with an assurance from Tara Singh that he will soon join her. She finds out in Pakistan that her father purposefully mismanaged her husband’s and son’s paperwork, because he hopes to arrange her marriage to a nephew. Realizing the plot from a telephone call from Sakina, Tara follows her illegally into Pakistan. Tara is caricatured as a superhuman in the next scene. He singlehandedly fights the many Pakistanis that Ashraf Ali Khan had brought with him, as though they were made of fluff and he of iron. The saying sava lakh se ek ladaun, tabhe Gobind Singh naam kahaun—when one (Sikh) fights with 125,000, then only will I call myself Gobind Singh (the last Sikh Guru’s sayings during the battles with the Mughal forces)—seems to come alive. Yet, it is not only the hypermasculinity of the Sikh that is troubling in this film. When Khan seems to repent and wishes to bring the couple together, he asks his son-in-law to first convert to Islam. Tara Singh agrees, which in and of itself is surprising, as he appears to be a strong and proud Sikh; he repeats, “Islam Zindabad” (long live Islam) and then “Pakistan Zindabad.” However, his patriotic nationalism is shown in excess, for when the father-in-law asks him to repeat “Hindustan Murdabad” (death to Hindustan), Tara Singh becomes so enraged and deranged that he pulls out a hand water pump from the ground, wielding it as a phallus, shaking it from his hips in a circular fashion and killing many Muslims at one go. That this film appeared a few years after the Sikh Massacre of the 1990s, which followed the 1984 state-sponsored Sikh genocide, suggests Sharma’s intent in separating Sikhism from Islam and the imagined Sikh nation, Khalistan, from Pakistan. Many in India blame Pakistan for supporting Sikh separatists during the Khalistani Movement. Somehow, in spite of what seems like an entire army unit, Tara Singh, Sakina, and their son escape, taking shelter in a poor farmer’s house. As the family hides in a farmer’s cottage, the farmer’s “greedy” wife demands Sakina’s jewelry as compensation. The next day, after the group leaves the farm, Sakina’s parents arrive, searching for their daughter. Upon the discovery of the jewels, Ashraf Ali Khan brutally beats the poor, albeit scheming, farmer’s wife. Finally, the fight scene that ensues on the train of runaway goods—cotton, sugar, and as one character playfully says, afeem (drugs)—is prolonged and excessively bloody, showing Tara Singh in a Rambo-like guise, singlehandedly, once again, killing hundreds of terrifying Muslim soldiers. Sakina, who so far has been only a backdrop, picks up the shovel to feed coal to the train engine and wields a gun to shoot at Muslim soldiers. Soon, however, Sakina is wounded, and the story takes a turn. Ashraf Ali Khan relents. The Sikh man is given the Muslim woman by her father as a legitimate wife and the family returns to India. The return of Sakina to Tara also signifies India’s desire to take back Pakistan. Thus, as can be seen from Gadar, particularly in the aftermath of the 1984 Sikh Massacre, the hypermasculine Sikh trope became highly popular. In the film, 70

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even though at first Tara Singh is represented as a gentle poet, he soon becomes a ferocious lion. As stated earlier, this film was a blockbuster, and Indian audiences, particularly the Sikhs, identified with the Tara Singh character in a nationstate that feminized and rendered the Sikhs weak. Released 54 years after the Partition, and in the aftermath of the 1984 Sikh massacre, the film should have allowed the Sikh audience, feminized as the Other of the majority Hindus and as victims after the genocide, release. However, I claim that the film was a success insofar as mainstream audiences view it as a Muslim/Hindu film, identifying with the main character Tara Singh, played by Sunny Doel, a mona Sikh, who is well-known as a romantic hero in Hindi cinema. I argue that successful witnessing for Sikhs is impossible due to the director’s too-close identification with the Sikhs’ and Partition traumas as the audience and the director become surrogate victims; the film allows too-easy access to the Partition trauma, leading to retraumatization, as seen from the riots and agitations that followed the film screening. The film, for obvious reasons, deviates from the Buta Singh–Zainab story, in which Buta Singh’s “self-annihilation marks a … gender reversal of dominant narratives that posits women as subjects/subjected of the ultimate sacrifice for marital loyalty (with sati as the major trope),” thereby marking him “deviant” (Paola Bacchetta 15), hence feminized—as also seen in Vic Sarin’s film Partition. “Collective violence” of the Partition has been, in the manner of the Jewish Holocaust, “collectively … homogenized … through languages of patriotism and betrayal in popular representations,” and hence representations about the violence of Partition through “cultural … [and] public memory” differ from the “sensory memory of individuals” (Das and Kleinman 13). For example, Khushwant Singh, the well-known author and columnist, underwent the Partition trauma and fictionalized it in Train to Pakistan (1956; see Chapter 6 of this book); he describes the Partition violence below: The June afternoon of 1947 remains etched in my mind [when] I heard an uproar. I ran up to the roof of my apartment. The sun burnt down fiercely over the city. From the centre billowed out a huge cloud of dense, black smoke. I did not have to make guesses; the Hindu-Sikh mohalla of Shahalmi was going up in smokes. (Khushwant Singh, “Last Days in Lahore” 432) While traveling to Abbottabad a few days later, at Taxila station, he “noticed the train halt at a signal. Sikhs were dragged out and killed.” As he walked to the train station to catch a train to Lahore, he was “surprised to see the road deserted. Suddenly a lorryload of Sikh soldiers pulled up and a lieutenant ordered [him] to get in. ‘Are you crazy?’ He shouted. ‘They have killed all Sikhs in neighboring villages and you are strolling” (Khushwant Singh, Outlook). Even though Singh’s “sensory memory” remained repressed, even after seeing the massacre as he “strolled” around in riot-torn areas, his fictionalized accounts create “cultural and public memory,” as I discuss in Chapter 5. I argue that in cultural 71

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memory, as seen in Tamas, Shaheed-e-Mohabbat Boota Singh, Partition, and Gadar: Ek Prem Katha, the writers and directors employ either the hypermasculine or the self-sacrificing trope, while in personal memory, the violence is repressed or rewritten and idealization takes place, as the discussion of Partition exemplifies, so that the memory of violence becomes if not palatable, at least less troubling.

Notes 1 Part of the discussion of Tamas was first published as Jaspal Kaur Singh, “Contrary Narrative Spaces and the Sikh Woman: Imperial Aftermaths in Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas and Gulzar’s Maachis.” Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory. 2:2 (2006): 125–134. I thank Routledge, Taylor & Francis Ltd, for permission to reproduce it here. 2 Nihangs are an order of Sikhs who follow a soldier lifestyle, as formed by Guru Gobind Singh. They wear blue robes accented by saffron and reject household comforts. They devote their lives to the service of gurudwara and Sikhism. 3 A similarly disturbing scene is represented in Bapsi Sidwa’s Cracking India, where the Sikhs, seen from a child’s perspective during the riots, are portrayed as sword-wielding, loose-haired rapists and murderers: “In fifteen minutes the village was swamped by the Sikhs—tall men with streaming hair and thick biceps and thighs, waving full-sized swords and sten-guns, roaring, ‘Bolay so Nihal! Sat Sri Akal’” (211). And then, as violence is unleashed on the Muslims, the Sikhs are described in the following manner: “The Sikhs were among them like hairy vengeful demons, wielding bloodied swords, dragging them out as a sprinkling of Hindus, darting about at the fringes, their faces vaguely familiar, pointed out and identified the Mussulmans by name” (213). The idea is, of course, that Hindus were too weak or effeminate to wield the swords, so the manly and hypermasculine Sikhs performed the duty. Sikhs are constructed as saint-soldiers in the Sikh historical narrative; in colonial narratives, Sikhs are constructed as warriors in opposition to the effete Hindus; however, in texts written outside India, particularly in Pakistan, the British construction of Sikhs as ferocious lions influences cultural production in stereotypical and simplistic ways. 4 Vic Sarin, in a phone conversation with the author on 13 March 2014 from his home in Vancouver, Canada. 5 Men giving a woman protection by literally putting a sheet over her. This ceremony was customary when a young wife became a widow in the house and one of the husband’s brothers, married or unmarried, would take her as his wife. 6 Butalia, who “pieced together this account from newspaper reports, books and an unpublished manuscript: Lahore: A Memoir by Som Anand,” writes that a film, Kartav Singh, was released in Pakistan (130). 7 Phone conversation, 13 March 2014. 8 Phone conversation, 13 March 2014. 9 For more on the weakened British empire after the second World War, see Margaret MacMillan’s report entitled, “Rebuilding the World after the Second World War.” 10 See, for example, Catherine Cameron’s Resolving Childhood Trauma: A Long-Term Study of Abuse Survivors for more on idealization. 11 Part of the discussion of Gadar was first published as Jaspal Kaur Singh, “The Construction of Sikh National Identity in Bhai Vir Singh’s Sundri and Anil Sharma’s Gadar: Ek Prem Katha,” Journal of Contemporary Thought (Special Issue: Thinking Territory: Some Reflections), 2009, pp. 250–261. I am thankful to Prafulla Kar for permission to reproduce it here.

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5 PARTITION NARRATIVES AND SIKH GENDERED IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION Memory of Violence in Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan

Written through memories of the Partition trauma ten brief years after the event, Khushwant Singh’s novel Train to Pakistan is set in a small village, Mano Majra, near the India–Pakistan border, during the summer of 1947. Through two primary figures, the narrative represents two aspects of the Sikh nation during the Partition. Juggat Singh, or Jugga, the local badmash from the rural area, symbolizes the feminine principle in Sikhism (Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh,The Feminine Principle 92), namely seva (service) and sangat (congregation), traditionally associated with the female gender, to which Jugga gives new meaning through his self-sacrificing act, as I discuss below. Iqbal, the modern, foreign-returned, western-educated, circumcised, Euro-interpellated (Ashcroft et al. 233), clean-shaven, shorthaired mona Sikh (241), symbolizes the altered ethos of the Sikh nation. In this chapter, I argue that Sikhs, gendered and feminized, are represented as either self-sacrificing, self-righteous, or inactive, while Sikh women, once again, are absent from the narrative and thus erased from dominant historiography and ideology, and repressed from memory. Khushwant Singh, journalist, columnist, historian, and award-winning novelist, was born in 1915 in Haladi in pre-Partition Punjab. He was educated at the Government College, Lahore, and at King’s College and the Inner Temple in London. Singh was awarded the third-highest civilian award in 1974, but in 1984 he returned it to protest Operation Blue Star, the central government’s brutal attack on the Sikh holiest site, the Golden Temple in Amritsar. Khushwant Singh, the remembering subject, through a fictionalized account narrativizes the Partition trauma as a “subject [who is] the effect of the discursive processing of [his] experiences” (Spitzer 25). As Spitzer, writing about the Jewish Holocaust, argues, “discourse plays a fundamental role in the process that allows experiences to come about and in shaping the form and content” (25). He adds, “[memory] is not the voluntary controlled retrieval of the past itself, but rather of the experience of the past,” and some of these experiences are “‘failed experiences,’ that is, trauma” (25). Partition trauma, like the Jewish holocaust, became 73

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“unrepresentable,” as survivors were unable to “express or narrate their past experiences … [due to] symbolic language [falling] short in its mimetic possibilities: the historical reality that has to be represented is beyond comprehension” (26). Khushwant Singh recollects the Partition in conflicted and ambiguous ways. His memory is fragmented, as the narrative regarding the communal tension and violence having little impact on him shows; although Singh was in the middle of the Partition communal violence and remembers seeing the Hindu-Sikh mohalla (area) of Shahalmi burning, from whose center he saw dark smoke rising on a mid-June afternoon, and the silent and hot sun burning down on the city in 1947. He recollects, the turmoil had little impact on the well-to-do who lived around Lawrence Gardens … We went about in our cars to our offices, [spent] evenings playing tennis at the Cosmopolitan or the Gymkhana Club, had dinner parties where Scotch … flowed like waters of the Ravi. In elite residential areas, the old bonhomie of Hindu-Muslim bahi Bhai-ism continued. (Khushwant Singh, “Last Days in Lahore”) The trauma seemed to have already split the narrator’s psyche. One afternoon, as Khushwant Singh was walking down to Taxila to board a train to Lahore as he had a legal case in Abbotabad, he found himself walking close to Mozang, a center of what he calls “Muslim Goondas (gangsters)”. Singh writes, “I was surprised to see the road deserted. Suddenly a lorryload of Sikh soldiers pulled up and a lieutenant ordered me to get in … Are you crazy?” the soldier shouted. “They have killed all Sikhs in neighboring villages and you are strolling.” (“Last Days in Lahore”) When he continued to travel in the train, “At Badami Bagh (station), there was another massacre. Locked in [his] first-class bogey, [he] neither saw nor heard anything” (“Last Days in Lahore”). After handing the house keys to his Lahore Muslim colleague and friend, “Manzur Qadir (later foreign minister of Pakistan),” who was returning from Shimla, Khushwant Singh drove to Delhi where “there wasn’t a soul on the 200-mile stretch” (“Last Days in Lahore”). He also remembers that on August 14, 1947, he was among the crowd of people who stood outside Parliament House in Delhi chanting “Bharat Mata Ki Jai” (Praise to Mother India) and marveled at Jawaharlal Nehru’s “Tryst with Destiny Speech” (“Last Days in Lahore”). While Khushwant Singh wrote the novel a mere ten years after the traumatic event, one can see his fragmentation right from the time of the Partition, as seen from the examples above, where he represses the knowledge of communal violence, which will be reflected in his text through ellipses and gaps. “Nostalgic memory” also provided him with “animating purpose” to reconstruct Sikhs’ identity in postcolonial India. According to Spitzer, Nostalgic memory … serves an important comparative and, by implication, animating purpose. It sets up the positive from within the ‘world of 74

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yesterday’ as a model for creative inspiration, and possible emulation, within the ‘world of the here-and-now.’ And, by establishing a link between a ‘self-in-present’ and an image of a ‘self-in-past,’ nostalgic memory also plays a significant role in the reconstruction and continuing of individual and collective identity. (original emphasis 92) As a postcolonial subject within the nation-state of India, and as a minority ethnic Sikh subject, his attempts at recovering the intrinsic goodness of subaltern subjects, such as the “self-sacrificing” Juggat Singh, points to his attempts at situating Sikhs as normative and non-violent within the troubled postcolonial Indian nation-state, while the western-educated and logical Iqbal, mimicking the author’s own inaction during the Partition violence, will remain suspended in an in-between space, as I discuss below. Since the Partition, Sikhs, within Punjab and within India, have inhabited an uneasy space, as religious minorities and as “traitors” who had supported the British during the first Independence Movement of 1857. I argue that due to the trauma of Partition and as a remembering subject, Khushwant Singh’s narrative is elliptical and fragmented. The novel is set during the Partition in a town all but forgotten by the colonial authorities. Apparently, all the communities coexisted peacefully for generations. The village of Mano Majra, the setting of the novel, is portrayed in idyllic terms with Sikhs and Muslims present in about equal numbers and sharing common rituals. For example, Lala Ram Lal, the local moneylender and a Hindu, dwells harmoniously with members of other religious groups, as represented by the veneration of a deity, a “large slab of sandstone that stands upright under a keekar tree beside the pond [where] Hindu, Sikh, Muslim or pseudo-Christian— repair secretly whenever they are in a special need of a blessing” (Khushwant Singh, Train to Pakistan 6). In other words, everyone in the village worships a spirit and therefore, there is no religious division. The idyllic nature of the setting can be seen as “nostalgia” where the remembering subject, according to Spitzer, “[takes] refuge in an idealized past while avoiding a critical examination of and engagement with the present” (92). As can be seen in the setting of the novel, Khushwant Singh, even ten years after the event, is unable to name the communal tension. The setting of the novel provides a link between the “world of yesterday” and the “world of the here-and-now” through the trope of the railway tracks and the trains that run through the village, Mano Majra, which was known for its railway station, for when night falls and all is silent, the sound of the train going through the quiet night is heard loud and clear (6). While the train represents modernity and industrialization in dominant ideology, it also symbolizes destruction, ultimately bringing death to the community through the arrival of the Ghost Trains. These trains were sent across the border by Muslim Pakistanis with dead bodies of both Hindus and Sikhs. The audience is introduced to two Sikhs, Iqbal and Juggat, when the rich moneylender Lala Ram Lal is murdered. 75

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Juggat is the local badmash (a gangster), and Iqbal, the newly arrived westernized social worker, speaking English and acting posh; they both end up in jail, suspected of being involved. At the time, the magistrate Hukum Chand is organizing the relocation of Muslims from Mano Majra to Pakistan. When the murder took place, Iqbal had just arrived from the city, while Juggat was out in the fields with his Muslim lover Nooran. Juggat’s group, a bunch of dacoits, bandits, frame him by throwing stolen bangles in his yard, as he had earlier refused to participate in the murder. They throw some stolen gold bangles over the wall of his home, yelling, “wear these bangles,” at once feminizing and Othering him for his relationship with a Muslim, Nooran, while planting evidence against him. Thus, Sikhs, one representing the uneducated masses, the emotional side, the other the educated, secular, and restrained side, who might object to the relocation of Muslims, are conveniently removed from the troubled social and political space. When he first enters the jail in Chundunnugger, the police mockingly welcome Juggat, who is already notorious as Number Ten—his prison registration number—and, before him, his father Alam Singh, who was charged with robbery and hanged for murder. Juggat Singh’s mother had to mortgage her meager land to pay the lawyers to try to get Alam out of prison. Juggat, apparently, turns to docioty to “redeem the land” (84), but ends up in jail, time and time again. When one of the policemen jocularly comments that Juggat thinks the jail is his fatherin-law’s house, as he returns there so often, Juggat replies that he is back for seducing policemen’s daughters (96). Juggat, a poor landless farmer in colonial India, knows his reality and his position in the social system of India, so he reacts passively to the police. Khushwant Singh writes, The treatment he had received from the police had not made any difference to him. His equation with authority was simple: he was on the other side. Personalities did not come into it. Sub-inspectors and policemen were people in khaki who frequently arrested him, always abused him, and sometimes beat him. Since they abused him and beat him without anger or hate, they were not human beings with names. They were only denominations one tried to get the better of. (Train to Pakistan 235) Juggat depersonalizes his oppressor, as he himself has been objectified by them. However, when the tongawala (horse carriage driver) Bhola insults Muslims, knowing Juggat’s relationship with Nooran, Juggat responds furiously that if his hands were free, he would have broken all the bones in his body (94). The uneducated Sikh man is represented as simple and violent at the same time. He will not react against his own oppressors, but when it comes to the oppression of others, seen in the above example as horizontal hostility, he will use physical force. Iqbal, on the other hand, will remain inactive even in the face of communal violence, signifying Khushwant Singh’s own subject position during the Partition violence. In the author’s own experiences of the Partition trauma, in his writing 76

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about it and the role of Sikhs in it, “symbolic language” is inadequate “at that moment” (Spitzer, original emphasis 26). In an interview, Khushwant Singh states that he was “surprised to see the road deserted” even though he knew that violence was erupting all over Lahore as it is “etched” in his mind (“Last Days in Lahore”). Thus, as Spitzer notes, “It is not the nature of the event, nor an intrinsic limitation of representation; rather, it is the split between the living of an event and the available forms of representation with/in which the event can be experienced” (27). Khushwant Singh is unable to assimilate the violence of the Hindu/Sikh vs. Muslim killings. He has become a split remembering subject. According to Spitzer, Experience of an event or history is dependent on the terms the symbolic order offers. It needs these terms to transform living through the events into an experience of the event. To be part of an event or of a history as an object of its happening is not the same as experiencing it as a subject. The notion of experience already implied a certain degree of distance from the event; experience is the transposition of the event to the realm of the subject. Hence the experience of and event is already a representation and not the event itself. (Spitzer 27) Khushwant Singh, in his experience of representing the trauma of Partition, stalled for nine years before he was able to fictionalize it. He elides many moments due to his inability to experience them as he becomes an “ambiguous subject” of language—as neither the “speaking subject … [nor] object in relation to the events (30). Because of the communal violence that Khushwant Singh heard about and saw, and because “experience and memory are enabled, shaped, and structured according to the parameters of available discourse” (van Alphen 1999, 36), what he witnessed at the time of violence did not provide him an adequate vocabulary, hence the fictionalization of the event through Train to Pakistan. Even though the narrative is elliptical and full of gaps, it adds to cultural memory and history. As a remembering subject of trauma of a “charged historical episode,” Khushwant Singh creates “narrative obstacles” within the fictional text at “crucial dramatic juncture around the most painful issue” (Kacandes 63), as I discuss below regarding Juggat’s sacrifice. Khushwant Singh sets the scene of the novel’s beginning through symbolic language of violence: “The summer of 1947 was not like other Indian summers. Even the weather had a different feel … It was hotter than usual, and drier and dustier. And the summer was longer … the sparse clouds [casting] only shadows. There was no rain” (Singh, Train to Pakistan 1). The author displaces the violence onto the landscape, almost as narrative obstacles, disallowing identification. Juggat, the big badmash, taller than most men in the village (63) but ultimately a self-sacrificing Sikh man who saves a trainload of Muslims crossing over to Pakistan, believes in fate and destiny. Iqbal, the social 77

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worker from the People’s Party of India (89), understands that it is the colonial institutions that have created the badmash in Juggat. Juggat, knowing about the dominant ideas of karma and dharma, says, “No, Babu Sahib … it is our fate” (85). He says that the fate is written on his forehead and on the lines on his palms. Indicating that he is only profitably employed when there is work in the fields, he suggests that it is the months in-between when things are slow and money is scarce when he gets into trouble with the law (85). The ideas of karma and dharma were used by religions to dupe the poor and uneducated polity, and in Sikhism, Nanak, the first guru, created a religion where ideas such as dharma and karma, blind faith and ritualism, were to be abolished. However, poor and rural Sikhs still believe in the false ideas of dharma and karma. While Iqbal represents colonialism’s logic and mind, Juggat continues to see himself in terms of his bodily functions within the ethos of rural India; neither Juggat nor Iqbal is a protagonist to be admired, to be identified with. While Khushwant Singh remained suspended in the middle between seeing and unseeing during the Partition violence, he rationalizes his inactivity through the westernized Iqbal and through his fictionalized account of the communal violence: Communal riots, precipitated by reports of the proposed division of the country into a Hindu India and a Muslim Pakistan, had broken out in Calcutta, and within a few months the death toll had mounted to several thousand. Muslims said the Hindus had planned and started the killing. According to Hindus, the Muslims were to blame. The fact is, both sides killed. Both shot and stabbed and speared and clubbed. Both tortured. Both raped. (Train to Pakistan 1) Iqbal, modern and egalitarian, a real “babu,” who does not believe in the caste system, travels to Mano Majra in a train. Finding the train crowded and unbearable, he wants to describe the trip as “insufferable,” but because of “the limits to which human endurance could be stretched in India” he realizes that “the word [is] meaningless” (60). He even rationalizes his own discomfort away as he feels there is no language to describe it in India. When he reaches Mano Majra, and finding out that there are no hotels, Iqbal makes his way to the gurudwara. When he offers his name to Bhai Meet Singh, the temple priest, the Bhai asks, “Iqbal Singh?” (36). He doesn’t respond, and is relieved when the Bhai doesn’t pursue the discussion further. He knows that his name could be Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh, as the name is common for all three communities (36). Khushwant Singh himself is marked as a Sikh, being a keshdhari (long hair and beard) Sikh, complete with a turban. Yet, as an upper-class Sikh, the Partition violence seems to pass him by, and for a time he continues on as before (“Last Days in Lahore”). Thus, within the novel, when Partition mayhem occurs and Iqbal could save innocent Muslims by confronting the mob that plans to attack them, he debates and procrastinates. Should he sacrifice his life by facing the 78

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Hindu and Sikh mob, telling them they are wrong and immoral, and if they shoot him down, should he fall down with dignity, even though there would be no one around to see his “supreme act of sacrifice” (244)? He is sure he will be killed, one way or the other, for they “would strip him and see. Circumcised, therefore Muslim” (244). As a shaved and circumcised Sikh, along with being westernized, his inner Cunningham (see discussion in Chapter 3), internalized colonialism for the split colonial subject, makes an appearance when a ghost train, filled with slaughtered Sikhs and Hindus, makes an appearance at Mano Majra. The train arrives late, disrupting the routine of the Mano Majrans, who time their daily lives with the arrivals and departures of the trains. It is only after they smell burning flesh that, investigating the stench, they find that officials are cremating the bodies. As tension mounts and many, along with Malli and his gang—Iqbal’s former gang members—prepare to retaliate, Iqbal begins to have an inner debate regarding the pros and cons of taking action. He wonders about the purpose of sacrifice. He feels that the point of sacrifice is the sole purpose. “For the purpose, it is not enough that a thing is intrinsically good; it must be known to be good” (225). He wonders how it would be enough to know within oneself that one is right, as the satisfaction of knowing “would be posthumous … [as] you would be dead” (225). Along the lines of sacrifice, he thinks that the act can only be useful if those acted upon are ready to be receptive (225). As such, he decides not to act as his life would be wasted upon a few “subhuman species” who were killing each other mindlessly, and decides that it would be only “a mild setback to the annual increase of four million” (244). And so, he does nothing. Many during the riots were unable, unwilling, or simply powerless to intervene in the face of brutality. Khushwant Singh, a member of the elite Indian class, remembers life continuing on as before for him while India burned. He writes that by July 1947, narratives about the violence in east Punjab against Muslims were rampant, and the last time he went to High Court, Sikh students belonging to the National Congress were arrested. They were charged with killing Muslim men. (Outlook). Why were the Sikhs being targeted? Why did they not receive any help from the police? Khushwant Singh remembers that over 80 percent of Punjab police were Muslim, and the state government was predominantly Muslim as well. The situation was the same in western Punjab. Hindus and Sikhs began moving out of those areas that were Muslim dominated, as my parents had done in 1947 when they left Rawalpindi to move back to Burma (see the Introduction to this book). Most Hindus and Sikhs moved to safer areas around eastern Punjab. (Outlook). Chris Everett, head of CID in Punjab, who had studied law with Khushwant Singh in London, advised him to leave Lahore. Khushwant Singh, along with his wife, took a train to Kalka. His children were sent ahead to safety with their grandparents. From Kalka, they went to Delhi by car. (Outlook). Mass migration continued throughout the early months of 1947, as seen by my grandparents’ and parents’ example (see Introduction). Khushwant Singh, although aware of the political situation and the violent atmosphere, either did not remember seeing or 79

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hearing anything, or was like other well-to-do citizens who did not themselves face violence, and continued to go to work or the club, drinking scotch. Did he, at that time, debate about the issue as Iqbal does? Did he remember clearly, or did he repress some of his memories? Kacandes argues that traumatized subjects of a “charged historical episode” often create “narrative obstacles” within the fictional text at a “crucial dramatic juncture around the most painful issue” (63), so Iqbal sees Indians as “subhuman species” and does nothing to prevent carnage. In this example, Khushwant Singh, the author, is unable to dramatize the trauma of communal violence, either because he repressed his own memories, or is transferring the trauma onto the logical Iqbal. When Muslims from Mano Majra, relocated to the refugee camp, are being transported to Pakistan by train, Malli and his gang prepare to loot and brutalize them. And in contrast to Iqbal, Juggat becomes angered at the gang and concerned for the Muslim refugees. His body large and formidable (254), he steps into the gurudwara to ask Meet Singh, the Bhai, to recite to him from the gurugranth before he takes action (254). As a simple farmer, he still needs religious sanction to do a good deed. Meet Singh obliges and reads from the holy book. Most Sikhs, believing in eternal truth and seeing the interconnections between all beings, believe in dharma and karma. As the language of the Gurugranth is hard for lay people to understand, Juggat asks Meet Singh the meaning of the reading. Meet Singh simplifies it for him by saying that if he were to do something good, God will help him, and if he does something bad, God will block his progress (256). Saying Sat Sri Akal, meaning “truth shall prevail,” a common Sikh greeting, to the Bhai and to the sleeping Iqbal, Juggat disappears into the night. The rural Sikh will either kill or be killed. Khushwant Singh seems to suggest that uneducated and emotional people enacted the violence that occurred during the Partition. Malli and his gang, full of anger and excitement at the prospect of looting and raping, sling a rope across the bridge where the train is going to pass. The rope will slow down or stop the train and they will begin the attack. It is now dark. Nooran, Juggat’s lover, is on the train. Earlier, risking her father’s and other Muslims’ wrath, Nooran had visited Juggat’s mother, informing her that she is pregnant with Juggat’s baby. If she goes to Pakistan, she will be murdered if she is found out, or she might be married off (190). After extracting a promise that Juggat will come and fetch her, she leaves, packs her meager luggage, loads it on a buffalo, and for expediency, carries a shard of “mirror” (191) in order to commit suicide and save her honor, if the need arises. Here, Juggat and Nooran’s child represents religious and cultural syncretism, pointing to “nostalgic memory,” which allows the author and the readers to “transcend recent history [of violence and divisions] by reconnecting them to broadly shared values,” through what Spitzer calls “cultural resistance and cultural survival” (original emphasis 96). Yet, as represented in Nooran’s “piece of broken mirror,” where many women committed suicide to protect the honor of their communities, the text also points to “Critical memory—memory incorporating the negative and 80

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the bitter from the immediate past” (96), as Khushwant Singh, writing in 1958, was certainly aware of women’s bodies, Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus, brutalized or killed by their own family members in the name of communalism and community honor. Juggat, feminized, like Roop in What the Body Remembers (see Chapter 3 of this book), represents the body of the Sikh nation; Iqbal, the logical and educated one, on the other hand, represents the mind, as Sardarji, along with Cunningham (What the Body Remembers), present in equal measure in Iqbal, represent the mind of the emergent post-colonial India. When Juggat was in jail, he had asked Iqbal to teach him the “git-mit” (English) talk, to teach him a few words in English, like “Good morning”, as he thinks knowing English in New India will mean he is educated; the narrator notes that those who did clerical work, writing letters in Urdu and Gurmukhi were “literate, but uneducated” (155).1 He is Othered as the uneducated lumpen. The night of the planned train attack by a group of Sikhs in retaliation for the ghost train, Iqbal, having debated and philosophized over various potential actions, unable to decide on one definitive one, falls asleep; the action shifts to the dark night. It is a dark night with the moon rising and showing everything in a pale light (261). The narrative bears the burden of lapsed memory and traces of it appear in the description. Malli and his gang, hiding in the shrubbery with their assorted weapons, plan to derail the train (262). They see a lone man—a “big man … climbing on the steel span” of the bridge, “[stretching] himself on the rope” and “slashing away [at it]” (262). It is deduced by the reader that it is Juggat, for he is one of the tallest Sikhs in the community. Malli and his gang shout at him to stop, but the figure continues to slash the rope. Malli takes aim and shoots, hitting his mark (264). As the man’s hands begin to slide off the rope, he grips it harder and hacks at it with a kirpan (an article of Sikhs’ faith) and his teeth, and as the engine barrels towards him, the volley of shots weaken his grip, and the “rope [snaps] in the center [and] he [falls]. The train [goes] over him, and … on to Pakistan” (263). The rural uneducated lumpen Sikh sacrifices himself for the good of the enemy community. Thus, Khushwant Singh’s text creates what Kacandes calls “narrative obstacles” where the text “no longer has access to [the protagonist’s] psyche” due to “narrative indirectness” (63). We assume it is Juggat. We think it is him slashing at the rope. We know that it is Juggat’s body that the train crushes. Kacandes adds, “displacement and disassociation” occur at critical moments in the text where the action is not “witnessed directly,” but only through “its effect on others” (63). At this point in the narrative, the audience only indirectly witnesses the outcome of Malli’s shots. The shots supposedly hit the target as the train goes over Juggat’s body. The audience still assumes it is Juggat, but is not certain. As Kacandes claims, “Gaps are imposed” in the narrative for the readers due to the “ellipses” as the “text too is blinded by shock—traumatized—and therefore neither witnesses nor transmits to us the site of transgression” (64). The audience is not provided the details or a glimpse of Juggat’s death. 81

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I argue that Khushwant Singh’s text is a type of traumatic narrative, as it does not transmit the story of Juggat’s sacrifice and death directly due to suppression. In this way, to paraphrase Kacandes, the “incommensurability of the crimes [of Partition] and … the presence of trauma … [assigns] guilt and victimhood … to … society as a whole. The society is the perpetrator. The society is the victim” (65). Society, or the uneducated masses, perpetrated violence against each other, or so the narrative suggests. The lone person who acts is hidden in the dark and practically unrepresentable. Kacandes argues about the Holocaust narratives that such “indirectness, euphemisms, and elision, precludes … the reader-scholar’s involvement,” leading to her inability to become a textual witness (65). Thus, as a postmemory scholar, I, as a critical reader-scholar, have to fill the gaps in order to perform narrative witnessing. Khushwant Singh, who is representing his trauma through narrative memory, allows readers/scholars/ critics to read the gaps and connect the circuit, and provide another narrative—for trauma, as Kacandes argues, must be narrativized for it to heal (67). In my “textual witnessing” of the novel, making sense of Khushwant Singh’s privileged upbringing and his being untouched by the Partition violence, his non-involvement in the struggles at the moment of fracture will have to include his representations; Khushwant Singh’s own position during the Partition, where he appeared unaware of the violence, is represented by Iqbal; however, he displaces his trauma onto the idealized figure of Juggat, a self-sacrificing Sikh, one who embodies Sikhism’s ideals of seva, symbolizing the Sikh nation, and thus, by extension, the millions of Sikhs who were slaughtered (senselessly) and who were displaced. As a “scholar/critic,” I see that Khushwant Singh, having seen the Partition violence or the threat of it, through his repression and displacement, posits, in the elliptical text, the idea that the Sikhs died so that others could be protected. They died so another nation could be born. In the case of the novel, it is Pakistan; in historical narratives, it is India. As a survivor, and due to the disruption of memory, he is unable to see or show the slaughter or death of Sikhs in a direct way as his “memory is disrupted,” severing the past from the present (Brison 39): “Locked in [his] firstclass bogey, [he] neither saw nor heard anything” (Khushwant Singh, “Last Days in Lahore”), although he was aware of the violence occurring in the streets; he, however, by “transforming … memories of traumatic events … themselves uncontrollable, intrusive, and frequently somatic” (Brison 39) into a text that can be witnessed by others, can reconstruct the subject of trauma and, by extension, the survivors of cultural trauma and violence. In Chapter 6, I shall examine Amrita Pritam’s Partition narrative in Pinjar: The Skeleton (1950) to discuss the reconstruction of the self for the survivors of personal and cultural trauma and their narrativization to address successful and unsuccessful witnessing.

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Note 1 Once engaged to Sardarji, Roop learns the “git-mit” (7) talk, to speak English, saying “How do you do?” and “Delighted to meet you” (105), and in postcolonial India, because she knows English, she can turn “the energy of [her] youth, [her] ambition for [herself] to ambition for [Sardarji]” (468), who now represents the new nation (What the Body Remembers).

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Amrita Pritam’s Pinjar: The Skeleton (first published in 1950) and her poetry represent the author’s memory of the Partition violence that she witnessed as a young Sikh woman, showing her attempts to transform the trauma into narrative and cultural memory. Sikh women, who became objects of others’ agency, particularly through the rhetoric of nationalism,1 attempt to transform themselves as agents of their own identities by recovering repressed memories and retelling them, aiming to reconnect with “the rest of the humanity” (Brison 40). What is involved in the reconstruction of the self for cultural and personal trauma survivors? According to Susan Brison, the “self is undone” and is unable to “envision a future” if memory of the past is “radically disrupted” and the “past is [severed] from the present” (39). Yet, many survivors of trauma are slowly able to reconstruct their lives. To transform oneself from victim to survivor, trauma must become narratable, so that witnessing can occur and the traumatized subject can heal. In order to remake oneself, the trauma survivor must shift from being an object to a subject. According to Brison, to “remake the self in trauma” or “to [remaster] traumatic memory,” trauma survivors must use their own words rather than the perpetrators’ to reconstruct themselves (39). The act of bearing witness to trauma facilitates this shift as the trauma, made narratable, becomes part of cultural memory. Brison, writing about Holocaust memory, discusses the act of bearing witness through narrative memory: [It does so by not only] transforming traumatic memory into a coherent narrative that can then be integrated into the survivor’s sense of self and view of the world, but also by reintegrating the survivor into a community, reestablishing connections essential to selfhood … Narrative memory is not passively endured; rather, it is an act on the part of the narrator, a speech act that defused traumatic memory, giving shape and a temporal order to the events recalled, establishing more control over their recalling, and helping the survivors to remake a self. (Brison 40)

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In reading her texts, I argue that Pritam, who witnessed Partition violence, attempts to reintegrate her fragmented self through two of the female characters, Pooro and Kammo, her mirror images (Lacan)2 in Pinjar. She tries to “reestablish connections essential to selfhood” in the narrative. In the remaking of the self, the traumatized subject first recalls collective memory, as “All memory of (human inflicted) trauma—whether traumatic memory or narrative memory—is cultural memory … as traumatic events are initially experienced in a cultural context” (Brison 42). Pritam, born in 1919 in Gujranwala, Punjab, now part of Pakistan, reimagines being born during the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh Massacre.3 She states, “The air burning with pain was mixed with the smell of mitti (earth)” (Datta 5). During the pre-Partition communal tensions, she sees the symbolic destruction of communal harmony where she compares the nation to a tree infested by termites to its very roots (Pinjar 9). As a young woman, she was already deeply aware of colonial and communal violence. Pritam’s poems are scattered with signs of her traumatic fragmentation from the time when women’s bodies were constructed through violence, as a new nation-state was being created. It was communal and sexual violence that led to the birth of the free nations, India and Pakistan. In 1947, Pritam claims, “Lahore was turned into a graveyard. It was the politics of hate that swept Lahore in flames; at night one would see houses being in flames, hear cries of desperation, and witness long hours of curfew during the day” (Datta 14). As a traumatized subject, Pritam tries to repress the screams in the daytime, but seeing the violence and murder of community members, she is undone. Remembering the Partition violence, she retells it years later to Nonica Datta: In Lahore, at night, I … could hear those shrieks which got suppressed in the day-long curfew … Expecting my second child, I often went for a walk on the Mall road, an exclusive place in Lahore. There one day I saw a Sikh running around, with a knife pierced into his stomach. I immediately rushed back, and never stepped out of the house thereafter. At night, I would watch Lahore burning from my rooftop. (Datta 5) Although she witnessed the wounded Sikh man, at night she could distance herself from the horror of the riots, seeing it from afar. The city was in flames and women were being abducted, raped, and murdered in their thousands. When the news of the mayhem reached Pritam, she thought it was temporary madness (5). Like Khushwant Singh (discussed in Chapter 5), she too became split, reconstructing Pooro’s abduction as love (Pinjar) due to the trauma of the Sikh and Partition violence, as I discuss further below. After the March/April riots, when my parents marched through the night with their infant daughters and old parents, fleeing from the Partition violence in West Punjab, Rawalpindi district, Pritam, pregnant with her second child, left Lahore along with her small child and husband. “She did not take her winter clothes, 85

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and left with only a red shawl” (5), which she cuts up into three pieces: one for her and the others for her husband and child. My grandmother, too, had retrieved her dowry phulkari shawl from her trunk to carry with her through the dark night. However, years later, the shawl was unable to give us warmth, as we, refugees from Burma in India, had cut it into little pieces in India to decorate our small and bare apartment when we became refugees, using it to cover her new metal trunk in our exiled land, India (see the Introduction to this book). Shauna Singh Baldwin drapes her shawl around her shoulders to write about Sikh trauma and gender violence (as I discuss in Chapter 3). Pritam’s Punjabi shawl, the phulkari, symbolizing communal honor,4 warmth, and sense of belonging to an ancestral place and culture, is cut up into pieces, symbolizing the fragmenting of Sikh gendered identity and the destruction of the idea of honor for the Sikhs in Punjab, and particularly the displaced. In May of 1947, Pritam travels to Delhi from Dehradun.5 In Delhi, “homeless people with vacuous looks—observed the land, where they were being labeled refugees … in their own country—people without a country” (Datta 5). Repressed trauma and violence that Pritam suffered during the Partition begin to resurface on a train ride. She describes how she saw the pitch darkness of the night like a sign of the times. So piercing were the sighs the winds carried and echoed, it seems I was back in mourning over the watershed of history. The trees loomed larger and larger like sentinels of sorrow. There were patches of stark aridity in between like the mounds of massive graves. (Datta 12) As the train journey continues, Pritam, thinking about the thousands of butchered men and the innumerable abducted and raped women, begins ruminating about the Muslim Sufi poet Waris Shah (1722–1798) and his epic poem “Hir and Ranjha,” particularly its qissa tradition in Punjab about the tragic love story of the star-crossed lovers. She thinks about Waris Shah’s poem, about his poetic rendering of love and choice, about Hir’s poisoning by her uncle who objected to their love, and Ranjha’s subsequent suicide; that tragedy echoes in her body. She then takes out her pen and writes the famous Waris Shah poem, “Aj Akhan Waris Shah Noon” (“I ask Waris Shah today”): “But who would lament the plight of millions of Hirs today? … In the moving train, my trembling fingers moved on to describe the pangs I went through” (Datta 6). I ask Waris Shah today, To speak from the graveyards And turn another page From the book of love. When one Punjab’s daughter cried, You wrote paeans of laments. 86

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Today a hundred thousand daughters are crying Out to you. Rise, sharer of sorrows Rise and behold our Punjab Fields are spread with corpses, And blood fills the Chenab. (Datta 5, my translation) The repressed memory of the Partition violence slowly takes shape as she reimagines the raped, violated, and dead women of Punjab. Thus began Pritam’s journey of traumatic memory recall. Expanding on Kacandes’ claim that “trauma must be narrativized for healing to take place” (6), I argue throughout this book that repressed memory of violence and trauma must be made narratable and become part of cultural memory for healing to occur. The Partition violence and trauma, to a large extent, remains repressed; however, my attempts at locating some of the voices from the Partition, such as Pritam’s, and interpreting them to create a circuit of communication with the traumatized communities, particularly the Sikhs, will hopefully lead to healing. For healing to take place, trauma must be narrated, and Pritam’s Pinjar, her poems, her literature, form personal and cultural memory for the traumatized Sikh subject, and for the violated and wounded Sikh community. She writes about the pangs she felt, and so, although her traumatic memories are transformed into narrative memory, they veer towards the imaginary rather than symbolic representations. As Brison argues, “A primary distinguishing factor of traumatic memories is that they are more tied to the body than are narrative memories” (Brison 42). Translating traumatic memory into narrative memory was no easy task for Pritam. As she tries to translate traumatic memory to reinscribe herself, her body gets in the way. “Trauma,” according to Brison, “undoes the self by breaking the ongoing narratives, severing the connections among remembered past, lived present, and anticipated future” (41). Pritam’s trauma takes many turns as she attempts to break connections to her past. Writing about Pritam, Khushwant Singh states, “In Delhi, she made a decision to wipe out her past. She cut off her hair and became a heavy smoker” (Outlook n.p.). Due to the repressed memories of Partition violence, Pritam constructs for herself an alternative identity, a modern and postcolonial one. Like Roop in What the Body Remembers, she attempts reinscription on her body. Here, Pritam’s acts of leaving her husband, cutting her hair, smoking cigarettes, and moving from Punjab to Delhi are signs of her attempts to overcome her trauma. One of her attempts to overcome her trauma appears as identification with the globally oppressed womanhood, which she writes in one of her poems entitled “Me,” where she writes about violated women as her contemporaries: for example, when there is death in Hanoi, she writes, it also strikes at the same time in Prague, and each time, her selfhood dies (Pritam). 87

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She identifies with violence and brutality in the global arena, but words of empowerment are “killed” before they can be manifested, and if they are manifested, they are about violence where the individual is murdered; she fears her individualism might also die one day. Like an object of someone else’s speech act, Pritam, a product of colonial and patriarchal trauma, does not see herself as a subject with agency. While acknowledging that she writes protest poems against women’s oppression as an “individual,” she hastens to add: “But not militant Marxist protest, as someone has written. I am too much of an individualist to be a Marxist poet. Wherever I went in East Europe last year, I kept stressing this individualism that we have and cherish in India” (Pritam, “Of Pain and Protest”). Refusing to see postcolonial neocolonialism and embracing colonial liberal modernity and ideas of individualism, this subject of violent history remains fragmented; and thus, as we shall see, she will valorize western ideas of love over Indian practices of arranged marriages in her novel. However, as a fragmented postcolonial subject, who states she is not a Marxist, she will still highlight the economic exploitation of the colonized Indians under British colonialism and the cyclical oppression of the most disenfranchised— women—through communal and sexual violence in Punjab in Pinjar. Pritam’s 1950 Punjabi novel Pinjar was translated into English in 1987 by Khushwant Singh, who, besides writing a seminal text on the Partition, Train to Pakistan, also wrote a number of articles on Amrita Pritam. In Pinjar, Pritam displaces the traumatic memory of gender violence that she witnessed onto the violated and skeletal body of Pooro, a Punjabi Hindu woman, who is abducted by a Muslim man during the Partition. At the time of her abduction, she is engaged to be married to Ram Chand, a Hindu man. In an interview where she discussed Pinjar, Pritam claims that young Punjabi Hindu Pooro’s abduction by a Muslim man, Rashid or Rasheeda, had nothing to do with “religion or politics.” About Pooro learning to love her abductor, and never wanting to hurt him or punish him, Pritam provides justification: “Women never do anything bad to their husbands, particularly ones forced upon them” through arranged marriages; they eventually love them for their “good qualities” (“Of Pain and Protest”). Thus, Pritam’s narratives locate trauma on the bodies of Indian women within heteropatriarchal constructs, and not within the historical reality of the brewing pre-Partition gender and sexual violence. In her reading, Poora is no longer a subject of history, but an object of patriarchal values. Abductions and arranged marriages are equated, which, in my reading, suggests Pritam’s internalization of colonialism’s binaries of love vs. arranged marriages prevalent during the colonial period.6 However, the narrative in Pinjar regarding love and abduction being equal suggests otherwise. When impregnated by Rasheeda, Pooro feels the presence of the baby in her body as “a slimy slug” (1). She felt as if her body was a pea-pod inside which she carried a slimy, white caterpillar. Her body was unclean. If only she could take the 88

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worm out of her womb and fling it away! Pick it out with her nails as if it were a thorn! Pluck it off as if it were a maggot or a leech! (Pinjar 1) In the 2003 film version of the novel, directed by Chandra Prakash Dwivedi, Pooro aborts the baby, bleeding it away as she deliberately carries heavy loads. In the novel, however, she is initially disgusted by her newborn son “tugging at [her] breast … drawing milk from her veins and … sucking it out with force, just as his father had used force to take her … like a dog gnawing a bone and a like a dog consuming it” (Pinjar 35). Victims of violence are objectified and dehumanized, and Pooro, who feels both, in turn dehumanizes the father, her rapist. In her enforced motherhood, she feels worthless and used. Set in the pre-Partition and Partition periods, Pinjar was influenced by the religious and political matrix of British India and colonialism’s economic oppression and exploitation. Rasheeda was initially urged, indeed threatened, by his relatives to abduct Pooro. Years ago, Pooro’s uncle had abducted Rasheeda’s aunt. Additionally, and more importantly, Rasheeda’s grandfather had lost his home to Pooro’s moneylending grandfather due to his inability to repay his loan. The political and economic situation during the 1940s was indeed a relevant factor in the oppression of women; since British colonizers taxed the colonized farmers heavily, particularly the smallholders, many would lose their lands due to their inability to pay (Banerjee and Iyer). According to Banerjee and Iyer, disputes about money often had to do with property. According to Istiaq Ahmed, in 1935, the Masjid Shaheed Ganj dispute between Sikh and Muslim zealots turned into a bloody conflict. It has its origins in conflicting claims to a place claimed as sacred by both. Many people were killed and a veritable threat to law and order existed for some days. (Ahmed n.p.) Thus, the land where the place of worship was located became a reason for the communal flareup. Pritam, who lived in Lahore at this time, was witness to such strife, and thus her novel reflects the milieu, as Pooro and her sister are exhorted not to go out alone in the village except in “broad daylight of the afternoon” as “the Muslims had become very aggressive” (Pinjar 6). Rashid claims he fell in love with Pooro the first time he saw her, tells her he couldn’t bear to see her in tears, and promises to “put the world at [her] feet” (20) after he abducts her; still, after 15 days of captivity she runs away to her parent’s home. Her mother’s anguish at the condition of her daughter is clear, but her father is stoic, “The neighbors will hear. There will be a crowd” (22). He asks, “Who will marry you now? You have lost your religion and your birthright. If we dared to help you, we will be wiped out without a trace of blood left behind to tell of our fate” (22), suggesting losing honor and religion 89

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is more potent than loss of life. Pooro’s mother, “hardening her heart,” says, “Daughter, it would have been better if you had died at birth!” (22). Pooro, who has three sisters and two brothers, one of whom was born just a few weeks ago before the abduction, is pushed out of the house, the door shut on her crying and beseeching face. Pritam, who belongs to a Sikh community in the Punjab and is aware of such practices as female feticide, represents the favoring of sons. The narrative depicts the desirability of sons over daughters: Pooro’s mother had had three daughters in succession with only two years between them. She had had enough daughters, and now that fortune was smiling on them once again and they had plenty to eat and sufficient to wear (as Pooro’s father had earlier travelled to Thailand, along with his family, to earn a living as they were facing ‘disgrace’ due to their poverty), she wished that her next child should be another son. (Pinjar 4) As my mother gave birth to me, the third daughter after only one son, my maternal grandmother, a woman from Rawalpindi, a village famous for female feticide, mourned, and out of revenge and mean-spiritedness, sacked the kitchen help, so my mother had to get up after a few days and take care of the cooking and cleaning. There were no celebrations and my mother became extremely sick with jaundice a few months after I was born. Pritam’s narrative in the novel is described as episodic (Coppola 14). The story appears in fragments and installments. After her son is born, Pooro runs into a 12-year-old Hindu girl, Kammo, an orphan in tattered clothes, who carries a heavy pitcher of water on her head. Through jumbled sentences, the audience comes to know about Kammo and her mother’s misfortunes as women (38). The narrative jumps five years ahead and Pooro, now Hamida, whose Muslim name Rashid literally inscribed on her body with a tattoo, “could not put her many thoughts into words. Her emotions rose like foam on the crest of a wave, were battered against the rocks of experience and subsided once more into water” (41). She then meets Taro, a young “sallow faced girl” with “large melancholic eyes … married two years earlier” who tells Hamida, “When parents give away a daughter in marriage, they put a noose around her neck and hand the other end of the rope to the man of their choice … When a girl is given away in marriage, God deprives her of her tongue, so that she may not complain” (44). In the face of such oppression, Hamida can only think of Rashid, desiring “to fervently make love to him. After all, he was her husband and the father of her son. This alone was true; this alone mattered. The rest was mere prattle and a lie” (48). As Pritam herself notes, arranged marriages, too, occur among strangers, and such wives too come to “love” their husbands. For Hamida, it is due to the repression of her trauma that she can desire to make love to Rashid, her abductor and rapist. She fantasizes that her life is 90

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good. But does she forget? Is she able to recover her memory of trauma, or is it repressed as a survival strategy? Regarding traumatic memory, Sturken asks, “What is an experience that is not remembered? What is a memory that doesn’t need experience (232)? It appears that Hamida has forgotten her experiences of violence. Do the experiences get “reinscripted” and then “transferred onto the traumatic loss” of her self and identity (232)? If she is not fragmented, Hamida, who appears to cherish Rashid as a father and a husband, would not identify with a skeleton, as she does when she sees Kammo, a “madwoman,” her mirror image, whose “breasts and belly are bare,” skin resembles “black parchment,” hair is “ tangled … and [hanging] like ropes,” and whose “thin charred body” appears “like a skeleton” (50). Kammo, desolate, lost, mad, becomes pregnant. The Hindu village elders of the “Panchayat” decide to leave Kammo far out of town, but she returns. The next day, Hamida finds Kammo “dead as a block of stone, and between her legs was a new-born baby, still attached to the mother by the umbilical cord” (53). While gendered violence is represented in a most brutal form, the advent of the baby signified renewal, some sort of hope. However, Kammo is dead. Pritam’s “episodic” and fragmented narrative shows that she finds it hard to narrate the violence and pain suffered by women and girls in pre-Partition and Partition Punjab. She underwent the trauma of Partition, and as a Punjabi Sikh woman closely identified with women’s oppression. Through representation of the “madwoman” image, Pritam shows Hamida, and by extension, herself, as a “surrogate victim;” the representation is based on overidentification (Hirsch, “Surviving Images” 16). Pritam, although attempting “narrative memory” (Brison), fails as she appears to lose self-reflexivity, especially in her representations of Hamida as a happy wife and Kammo’s child as a metaphor of hope. For example, overidentification with other oppressed women appears in one of her poems, “I am the Cursed Daughter of Punjab from History,” which shows the transformation of the poet into a fragmented object who cannot speak due to her cracked tongue and whose hands and feet are bound: “I break myself in pieces … As if my limbs have been/Torn from my body” (Datta 12). Pritam, who identifies herself as a daughter of Punjab, sees the land and its daughters as fragmented and splintered. In Pinjar, colonialism’s violence through the Partition of India was displaced onto the bodies of women, violated and dismembered, through communal violence. As the narrative, broken and disjointed, jumping around in space and time, raggedly moves forward, we come to the Partition of India: “Just as a peeled orange falls apart into many segments, the Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs of the Punjab broke away from each other” (Pinjar 82). Hearing about the August 15, 1947 violence and the “abduction of Hindu girls by Muslims and Muslim girls by Hindus … Hamida’s ears burned with rage … Some had been forced into marriage, some murdered, some stripped and paraded naked in the streets (83). Hamida sees Hindus being burned alive as “fat oozed from them like wax; the flesh peeled off their bones like parchment; their elbows and knees stuck out like white stumps” (83). She also sees gangs of 91

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goondas or ruffians parade naked women from the other community around the streets. As the mayhem unfolds around her, one day Hamida hides a “girl” (Pritam describes her as a girl, but she’s a grown woman) from one of the refugee camps in her home. She had been taken out every night for the past nine nights to be overpowered and raped by various men (86). When Hamida sees a convoy of refugees passing through Chatto village, she resolves to hand the young girl over to the authorities, while at the same time hoping to catch a glimpse of Ram Chand, her former fiancée, as she finds out the convoy is from Rattoval village. She had seen him, once, in Rattoval, where she had gone on a pretext. Picking up a bit of “dust from where the spot on which he had stood [she had] reverently smeared it on her eyelids” (77); this act signifies a women’s position as less than the dust on a patriarchal male’s feet. Seeing her cry, he had asked if she was Pooro, and she, running away, had thrown the answer in the wind: “Pooro has been dead a long time” (77). She sees him again, on his way in the caravan to India. When she sees Ram Chand, she hands over the “girl” to him, asking him to find her family in India. He asks, “You are Pooro, aren’t you?” and she replies, “Is there a need for such a question?” (89). She is surprised that he still is unsure about her identity. I argue that he isn’t unsure, but is hesitant to “reclaim” her. Ram Chand then tells her that he had married her younger sister, Lajo, while her brother had married his sister, Taro. Lajo, however, had been abducted. Ram Chand beseeches Hamida to find her; he tells her that Lajo’s name is tattooed on her arm. At this point in Indian colonial history, with the new nation-states of India and Pakistan, abducted women were being relocated and returned to their families (Butalia; Das). Anjali Gera Roy and Nandini Bhatia, in Partitioned Lives: Narratives of Home, Displacement, and Resettlement, note that the gendered nature of the Partition violence is linked to notions of honor and purity, and as such, “women’s bodies become sites of national struggles and sexual violence: Partition narratives are replete with raped, abducted and martyred women” (35). Most of these women’s bodies, dismembered and dehumanized, remain nameless. Das also claims that: “Partition in both the literary and popular imagination has been the violation of women, mass rapes and mass abductions, their expulsion from homes, the imperative to court heroic deaths, and the recovery operations staged by India and Pakistan” (13). As colonialism’s and nationalism’s patriarchal territorial struggles were waged, discursively and literally, over women’s bodies,7 the “trauma victim’s body [was] used as someone else’s language,” and as Brison argues about the Holocaust survivors, “The trauma survivor experiences a figurative dismemberment—a shattering of assumptions, a severing of the past, present and future, a disruption of memory” (48). The language of patriarchal nationalism is at work in the recovery process. Hamida, resentful of communalism’s use of religion to “discard” her when she was abducted, now wonders at patriarchal nationalism and the nation’s 92

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efforts to recover abducted women (Pinjar 98). What was the difference? With Rashid’s help, she recovers Lajo from a Muslim family and “returns” her to her family at a camp set up by the Pakistan government. Ram Chand embraces Rashid, “and repeated over and over again: ‘Brother, you have been very good to us; I’ll never forget the obligation I owe you’” (124), completely ignoring the fact of Pooro’s abduction by Rashid. Rashid feels that he has “partly redeemed the debt of honour he owned” on the “score” of having abducted Pooro, by helping to return Lajo (124). Here, Rashid is exonerated for the abduction and rape of Poora, and as More (317) claims, “In the heat of emotion of revenge [Rashid] abducts Pooro, but later realizes his mistake and changes himself beyond imagination. At heart he is a romantic and lovable, kind and considerate.” More justifies Hamida’s “choice” in staying back with her husband—“like a traditional Indian wife—all is portrayed very realistically and artistically.” Of course, there is no sense of irony in More’s examination of Rashid’s acts, but there is definitely irony in my usage of his quote! While the attempt at humanizing Rashid by Pritam is lauded, and the misreading by More understood, even if not accepted, the reality during the Partition massacre and rape was that women, dehumanized and objectified, were simply used as pawns between the two patriarchies; how these women resisted for agency is another matter. Many critics see Poora’s “choice” to stay with Rashid as an individualistic choice. For example, Bhagyashree S. Varma sees Pooro as a “spirited woman” whose skeleton becomes that of a victim—“Pooro, who lives the life of a Hindu daughter, a Muslim wife and a beloved whose religion is love” (Varma 321). Jagdev Singh, too, sees Pooro’s “choice” as the element of “new horizon and hope in the form of a stronger marital bond as a source of sustenance for her” (Jagdev Singh 308). By romanticizing abduction and rape, Pritam fails in her attempts to narrativize the traumatic memory of Partition. Pooro soon realizes that “Out of this conflict of hate and love, love and hate, were born Hamida’s [Pooro’s Muslim name] son and Hamida’s love for her husband, Rashida” (Pinjar 35). How is it that Pooro can learn to love her violator and abductor Rashid? Yes, woman in arranged marriages can learn to love their spouses, as I once did, but the marriages are sanctioned and “desired” by young women as the only source of power and subjecthood (as I discuss in Representation and Resistance in more detail). When her brother beseeches Pooro to return with them, saying it is her “only chance” (125), she realizes that she only has to say she is a Hindu (now that she has her family, community, and nation’s permission to do so) and she will be returned. Knowing the situation of women who are returned after being abducted, and the shame and the loss of honor, she decides to stay back with Rashid and her son, saying, “When Lajo is welcomed back in her home, then you can take it that Pooro has also returned to you … Whether one is a Hindu girl or a Muslim one, whoever reaches her destination, she carries along my soul also;” she closes her eyes, and as the bus takes off, it leaves her on the 93

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“deserted road in clouds of dust” (125), once again signifying her as less than the mere dust on a male’s feet. While Pooro’s act of staying back suggests choice, her identification with all abducted women—“Whether one is Hindu girl or a Muslim one, whoever reaches her destination, she carries along my soul also” (125)—shows “overidentification” (Hirsch, “Surviving Images” 16) and may lead to retraumatization, as the narrative shows, when she is left back in a “cloud of dust.” Urvashi Butalia sums up the idea of choice thus: “Impossible as it may seem, there were women, who, like Zainab, had formed relationships with their abductors or with men who had bought them for a price” (147).8 While I question her choice of the word “relationship,” I argue that women in patriarchal societies are coerced into certain unsavory acts which are constructed by heteropatriarchal discourse as desirable: “For the majority of Indian woman, (arranged) marriage is like an abduction anyway, a violation, an assault, usually by an unknown man. Why, then, should this assault be any different?” (Butalia 148). Why, indeed. As I discuss in Representation and Resistance, most Indian women’s only source of power and subjecthood comes from within the patriarchal domestic spaces. As limited as the choices are, their violation—arranged marriage—is a bit less traumatic than being abducted and raped, as the act is socially legitimized and sanctioned, leading young women to internalize desire through heteropatriarchal discourse. Thus, arranged marriages provide pleasure to the subjected bodies while abduction and rape do not. Pritam herself went through an arranged marriage, as did I. Arranged marriages are no different from the so-called love marriages or marriages of choice within the institutional oppression of heteropatriarchal families. The only difference is that the idea of love is romanticized through discourses of modernity, while arranged marriages, seen as backward and traditional by colonialists, were constructed and represented in literature and culture as oppressive. Also, socio-economic contexts regarding gender equality and the idea of choice within marriages in India are also a factor. As one social worker helping Muslim refugees and abducted woman return to their families after the Partition violence describes to Butalia, there were women who had been born into poor homes and had not seen anything other than poverty. A half full stomach and rags on your body. And now they had fallen into the hands of men who bought them silken salwars and net dupattas, who taught them the pleasures of cold ice cream and hot coffee, who took them to the cinema … So they are happy to forget the frightening past, or the equally uncertain future, and live for the present. (The Other Side of Silence 150) The social worker continues, “But the new man with whom she is like God. Let everyone talk, she will never leave this man who has filled her world with 94

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colour” (151). When some of these women were recovered, they had to be removed from their captors by “force” (151), as the Ministry of Relief and Rehabilitation ordained: “It has been mutually agreed between the two Dominions that in such cases they should be forcibly evacuated” (original emphasis 160). Gender and class are complicated in the intersections of violent patriarchies; women’s voices and choices do not matter at such junctures.9 In the meantime, the two countries joust with each other over which one is more civilized in its treatment of women, as Butalia explains: Communalism came to be associated mainly with Pakistan, India could take upon itself the mantle of its opposite: thus Pakistan came to be represented as the communal, abductor country, refusing to return Hindu and Sikh women, while India was the responsible, and civilized non-communal country, fulfilling its moral obligations. (The Other Side of Silence 192) In this case, recovered women were objects to be exchanged with or without choice. They were objects, as they would have “difficulty of regaining [their] voice, [their] subjectivity, after [they have] been reduced to silence,” argues Brison about the Holocaust and other terror victims, “to the status of an object, or worse, made into someone else’s speech, the medium of another’s agency” (Brison 47). Thus, even though women’s voices were not heard during the Partition, to become subjects within a discourse community, their stories must be made narratable. Pritam’s Pinjar attempts the process, even if in fragmentary form, for “under the right conditions, saying something about a traumatic memory does something to it” (original emphasis 48). However, ultimately, Pritam, in her attempt at narrativizing her own traumatic memory and that of her community and nation, is unable to “reintegrate the survivor into a community, reestablishing connections essential to selfhood” for “narrative memory,” according to Brison’s argument, “is not passively endured; rather, it is an act on the part of the narrator, a speech act that defines traumatic memory, giving shape and a temporal order to the events recalled, establishing more control over their recall, and helping the survivor to remake a self” (40). When Hamida finally meets her brother and Ram Chand at the government camp, “They felt helpless before the inexorable writ of fate. They had nothing to say to each other. All they could do was cry like children and wipe their tears away with the backs of their hands” (Pinjar 123). As can be seen from the above representation, the trauma remains unarticulated by the trauma victims, but “the signs and symptoms of trauma remain, caused by a source more virulent for being driven underground” (Brison 49). Thus, Pritam runs away to the safety of her home from the image of the “Sikh man running around, with a knife pierced into his stomach,” but she is unable to ignore Lahore, seen from her rooftop, burning, which colors her narratives. Yet, in her attempts to survive her past, she does “reexamine it, retell it, and thereby [endeavor] to overcome it” (49); 95

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however, as I discuss here, her attempts at reconstruction and recovery, although partially successful, are ultimately ineffective. As a society, the trauma of Partition continues to haunt many—and for the purpose of this chapter, Sikhs—as the imposition of “arbitrary term limits on memory and on recovery” (49) forecloses the construction of meaning, as my discussion in the next three chapters on the trauma of 1984 state-sponsored violence against Sikhs shows. As Eva Hoffman states, “Those who don’t understand the past may be condemned to repeat it, but those who never repeat it are condemned not to understand it” (quoted in Brison 49). Thus, even though many, like Pritam and Khushwant Singh, have attempted to narrate the trauma in order to overcome it, collective and cultural traumas were repeated for Sikhs when they faced violence and genocide sponsored by the Indian nation-state in 1984, leading to further retraumatization and fragmentation.

Notes 1 For more on nationalism’s reconstruction of the Indian woman, see my monograph Representation and Resistance, particularly chapter two. 2 For more on Lacan and the Mirror Image, see Elizabeth Grosz’s Lacan: A Feminist Introduction. 3 It was the year of the Rowlatt Act, which facilitated the British government to arrest and jail anyone without trial. It was also the year that thousands of Sikhs were killed by colonial guns. 4 See Maskiell for more on the significance and gendering of phulkari. 5 My daughter and my husband too were born in Dehradun. My in-laws came to Dehradun as refugees from Lahore during the partition. 6 For more on the East/West binaries and idea of love vs. arranged marriages, where love is seen as liberatory and arranged marriages are seen as oppressive, see my monograph, Representation and Resistance. 7 See my monograph, Representation and Resistance, for example. 8 See Chapter 4 and the discussion of Zainab, who, as an abducted woman, had fashioned a bond with her abductor Buta Singh. 9 And in fact, “The state then financed mass abortions, out of a special budget set aside for the purpose, at that time when abortion was actually illegal” (Butalia 161). Thus, women were being used as pawns—as objects—between the communities as “National Honour” (191) was at stake as the Indian nation had been emasculated.

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7 VIOLENCE, STATE TERROR, AND GENDERED SIKH IDENTITY The Aftermath of Operation Blue Star in Gulzar’s 1996 Hindi film Maachis and Anurag Singh’s 2013 Punjabi film Punjab 1984

Part One: Historical Background of Operation Blue Star and the 1984 State-Sponsored Massacre of the Sikhs in India On October 31, 1984, the Prime Minister of India Indira Gandhi was assassinated by two of her Sikh bodyguards. This event unleashed an unprecedented violence against Sikhs by state-sponsored and Hindu Fundamentalist terrorism in Delhi and in many other states. Over 3,000 Sikh men, women, and children (the number varies in different accounts) in Delhi alone were raped, tortured, and burned to death in three days (Mitta and Phoolka 4), and many Sikh businesses and homes were looted and burned. From 1984 to 1998, Rajeev Gandhi’s government unleashed extreme violence and torture against amritdhari Sikhs in Punjab, killing from “10,000 to 100,000 people” (again, the number varies between Sikh reports and official accounts) (Axel, The Nation’s Tortured Body 5). Before Gandhi’s assassination, it was becoming clear that the majority of Sikhs, and particularly the Akali Dal party, did not support her re-election, sparking divisive policies in Punjab begun by the Congress Party government, then led by Indira Gandhi. At this time, Punjabi Sikhs were demanding more water rights for their farmers and numerous other rights, seeking greater political autonomy. In 1978, the Akali Dal Party in Punjab, which had taken the majority vote in the government elections after several years of Indira Gandhi-led Congress Party rule (1971–1977), became a threat to the central government, the Congress Party. Indira Gandhi, in order to counter the threat of the Akali Dal Party, which was opposing her rule, introduced Jarnail Singh Bindranwale to Punjabi politics (Kirpal Dhillon 3–23; Axel 124). However, Bindranwale became both “a preacher and a political critic,” and “eventually turned on both the Congress and the Akali Party” (Axel 124). Additionally, and more importantly perhaps, particularly in view of the rural polity, he urged Sikhs to undergo the Khalsa initiation rites, to become pure Khalsa, the amritdhari, through baptism. He

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then joined a religious group, which clashed with another where many people were killed; he was subsequently arrested, but released after his followers protested. He became doubly popular and his following increased. He became forceful in his criticism of the central government and in his demands for Sikh autonomy in the Punjab. He became so powerful that many left their homes and joined him at his fortress, a former religious center; they amassed a cache of arms. The Hindu majority Indian nation-state came to know Bindranwale as a terrorist, a separatist, a Khalistani; his followers committed terrorism, such as the killing of a Hindu cop, and shooting unarmed Hindu bus passengers and other Hindu civilians. Once they were declared dangerous to the nation-state, Bindranwale and his followers relocated to the Golden Temple in Amritsar. It was in June 1984 that Indira Gandhi ordered Operation Blue Star. After bombing and destroying “several buildings and destroying a library with extremely valuable relics of Sikh history, the army took control of the temple. The body of Bindranwale was found with hundreds of others, most of whom had been pilgrims” (125), leading to the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards and the subsequent massacre of Sikhs by the government-led and state-sponsored violence. Sikh men, women, and children were assaulted, brutalized, raped, and murdered for days due to the state-sponsored and Congress-led atrocities. Rajiv Gandhi, who was elected Prime Minister after his mother’s assassination, “likened the pogrom to the reverberations caused by the impact of a fallen tree: ‘But, when a mighty tree falls, it is only natural that the earth around it does shake a little’” (Mitta and Phoolka vii). Between 1984 and 1998, thousands of Sikhs were held in “unacknowledged detention, tortured, and often killed” (Axel 126). Many call it the decade of the disappearing Sikh youth, as entire villages were wiped out of them, women assaulted and raped, and children brutalized. According to Kirpal Dhillon, Police Chief in Punjab at the time, “The Akal Takht, the most sacred of the four Sikh takhts or center of temporal power, along with its many holy relics” (Kirpal Dhillon 16) were destroyed, as well as “precious manuscripts and memorabilia of great historical value, dating back to the Guru period” (12). Noting that Operation Blue Star was one of the “worst disasters to befall the Akal Takht in two centuries,” with the previous being the sacking of Amritsar and the Akal Takht in 1764 by the forces of Afghani Ahmed Shah Abdali (discussed in Chapter 1), Kirpal Dhillon writes, “Akal Takht occupies a unique position in Sikh tradition. For it was here that the sixth Sikh Guru, Hargovind, assumed both the spiritual and temporal leadership of his people and raised a militia to fight the tyrannical rule of the Mughal emperors and their proxies in Punjab” (17). He argues that the destruction of the Sikhs’ holiest site served as a “strong unifying force for all the different shades of opinion and social segments of the Sikh people” (17). In 1984, my husband and I, both in our early thirties, along with our 15month-old son and six-year-old daughter, were newly arrived in the US, having 98

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left India in January. We avoided the violence, although our family members were assaulted, and their properties burned and looted. There were young women from my extended family who hid for days in Delhi and Punjab, but their stories are concealed. The Sikh community in the Raleigh-Durham Sikh gurudwara would constantly expound on the true meaning of being a Sikh. As a diasporic Sikh, who was an amritdhari throughout my teen years, but with trimmed hair after my exile from Burma to India and especially my move to the US,1 I would go through severe anxiety about my identity. My then husband, an amritdhari until his early thirties, who trimmed his dark and ample beard in an attempt to groom himself for the job market in the US, was guilt-ridden about his acts, especially due to the Sikh situation in Punjab and the lectures at the Durham gurudwara by staunch Khalistanis from the US. My son wore an under-turban over his long uncut hair, and my daughter still had long uncut hair, so I felt that they at least redeemed us. Am I a real Sikh, I used to wonder? Am I being a hypocrite to cut my hair and still come to the gurudwara? Will my seva (service) during the langar (community kitchen) save my children and me? We were asked to donate to the Khalistani cause and sign ledgers of support; we were poor, and since I had already been brutalized under a military regime in Burma, I was afraid to put my signature on unknown documents. The diaspora, however, rallied in Punjab’s support and thousands of dollars were collected and donated to the cause. In the meantime, Punjab continued to burn. As Simrat Dhillon, writing about the Sikh diaspora and its role in the Khalistan movement, especially Sikh’s call to separatism, writes, Operation Blue Star and the Delhi pogroms justified the Sikh call to action … The Gurdwaras [in India and the diaspora] provided the human rights activists, the advocates of Khalistan, and other members of the community a platform to speak out against the oppression, the lack of law and order in Punjab, and the Indian government … Massacre art became a common sight, adorning the walls of Gurdwaras with pictures of tortured bodies, referred to as Shaheeds or martyrs, which depicted the violence in Punjab and further touched the emotional chords in the Sikh psyche. (Simrat Dhillon 6–7) Sikhs’ tortured bodies began to circulate in the media in efforts to mobilize the Sikh polity. The situation in Punjab became increasingly troubling. At this point, the Sikh panth became beleaguered. According to Jyoti Grewal, the situation in Punjab was about jockeying political power, controlling economic power, and aggrandizing personal power … [of] the Congress represented by Indira Gandhi and Giani Zail Singh; the Akali Dal and the SGPC (Shiromani Gurudwara Prabandakh Committee), and the loose cannon, Bindranwale, 99

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and his coterie of supporters which turned the Sikh community into a “kutti quam” or “bitch community.” (Jyoti Grewal 35) The real issue was political power in Punjab, but Sikhs, riled up due to the politicians’ antics, and due to being marginalized in India as a minority who had to fight for every right, became Othered in India and became objects of violence. As the feminization of Sikhs intensified, the gendered discourse of the nation turned the amritdhari Sikh into the figure of a terrorist in popular imagination, and many indeed turned to violence as resistance for their rights. Indira Gandhi’s assassination sparked pogroms against the Sikhs in Delhi. These events were clearly mapped and supported by the central government. Not only did the political leaders plan and supply the mobs, they also led them and actively participated in the burning, looting, raping, and killing of amritdhari Sikh men, women, and children. Evidence shows that busloads of rioters were taken to homes and businesses of Sikhs in the suburbs of Delhi (Mitta and Phoolka, among others). Police jeeps equipped with loudspeakers announced that Sikhs were slaughtering Hindus and sending trainloads of dead Hindus from Punjab into Delhi.2 According to Kirpal Dhillon, Sikhs’ households in mixed colonies were carefully identified with the help of electoral rolls, not unlike the Nazi pogroms against the Jews half a century earlier. The police simply vanished from the scene or, in many cases, even felicitated the success of the assault, later somewhat sadistically labeled as ‘teach-the-Sikhras-a-lesson-they-willnever-forget.’ (Kirpal Dhillon 19) India is a secular nation-state, so how are such atrocities permitted? In spite of some “saviors” who were rescued by the enemy communities during the 1947 Partition Riots (Nandy n.p.), thousands died. As I’ve discussed in previous chapters, my grandfather Meher Singh’s Muslim neighbors in Rawalpindi saved him, and his Hindu neighbors saved my uncle Nanak Singh, who lived in Delhi during the 1984 mayhem. According to Dhillon, Barring a few exceptions, Hindus were generally supportive of the army action in the Golden Temple … The operation was widely hailed by Hindus in Delhi amid widespread rejoicing and distribution of sweets, an unsavory triumphalist act … [There was a] loud expression of glee at a dinner in a classy Delhi colony, where all the guests other than myself were Punjabi Hindus [Dhillon is a Sikh], on the day Bindranwale was killed in Operation Blue Star. Married to a Hindu, I was aghast to discover that I was no longer a cherished 100

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guest at my relatives’ home after Mrs. Gandhi’s assassination. It was as if I was the killer. (Kirpal Dhillon, original emphasis 23) Sikhs were othered in the Indian nation-state to the extent that many never recovered their sense of belonging, as justice was never served. In fact, they are told by most Indians to forget the Sikh Massacre as a blip in Indian history, in spite of many in Punjab and the diaspora keeping the memory alive (see Jarnail Singh, Brian Keith Axel, Darshan Singh Tatla, Shruti Devgan, among others); in his now infamous June 10, 2010 speech, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, while apologizing for the tragedy of 1984 and announcing compensation for the riot victims, beseeched the Sikh community not to dwell too much in the past (Nairita Das n.p.). A newspaper reported “The Prime Minister’s remarks came in the meeting which also included Indo-Canadian MP Sukh Dhaliwal, who recently introduced a motion in the Canadian Parliament to declare the 1984 riots a ‘genocide’” (Das). The Indian government refused to apologize, let alone compensate, for the lives lost and the properties looted and burned during the so-called riots. The Prime Minister argued that Sikh separatists were trying to keep the memory of the massacre alive (Das). His views continue to echo in many parts of India and the diaspora, and according to Das, Ujjal Dosanjh, former Canadian Minister of Health, “warned that many groups were using the issue to further their Khalistani agenda … Justice for the riot victims is far from their minds” (Das). The Prime Minister then paid a visit to the 1985 Kanishka Air India flight 182 bomb blast victims, most of them Canadians, at the Air India Memorial. Sikh extremists had executed the blast to protest the 1984 Sikh Massacre. The criminals were apprehended and imprisoned by the Canadian authorities. Thus, certain bodies are seen as “grievable” (Butler), while others, who died during and after the 1984 Massacre, are seen as superfluous, hence they become unconstituted. According to Judith Butler in her blog post discussion about queered bodies, To say that a life is injurable, for instance, or that it can be lost, destroyed, or systematically neglected to the point of death, is to underscore not only the finitude of a life (that death is certain) but also its precariousness (that life requires various social and economic conditions to be met in order to be sustained as a life). Precariousness implies living socially, that is, the fact that one’s life is always in some sense in the hands of the other. It implies exposure both to those we know and to those we do not know; a dependency on people we know, or barely know, or know not at all. Reciprocally, it implies being impinged upon by the exposure and dependency of others, most of whom remain anonymous. These are not necessarily relations of love or even of care, but constitute obligations toward others, most of whom we cannot 101

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name and do not know, and who may or may not bear traits of familiarity to an established sense of who “we” are. (Butler “Precariousness and Grievability”) If the social responsibilities towards bodies are not met, then they remain unconstituted and therefore, an injury to them is not seen as grievable. Manmohan Singh sees Sikhs’ bodies as ungrievable. Sikhs’ lives were precarious; they were and are susceptible to injury from the hands of others. Butler further argues: “This will be a life that will have been lived” is the presupposition of a grievable life, which means that this will be a life that can be regarded as a life, and be sustained by that regard. Without grievability, there is no life, or, rather, there is something living that is other than life. Instead, “there is a life that will never have been lived,” sustained by no regard, no testimony, and ungrieved when lost. (Butler “Precariousness and Grievability”) Due to the injustice that Sikhs faced, they were no longer seen as legitimate citizens of India. They became dispossessed due to the denial of justice by the government. This dispossession is constructed and imposed through a gendered binary discourse in a secular nation-state where Sikhs were and are3 seen as “terrorists,” or belonging to a “bitch community” as femininized and queered subjects in opposition to normalized Hindus, and become easy target of violence. The construction and representation of Sikh identity within secular India point to the complex political underpinnings of the formation of communal identities, and the violence that often accompanies them. Writing about the Partition violence of the 1940s in India that he witnessed as a child, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen addresses the role of divisive identity politics in fomenting violence: “A great many persons’ identities as Indian, as subcontinentals, as Asians, or as members of the human race, seemed to give way—quite suddenly—to sectarian identification as Hindus, Muslims, or Sikh communities” (Sen 10). What happens to other distinctions?, adds Sen, such as “nationalities, locations, classes, occupations, social status, languages, politics” (10)—and more importantly, I add, gender? Amritdhari Sikhs have been constructed and represented by gendered binary language either as the Lions of Punjab by British colonizers, as brutal butchers by communalist discourses after the Partition, and as “terrorists” by the central government of India after 1984. In the contemporary period and particularly after 9/11, turbaned Sikhs are further feminized in the diaspora; Jasbir Puar examines the gendered, feminized, and queered body of the terrorists after 9/11 and during the present “queer times” of the Global War on Terror. She states, Through an examination of queerness in various terrorist corporealities, I contend that queerness proliferates even, or especially, as they remain denied or unacknowledged. I take up these enquiries not only 102

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to argue that discourses of counterterrorism are intrinsically gendered, raced, sexualized, and nationalized but also to demonstrate the production of normative patriot bodies that cohere against and through queer terrorists’ corporealities. (Puar, “Queer Times, Queer Assemblages” 121) Although Puar is here more interested in the construction and representation of the “turbaned Sikh terrorist” in the diaspora after 9/11, I argue that Sikhs have been queered and feminized in India through the “counter-terrorism” tactics used by the Indian nation-state in the aftermath of the 1984 Sikh Massacre.4 The various fragments of the amritdhari male body came to stand in for the Sikh community. The 1984 state violence gendered fragments of the male Sikh body. As Axel argues, “the amritdhari head and face” became targeted as the head and face of a terrorist, and through “knowledge production, identification, and disciplinary strategy” and “violent coercion,” Sikhs are “turned” [by their torturers to become informers]; they are called, as Axel writes, “billi, ‘cat’ (or pussy)” (The Nation’s Tortured Body 133). Thus, during the counterterrorism acts against Sikhs after the 1984 Sikh Massacre, when many Sikh youth, radicalized by violence and torture, turned to the Khalistani or the separatist movement, violence and torture feminized the amritdhari Sikh male body and the Sikh panth as the “kutti quam” or bitch community (Jyoti Grewal), respectively. In the post-1984 films, such as Maachis, the Sikh man is queered and feminized, struggling to articulate trauma, while Sikh women, yet again, remain in the margins of the narrative space, picking up arms and joining the violence, yet barely articulate and mostly invisible in national narratives. And if, as in Punjab 1984, women are given narrative space, they only appear as suffering mothers or silenced lovers. How can we hear the traumatized voices from the past when they are mediated by perpetrator nations constructing “the memory of a violent and shameful past” (Jacobs 154)? As I note in the Introduction and Chapter 1 of this book, dominant representations show Sikhs as brutal butchers as the nation attempts to reconstruct its shameful past. Yet, memories of Sikh violence are denied them, as justice is still to be served. Whose memory—of terror, or violence, of genocide—should be “privileged at sites of terror” (Jacobs 154), such as Delhi and the Punjab, where the massacre and violence took place? As Hirsch and Smith note, power determines who gets space to provide witnessing and testimonies regarding state terrorism and violence (12). How can we, as members of the Sikh community or as readers, bear witness to the collective violence and trauma, when spaces of collective memory have been virtually closed off in the dominant national spaces, as the Indian government’s demand to forget the 1984 Massacre shows? However, many artists and writers do attempt to provide narrative space to the marginalized and oppressed Sikh community within the liminal spaces of the nation-state. 103

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I argue that the representations in the films Maachis and Punjab 1984, although attempting to provide narrative spaces for the traumatized Sikh community, inadvertently retraumatize the female viewer, as they deny the enabling of memory and working through of collective and personal trauma. Hirsch asks the following questions in her examination of the Holocaust memory and images: If these images, in their obsessive repetition, delimit our available archive of trauma, can they enable a response and ethical discourse in its aftermath? … Does their repetition in itself retraumatize, making distant viewers into surrogate victims who, having seen the images so often, have adopted them into their own narratives and memories, and have thus become all the more vulnerable to their effects? If they cut and wound, do they enable memory, mourning, and working through? Or, is their repetition an effect of melancholic replay, appropriative identification? (Hirsch, “Surviving Images” 8) In viewing Maachis, I also question whether the narrative will lead to working through and healing of the trauma, or rather to retruamatization for the collective wounded Sikh body. Is Gulzar, suffering from melancholia produced by both the Partition and the 1984 violence, repeating the trauma through over-appropriation? The images of trauma can be “appropriated” by the film director to a point where “retraumatization” can occur for the wounded Sikh community. Are the trauma victims—members of the Sikh community, the directors of the films and the viewers—able to work through the trauma, or do they simply end up retraumatized due to the repetition compulsion? I analyze the outcomes of such films through a postcolonial feminist critical analysis to understand the reception of the texts, and for their ability or inability to help or heal the community of past traumas. Marcia Landy claims that popular films “appear to reinforce dominant values,” yet at the same time “they are rife with contradictions … Their ‘resolutions’ are built on an edifice of opposing elements which on close examination reveal themselves to be in conflict not only with each other but with the events it seeks to resolve” (17). However, Landy acknowledges that filmic narratives are “also the story of change, resistance, and even subversion” (17). Maachis and Punjab 1984 both reinforce gender stereotypes, but they also resist some dominant historiography and representations. In many texts, the events of 1984 and the aftermath are mentioned in horror. How can a democratic nation, which came into being through Gandhi’s nonviolence movement (another myth),5 understand the massacre of the Sikhs? Were the Sikhs ever safe within the Indian nation-state? The myth of secularism and democracy lulled Sikhs for a time, but “1984 changed all that:” The ferocity with which Sikhs were killed in city after city in north India in the wake of Indira Gandhi’s assassination, the confusion and 104

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shock that stunned us into disbelief and then into a terrible realization of what had happened, dispelled forever that false sense of security. (Ritu Menon xi) Sikhs began asking questions, looking for answers in their history, in their religion and in the world in order to belong, to constitute a home, a place where they can be safe. Punjab is the homeland for some Sikhs, for others it is India, and for some, it became Khalistan, the imagined home of the Sikhs. The idea of Khalistan creates anxiety for the nation-state. Nationalism creates the idea of the nation as “real,” and in this case Khalistan is the “illusion,” therefore threatening (Axel, The Nation’s Tortured Body 80–81). The nation-state uses the idea of the threat, real or imagined, to justify regulatory functions, which are almost always violent and repressive, as the case of the Sikhs attests.

Part Two: 1984 State-Sponsored Massacre and its Aftermath in Gulzar’s Maachis and Anurag Singh’s Punjab 1984 Gulzar’s film Maachis (Matches) and Anurag Singh’s Punjab 1984 are set in the aftermath of the 1984 Sikh Massacre. Even the terms for the aftermath of the riots and brutality against the Sikhs have not been properly coined yet—Sikhs call it massacre, scholars call it pogrom, while others call it containment, and yet others are attempting for it to be declared a genocide. Ashis Nandy calls the event “Genocidal Massacre.” One is unable to discuss it without encountering the pitfalls and limits of language. Very few films were released about the 1984 Sikh Massacre immediately following the event, and even now only a handful exist, but Gulzar’s 1996 film Maachis is one of the few earlier films addressing the loss and violence with some amount of critical distance; although, he, too, appears to suffer from melancholia, as his narrative ends on a sense of hopelessness for the Sikh community. Gulzar, aka Sampooran Singh Kalra, a Sikh man, but now a mona, a cleanshaven Sikh, born on 18 August 1934, wrote and directed the film. Gulzar is a poet, lyricist, writer, and director, and Oscar winner for best original song, “Jai Ho” from Slumdog Millionaire. Gulzar, having himself undergone the trauma of Partition and become retraumatized by the 1984 Sikh Massacre, was inspired to write the screenplay when he heard someone say “he had lost half his family in 1947 and the other half in 1984” (Gulzar, “Terror is Silence”). In his short story collection Raavi Paar and Other Stories, he writes: I had witnessed the partition of India from very close quarters in 1947. It left me bruised and scarred. I cannot help but write about that excruciating period. I wrote the stories with the background of the partition to try and get the painful experiences out of my system. On sharing them with my readers, I hope very much to distance myself from the stories. My only wish, that these stories do not re-ignite the 105

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latent fear and anguish, once again, in some readers who witnessed the gory partition with their own eyes. (Gulzar, Raavi Paar and Other Stories 1) While texts such as Gulzar’s Maachis and Ravi Paar attempt to form a circuit of communication with their readers/viewers for the enabling of narrative memory, there is always the risk and the fear that they might cause retraumatization due to triggering. While launching the book on August 24, 2007, Gulzar stated, “The wounds have not healed and this is proved by the fact that whenever Aug 15 approaches, the agonising memories of partition also comes [sic] back, even after 60 years” (“Time we Moved away from the Partition”). He talks about remembering the horrors of 1947 and World War II and the violence and trauma of the Partition. At that time, I used to live near the Subzi Mandi in Roshanara Bagh in Delhi … Twenty-five years later, those memories still haunted me. But what I have seen is that while we got over the horrors of the World War by talking about it and taking it out of our system, partition’s memories have remained simply because we refuse to talk about it and have thus not let the wounds heal. (“Time We Moved”) The trauma of Partition violence is not only repressed by wounded individuals; the nation, too, only remembers it sporadically. Gulzar was born in Dina, Jhelum District (now in Pakistan), in pre-Partition India, and left during the 1947 Partition. Although born in what is now Pakistan, he only returned at the age of 78, ostensibly to attend a literary festival. I wanted to cross the Wagah border on foot. Walking on that soil I felt like I was walking to my homeland, my birthplace. The feeling was extremely intimate. Instinctively, as soon as I reached the Pakistan border, I took off my mojaris (shoes) and wanted to put my feet on the soil. (“This Will Probably be My Last Chance”) In 1969, when my siblings and I first landed in Calcutta, now Kolkata, after we were repatriated from Burma, I took the soil from the ground and placed it on my forehead, as my father requested. He told us Burma-born children of a Burma-born father that the land of India was our mother, for we were returning to it as Indian refugees. As for Gulzar, upon reaching the place of his birth, he became “too emotional,” and said, “I was totally alone. People say you feel happy visiting your childhood. I don’t think so. There is something nice, but sad about it. I was feeling unwell (“This Will Probably be My Last Chance”). His visit to the retraumatizing scene seems to undo Gulzar, since if trauma has

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not been worked through, it leads to fragmentation and melancholia, and thus, Gulzar’s body becomes sick. This pain (of partition) sort of leaps out of me … A part of me was left behind in Pakistan in 1947. My trauma is associated with that place. I am searching for that lost half. Watan mera yeh, desh mera who (This is my homeland, that is my country). (“Time We Moved”) Fragmented and dislocated, as part of him was left behind during the Partition, Gulzar left Pakistan to return to India and was unable to attend the literary festival. As a Sikh, the 1984 Massacre left him retraumatized, as the events triggered his repressed memories of the Partition violence, and further fragmented, as the Massacre traumatized him afresh—but this experience began the emergence of narrative and hence he produced the story for Maachis. He recalls seeing “chilling incidents. Young boys were stopped by the police who would make cruel jokes about bombs hidden in their puggris (turbans)” (“Terror is Silence”). The amritdhari Sikh body became synonymous with the terrorist in dominant Indian ideology. When asked to define terror, the film director states: “‘Terror’ is the silence which fell on Punjab and Assam (which was also being brutalized by the State and the Police) when no one would have the guts to come out of their house after 6 pm and cross the street” (“Terror is Silence”). The silence reflects the repressed and traumatized memories of the victims, but as Gulzar shows, silence also speaks its own language, and as Roop and Satya show (Baldwin, What the Body Remembers), from the void truth is spoken and heard, as I discuss in Maachis and Punjab 1984. Gender and Violence in Gulzar’s Maachis: Matches Maachis is a Hindi language film and although directed by a Bollywood film director, Gulzar, it is an offbeat film. Its backdrop of revolt, police brutality, and separatist militancy is captured through Gulzar’s cinematography in painstaking ways. His narrative references police action where each and every village in Punjab in the aftermath of the 1984 Sikh Massacre was impacted; throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, police picked out youths aged between 18 and 35, kept them in custody, tortured them for information regarding separatists and “terrorists,” and then killed them through fake or staged encounters; in reality, the police simply shot them point blank or killed them during torture, but in police reports they wrote that the deaths occurred during an encounter. Entire villages and a whole generation of Sikh youths were wiped out, and many men and women picked up arms to defend the Sikh nation and work towards a sense of autonomy through the imagination of a homeland, Khalistan. 107

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In examining the attachments to an imaginary homeland, Khalistan, we have to ask: When did Punjabi consciousness transform into Sikh consciousness? How did Sikh consciousness consolidate into Sikh nationalism? Finally, why and how is Khalistan, a separate Sikh homeland, imagined and constituted? Why does this imaginary homeland invoke a regulatory function of the nationstate? Did the ideas of Sikh nationalism and homeland arise in India, or were they constructed in the far reaches of the diaspora? Within the larger trajectory of Sikh identity formation and in view of the above questions, the role of Sikhs in precolonial and colonial India, the fate of Sikhs during and after the Partition of India, and especially the state of the Sikhs in the aftermath of the 1984 Sikh Massacre by the ruling party become significant. While I will not be able to discuss the entire Sikh history in this chapter, I will revisit some seminal points (for more, see Chapter 1). Set in the late 1980s in Punjab, the narrative in Maachis begins with a nameless policeman pulling the brutalized body of a longhaired and bearded Sikh amritdhari out of a well in the middle of the night. The point of view is from the interior of the well. As the dripping body is placed on the floor, the two police officers call an ambulance and leave. As they are driving away in a police jeep, the senior officer, also nameless, asks the inspector, S.K. Vohra, how he could let the terrorist die; he says, “as you know, once the tortured crosses the limit of tolerance, then death is imminent.” Yawning, Vohra says, “I didn’t kill him. He committed suicide.” He yawns again and apologizes. “Sorry Sir, they woke me up in the middle of the night.” The officer chastises the Inspector, saying, “You had him for six months and you still could not get the information of his group.” The film cuts to a clear blue sky over a snow-capped mountain. A group of four Sikh youth are in the borderland between India and Pakistan. A song indicating they are on the run, having left their nation, reveals their nostalgia for home. The narrative flashes back to Pali (Kripal Singh), mona Sikh, on his motorcycle driving through lush Punjab fields to visit his friend Jassie (Jaswant Singh Randhawa), an amridhari Sikh, and Jassie’s sister, Veeran (Virendra Kaur). Veeran and Pali are in love. Jassie’s mother discusses Veeran’s wedding. Pali suggests a double wedding if they find a bride for Jassie. As laughter rings in the air, Veeran sees the police surrounding the village. A police officer knocks on their door. The meeting becomes Jassie’s first unfortunate encounter with Inspectors Vohra and Khurana, who are looking for a terrorist named Jimmy. They are both Hindus. Vohra ogles Veeran, asking her if there’s anyone else in the family. Pali asks her to go indoors, while he faces Vohra. Khurana asks Jassie if he knows Jimmy who, after murdering a member of parliament named Kedar Nath in Delhi, is hiding in Punjab. Jassie, in an attempt at humor or to defuse the tension, smiles and leads him out to the fields. A wide-angled shot shows more police officers following them, as Jassie leads the inspectors towards his dog, also named Jimmy. Laughing, he says, “Meet Jimmy.” As he sits down to pat the dog, the shot composition shows the unsmiling Inspectors looking down at Jassie; the power differential is evident. 108

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Khurana says that he needs to take Jassie to the police office for questioning. When Pali tries to stop him, Vohra interjects tersely, “It will be just for half an hour. If you don’t want him to come, we can search your house, and it might not be to your benefit,” indicating they could rape Veeran. They take Jassie into custody. When he doesn’t return for hours, Pali sets off to the local police station to inquire but doesn’t find him there. The next day he requests the local politician, an amridhari Sikh, for help, who talks about due process and law and order, but does nothing to help. A few days later, Jassie, beaten and tortured, barely able to walk, returns home. Pali could not bear to see his friend’s brutalized condition. Feeling powerless, but enraged, he joins the Khalistani Sikh separatists, leaving his old grandfather to take care of himself. A man named Sanathan, bitter about India’s Partition, and the loss of half of his family in Partition and the other half in the 1984 Massacre, blaming the politicians for his involvement in the violence and loss, trains Pali in the Khalistani camp. Sanathan informs him that although he is not a Sikh, his brother was one, as in many Hindu families the eldest son would convert to Sikhism,6 and that his parents and uncles were all married in a gurudwara. So, who am I, he asks? Sanathan mocks the idea of the non-violent struggle for independence, pointing to the violence and loss of lives during the Partition. His fight, he claims, is against religious and economic inequality in India. Pali allies himself with Sanathan and joins the camp. Veeran is bereft by Pali’s absence. Jassie is once again picked up by the police and again tortured. He becomes disabled; soon, he is freed. Veeran picks up the shovel, drives the tractor, farms the land, and become the head of the family, taking care of their mother and Jassie. Pali, in the meantime, kills Khurana. He then returns to his home and confesses to Jassie about the murder, saying he couldn’t bear to think of Khurana torturing his friend any more. He urges Jassie to marry Veeran to a respectable boy. He explains he’s on a mission and there’s no turning back. Veeran begs him to take her with him, but he leaves, saying the camp is no place for a woman. Veeran, as his fiancée, asks his permission, although at this point in Punjab history, many Sikh women had already joined the Khalistani Movement; yet Pali does not allow her to become a militant. Jassie is taken into custody again, and this time, while torturing and questioning him, the police, pressured to find Kedar Nath’s killer, use extra violence and kill him. They declare it a suicide by tying him up and submerging his body in a well. Veeran’s mother, unable to bear the pain of her son’s death, passes away. With Jassie and her mother dead and Pali gone, Veeran, who had taken the role as head of the family, now decides to join the revolutionaries. She is trained to be a missile launcher. A few months later, she ends up in the same camp as Pali. Pali is shocked. She explains to him that Jassie is dead, her mother passed away, and as a single woman, fearing for her life and being harassed by the police, she joined the movement. Although she has obviously undergone training and can wield guns, she is relegated to the kitchen, cooking and washing dirty dishes and doing the laundry. She eats only after she has fed 109

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everyone else, as is the custom for women in the dominant Indian culture. Sanatan specifically commands her to treat the other youths as her younger brothers-in-law, and himself as an elder of the family. Sharanpal Ruprai, a Canadian Sikh academic and poet whose work I examine in Chapter 12, writes about the idea of Sikh seva being manipulated into placing women in the kitchen. Sikh men and women are all ordained to serve (seva) in the community kitchen at the gurudwaras. However, as Ruprai writes, when she served cooked food in the lunchroom, the male servers disapproved of it as they saw it as their domain, while they expected women to be in the community kitchen and to help predominantly in cooking the food, not serving it. The majority of Sikh women occupy themselves in preparing and cooking the food in the kitchen. Ruprai argues, “The women in the kitchen were modeling the ritualization of control [by patriarchal Sikhs through] staying in the kitchen (“Being Sikh, Being Women” 35). Thus, the Sikh woman, Veeran, once again occupies a conflicted and gendered narrative space: she may be a brutal terrorist, but in the iconography of the nation, the image of the Sikh woman is simultaneously also one of nurturer and caretaker. She will die through honor killing to save the honor of the community, or she will kill for a cause—the cause of the Sikh family and, by extension, the Sikh nation. In a Himachali camp, Veeran meets four young men who were all victims of police brutality and had witnessed their family members being killed or tortured. One of the men at the camp, Jimmy, whose father was burned alive, a burning car tire stuck on his head tied by his own turban, stabs Kedar Nath, a member of parliament, who had refused to help his father when Hindus were dragging him to his death. Jimmy assumes, erroneously, that he murdered Kedar Nath and joins the camp. He recalls his mother’s pain at having to forcefully cut his hair to save his life; she would recite gurbani while he tried to sleep, touching his shorn hair, crying incessantly.7 This was the Jimmy who the police were searching for in the fields when they reached Jassie’s village. Kedar Nath recovers from Jimmy’s attack and eventually becomes a Minister in the Government.8 He visits Himachal to worship at the famous Sikh temple in Manikaran, guarded by police officers. The police chief, who was responsible for killing Jassie, is one of the officers responsible for the Minister’s security. Pali attempts to kill the officer and is apprehended. The police raid their camp. Sanathan is convinced that Pali was turned during torture and became a “billi” (Axel, The Nation’s Tortured Body 133), and suspects Veeran too will break under pressure, so he locks her up, leaving a guard behind. He then takes off with the missile launcher to kill the Minister. Veeran, however, escapes by killing the guard. She then surreptitiously follows Sanatan, who launches the missile, blowing up the Minister. A tense scene follows. Sanatan runs into the forest. Veeran follows, hiding behind trees. They are among rocks and surrounded by the oncoming police force. Sanatan is wounded. Veeran stands with her gun cocked. From a low-angle shot, Sanatan is seen looking around. The next shot is of Veeran shooting in the air. As she heaves herself out of the opening in the rock, 110

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the camera pans on Sanatan’s face, eyes open, dead, while blood flows from his wound. The moment of the shot hitting Sanatan is not represented. The narrative presents Veera as strong and competent: she tackles a difficult task of killing a member of the camp, an elder and a leader, and is equal to the task in every way. Yet, the narrative is indirect, and we do not get direct access to Veeran’s action. Thus, as Kacandes, discussing “narrative obstacle” or the ellipses where the film “withholds” (64) or obstructs what the viewer can see in terms of woman and violence, the filming in Maachis, too, shows Gulzar’s and, by extension, Indian culture’s inability to see female violence—either inflicted upon them or inflicted by them. Women cannot be agents of violence in any way. The next scene is of Veeran at the police station in order to visit Pali. She is searched to make sure she carries no weapons. When she enters the cell, Veeran sees that Pali has been tortured and brutalized; his eye is swollen and shut, his face bruised, and he walks with great difficulty. He is also inarticulate, unable to speak. The Sikh male is wounded and silenced by state violence. Veeran manages to conceal a cyanide capsule in her mouth, which she passes to him through a kiss. After a prolonged look of compassion and resignation, Veeran leaves. Pali crushes the capsule, making a popping sound; soon, he is dead as blood slowly oozes from his lips. The camera pans to Veeran in a truck, riding slowly away. The last shot is of her, dead, with blood trailing from her nose. She looks as if she is sleeping peacefully. While the Sikh man is rendered speechless, and then kills himself with the help of the woman, the Sikh woman, now single and alone, surely a target of violence and shame, has agency but choses to commit suicide in order to protect the honor of the community. Gulzar’s Maachis shows that the nation cannot be borne on the shoulders of strong Sikh women. It can, however, be etched on their bodies, whereupon they become bearers and signs of patriarchal nationalism to be sacrificed on its altar, or to commit forms of honor killing or sati. Thus, as in the earlier novels of Partition, the Sikh woman is killed to protect her honor, or she kills herself and her children (see Chapter 4) to protect the honor of her family and, by extension, the Sikh community. Maachis, which deals with the massacre of Sikhs and the emergence of Sikh militancy, represents the Sikh woman as the one who can act and kill, but the act of violence is condoned as the act of a strong sister, sister-in-law (Bhabhi, as the young men in the camp call her) or wife (she is considered Pali’s wife by the men, as they treat her like a married woman, particularly in naming her Bhabhi), but not as a strong female subject. The ability to enact violence on the self is represented as Veeran taking control of her own destiny that is, paradoxically, controlled by the gesture of obedient surrender—suicide—to the narrative of the heteropatriarchal nation. In the sacrificial erasure of her own body, Sikh national identity is maintained. While in texts published in earlier times, women committed sati to protect their honor for the sake of the family, in Maachis the Sikh woman is simultaneously a destroyer of others and of herself. Though no longer passive, she still lacks agency, and therefore the means to construct her own selfhood, as the gendered 111

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nature of nationalism disallows and disavows such constructions; nationalism always constructs and represents the nation through heteropatriarchal tropes. Sikhism, which originated as a peaceful religious reform movement, becomes reconstituted at various historical moments through violence. When the Afghans and Mughals were attacking the nation, Sikhs became known as warriors. When the Khalsa nation was colonized, Sikhs were converted to Lions of Punjab. When the nation was parted, nationalism constructed victims and heroes, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus. We saw the ravages of colonialism in the bloodbath of Partition. The bloodbath continues in the aftermath of colonialism in communalism; the Hindus against the Muslims against the Sikhs against the Muslims against the Hindus against the poor against women … and so forth. In such a scenario, the position of the Sikh woman shifts and occupies multiple spaces. She is at once represented as the creator and the destroyer, be she the harmonious Durga or the bloodthirsty Kali, Meera Bhai or Rani Jindan; she has to protect or be protected, created and destroyed, be a nurturer and a violator, if the nation is to be created—yet, she lacks agency. She is the future mother of a mythical nation—the imaginary Khalistan of the mythical and fragmented Sikh nation conjured up by the traumatized and violated Sikhs/ separatists/terrorists. Is she my daughter?9 Engendering the Imaginary Sikh Nation in Anurag Singh’s Punjabi Language Film, Punjab 1984 While the title of the film suggests that the narrative will center on 1984, which it does focus on briefly, the remainder of the film highlights the aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s assassination, police violence in the decade following the 1984 Sikh Massacre, the disappearing young Sikh men and their distressed mothers in the state of Punjab. Anurag Singh states that the film came about due to a small personal incident from when he was very young. When the curfew was enforced during the 1984 Operation Blue Star attack on the Golden Temple, his father was in the village, while he, his brother, and his mother were in Amritsar. They had to wait days before his father finally returned on a bicycle from the village, as there was no other transportation available. For some reason, Anurag Singh remembers that his father was carrying a tabletop fan for the family in one hand all the way from the village. It was only the re-emergence of small memories and the accumulation of other tidbits about 1984 over the years that led to the making of the film. He said he waited a long time to create the story, as not only did he not get a summons from Guru Maharaj (God), but also he did not wish to retraumatize the Sikh community, as he felt responsible for the film’s effect on the wounded Sikh nation. He indicated that he finally got the call and the idea for a perfect story: a story of humanity, a story of all mothers. Punjab 1984 is a regional Punjabi language film. The narrative begins in Punjab with the long-suffering and patient mother of Shivjeet (Shiva) Singh Maan, an amritdhari Sikh man—played by well-known Punjabi film actor Diljit 112

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Dosanjh—who regularly visits the police station in search of any news of her long “disappeared” son. The story has many similarities with Maachis, and many similar characters recur in Punjab 1984: the brutal police officer, the torture scenes, the Khalistani terrorists, the territoriality of the imagined Khalistan homeland, and the long-suffering mother and girlfriend. The initial animosity between the policeman Deep Singh Rana and Shiva begins with a land dispute. A proud and self-respecting farmer, Shiva confronts Rana and the farmer trying to wrest his ancestral land from his father. Shiva in no uncertain terms states that he has no qualm about flexing his muscles, if needed. Rana is enraged at the threat. Shiva’s father, in the meantime, is legally fighting to reclaim his land, and since he has a court date in Amritsar, he also plans a visit to the Golden Temple. However, his visit happens on the fateful day of the Operation Blue Star attack, and he, along with some pilgrims, is locked inside a dark room in the temple for two days. A woman with a small child moans, asking the men in the room to save her son, as he was dying of thirst. Since no-one volunteers, she ventures out, but Shiva’s father stops her and walks to the sarovar, the sacred pool around the temple. While fetching the water, he is shot dead by the army. Shiva’s mother is seen mourning his death, but she soon continues the duties of her domestic life— her daily chores, cooking for her son—while Shiva, once a playful and romantic man wooing his college classmate Jeeti, transforms into a grim and dedicated farmer. Once, as he tills the soil, he breaks down in remembrance of his father. Sobbing, he smears the tilled soil all over his face, neck, and chest. His mother, bringing him his lunch, sees him crying and cradles him in her arms. He says his father’s sweat is mixed in the soil and he just wanted to hug him. In a long shot, the two tiny entwined figures are seen surrounded by the tilled soil—in deep fissures of circles and straight lines, telling the tale of the Punjabi Sikh farmer, attempting to write his own narrative and history into the land. As Shiva continues to farm, the narrative skips to the next year. It is August 1985. There are staged or faked police encounters with Sikhs all over Punjab, where Sikhs are either detained, tortured, or killed. Sikh youth are disappearing all over the Punjab. Rana confronts Shiva and threatens to torture him. Shiva promises Rana he will not utter a sound if tortured, since he is the son of his father, and if Rana too is the son of his father he will continue to torture him until he breaks Shiva; in other words, whoever breaks first is a bastard. Soon, Shiva is apprehended as a suspected terrorist and the torture begins. The torture scene, as Shiva does not utter a single sound while being brutally beaten, while Rana, exhausted, finally gives up, is represented in heteropatriarchal and hypermasculine tropes. Finally, after a few weeks, Rana constructs a fake encounter scene (where the police make it appear as if the terrorists were attacking them and they killed the terrorists in self-defense) and asks the “terrorists,” Shiva along with a few others, to run for their lives. Many are shot in the back, but Shiva escapes. He joins the known Khalistani Sukhdev Singh Sarharli and becomes a separatist, longing to return home to a safe Punjab—a Punjab imagined as Khalistan by Sarharli. The Akali Dal is represented in the 113

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film as a corrupt Sikh leader who manipulates the situation merely to gain votes in the Punjab elections. As the situation escalates, and there are infighting and murders within the various separatist groups, Shiva becomes disenchanted. However, to redeem the situation for himself, he asks for an assignment that will challenge him: he requests the task of eliminating a corrupt police officer and is given the assignment. He and a team of three others attempt the operation, but in the skirmish, he is shot. In the meantime, Shiva’s mother looks for her son. She hears of a wounded terrorist who used to know Shiva, and comes seeking information to the far reaches of Punjab. The lone survivor tells Shiva’s mother of her son’s presumed death. As she mourns his death, she is seen sitting in a tilled field, the same place where Shiva sat rubbing the soil on his body, caressing and rubbing the soil, sobbing for her lost son. Shiva, however, reappears and threatens to kill Rana in the presence of a policeman. When informed by the policeman, Rana prepares for the encounter over the only bridge leading to the village. In this scene, too, Shiva repeats the theme of manhood; if Rana is the true son of his father, he will win, but if Shiva is the true son of his father, he will win. As an aggressive gun and fistfight ensues between the two, Shiva finally kills Rana and returns home to the village, all the while visualizing the green door to his house. He thinks about his beloved girlfriend Jeeti, who used to match her chunni/scarf with the color of his turban. However, she had been married off to a police officer when the news of Shiva’s death reached the family. Once, when Shiva had surreptitiously visited the village before her marriage, Jeeti had beseeched him to take her along to the Khalistani camp. She appeared assertive and bold, reaching out to touch his hand, but when he refused, she simply gave in, unlike Veeran, who took matters into her own hands. He told her the revolution is no place for a woman. Again, the Sikh man disallows a woman to join the movement, despite the known fact of women becoming radicalized and participating in the struggle. Throughout the film, Jeeti is mostly silent and submissive. Shiva’s manner of returning home to his mother also appears in hyperbolic terms. He shouts at the top of his lungs, Bole So Nihal! (The phrase is a form of blessing that comes at the end of a prayer; it means, whoever speaks the phrase shall be blessed.) His mother opens the gate and he falls into her arms. He asks her for food, and she tells him she’s been waiting for a long time to feed him. As he is about to step over the threshold of the house, he is shot from behind by Jeeti’s husband, the policeman, who says, “bloody terrorists.” Shiva dies in his mother’s arms. Jeeti runs to her room, cries, collapses to the floor and takes off her wedding bangles. The film ends with documentary footage of Sikh mothers with photos of lost and disappeared sons who are still waiting for their return. The caption reads, “Dedicated to all mothers, who are still waiting for their sons.” Thus, although Kirron Kher, the woman who plays Shiva’s mother, has narrative space throughout the film, her only role is that of the long-suffering and patient mother. Her point of view does not allow identification, as it does not provide the character with any interiority. For example, she 114

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visits the police station every day after her son’s disappearance, and one day, Rana brutally beats her for talking to a journalist—her only cry? “Beat me as much as you want, but return my son to me.” When people ask her why she waits each day at the police station when there is never any news, she says, “when a son is born, a mother also gives birth to udeek,” to wait (it implies patience). She is seen as forever providing food to the family and to other people, including a policeman who had once participated in torturing her son. She says, if I feed someone else’s son, maybe some other mother might feed my son. Her role is limited due to her limited cultural resources, but she is also never seen expressing anger. She becomes synonymous with Punjab or the imaginary Khalistan, the motherland—eternally patient, eternally waiting, eternally expectant, but also never real: an imaginary perfect mother. Thus, the amritdhari Sikh man, feminized and othered as a terrorist, attempts redemption by trying to eradicate corruption and brutality, although in brutal and violent ways. By contrast, the amridhari Sikh woman, many of whom took up arms to be part of the movement (Laurent Gayer), is here only represented in the limited role of a patient and long-suffering mother, or the silent and submissive girlfriend. There is no narrative or representational space for the engendering of agency for the Sikh women, although the narrative space for the Sikh men, too, is limited, as Shiva is shown as a hypermasculine and quick-tempered young man, who, however, dies a brutal death at the end of the film. Thus, this film, too (as well as Maachis) disallows narrative witnessing, as the creation of a circuit of communication becomes impossible for the viewing Sikh subjects; many Sikh women who see the movie are retraumatized as they remember lost ones. The police harassed a young relative of mine, Dalbir, an amritdhari Sikh man from Dehradun, when he visited Delhi during the 1990s. He told me in detail about his passport renewal and the address of his uncle that he had given for identity verification. His uncle, an amritdhari, who lived in Lucknow, harassed by the police in the aftermath of the 1984 anti-Sikh violence, and not knowing his nephew had given his name for identity verification, denied knowing Dalbir. After months, however, the matter was resolved. When I told him and his mother that I was writing about Punjab 1984, he told me how much his mother had cried when she saw the movie. The viewing led to retraumatization. His mother then told me about their bakery that was looted and burned during the 1984 anti-Sikh violence in Dehradun. When I asked them where their daughter, who was in her twenties during the violence, was at that time, they had no answer, other than saying they remained in hiding until the violence ended. The circuit of communication for the most part becomes jammed when it comes to women and gender violence. For the wounded Sikh community and the traumatized Sikh reader, narrative witnessing, in the cases of both Maachis and Punjab 1984, is unsuccessful due to both directors’ woundedness. Judith Herman, discussing the dialectic of trauma, notices the conflict between the desire to tell and the will to deny: 115

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The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma. People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory, and fragmented manner, which undermines their credibility and thereby serves the twin imperatives of truth telling and secrecy. When the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery. But far too often secrecy prevails, and the story of the traumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom. (Herman 1) The survivors of trauma tell their stories, when they are able to, as Gulzar and Anurag Singh do, in “highly emotional, contradictory and fragmented manner” (Herman 1), and therefore the reception of the texts, especially for readers and viewers from the wounded Sikh community, often leads to retraumatization.

Notes 1 In order to get a job in retail, I cut my hair, as I was advised by friends and relatives that having long hair and looking too eastern would affect my job prospects. My father, an amritdhari, too, who, at the age of 62, having migrated to the US in 1982, was advised, and to an extent forced, by his older brother to cut his hair and remove his turban in order to get a job at a 7-Eleven convenience store. My older brother, when he had immigrated to Canada, cut off his hair in order to get a job at a shipping dock as a day laborer. 2 For more, see Khushwant Singh, My Bleeding Punjab; Brian Keith Axel, The Nation’s Tortured Body: Violence, Representation, and the Formation of a Sikh “Diaspora”; Baldev Singh, Impartial Reports on Sikh Genocide ’84; Manoj Mitta and H.S. Phoolka, When a Tree Shook Delhi: The 1984 Carnage and its Aftermath; Amarjit Kaur et al., The Punjab Story, among others. 3 See more regarding the current situation in terms of the idea of Khalistan and the pursuit of justice by Sikhs in India and the diaspora in Amandeep Sandhu’s “Hide-and-Sikh Politics.” 4 For more, see Axel on the idea of the feminization of Sikhs as “billis” (pussies) in The Nation’s Tortured Body 133. 5 When over a million people were slaughtered and over 10 million rendered refugees, it can hardly be called a peaceful creation of the nation. However, in stories and films, we read about the peaceful end of the British empire in India, over and over again. 6 The tradition of Hindus converting the eldest son to Sikhism is believed to have started during the Mughal period when the Muslims were forcefully converting the Hindus to Islam and the Sikhs, the Khalsa, were protecting them (see Khushwant Singh and Kuldip Nayar). Later, it was believed that when a woman couldn’t conceive, or if she only had daughters, the couple would promise to convert their first-born son to Sikhism. 7 When he was not yet eight, my son cried when I cut his long unshorn hair after a few hard years of facing racism in the United States of America. He was the only Sikh boy in town with a patka, a headgear with long, uncut hair, and was the brunt of jokes (he was called a girl and then a freak) and beaten many times. After I cut his hair, for a long time he struggled with issues of identity, particularly religious and national ideas of belonging in the United States. Even in recent years, his trauma and woundedness appear in psychotherapy, when he remembers his mother’s violent behavior towards him. As a Sikh woman from the diaspora, I’m still trying to articulate various traumas and find words to

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narrate the violence we faced as Sikh women and men, and the violence I perpetrated on my body and bodies of others, particularly my son’s and daughter’s, in uncanny ways. 8 See Mitta and Phoolka for more on politicians who were involved in the carnage and became ministers in Rajiv Gandhi’s government. 9 An earlier version of Maachis was first published in Jaspal Kaur Singh, “Contrary Narrative Spaces and the Sikh Woman: Imperial Aftermaths in Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas and Gulzar’s Maachis.” Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory. 2:2 (2006): 125–134. I thank Routledge, Taylor & Francis Ltd, for permission to reproduce it here.

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8 TRAUMATIZED SIKH MALE AND FEMALE SUBJECTS Representations of Trauma and Memory in Amitoj Mann’s 2003 Punjabi Film Hawayein

How do Sikhs represent cultural memories within trauma narratives in fiction and films? According to Bal et al., cultural memory is a cultural, personal, and social experience; the representation of trauma and cultural memory through artifacts such as literature or cinema is an endeavor by artists occurring in the present, but their past is simultaneously being “modified and redescribed even as it continues to shape the future” (vii). Amitoj1 Mann’s Hindi language film Hawayein represents the 1984 Massacre through a gendered heteropatriarchal discourse where he attempts to narrate the past in order to rewrite the Sikhs’ future in India. I argue that the film does not lead to “social forgetting” (Crewe 76), reintegration, or cultural healing for the traumatized Sikh subjects, male and particularly female, due to the fragmentary narrative and due to the repetition compulsion of the screenwriter, director, and producer (Mann is one of the producers). The narrative resurfaces as a symptom of Sikh trauma. Hawayein represents the aftermath of Operation Blue Star through the point of view of a primary male character, a mona Sikh. A quote at the opening of the film dedicates it to: “The Shaheeds, the martyrs, victims who died in the Punjab holocaust, innocent Sikhs who died before and after operation Blue Star, Sikh men, women, and children massacred during the 1984 Sikh genocide, and Sikhs and non-Sikhs who died due to terrorism.” Another quote is attributed to Rajiv Gandhi, son of the assassinated Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, who responded to the Sikh Massacre in India by stating: “When a huge tree falls, earth trembles” (Puri). In an interview, Mann, a mona Sikh, son of famous amritdhari Sikh Punjabi song writer and lyricist Babu Singh Maan,2 states the reason, the cause, of the film was to tell people the story of the 1984 Sikh Massacre and the brutal aftermath of the 1990s for the Sikhs, so that the tragedy doesn’t reoccur. He is the actor, screenwriter, director, and one of the producers of the film. He tells the interviewer that they, including himself and the interviewer, had all witnessed the traumatic events of 1984 and so he felt personally responsible to tell the story, to tell the truth. He said he couldn’t ignore the pain of his people and the screams of his land. 118

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Mann confesses that he cried at least 25 times during the writing of the screenplay, as he felt the pain that the brutalized Sikhs felt—the violence of 1984. One of the reasons there are so few films about the 1984 Massacre, he says, is that people are afraid to tell the stories. His film was banned in the Punjab and in Delhi. As the narrative unfolds, a middle-class Delhi Sikh family gathers in the living room to discuss an upcoming marriage. Mr. Sachar, an amritdhari Sikh, accompanied by Mr. Bhargava, a Hindu, visits another amritdhari Sikh, Brigadier Singh. As they greet each other, Bhargava points to a photo of the Brigadier, saying, “You are a decorated 1971 Indo-Pak war veteran, awarded a Veer Chakra for war bravery. You must release Sachar of his anxiety.” The camera then slowly pans across the photo, indicating the Brigadier’s service to India. Sachar then asks for Rani, the Brigadier’s daughter’s hand in marriage for his son, Gursewak. The Brigadier demands that the groom-to-be should be present at the discussion. As Bhargava gets up to fetch the young man, a young mona Sikh, Sarabjit, the Brigadier’s son, joins the discussion. Many young Sikh men had cut off their hair and shaved their beards after hearing the rumors of the terror in Punjab of Operation Wood Rose and Operation Blue Star (as my nephews from Delhi who migrated to Punjab initially did). When he greets the elders, he says “Sat Sri Akal” to Mr. Sachar and “Namaste” to Mr. Bhargava. Bhargava acts upset at the difference in greeting, saying that he was about to ask Sarabjit about the Punjab situation, but the way he was greeted is answer enough. He means the difference in the Sikh and Hindu manner of greeting and is upset at being differentiated, as he feels like one of the members of the Sikh community due to his intimacy with the family. As Bhargava leaves, the discussion turns to Operation Blue Star. At the mention of the Operation, Sarabjit angrily states that the central government knowingly allowed armaments to be transported to Punjab with a particular goal in mind. To smoke out the Sikh separatist and Khalistani terrorist Bindrawale, who was holed up in the Amritsar Harmandir Sahib/Golden Temple, Indira Gandhi, then Prime Minister of India, launched an attack, code name Operation Blue Star, between 1 and 6 June 1984. Bindrawale and a number of other members of his group were rumored to be hoarding arms in the complex. As is now well-known, the factions that existed in the Punjab of 1980s were further exacerbated by the introduction of Bindranwale, a maverick militant religious leader, by Gandhi’s Congress Party into the Punjab politics. The Akalis had appointed Longowal, a popular Sikh politician, as leader to continue the struggle against the Central government (Rajindar Puri). The Congress Party then introduced Bindranwale to weaken the ruling Akalis’ hold on the Punjab. The new spiritual leader Bindranwale became popular with the rural farming community, especially after he was arrested for murder and later released for lack of evidence (Guha);3 he had a huge following and established his own group. Talks were initiated between the central government and the Akali Party to resolve some of the issues in Punjab, including the escalating violence among various factions. The Akali Party organized a series of civil 119

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disobedience movements that lead to large-scale protests in Punjab. The central government used increased police force against the various protest movements in Punjab. The May 23, 1984 Grain roko Morcha (stop the grain protest) was one of the main reasons for Indira Gandhi to summon the army. Brindranwale, along with his followers, who had started hoarding arms in the Golden Temple, became the main target, leading to Operation Blue Star. When Sarabjit joins the conversation about Operation Blue Star, saying the central government knew about Bhindranwale and deliberately allowed arms to flow into the Punjab, Brigadier Singh silences him, admonishing him for speaking about issues that he does not fully comprehend. The discussion then returns to the wedding. Rani’s and Gursewak’s wedding is then set for November 1, 1984. The discussion seems to jump from the wedding to Operation Blue Star and back, indicating the fragmentary nature of the narrative. At the university that Sarabjit attends in Delhi, he meets Muskaan, a Hindu woman, and they fall in love. On October 31, 1984, the family celebrates Rani’s and Gursewak’s engagement. Suddenly, Indira Gandhi’s assassination is announced. As the family gathers around a television set, they hear chants of “khoon ka badla khoon” (“Blood for Blood”). The Brigadier warns of backlash from an egged-on and simple populace. Amidst such a tense situation, the family decides to have a short wedding ceremony for Rani the next day, as the ceremony is already scheduled. Postponing a girl’s wedding (in India, no matter how old the bride is, she is called the girl and the man is called the boy) is considered ashub, inauspicious for the parents’ family. However, early the next morning, violence against the Sikhs erupts. As Sarabjit ventures out toward Alok Puri, the colony where Gursevak lives, along with Mr. Bharagava, Muskaan’s Hindu father, a family friend, they see countless deaths and unimaginable destruction. In the foreground, the carefully orchestrated Hindu mob shove tires around Sikhs’ heads, pour kerosene, and set them on fire, while women, seen in the background, running in terror, yell and scream for mercy. A prolonged re-enactment of the trauma of the Sikh Massacre fills the screen: Sikh men without turbans, hair loose, running desperately away from the Hindu mob pursuing them with swords, sticks, and kerosene, turbaned Sikh men being stabbed and clubbed to death, burned alive, heads stuck inside burning tires, and women sobbing and begging for mercy. In the background, barely perceptible, women struggle and scream, being violently assaulted, dragged, and picked up by men. While the action of killing Sikh men is depicted in graphic detail in the foreground, the rape of women is merely shown through symbolic gestures, such as the forceful yanking off of a salwar/pants, partially obscured by a door, the dupatta, the scarf, a symbol of modesty, yanked off and thrown up in the air where it floats in slow motion. According to Bal et al., cultural memory is both individual and sociocultural (vii), and as Hirsch and Smith claim, “What a culture remembers and what it chooses to forget are intricately bound up with issues of power and hegemony, and thus with gender” (6); I argue that sites of memory, such as Hawayein, unable or unwilling to show 120

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gender violence, elide Sikhs’ female violated bodies in communal, cultural, and national narratives. While gendered violence and mass rapes of the Partition are discussed in Veena Das’s Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary, she also elides the same occurring during the 1984 Massacre. In contrast (to the Partition), if we consider the riots against the Sikhs in 1984, the dominant themes were those of humiliation of men. Women were not attacked, though there might have been a few isolated cases of rape … in some cases Hindu and Muslims groups consciously try to avoid rape of women of the other community. (Das 14) While Amitoj Mann is unable to represent female violence, Das is unable to name the 1984 Sikh violence and massacre of women. She names the violence of Partition. Humans, she argues, died when autonomous citizens of India were simultaneously born as monsters … It was on the register of the imaginary that the question of what would constitute the passion of those who occupied this unspeakable and unhearable zone (of gender violence) was given shape [to by men who molded] the silences of women with their words. (Das 56) Many artists and writers attempted to give shape to communal and gender violence during the Partition. I’m not concerned about the pornographic nature of the representation of gender violence that proliferates in Bollywood and Hollywood cinema, about serial murderers and rapists, such as Ted Bundy and Jack the Ripper, as Deborah Cameron and Elizabeth Frazer discuss in their work; my concern here is the attempt at narrativizing the 1984 trauma in all its gendered perspective in a nuanced and realistic way that will lead to working through and towards healing. Most of the texts and representations instead either elide the gendered nature of violence or subsume it under a heteronormative and nationalist violence. Or there is denial, as Das and many others within the Indian nation-state do, about Hindu men violating and raping Sikh women during the 1984 Massacre. Veena Das reminds herself that those, like Sadaat Hasan Manto, who tried to name “it,” have “themselves touched madness and died in fierce regret for the loss of the radical dream of transforming India” (58). Are writers and directors afraid of that madness, and hence only a few address the Sikh Massacre, and they are unable to represent Sikh women’s violence and rape during the terror? There are a handful of accounts resurfacing in recent years about the violation and rape of Sikh women during this period, and Reema Anand’s Scorched White Lilies of ’84 is one of them. Anand, a Sikh writer, social worker and author, notes, 121

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There were accounts of gruesome sexual assaults and the rapes committed in areas of Sultanpuri, Kalyanpuri, Mongolpuri and Trilokpuri based on personal interviews taken by journalists and the medical records at the relief camps set up by the community and some non-governmental organizations. (Anand 50) Anand provides many textual examples of rape and violence perpetrated on Sikh women in her texts. During her work with survivors of ’84 in Delhi’s Trilokpuri, she asks Kali, one of the “toughest of them, the leader among them and the most vociferous and fierce in her exterior demeanor,” to recount her memories, who, sobbing, narrates the following: It has been twenty-two years didi (sister), but the nightmare doesn’t go away. In front of my eyes, they kept seizing young girls in our group. They flashed torches in our faces. They used knives to slice open the front of our shirts and cut open the cord of the salwars (trousers) of the girls they thought passable. (Anand 50) Anand, who bore testimony to this narrative, fell sick after hearing this account, but realizing it helped Kali to narrate the repressed memory, she listens. Kali recounts another woman’s account of rape: “Gurdip Kaur, a forty-five-year-old woman was gang-raped by a group of eight young boys of about sixteen to eighteen years of age in front of her sixteen-year-old son” (50). In the text, Anand continues to bear witness to the 1984 raped and violated Sikh women. There were many inquiries into the atrocities of 1984, but the rapes of women were missing from the governments’ reports. None of the commissions, enquiries, or journalists—except perhaps Madhu Kishwar—mentioned the word “rape.” As Anand writes, “Even the People’s Union for Democratic Rights … failed to mention atrocities committed on Sikh women and their young daughters” (51). Although Indian and Sikh patriarchies chose to, or were made to, forget sexual violence against Sikh women, a testimony such as Kali’s, as Hirsch and Smith write in terms of narrative memory, “serves as a challenge and a countermemory to official hegemonic history” (10). While Anand’s text allows retelling of traumatic memory, Mann’s attempts in Hawayein to represent the violated Sikh women is through fragmentation and dissociation. As Sarabjit attempts to save Gursewak while he is being beaten by the Hindu mob, a Hindu politician is seen orchestrating the massacre. The politician orders a Hindu man to kill Gursewak, while Mr. Bhargava, trying to save him, is stabbed to death. In the skirmish, Sarabjit is wounded. Only a few days after the assassination of Indira Gandhi and the beginning of the Sikh Massacre, on November 4, Sarabjit wakes up in a Relief Camp in Delhi where he is reunited with his grandmother. Sobbing, she narrates the episodes of destruction in the family through fragmentary narratives. Through flashbacks, the 1984 Massacre 122

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and rape of women are portrayed as memory. While the setting of the film begins in Delhi, the epicenter of the 1984 violence, the aftermath of it in Punjab is felt long afterwards in police and army brutality, economic exploitation, rapes, murders, and massacres. In the film, the aftershocks are dramatized through Sarabjit’s family’s fragmentation. Sarabjit and his grandmother decide to return to Punjab, but here too mayhem awaits them. His cousin Sukhi and her friend Lali are holding a memorial for their dead relatives, and Sukhi laments the fact that the threads of her rakhi (a sacred thread tied to a brother’s wrist for protection) must have weakened, for her cousin brother, Sarabjit, will no longer be able to protect her. At the very moment, Sarabjit returns. While Sukhi is overjoyed to see him alive, her father, who wishes to appropriate the Brigadier’s land, is upset. Sarabjit soon starts farming, riding a tractor and creating lines and fissures in the earth, trying to reimagine and recreate another reality. When the wheat grows and matures, Sarabjit harvests it. His grandmother and Sukhi urge him to marry Lali. That night, Sikh men who look like Khalistani separatists arrive at his house, demand food, plant ammunition, and leave. Before morning, the Punjab police arrive, find the guns, pick up Sarabjit, and begin a regime of torture. The next shot shows Sarabjit’s uncle begging the police to release his nephew; he says he had only asked the police to scare his nephew so that he will hand over the land to him. As he touches the police officer’s feet for forgiveness, he is brutally beaten. After Sarabjit is tortured, the police place him in a car to relocate him when a group of Sikhs ambushes them. Sarabjit chases one of the police officers into the city, where a fistfight ensues. Lali, who is shopping in the city, sees him, and grabs the policeman’s gun away from him before he is able to shoot. Sarabjit snatches the gun, shoots the policeman, and along with Lali escapes with the others into the jungle. Here he is reunited with his Sikh college friend, nicknamed Kanpuriya, a Kanpur native. He fills Sarabjit with narratives of Sikh Massacre and torture in Kanpur, providing him with ample reasons for his own status as a terrorist, or a Khalistani, a separatist. Sarabjit and Lali join the group. While Lali is occasionally seen with a gun and walking among the men, dressed and looking like a soldier, she does not take an active role. At the camp, a woman is seen with a steel tray, waiting for the others to return, suggesting her role as a server. The members of this camp struggle with the corrupt local police force and politicians who, with the help of local thugs, are forcefully wresting land from farmers. As the narrative moves rapidly from one assault to another, with prolonged scenes of torture of male Sikhs, the re-enactment of the 1984 trauma and violence appear obsessive and repetitive (Hirsch and Smith). While Mann attempts to represent the trauma of the 1984 Massacre, the narrative becomes overly fragmented and rushed. As Sarabjit and Kanpuriya wage a war against the police and others for justice, they also fight to clear their names as terrorists. The real terrorists, the narrative shows, are the members of Balwant’s group, the thugs hired by his uncle, who harass and kill innocent Hindus and politicians; they are the ones trained in 123

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Pakistan, and are the corrupt “Khalistanis,” demanding a separate Sikh homeland at the behest of General Malik, a Muslim from Pakistan. Malik demands that Hindus and Sikhs should massacre each other, and then, through re-migration of Muslims from Pakistan to India, a Khalistan should be created. Desiring India’s decline and easy access to India through the proposed nation of Khalistan, Malik declares, “Aisa bana tha Pakistan, aise hi bana tha Bangladesh, aise beney ga Khalistan, phir Kashmir” (This is how Pakistan was created, how Bangladesh was created, how Khalistan is going to be created, and then Kashmir). Towards that end, a subtitle appears: “Balwant implements mass killing plans.” In what follows, the trauma of the 1984 Massacre and violence, and its aftermath, is displaced onto forces outside India—that is, Pakistan—for how can the elected politicians of a democratic nation-state allow citizens of its own country to be mercilessly slaughtered? Mann is unable to imagine Hindu elected politicians orchestrating the killing of Sikhs, as history testifies they did. His trauma is projected onto another community, another religion, and another nation—an easy target. According to Julia Bleakney, “Trauma is an overwhelming or extraordinary experience that produces such responses as denial, repression, repetition, or dissociation” (20). Trauma that is repressed returns to haunt the survivor in “disruptive and non-linear ways” (20). In Hawayein, the repressed trauma of the Sikh community returns as the repetition compulsion and erupts on the screen. Kanpuriya, on discovering that a Hindu politician responsible for mass killings of Sikhs in 1984 was going to be in town, shoots him at the railway station, and is nabbed by the police. Sarabjit and his cohorts decide that the world needs to know about the situation in Punjab. They abduct a Swedish diplomat and persuade him to tell the Punjab story to the world—the story of massacre must be made narratable; however, the repercussion is severe, and Kanpuriya is brutally tortured and almost killed at the hands of police officers. Although Mann attempts narration of the Sikh Massacre, the film is unable to contain the excesses. The narrative then shifts to Muskaan, Sarabjit’s girlfriend, who, as a Delhi journalist, also wishes to report the Punjab story to the world. She is from the dominant Hindu community and is provided narrative space in the dominant ideology, and will use it, for she, too, is a traumatized subject, albeit a surrogate one, standing in for the often guilt-ridden and sympathetic populace of India, who were impotent or unable to intervene on the Sikhs’ behalf. As Gabriele Schwab, a German American woman born in what she calls a “perpetrator” post-war nation of Germany, where memories of holocaust violence are willfully repressed through an altered national language, claims that internalization of such prohibitive language made it hard to speak about violence without guilt or fear (77). Schwab, in trying to remember fragments of stories told to her about the holocaust, “picked up on something untold, silenced, violently cut out” and realized that such repressed memories “also call for speech, testimony, and witnessing.” (48). Thus, Muskaan, represented by Mann as the majority community that stood by, willingly or unwillingly, symbolizes the Hindu nation’s attempt to give voice to the Sikh Massacre. 124

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Muskaan accompanies a spiritual pad yatra, a procession, with a Hindu yogi to the Land of the Five Rivers, Punjab, in order to end the strife there. Balwant, along with General Malik, plans mass killings at this event; however, the plan is foiled, the bomb goes off prematurely, and in the ensuing melee, shots are fired by both Balwant and Sarabjit’s group dressed as policemen, as well as the Punjab police and General Malik’s men from Pakistan. Total chaos ensues, signifying the turmoil that reigned in Punjab for over a decade. Sarabjit, recognizing Balwant, pursues him. Malik shoots the Hindu yogi. A Sikh thug from Balwant’s group points his gun at Sarabjit. Sarabjit implores his Sikh brethren to end the Pakistan-instigated massacre of Sikhs. The Sikh thug capitulates and gives Sarabjit the gun. Sarabjit then shoots Malik dead. Balwant takes off with Sarabjit in hot pursuit. After beating him mercilessly, Sarabjit, using an axe, chops him to death. At that point, a Hindu police office shoots Sarabjit, who dies a slow-motion death. Sarabjit, signifying the Sikh youth who were inadvertently drawn into the separatist movement, meets his untimely and brutal end. As Sarabjit’s dead body is being mutilated and kicked around by the police, Lali, who has been literally and symbolically on the periphery of this action, wipes her tears, fires two shots with her AK-47 into the policeman’s heart and kills him. Almost simultaneously, the police fire shots and her open-mouthed visage, veiled by smoke, pauses into a freeze frame. A voiceover is heard. “Who were these people? Terrorists? Lost Creatures? Criminals?” As the images reappear on the screen, we see Muskaan on stage, her 2002 book Hawayein: A Book Based on True Events projected on screen, narrating her side of the story. “Did they not wish to live,” she continues, “or were they not allowed to live? The more than 6,500 people that died were not orphans; just because we hid their dead bodies, their past is not erased. It is true that wounds should not be poked, but if we forget, the outcome could be much worse. That is the reason for this book,” she concludes. Thus, the narrative ends with a Hindu woman, all in white, holding the book, and asking for remembrance so that such cultural traumas can be avoided. Mann, in this film, which is chaotic and fragmentary, attempts to remember the trauma of the Sikh Massacre in order to re-form the relationship with the majoritarian community that belongs to the perpetrator group, the Hindus. Regarding cultural memory and trauma, and the remembering subject’s attempts to narrate a traumatic past, Mieke Bal et al. claim that repression and dissociation occur: Repression results in ellipsis—the omission of important elements in the narrative—whereas dissociation doubles the strand of the narrative series of events by splitting off a sideline. In contrast to ellipses, this sideline is called paralepsis in the narrative theory. In other words, repression interrupts the flow of narratives that shapes memory; dissociation splits off material that cannot then be incorporated into the main narrative. (Bal et al. xi) 125

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Thus, traumatic memory, when repressed, is available only through symbolic or indirect indications, whereas when dissociated, subconscious traumatic memory can be repeated as traumatic re-enactments. Mann’s Hawayein attempts to give voice to the trauma of the 1984 Sikh Massacre by tapping into his psyche as a Sikh man and into the cultural memory of the Hindu nation. Muskaan’s attempt at telling the story of the Sikh trauma falls short. Hindus in India, for the most part, do not accept the event as a massacre, let alone a genocide. Mann, as a member of a traumatized community, attempts to make the repressed memory of trauma narratable through testimony and through “bearing witness” (Kosicki 13), but his attempts are barely successful due to the repetition compulsion and the fragmentary narrative style. Schwab argues, “Any redress aimed at ending the cycle of violence” requires “different ethics of relating to the other” (150). Mann attempts to relate to the Hindu community, but I argue, his attempt only leads to the retraumatization of the wounded Sikh polity due to excessive and repetitive violence and gaps in the narrative. “To remember,” writes Paul Ricoeur, “is to have a memory or to set off in search of a memory … [and] from memories to reflective memory, passing by way of recollection” (4). For, “to remember something is at the same time to remember oneself” (5). As Ricoeur claims, “To say: you will remember, is also to say: you will not forget” (87), and to not forget one must tell so that the mourning subject can heal, and for its part, the work of mourning, since it requires time, projects the artisan of this work ahead of himself; he will have to continue, one by one, to cut the ties that hold him in the grip of the lost objects of his love and his hate: as for reconciliation with the loss itself, this will forever remain an unfinished task. (Ricoeur 88) If Muskaan is the remembering subject here, is she wounded by the wounds of Sikhs? Or, is Mann the remembering subject? Mann is a postmemory artist who uses his own and his community’s memory of violence to narrate the story in the film, so that trauma victims of 1984 and the subsequent Sikh Massacre of the 1990s can be shared with others and healing can occur. According to Michael Elm, Kobi Kabalek and Julia B. Köhne, Film not only stores and replays traumatic energies in a sort of ‘cultural container’ viewed by the public, it oftentimes also processes and transforms these energies into even more complex cultural material. It gives them a new, altered shape, a symbolic, more readable form that might arouse less of a society’s fear than the historical event itself. The transposed ‘trauma’ comes in the garment of distortion, as translating traumatic language into film language often implies moments of deformation,

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disfigurement, fracture, breakup, dislocation, or transmutation that are not easy to decipher. (Elm et al. 10) I argue that due to the elliptical nature of the narrative, due to the repetition compulsion in Hawayein, deformation in the historical narrative occurs. Hindus have not accepted the fact of the Sikh Massacre. For the wounded Sikh subjects, and certainly Sikh women, healing is foreclosed in the viewing of the film. It is only through bearing witness that healing can occur. According to Kaja Silverman, “to remember other people’s memories is to inhabit time” (189), which can lead to the cyclical continuation of the same and can be misrepresented. However, Silverman also notes that the “function of recollection … is to transform” (189). Mann places the blame of Sikh cultural trauma at Pakistan’s door, and so transformation within the Indian nation-state is impossible. Does he incorrectly remember that the majority of the Hindus applauded the attack on the Harmandir Sahib/Golden Temple (Kirpal Singh Dhillon), and indeed the majority stood by while Sikhs were massacred? Yet, to “remember perfectly would be forever to inhabit the same cultural order” (Silverman 189). If so, Mann’s imperfect memory of the Sikh trauma may be transformative in attempting communal harmony between Sikhs and Hindus, as it shifts “significance not only of the past, but also of the present” (189). However, to do so at the expense of another community, the Muslims and the Pakistan nation-state, is a failure of imagination. Mannerism Productions produced Hawayein as a low-budget film in 2003, and boasts on the DVD back cover that it was “crafted with commercial parameters, that it was shot in more than 41 authentic & picturesque locations in Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Delhi and on the massive sets of Kamalistan Studio—Mumbai” in order to “shatter previous stereotypes of Sikh characters shown on the Indian screen.” Although it attempts to break Sikh terrorist stereotypes, the film shows Mann’s fragmentary narratives of his repressed memories of trauma produced in hyperbolic and hypermasculinist terms. In focusing only on the images of tortured male Sikh bodies, Mann once again proves that women’s bodies—militant, violent, raped, mutilated, or otherwise—are not objects of vision, and women’s narratives of trauma, fragmentary or otherwise, remain mostly peripheral. The gendered narrative precludes healing for the wounded Sikh community, and particularly so for the traumatized Sikh females.

Notes 1 Also spelled Ammtoje. 2 The last name of both Amitoj Mann and Babu Singh Maan is variously spelled as either Mann or Maan. 3 For more on Bindrawale and the Punjab politics preceding Operation Blue Star, see Guha.

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9 (EN)GENDERING NATIONS IN MANOJ PUNJ’S 2004 PUNJABI FILM DES HOYAA PRADES When One’s Nation Becomes a Foreign Territory

Discussing electronic media in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimension of Globalization, Arjun Appadurai claims that imagination is no longer individual, as mass media create “communities of sentiment [in which] groups begin to imagine and feel things together” (8). He goes on to state, “the nation-state, as a complex modern political form, is on its last legs” (19). Appadurai claims that the lines between realistic (e.g. news reporting) and fictional (e.g. cinematic) media are increasingly blurred. To him, a nation is a group of people with common ties and a “nation-state is a self-governing group of people with a common culture” (19). Is India a nation-state with a common culture for the Sikhs, both men and women? Since the state-sponsored terror of the 1984 Sikh Massacre, most Sikhs have been feeling unhomed (in the sense that they no longer feel at home in India). During the creation of Pakistan when India gained independence from the British, the oppositional idea of a Khalistan was also circulated, although Sikhs chose to call India home and became citizens of independent India. According to Jyoti Grewal, Khalistan as an idea was as implausible as was the idea of Pakistan in the early days of its enunciation. This is borne out by the fact that the Azad Punjab Scheme authored by Master Tara Singh and the Akalis included [all Punjabi] Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs in it … The idea of Khalistan, popularized by V.S. Bhatti, was neither as powerful a demand nor did it have enough purchase to be realized … an important facet of this contested issue of homelands for cultural minorities is the reality that at no time did the Akalis envision a territorial space called Khalistan, Sikhistan, or a Sikh state with Sikhs as majority. (Grewal 29) The Akalis, in reality, were more interested in keeping parts of the Punjab within India; they already had thrown in their lot with the Congress when the idea of Partition was becoming a reality. 128

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The next time the idea of Khalistan was floated by the Akalis was after the Anandpur resolution of 1977. The resolution included a list of demands drafted by the Akali Dal addressing the “economic, political, cultural, social and religious concerns of Sikhs” (Grewal 39). According to Grewal, Bhindranwale misused and abused this resolution in his desire to serve first the Congress and then himself (40). To harness the support of the rural Jats, Bhindranwale amplified their fears to the point where they consumed them … it was not difficult for Bhindranwale to sway the Jats; after all, the countryside Jats were not spending their time in the libraries reading the resolution. They were listening to Bhindranwale’s spin on it, which was selective, undemocratic, and frankly, wrong. (Grewal 41) The central government was fast losing popularity in Punjab. The Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, and the President of India, Zail Singh, helped create the political crisis of 1981 in Punjab when they used Bhindranwale in the Punjab politics to regain power (Grewal; Simrat Dhillon). Grewal argues that the situation in Punjab was about various factions gaining political power. When the situation deteriorated to such an extent that violent protests broke out in Punjab, which were brutally repressed by the central government, and Bhindranwale began using terrorist tactics to resist, the Sikh community began to be considered violent and unruly by the majority Hindu Indians. While the quam here is feminized, the torture of Sikhs during Operation Wood Rose turned many Sikhs into terrorists or separatists to be used as traitors by the state (The Nation’s Tortured Body 133). During this time, Gandhi deployed the army, first through Operation Wood Rose and then through Operation Blue Star. The crisis created by Indira Gandhi’s use of Bhindranwale in Punjab then fostered ideas of terrorism and militancy, in which the reasons for the causes of state violence against the Sikhs can be found. Many in India and the diaspora knew that Punjab, being the bread bowl of India, was becoming politically strong. Indira Gandhi, whose popularity was waning, needed the political support of Punjab to make the center stronger. The Akalis had been making demands on the center for a long time, and since the center ignored the needs of Punjab, Sikhs and the Akali Dal tried to have their demands met through various morchas (protest marches) and sit-ins (Kirpal Dhillon 10). While Bhindranwale had some support from the rural farmers who were “suffering from not being paid their due for the food they were producing; waters for irrigation were being promised to Haryana, the Hindu-dominated state which was carved out of Punjab’s side,” his greater base of support came from the diaspora (Grewal 52; Axel; Simrat Dhillon). Diasporic Sikhs in gurudwaras collected vast amounts of money and weapons across the globe, and sermons regarding Khalistan were offered in the gurudwaras of New York, Vancouver, Toronto, Houston, Bradford, and Birmingham (Grewal 53). I heard 129

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these sermons in Raleigh-Durham in North Carolina, where I lived for a number of years in the 1980s and where the Khalistani movement was strong. We, my family consisting of my then husband, an amritdhari, my young amritdhari son, my daughter who observed the five Ks, and myself, a moni with trimmed hair1 (as opposed to the mona used for a male Sikh with trimmed hair and beard), were new immigrants to the USA in 1984. We were constantly harangued by the Khalistanis to donate to the Khalistan cause, observe the five Ks, sign petitions, and write letters to our senators. Those were tense and troubling days for us on a personal level, as my husband’s job did not provide benefits (he was a research assistant for a Professor at North Carolina State) and I worked for minimum wage at a retail store (full-time, to get full medical benefits for the family). Besides being broke and insecure, I had lived through the violence of a military regime in Burma and was chary of getting involved, as we only had green cards. We were constantly reminded about the terror and atrocities committed against the Sikh in India, through news and photos of the shahids (martyrs) in the gurudwara, and through lectures from Sikh visitors from India. My mother-in-law was a steadfast amritdhari Sikh whose family lived through the Partition, she had lost home and property in Lahore and her brother and nephews were pro-Khalistan in Punjab; she kept in constant touch with my husband about the Punjab situation and he was becoming increasingly enamored by the radicalized Raleigh-Durham Sikhs. Most of our Sundays were spent either at the gurudwara or with the Sikh families in the area. My entire in-laws’ family and extended family were unsettled when I trimmed my daughter’s knee-length hair, as it became infested with lice when I started working full-time in retail as well as taking care of all the domestic chores. My trimmed hair, always an issue with my husband and the in-laws, became a further area of stress in our lives. According to Brian Keith Axel in The Nation’s Tortured Body, the amritdhari in the Sikh diaspora is reconstructed through the circulation of various iconic images, ranging from the “nineteenth century processes of surrender (to the British colonizers) and constructions of the Sikh body,” the construction of the “glorious body” of the last Sikh King, “Maharaja Duleep2 Singh,” and of “tortured” Sikh bodies (Axel 156). In 1854, Duleep Singh (September 6, 1838– October 22, 1893) was taken to England as a young boy after the Anglo-Sikh war and had cut his hair and converted to Christianity. Most of his images and paintings from England during this time, however, are with his head covered in a turban as a true amritdhari. Images of the turbaned Duleep Singh, which were first circulated in England and then in Punjab during the colonial period, became increasingly popular during the Khalistani movement along with images of “tortured bodies” (of shaheeds, the martyrs), victims of police brutality, at countless Sikh gurudwara websites in the West. Axel argues that these images fed both a Sikh sense of persecution and solidarity in the diaspora (156). As diasporic Sikhs from Burma and India, such an imagery created a wounded sense of communal identity for us in a racist nation-state, particularly in the 130

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South where we faced discrimination due to our race and religion: my son because of his long hair and underturban, my amritdhari husband because of his turban, beard and long hair,3 my daughter for her long, uncut hair, and for me due to my accent and my skin color. In Burma, my siblings and I had gone through Sikh baptism and followed Sikhism as closely as we knew how to in the diaspora. The daily prayers reminded us of the Guru’s sacrifice and the Mughal torture many had gone through to save it. Therefore, may we, says the ardas, serve Sikhism through our breath and through our hair. According to Axel, it is through the reminder of a “founding trauma” (156) that unified the Sikh community. The founding trauma, he argues, itself sets into motion a desire for, not only order, but a return to order. For the Indian nation-state, this is a return that itself dictates the very terms of terror (i.e., the nightmare of disintegration). And, for many Khalistanis, this is a return that legitimizes a militant struggle. (Axel 156) Colonial violence first dismantled the Sikh nation and fragmented the community, then the Partition violence scattered the Sikhs, and during the police terror and the subsequent Khalistani movement, “violence [became] the thread by which the diaspora is constituted as a community” (Axel 156; Simrat Dhillon; Tatla). The founding trauma and the re-traumatization together construct the Sikh desire for a homeland, Khalistan. While the violence, trauma, and the wounds that Sikhs have suffered become paramount in literature and dominant representational imagery, the sant-sipahi or warrior-saint idea slowly faded and, in its place, “the masculinized body of the amritdhari,” that is, a baptized Sikh (Axel 35) took its place. In the Sikh gurudwara in the Raleigh-Durham area, we were exhorted to stop cutting our hair, to nurture the turban, and to donate to the Khalistani cause. We heard about my uncles, paternal and maternal, who were hounded in Delhi during the 1984 Sikh Massacre—in Janak Puri and in Ashok Vihar; about my paternal uncle Nanak, an Indian National Army fauji from the 1940s in colonial Burma, hidden by Hindu neighbors during the Massacre, relocating to Punjab; my maternal uncle Seva, also an Indian National Army fauji, who was an interpreter for the Japanese during the war with the British, leaving to relocate to Punjab; about my in-laws’ terrible state in Uttar Pradesh, where they were harassed, brutalized, and their property looted; about my husband’s pro-Khalistani relatives in the Punjab after the 1984 violence and the terrible psychological state they were in (see the Introduction). The gurudwara Sikh community was the only space where we should have felt safe, and my husband and my children did, but I felt further dislocated and unhomed. Why is the idea of belonging to a nation, to a space, a territory so important for the Sikhs in India and the diaspora? They are simultaneously reminded of stories of glory 131

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from when they were whole, and the torture and fragmentation they suffered at the hands of the Mughals. Maharaja Ranjit Singh, who established a Khalsa Raj in Punjab between 1799 and 1839, died in 1839, leaving the Sikhs weakened by war with the Afghans. After two wars, they were conquered by the British on March 24, 1849 (Axel; Khushwant Singh, A History of the Sikhs). As discussed in Chapter 1 of this book, but worth reiterating again here briefly, when the Sikhs, 16,000 strong, surrendered to the British, the British orchestrated a demonstration wherein each Sikh soldier was forced to walk between British troops and lay down their arms (Axel 40; Khushwant Singh, A History of the Sikhs). Governor-General Dalhousie reported this “spectacle” as “absolute subjection and humiliation of so powerful an enemy” (Axel, original emphasis 40) that he personally reported to the Crown about the antics. The colonial scene of surrender “points to a complex of processes that figures into the formation of colonial Sikh subject … the identification of a Sikh subject by the ‘distinctive’ and ‘distinctively’ gendered, image of the male Sikh body. Today, the postcolonial Sikh subject is marked with this indelible imprint of coloniality” (42). The surrendered colonial body of the Sikh became iconic in colonial discourse, which was then disseminated around the world in various guises. One of the most famous and popular images was that of Maharaja Duleep Singh, who was a subject of the empire, and his painting, complete with turban and beard, circulated in England and India. When the British annexed Punjab in 1849, Maharaja Duleep was barely 11 years old. He cut his hair and converted to Christianity in 1852 and left for England two years later. In England, his life was “chronicled by a series of portraits” in an Indian dress and with a turban covering his short hair; the turban, then, argues Axel, became the “national feature” of the Sikhs (56). Even though they were constituted as brave and as warriors in earlier writings, the co-optation and transformation of these iconic images of the Sikhs as subjects of the British became predominant in colonial discourse and at once feminized the Sikhs— as submissive to the British. According to Axel, Within the colonial context the painting of dethroned Indian royalty constituted an acute act of appropriation—reiteration, renegotiation, and revaluing the surrender of former foes. More specifically, the production of portraits of Maharaja Duleep Singh became part of an emerging system of global capital that followed the lines of colonialist expansion, transforming one corporeal image into both a new commodity for consumption and an iterable model of citation. Conversely, portraits of Maharaja Duleep Singh simultaneously reconstituted the masculinized Sikh body and transformed it into an icon of the Sikh ‘nation,’ itself subject to the Crown. (Axel 47) 132

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Quoting Bernard Cohn, Axel discusses the “historical enactment of surrender: ‘In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, an Indian would place his turban at the feet of his conqueror as a sign of complete surrender. This was also used in a metaphoric sense to ask a great favor of someone, indicating a willingness to become his slave’” (Axel 155–16). “Meri pugree na uchal,” a popular Punjabi saying, literally means “don’t toss my turban,” but symbolically it means demeaning or disrespecting someone; thus, the turban becomes synonymous with Sikh respect and honor. In 1984, when I moved to the US with my husband and two small children, the immigration officer at Chicago O’Hare International Airport ordered my husband, an amritdhari, to remove his “hat” for the green card photo. When he told her it was not a hat, she demanded, “Do you want your green card or not?” His green card shows a bearded man with a black underturban exposing his ears with tears in his eyes. Six years later, we decided to cut my son’s long hair and remove his patka, a version of a small turban young boys wear, as he was harassed and teased at school, called a girl, and pushed into the mud in the playground by white schoolboys. One day, in 1990 Oregon, where there was not a gurudwara in sight in a 100-mile radius nor a sight of another Sikh for a long way, I came to know that he was teased as he walked to school for his hair covering. I talked to my son, persuading him to cut his hair, as his cousin, my nephew, from a strict amritdhari family had also done due to the racism he faced in Illinois. My nephew had run away from home, leaving a note saying, “I’m sorry.” My sister was beside herself with fear that he might have committed suicide. The police were called. He returned the next day after spending a night in a homeless shelter. His father, a staunch amritdhari to this day, was devastated and fell silent for months, if not years. My nephew, an A student in his high school, and an award-winning Sikh student at the gurudwara camp, became aloof; his studies suffered. He would confide in me, telling me he wished his father would communicate with him. My husband agreed with me, albeit reluctantly, that it would be better if we cut our son’s hair ourselves when he was still young in order to protect him from the trauma that my nephew went through and to protect him from further harassment and racism in the US. I was given charge to complete the difficult and heartbreaking task, since I was a moni Sikh and no longer an amritdhari (I’d grown back my bangs which I cut when I was 13 in Burma, but had trimmed my hair during my stateless condition in Delhi after my exile). Although he agreed to have his hair cut, my son cried and howled and struggled as I cut his hair. In order to control him, I had to hold him fast to myself and kept cutting at it with a pair of old sewing scissors. Subsequently, although he agreed that he could play sports and be more easily accepted in his all-white cohort group, he had repressed the trauma for over a decade before he was able to write about it in an Asian American Studies class, and finally forgive me. Recently, however, his psychotherapist told him some of his issues regarding his identity as a man stem from the violent acts perpetrated on so young a body. I share these stories as a way of framing ideas about the importance of the turban and 133

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the Five Ks for Sikh identity, and the trauma of having them forcibly removed, or removing them—due to racism, colonialism, or state terror. It is this feminization of them as defeated colonial subjects or feminized ones in the diaspora that Sikhs resist in their daily prayers in the late 20th century; only, after the Partition, the anxiety is transferred onto the Mughals and the battles of religious conversions that they had waged against them. In 1854, the turban, which the painter Winterhalter detailed in the portrait of Duleep Singh, “took on significance as, not merely a turban, but a turban laid before the sovereign Queen Victoria” (Axel 60). The turban, symbolizing the Sikh nation and Sikh masculinity, is rendered docile. Sikhs migrated to the UK during the British colonial era for education and work as colonial subjects. They were also recruited in large numbers into the British army as the “Lions of Punjab” after the Sikh nation’s defeat. After World War II, Indians, including many Sikhs, poor and disenfranchised in colonial India, travelled to England to rebuild the country after the devastations it suffered. This diaspora became larger when Sikhs, persecuted by the Indian police and army in 1984, sought asylum in England and other parts of the West. Violence begun during the modern period within the Sikh homeland, and followed by the Indian state violence against the Sikhs, produced a significant diasporic presence in England and the Global North. The violence that helped produce the Sikh diaspora and the Sikh homeland in turn “engenders both a threat to the diaspora and a promise” (Axel 121). While Khalistan became a “historical effect, emerging out of the dialectics of diaspora and nation-state,” since 1984 it has “become a constitutive aspect of the Sikh diaspora and a social formation around which categories of violence have come to be organized” (original emphasis 122). The representations of the wounded or tortured Sikh body, including that of Bhindranwale, around the world—on the internet and in gurudwaras—constructs the Sikh homeland, and more importantly the “transnational production and discursive translation of Sikhs as a persecuted people” (original emphasis 123). As recently as 2019 when I visited Australia and New Zealand, I saw tortured Sikh bodies and the larger-than-life framed portrait of Bhindranwale in the gurudwaras there. The Sikhs in India could no longer pride themselves as belonging to a nation, as they continued to face state terror all through the 1990s in the aftermath of the 1984 Massacre; justice was never served. Diasporic Sikhs then took on the task of creating a strong presence and solidarity through various means, including the dissemination of the tortured body of the amritdhari Sikh through the internet and social media, as I’ve mentioned. The mutilated and fragmented body of the shahid is then juxtaposed to the total body of the amritdhari Sikh as a surrogate for wholeness, of a return, of completeness that Sikhs re-remember from the past (Axel). The Sikh Kingdom was once whole and then, through various means, it became fragmented. To become whole again, in the imaginary of the Sikhs, the shahid, or the martyr, becomes “fetishistically” invested with the significance of the total body with the Five Ks of the amritdhari Sikh (Axel 149). For some, it is only in Khalistan that the “total body” will re-emerge (156), and therefore, 134

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for the nation-state, this return is a threat and terror, whereas for the Khalistanis, “this is a return that legitimizes militant struggle,” signifying a “promise” (156) for return and for wholeness. Thus, while in the diaspora, memories of trauma are kept alive, such memories are disavowed within the nation-state of India, leading to repression and fragmentation. Narratives about Sikh traumas by Sikh artists are necessarily elliptical and fragmented due to various forms of repressions and disavowals—of state-sponsored violence, of denial by the Hindu majority population, of Sikh secrets about gendered violence and about Sikh women’s participation in violent acts. How do artists and writers from survivor and perpetrator communities deal with the memory of trauma? Punjabi Sikhs grapple with ideas of home and homeland, community and ethnicity, quam and panth within the India nation-state, and resist their feminization in the media through self-representation. While the earlier struggles of the Sikhs were connected to their religious identity as the Khalsa, in the aftermath of British colonialism, especially with the construction of Sikhs as the Lions of Punjab, and in the aftermath of Operation Blue Star, their struggles have transformed to those of identity politics based on corporeality and territoriality. Examining Manoj Punj’s Punjabi film Des Hoyaa Prades in view of the intersections of various historical and cultural contexts provided above, complex questions arise: When did Punjabi consciousness, prevalent in the pre-colonial era, transform into Sikh consciousness? How did Sikh consciousness consolidate into Sikh nationalism? Through memory of trauma, Manoj Punj recreates ideas of homelands and nations for Sikhs in India and the diaspora, and challenges the notion of attachment that Sikhs bear for them. In many literary narratives, the events of 1984 are described with horror. How can one understand the massacre of Sikhs within a democratic nation that came into being through non-violence (even if that non-violence foundation is a national myth)? As a democracy, India is constructed and represented as secular. However, for many, including Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, 1984 changed all that. The ferocity with which Sikhs were killed in city after city in north India in the wake of Indira Gandhi’s assassination, the confusion and shock that stunned us into disbelief and then into a terrible realization of what had happened, dispelled forever that false sense of security. (Menon and Bhasin xi) How do Sikhs deal with this “home-grown violence” (xi) of the state, and how do they reconcile themselves with ideas of national belongings? Violence, torture, and terror unhomed Sikhs in India, and many turned to the diaspora for asylum and safety. Punjab is the homeland for some Sikhs, for others it is India, and for some it became Khalistan, an imaginary homeland. While Sikhs struggled to create a distinct identity for themselves within the Indian nation-state, and while the diasporics fought for recognition as subjects 135

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through an imagined nation, “the conflict is also suggestive of a certain national anxiety emerging around repeated attempts to maintain the image of the nation-state (i.e. India) as a totality” (Axel 106). The idea of Khalistan continues to challenge India as secular. Nationalism creates the idea of the nation as “real” (80) and in this case, even though Khalistan is an “illusion,” it becomes threatening (81). The threat to the nation-state, real or imagined, is met with regulatory functions and state interventions, which are almost always violent and repressive. Yet, where is this space of Khalistan? How is it possible to imagine it? According to Axel, “Khalistan, however, or a Sikh homeland by any name, is a territory that was never created. This unrealized territory may be understood as a locality that a history of colonial rule made possible to imagine, and even measure, but impossible to constitute” (88).4 Few fictional texts deal with the 1984 violence and terror that Sikhs faced, but Manoj Punj’s regional Punjabi film Des Hoyaa Prades, released in 2004, tackles the issue of violence and trauma faced by the Sikh community in complex ways. Punj (1976–2006) was acutely aware of the paucity of regional Punjabi films, and decided to make a film in the Punjabi language. The film is set during the turbulent times of terror for Sikhs after the 1984 Sikh Massacre and in the aftermath of the brutal retaliation against the Sikhs by the Indian Government following Indira Gandhi’s assassination by her Sikh bodyguards. The traumas of colonialism, the Partition of India, and the 1984 Massacre are represented in the displacement of Gurshan Singh Soman, the main character, a mona Sikh, from Punjab to the United States of America in 1987. Gurshan, played by popular Punjabi singer and actor Gurdas Maan, is represented as a Jat, a farmer, who engraves meaning on the body of his motherland, the land of Punjab, as the film unfolds.5 A wide-angle shot shows Gurshan riding a tractor, which traces shallow fissures on the soil as he prepares it for sowing. The gaze of the camera then traces the circular pattern through an overhead shot and Gurshan, in the middle, appears as part of the landscape. It is 1985. A friend stops by and informs Gurshan about his plans to immigrate to America, having sold his land for travel money. Gurshan asks, “How can you sell your mother?” Historically land became an important marker during colonialism, and in the postcolonial nation, it signifies belonging to the nation and to the community. After the British Land Alienation Act of 1900, which limited land ownership to rich and upper-caste landowners, the idea of cultural and territorial belonging altered for most of the poor rural farmers. Land was becoming increasingly valuable and was yielding rich dividends. According to Richard Fox, the provision of the Punjab Land Alienation Act of 1900 announced the colonial government’s opposition to the vested interests of the urban lower-middle class. By first dividing the Punjab’s population into putative agricultural and non-agricultural tribes (castes), the

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former mainly rural, the latter mainly urban, and then restricting the freedom of non-agriculturalists to purchase land or hold mortgages on it, the act clearly targeted the urban lower-class. (Fox 165) This act turned out to be the most punitive for the rural farmers and for the urban lower-middle classes in terms of land ownership. Colonialists not only reformed land ownership, they also controlled religious sites and organizations. Religious identity (caste) became of paramount importance due to economic oppression. Fox argues, “As urban reformist Singhs (Sikhs) in rational pursuit of their religious interests directed themselves to shrine reform, they also attacked the enemies of the lower-middle class, for the goal was the same in both cases: The British colonial authority” (182). The attacks ultimately did not prove successful, as the lower-middle-class Sikhs broke into factions and joined either the Akali Dal or the Indian National Congress, while others joined the Marxist revolutionary parties in the 1930s (184). While the urban Sikhs struck a compromise with the British authorities and regained control of the shrines, “those who gained the least, who found neither redress of their economic plight nor even a major voice in the management of the shrines and their incomes, were the Singh converts among the central Punjab smallholders” (184)—such as my grandfather, Meher Singh, who was from the Rawalpindi area of the Punjab (now in Pakistan); he migrated to Burma as a young man to work as a lorry driver for his uncles who transported goods from India to Burma for the colonial government. To them, belonging to a piece of land became a matter of survival. Most of the Sikhs who joined the British army during the colonial period, to a large extent, were poor rural Punjabi and Sikh farmers, as they were given a piece of land to farm by the colonizers. My grandmother, also from Rawalpindi, owned land (with a well in it, as she often said proudly): as returns were poor and taxation high in Punjab, she married Meher Singh and moved to Burma with him (she was to return to India after World War II to Punjab in 1946 to reclaim her land and her home, but had to run for her life along with her family during the 1947 riots). For Gurshan, his land is sacred and is also equivalent to a mother. As the narrative unfolds, Gurshan’s friend, Darshan, who is from the US, visits Punjab. Soon after he leaves, a group of Sikh terrorists visits his house in the middle of the night. As one of them is his schoolmate, he is forced to feed them and put them up for the night. Early the next morning, the police arrive at Gurshan’s house, search it, and find a bag full of guns. Gurshan and his family are helpless in the face of police terror, as they terrorize them through verbal and physical intimidation. They accuse him of international terrorism due to his friendship with Darshan. He is jailed, tortured, and released. Even before the assassination of Indira Gandhi, due to protests and agitations by Sikhs, the police became all-powerful due to various government ordinances. According to Axel,

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Parts of Punjab, and at times Punjab as a whole, have been subject to [these ordinances] on several occasions (and almost continuously between 1984 and 1994). According to the Punjab Disturbed Area Act, the declaration of Punjab, or any part of Punjab, as a disturbed area ‘empowers any commissioned officer, warrant officer, noncommissioned officer or any other person of equivalent rank in the armed forces to, after giving due warning as he may consider necessary, fire upon or otherwise use force, even to the causing of death, against any person who is acting in contravention to any law.’ (original emphasis 131) The members of the armed forces were detaining and terrorizing Sikh youth even before Gandhi’s assassination, and the situation simply escalated after her death. The police and army searched, tortured, and murdered hundreds and thousands of Sikh youth, and brutalized and raped women. Gurshan and his sister, along with their parents, continue to farm the land, although Gurshan has become quiet and withdrawn. His joy in farming the land has diminished. Soon, as the separatists mount attacks against the police and Hindu sites, Gurshan is imprisoned again, and a series of brutal torture routines commences. The visualization of terror against the Sikh body erupts in the filmic narrative. The Punjab police officials began identifying anyone suspected of terrorism, and by the late 1980s and early 1990s, the amridhari as a terrorist became paramount in police reports. As can be seen from the narrative of Des Hoyaa Prades, as my male Sikh family members in Punjab testify, and as literary texts written by Sikhs show, by 1985 even clean-shaven mona Sikhs became targets of terror. Although Gurshan is represented as a mona Sikh, he is occasionally represented in a dastaar, an underturban, or an informal turban and sporting a kara (one of the five Ks). When Gurshan’s sister Guddi, a college student, requests the police officer Randhawa to release her brother, professing his innocence, he makes an indecent proposition to her, indicating he is willing to do her favors if she provides sexual favors in return. When she refuses, as can be imagined and seen, she is jailed. During her torture, she is asked to pee in her brother’s mouth, her salwar is forcibly removed, and she is physically brutalized. The torture and terror sequence lasts about five minutes, with the camera cross-cutting from Gurshan’s face to Guddi’s. While torture of Sikh women and Sikh women’s agency as separatists did not find much representational space in Indian cinema, Des Hoyaa Prades attempts to represent Sikh women’s rape and brutality at the hands of the Indian State functionaries. Guddi’s face is bruised and bleeding; the visualization of rape is seen only as a reflection of horror on Gurshan’s face. Thus, the film director and the actor are triangulated through Guddi in this patriarchal narrative. She becomes the passive victim of horror. Randhawa extorts money from Gurshan’s father, who sells his land; still short of cash, he phones Darshan in the US for help. After his children’s release, 138

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Gurshan’s father, an amritdhari Sikh, beseeches his son to leave the country and seek asylum in the US. Gurshan asks, “How can you ask me to leave my land? Did you not teach me that this land is like a mother?” The dialogue does not mention Guddi and her safety, nor does the script provide narrative space to show Guddi as a strong woman with agency. Guddi’s fiancée’s parents break off the engagement with their son, as they consider her soiled. Gurshan seeks asylum in the United States where he works at a gas station, and his wife Jassi and their small son soon follow. Guddi remains behind in terror-ridden Punjab with her parents. In the meantime, Guddi’s fiancée goes against his parent’s wishes and decides to marry her. Gurshan, as the older brother, travels back to India through Nepal to attend the wedding. In Punjab, he is killed in an encounter with the police after a long, terrifying, and brutal chase scene. Gurshan’s terror-filled face erupts on the screen, which eventually fades into black. The black and blank space represents a void in cultural spaces and the failure of language and its signification process. There is a gap between representation and meaning. The meaning of his death is lost. Such representations retraumatize, and for the wounded Sikh community, the lack of meaning leads to trauma due to the repetition compulsion: the wounds are not healed, the trauma is repressed, and the fragmentary narrative does not lead to healing. Gurshan’s ghost visits his wife and his friend that night, reminding them to scatter his ashes in both the Sutlej and the Hudson Rivers. His child, it is indicated, will grow up in America. Symbolizing the new nation, Khalistan, the child will live on in the diaspora. In this way, through “violence, wounding, and cultural representation … a dispersed and segmented population constitutes knowledge of, and reproduces itself, as a community” (Axel 156). Punj’s recreation of the 1980s Sikh Massacre is an experiment, recreating not only a traumatic past and present, but also a future imagined from the distant shores of the Hudson in the USA. “Violence is the thread by which the diaspora is constituted as a community” where Khalistan is reconstituted as the Sikh diaspora’s “promise” (156), as symbolized by Gurshan and Jassi’s son. While Punj attempts to narrativize the trauma of violence that Sikhs faced in the Indian nation-state so that healing can take place, this film, released a decade after Operation Blue Star, while highlighting the atrocities of the massacre and violence committed by the state against Sikhs in the Punjab, gestures toward the diasporic Sikh community to keep the memory of Punjab and the 1980s and 1990s trauma alive. In “Trauma, Narrative and the Art of Witnessing,” Martina Kopf, discussing the “problem of how to integrate traumatic experiences into individual as well as collective memories,” argues: In order to make the traumatic impact of the experience lose its weight, some sort of translation of traumatic memory into narrative memory has to take place. The production of a healing or integrating 139

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narrative demands that a certain circuit of communication comes into being. This process is open ended, it must not be misunderstood as simple reconstruction of past events. “Healing” in this context cannot mean a restoration or return to a stage “before” the event, “before” the traumatisation. It is a transformative process … (Kopf 6) In translating the Sikh Massacre into filmic narrative, the film appears to expect “narrative witnessing,” in which the audience is asked to “self-consciously make the connections” (Kacandes); these connections, I argue, are about the territorial geopolitical and material spaces that are constructed and actualized by various power structures as nations, which are then manifested as “real”—through certain forms of violence, be it epistemic, psychic, physical, or spiritual. Gurshan’s ashes are scattered in the Hudson and Sutlej Rivers, signifying the mutually constitutive nature and the dialectic relationship of the diaspora and the nation-state. Thus, through globalism, the des (nation or country) imagined by the Sikhs, displaced or violated, becomes part of the prades (foreign land).

Notes 1 When, as an amritdhari, I had first trimmed my bangs at the age of 13 in Burma, I had glued it back with my father’s beard glue and had prayed all night to be forgiven by Waheguru (God). 2 The name is sometimes spelled as Dalip. In this chapter, I shall use Duleep, as Axel uses that spelling and it makes for easier reading. 3 My husband had secretly trimmed his beard in the US in order to appear well-groomed for job interviews, and had cried when the scissors first touched his face. 4 This imagined space became a more seductive and popular idea after Indira Gandhi’s assassination by her two Sikh bodyguards for her violation of the Sikh Temple and killings of innocent pilgrims, as well as the death of Bindranwale, known as a separatist and terrorist to some and the savior of Sikhs to others, and the violent backlash the assassination brought against the Sikh community. 5 Gurdas Maan, a mona Sikh, is not considered a true Sikh by many. On a DiscoverSikhi. com discussion blog, a writer states: “He had never been one of us … He is one of them.”

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For any community, but especially for a minority community, to heal from the trauma of state-sanctioned violence, and for survivors to work through individual and communal suffering, dialogue is imperative. For genuine healing to lead to forgiveness, reconciliation, reconstruction, and restorative justice, both victims and perpetrators within a nation-state must share testimonies and stories of violence and trauma.1 Otherwise, citizens within a democratic nation-state lack the equal rights they are promised, and violence can reoccur in various forms, such as communalism, inter-ethnic violence, or gender violence. What does it mean to be citizens of a nation-state with a full guarantee of human rights while still belonging to a minority and marginalized community? Representations of Sikh identity in literature have been prevalent since Bhai Kahn Singh Nabha’s 1898 book Ham Hindu Nahin (We are Not Hindus) that was “written to promote one of the basic concerns [of the distinction of Sikh identity] of the Singh Sabha reformers” (J.S. Grewal 277; also see Jakobsh). During British colonialism, ideas of the civilized Christians in opposition to the heathen Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs abounded in colonial literature and representations. In reaction to colonialist ideology, the Arya Samaj, founded in 1875, aimed to reform Hinduism and worked towards its purification. According to J.S. Grewal, The Lahore Singh Sabah, a Sikh reform movement, of 1879 promoted a revolutionary Sikh identity in opposition to the Hindu identity construction by the Arya Samaj in order “to contest” the idea of “Shuddhi” (purity)—a purification rite meant to bring into the Arya fold all converts to Christianity and Islam, [which] was logically extended to the Sikhs in due course. (Grewal 295) These various reform movements were being conducted in opposition to colonialism’s idea of the civilized Christians and the anxiety introduced into traditional Indian society by ideas of western modernity. For Bhai Kahn Singh, 141

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“the recognition of the Sikh Panth (community) as a political community” was of “serious concern,” but the emphasis on a unique Sikh identity, particularly during British colonialism, “provided a new perspective for looking at religious (and national) identities” (Grewal 293). Thus, the depredations of the Indo-Sikh wars impacted Sikh identity due to their violent nature and more specifically due to the widespread propaganda by the British, who boasted of subjugating so ferocious a warrior caste and subsequently appropriating their valor for their own purposes by recruiting them wholesale for the British army. For Indian and diasporic Sikhs, the ravages of 1984 mark the moment of retraumatization regarding Sikh identity, yet many scholars and politicians, including Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh (Hindustan Times), would like to modulate this important historical and psychological marker. Pashaura Singh, editor of Sikhism in Global Context, claims that Sikh scholars have “over-emphasized, if not exaggerated, the impact of 1984 on the different arenas of Sikh Studies,” although he does note that he “appreciates the impact of 1984 on Sikh Studies” (Pashaura Singh 3). In the final analysis, he urges scholars to follow a “rational and scientific approach to explore different aspects of Sikhs and Sikhism” (3), implying that any scholar writing or theorizing about 1984 is being “irrational” and “non-scientific.” However, in order for cultural and traumatic wounds to heal, a public acknowledgement of guilt by the perpetrator nation is needed for the victimized Sikhs to seek restorative and not retributive justice, forgiveness, and reconciliation; it is also necessary for the majoritarian Hindus, who belong to the perpetrator nation (Gabriele Schwab). Therefore, Sikhs attempt to keep the memory of trauma alive. How do the Sikhs’ trauma, particularly of the 1984 Massacre, and the wounds left behind by the atrocities committed by the India nation-state, haunt the wounded Sikh community? How do Sikhs attempt to keep the memory of violence alive in order for the atrocities not to be repeated? Along with the reminders of violence suffered by Sikhs during the Mughal period in the daily prayers, Sikhs mark the modern atrocities through religious processions in India and the diaspora during Sikh religious holidays. Gurveen Kaur Khurana examines the California Yuba City nagar kirtan or public processions of devotional singing by the Sikhs during religious holidays. She claims, it serves to remind Sikhs of their past, of their history of constant wars and persecution at the hands of state and empires. From an invocation to the Mughal tyranny and the brave front put up by Sikhs under Guru Gobind Singh and later Banda Bahadur right until the genocide of 1984, the nagar kirtan plays a crucial role in voicing the concerns of the community—of persecution, discrimination, and misperceptions. (Khurana 236) If the traumatized are not allowed to remember, they cannot mourn their losses, which can in turn lead to melancholia.2 To remember the past and continue 142

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working through the trauma that leads to healing, students from the University of California at Davis and Berkeley collectively built a float to commemorate the events of 1984, using the slogan “Remember 1984,” during a nagar kirtan or Sikh procession in Yuba City. This occurred during the 300th anniversary of the installation of the Gurugranth, the Sikh holy book, by the last Sikh Guru, Gobind Singh, when he created the Sikhs as the Khalsa, the saint-soldiers. In 2008, approximately 80,000 participants/devotees attended the procession (229). Such moments, when the traumatized community attempts to keep the memory of the past alive, clash with the call to forget the past, as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said during his visit to Canada. Before commemorating the loss of lives in the Kanishka Air India flight bombing tragedy, Manmohan Singh beseeched Indian and Canadian Sikhs to forget the past and move forward (Hindustan Times). Yet, the 1984 float, while keeping memory alive, is also a visual reminder and representation for and of the Sikhs. “ It seeks to create a community as much as sustain and maintain Sikh symbols. It subjectivates and brings the individual into a community area. It is indeed a powerful and potent means to transmit and reproduce Sikh principles and communitas” (Khurana 244). Not only does the public display of wounds act as a healing process, it is also a reminder that real restorative justice has not been possible due to perpetrators’ denial of the event. What are the effects of public discourse about violence and trauma—to ask forgiveness, to give forgiveness, and to work towards healing of cultural wounds? According to Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, a clinical psychologist, author of A Human Being Died that Night, and member of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Committee, dialogue “humanizes the dehumanized and confronts perpetrators with their inhumanity. Through dialogue, victims as well as the greater society come to recognize perpetrators as human beings who failed morally, whether through coercion, the perverted convictions of a warped mind, or fear” (119). Once the perpetrators are humanized through the act of dialogue, it both punishes and rehabilitates them. Many of the perpetrators of the 1984 violence never showed remorse.3Mitta and Phoolka’s account of the carnage in When a Tree Shook Delhi: The 1984 Carnage and its Aftermath and Jarnail Singh’s I Accuse: The Anti-Sikh Violence of 1984 chronicle the blow-by-blow account of the Sikh Massacre and the perpetrators’ history, but also the perpetually delayed justice for the victims by the Indian Government, respectively. Furthermore, for victims of trauma and loss, forgiveness can lead to healing and health, for “forgiveness recognizes the deed, its impact having been and continuing to be lived by the victim, but transcends it” (Gobodo-Madikizela 95). If one is disallowed the act of forgiveness, “a world of painful emotional wounds, hostility, and resentment at the injustice visited on them” continue to connect them “to the one who inflicted the traumatic wound,” thereby preventing the victim of trauma from “fully coming to terms with the trauma and moving on” (96). In Shonali Bose’s novel Amu, we see many victims of violence, including the widows of 1984, some in Tilak Vihar or Trilok Puri in Delhi, others elsewhere, bemoaning their loss. Mitta and Phoolka’s When a Tree 143

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Shook Delhi chronicles accounts of the carnage and loss of lives during the antiSikh riots or Sikh Massacre, and Jarnail Singh’s I Accuse incorporates Sikh women’s accounts of murder and loss. Sikhs, in India and the diaspora, write about the Sikh Massacre as genocide, yet there has been no reconciliation between the Sikhs and the perpetrator nation, nor has there been restorative justice for the Sikhs due to the denial by the state. According to GobodoMadikizela, when there’s denial by the perpetrator nation about violence inflicted on a community, the victims remain in a symbolic dependency complex with the perpetrators (Gobodo-Madikizela 96). Sikhs then subconsciously hold on to the violence even though they wish to work through the trauma in many ways. Many of the films representing the Sikh violence and trauma continue to “cut and wound” (Hirsch, “Surviving Images” 5). If victims of cultural violence are unable to work through the trauma, they are unable to mourn. Once the act of acceptance and forgiveness is carried out, the work of healing and transformation can begin. According to Gobodo-Madikizela, “A sincere apology does not seek to erase what was done. No amount of words can undo past wrongs. Nothing can reverse the injustice done against others. But an apology pronounced in the context of horrible acts has the potential for transformation” (99). For the act of acceptance and forgiveness to be successful, “an apology has to name the deed, acknowledge wrongdoings, and recognize the pain of the victims. Such an apology conveys a sense of regret and deeply felt remorse … A remorseful apology inspires empathy and forgiveness” (99). A remorseful apology includes an individual’s responsibility in the overall schema of state-sponsored violence. Perpetrators of Sikh violence have yet to acknowledge their part in the Sikh Massacre, which denies Sikhs their rights and their humanity. Gobodo-Madikizela argues that A broad consensus exists in the literature that in order to torture, kill, and maim, perpetrators must first exclude their victims from the moral obligations they feel toward the world in general and, in particular, towards those with whom they are socially and politically connected. (Gobodo-Madikizela 128) Only when perpetrators acknowledge the humanity of their victims, to make their pain “audible and visible,” can victims forgive, and victims need to forgive in order to become “rehumanized” and regain “self-efficacy” (128). If healing does not occur through forgiveness, the trauma victim can be retraumatized, as occurred with British colonialism, the Anglo-Sikh wars, and the 1947 Partition and the 1984 Massacre. Many Sikhs continue to feel dehumanized and victimized in the Indian nation-state and in the diaspora due to cultural difference and traumatic memory. According to Gobodo-Madikizela, victims may have been functioning quite well in many contexts, 144

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but in one area, at those moments when something reminds them of this one person, this one ordeal, they feel dehumanized again, halved and ineffective, quarantined in an area of their mind and of their life where they remember being told in effect that they do not matter, that the moral obligations ordinarily extended towards others do not apply in their case. (Gobodo-Madikizela 130) As their humanity continues to be denied due to lack of reconciliation by the Hindu polity and the state government, Punjab, with about 58 percent of the population belonging to the Sikh faith, has descended into a morass of social and economic problems. As is well known, Punjab, which was known as the breadbasket of India, has now one of the highest poverty rates. According to Laveesh Bhandari and Minakshi Chakraborthy, “close to half of Punjab’s agricultural workers are landless and [there are] exceedingly high proportion of agricultural labourers in areas of high poverty rate … . [and there] is a growing addiction to psychotropic drugs and alcohol among Punjab rural and urban youth.” Colonialism objectified and dehumanized Sikhs, and the postcolonial and democratic Indian nation-state failed its Sikh citizens. As Amandeep Sandhu, author of Roll of Honor, Sepia Leaves, and Panjab: Journey Through Fault Lines, argues, Punjab screams, but neither the Centre nor its own government listens. That is why Punjab goes silent either through farmer and worker suicides, or in a stupor of drugs, or awaiting the elusive visa to escape its claustrophobia. Through lack of accountability and apathy, democracy has become an empty ritual, vacated of the trust between the individual and the State. (Sandhu, “Hide-and-Sikh Politics”) In Punjab, poverty and cyclical violence impact Sikh men in troubling ways, but women and children bear the brunt of that violence in grotesque ways.4 Many victims of violence open up to the idea of forgiveness in order to heal from past traumas; that is, if the perpetrators show genuine contrition (Gobodo-Madikizela 129). When the perpetrator is remorseful, it “transforms the image of victim as object to victim as human” (130), for it is only in dehumanizing the other that perpetrators are able to oppress. Gobodo-Madikizela also notes that it is through the “narrative of truth—of telling how a human life was destroyed—a murdered victim is ‘resurrected’ to affirm his or her humanity. At the same time, remorse recognizes the pain of the surviving family members” (130). Denial and suppression of violence and pain disallows the humanity of the victims and perpetuates dysfunction. Shonali Bose, a Los Angeles-based writer of the novel Amu and director of the film by the same name, based on the 1984 Sikh Massacre, faced challenges 145

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with obtaining a general audience rating for her film in India as the Indian nation-state and its functionaries continue their efforts to deny the massacre and genocidal violence of the Sikhs. In an interview with Sumit Bhattacharya, Bose states, “The censor board gave us an adult certificate because they said, ‘young people do not need to know’.” She made the film “because there was no film on the 1984 riots, and a large part of the world still doesn’t know” (Bhattacharya). Sonali Bose states: [The censor] board took out certain lines. When the male protagonist asks the widow (of 1984), was it one or two ministers [who organized the atrocities], and she says, no, it was the entire state, the bureaucracy, the government, the politicians, the police, all. They removed that line. So, what we did, we let the characters go silent at that point. We had to debate among ourselves whether we should challenge it in the courts, because that’s what you tend to do. Why should it get censored? Five lines removed. We thought for the widows of 1984 to be silenced in this manner, that their silence spoke louder than words. Ironically, that’s the first thing we get asked in India. They asked, what did they say? And in the press, all the lines were reported. (Walsh, “An Interview With Shonali Bose”) In literature and representation, the Sikh Massacre continues to be denied narrative space. It is only in liminal spaces of the nation that the stories of atrocities are uncovered and shared. The co-producer, Bedabrata Pain, discussing the 1984 Massacre, states: The ninth government report on the events was recently issued, given to parliament, and that report said that one or two ministers were responsible, not the other institutions, this film says exactly the opposite. That the entire Indian state, with all its organs, was involved in this killing. That’s why it’s important that this enters the mainstream. The government would like to get out of the situation, by making a scapegoat out of one or two people while exonerating the entire establishment. (Walsh) Not one of the perpetrators has been brought to justice, as the massacre continues to be denied by most of the Indian people and the government. The leaders and ministers who took active participation in the massacre are still unpunished to this day. As a member of the majority Hindu community, Bose attempts to give voice to one of the victims of the 1984 violence in the book and the film. The novel attempts to portray the life of an adopted Sikh woman, Kajori (Amrit is her given Sikh name, though she was once known as Amu), who lives with her academic mother Keya, a Hindu, in Los Angeles. After completing her final year 146

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at the university, Kajori returns to Delhi to visit her grandmother and other relatives. Keya is opposed to her trip and tries to dissuade her, but Kajori is adamant, saying she is “embarking on a journey of discovery” (Shonali Bose 6). As she reaches Delhi and is being driven home in a taxi, she requests a stop in order to take some photos. She wanders a bit further from the interiors of Connaught Place and lands inside a gurudwara, drawn there by the faint strains of shabab kirtan emanating from inside the complex of Rakab Ganj. At every turn, she is haunted by images, as certain people or events appear to trigger her repressed memory. Always curious about her past life and her biological parents, Kajori, or Kaju as she is fondly called by her family, could not convince her mother to disclose much about her past. Kaju confesses to her mother’s friend that she really wanted to “find out about her past, about what happened to her birth parents, who they were” (3). Other than hearing from Keya that her parents, “lived in a village in India, outside Delhi called Chandan Hola [and] died of malaria,” she has no memory of her past. When she was much younger, she used to have “nightmares every night” (67) and did not learn to speak until she was four, and as the residual memory of her traumatic past is repressed, she appears to become whole and healed (16). “After that day,” reveals the implied narrator, “Kaju had never looked back. It was as if something had snapped shut inside her, closing down all the trauma and the memories, and she had slowly become whole under the loving care of Keya” (67). While Punjab continued to suffer under the Central Government mandates, those in the diaspora, who repressed the knowledge of Sikh violence and trauma, assume all is well with the Sikh community. Keya “marveled at how the human brain could blot out painful truths and shield the present from the past” (16). Many Indians, mostly Hindus, too marvel at the way Sikhs have blotted out the past to shield their present, yet Sikhs continue to suffer in the Indian nation-state. Their present is neither safe nor secure, as the poverty rates, drug abuse, and domestic violence statistics (IRBC) in the Sikh majority state of Punjab show. While a lone Sikh child appears to have been healed under the care of one good Hindu woman, the Sikh community, neglected under various political parties in India, is still trying to find justice, as Jarnail Singh’s I Accuse notes, and as Punjab Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh, tweeted on 11 January 2018. In a December 6, 2015 news report in the Indian Express, Senior Supreme Court lawyer H.S. Phoolka accused then Congress president Amarinder Singh of “shielding party colleague Jagdish Tytler [one of the accused for his active involvement in the Massacre] in the 1984 riots case.” The official count of Sikh deaths varies: according to Jarnail Singh it is 3,000, while others point to at least 6,000 dead. While the victims repress the memory of trauma in order to continue functioning, the victimizers’ amnesia or denial stems from attempts to disown responsibilities by the Congress party and its leaders. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh implied that the issue of the 1984 Sikh Massacre is only kept alive by those trying to either satisfy their base or to get re-elected. He asked 147

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Sikhs to forget the past (Jarnail Singh 35). In his book I Accuse, Jarnail Singh asks, “how can a massacre be forgotten” (35) by the perpetrator nation (Schwab), by the individual perpetrators and by the victims and survivors? Gabriele Schwab, discussing the holocaust in Germany, defines Germany as the perpetrator nation and those who stood by and allowed it to occur as the “bystander” (ix). I argue that many Hindus in India stood by while the atrocities occurred. Sikhs did not forget. Kaju remembers, even though her Hindu mother assumes she’s forgotten the past. Listening to the sounds of shabad kirtan at the gurudwara, Kaju pauses. “It was a slow sing-song chant that sounded vaguely familiar. She moved along the cracked and cluttered pavement, trying to figure out where the strains of the music were coming from, when all at once, between the trees, she saw the golden spire catch the noonday light” (20). This sight triggers Kaju’s repressed memory of trauma as she slowly and painstakingly uncovers the history of the Sikh Massacre and her own stories within it, and she discovers that her repression mirrors national amnesia. In Amu, Keya withholds the facts of violence from Amu so that she can be “normal” and become whole; she is afraid if she told Amu that the Hindus stood by impassively while the leaders of the nation whipped up anti-communal passion, leading to the massacre of the Sikhs, Amu would no longer call her “Ma” (101). The majority Hindu polity stood by impassively and is now afraid to own up to their complicity in case Sikhs would no longer feel affiliated to the Indian Motherland. Additionally, the acceptance will then lead to providing compensation and retribution to the victims that the perpetrators are unwilling to provide. Sikhs are looking for restorative justice, and Hindus are afraid of retributive justice, while many are simply looking for justice leading to reconciliation and closure. Amu represents the massacre as state-sponsored, involving the help of politicians and police-backed goons who torched Sikh men, raped women, and killed children. For example, Kabir, who becomes Amu’s love interest in India, and whose father, a high-ranking government officer, passive in the face of antiSikh violence, tells Kaju: “It was the system that was responsible” (105). What is a “system” if not peopled by various bodies? By repeating the idea of the system at fault, many exonerate themselves from responsibility. Even Bose and Pain, when asked who was responsible, continue to reiterate the idea of the nation as the perpetrator without being able to name the majority Hindus as bystanders (Walsh). In the novel, we are taken back to a time of the Sikh Massacre and to Kaju’s mother, Shanno, in a relief camp after her husband and son are ruthlessly murdered. Bose, who was a Delhi University student at the time and remained locked safely behind the gates, went to the relief camps after the storm passed. In the novel and film, Keya is represented as the social worker who comes in contact with Shanno and her daughter, Amu. Shanno had left her son Arjun, around age three, under Amu’s care in the house while she went to look for her 148

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husband; when Amu, who appears to be around age five, followers her mother, Hindus burn the house down, with Arjun inside. Unable to cope with the violence and her husband’s death, Shanno blames herself for her son’s death. One day she hangs herself. Why does she exhort Keya in her suicide letter, “You must make [Amu] forget everything? She must never know. Give her a new identity, a new history, a new life” (original emphasis 131). Keya’s solution to the problem is to take Amu “far away” (132). Bal writes about the holocaust and the difficulty of incorporating the violence into narrative memory (ix). In a similar way, Bose appears to suffer from the same difficulty in incorporating the Sikh violence into narrative memory. Amu is simply whisked away to the US and made to forget the trauma. How can a Sikh reader in India and the diaspora perform an act of witnessing to the traumatic past, a past that is being repressed or reconfigured in history and in literature? As for Kaju, although she left India more than “two decades ago,” once in Delhi, she feels as if one part of her never left (45). She has nightmares of the 1984 violence in which she is in a “long, black, never-ending tunnel” surrounded by “rubbish heaps” and a “gigantic wasteland.” She sees a woman with her “head covered in a chunni … . her face turned away” and hears “screaming and calling” and from a tree, she sees a red chunni hanging, “fluttering in the wind” (44). Did Bose have nightmares after her work as a young student at the relief camp? As a person belonging to the majority community and as a bystander, Bose’s identification with the victims of terror, although not strictly what Hirsch calls “postmemory” where a person “adopts the traumatic experiences—of others as one’s own, or more specifically, as experiences one might have had, and of inscribing them into one’s own life story” (Hirsch 9), her appropriation of the 1984 trauma leads her to identifying too closely with the victims—“overappropriate identification”— such that she becomes the surrogate victim (10). As a bystander, Bose, who took up the work at the relief camp as a student volunteer, unable to accept the part of the Hindu majority polity that stood by, attempts to work through her own trauma of witnessing the aftermath of the atrocities. The representation, therefore, doesn’t allow Sikh viewers to work towards healing, as it precludes narrative witnessing; the narrative doesn’t allow identification for Sikhs, as the circuit of communication is blocked from them. Keya explains to Kaju, “It’s more about the State than any particular party” (106) who was responsible for the massacre. She adds, “The question to ask is not really who is guilty but who benefits from this kind of conflict … But it’s really the State that caused the violence in the first place” (107). She then blames the victim: “She felt that people had to overcome their own helplessness and find solutions, instead of always looking to the top” (107). The horrendous crime against Sikhs, similar to the Jewish trauma, as Kacandes writes, “cannot be described nor even imagined” (Kacandes 60) by many Indian writers. As such, due to the “incommensurability of the crime,” the majority of the people in India, as we see in the novel, are unable to “bear witness” (60) to the Sikh genocide and a nebulous “State” is assigned the perpetrator. 149

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While the central plot of the book and film seem to be about Amu and the 1984 riots, the end of the book and the film instead focus on Keya and her guilt. Keya thinks that if she had arrived earlier on the day that Shanno had committed suicide she might have prevented the tragedy. She tells Kaju, “It’s not that I was late that day. Because the truth is, it would have happened some other time. I was so close to her, how could I not have seen it coming? So, so sorry. And I can understand if you blame me. I blame myself” (132). Yet in the novel Amu, there is no “sincere apology” as suggested by Gobodo-Madikizela, who argues that a sincere apology is “unencumbered by explanation or justification. A sincere apology does not divert attention from the self, such as those accompanied by a disclaimer: ‘I am sorry that your sister was killed. Please understand that I was fighting to end the oppression of my people.’ Or ‘I apologize. But what I did happened because of the political climate of those days’” (Gobodo-Madikizela 98). To this one-sided dialogue, where Kaju is simply racked by sobs, Amu had no reaction other than to hold her mother “in a tight embrace” (132). She thinks, “This was the guilt that her mother had lived for nearly twenty years” (132). And in the tears they shed together, the narrative informs us, all the years of pain simply melt away (132). Thus, Bose’s act in her text and her refusal to act as witness for the Sikhs can be seen as the outcome of her own victimization (Kacandes 61) due to her guilt—of belonging to the majoritarian community that allowed such crimes but also continue to disavow them. Here, Kaju is not Keya’s “Mitwisser [to know with]” which, according to Kacandes, is “the action at the heart of psychological witnessing” (Kacandes 61). Thus, not only does it not allow witnessing for Kaju, the text also disallows a direct view into the traumatized character’s psyche (63). As Kacandes writes about the Holocaust and narrative witnessing, “The choice not to use a first person narrator to tell her or his story may be interpreted as a choice made to control distance between reader and the protagonist or to avoid certain kinds of information by avoiding insider views of the characters” (63). In Amu, readers do not know what Kaju thinks. The narrator in the novel informs the reader, “1984 was finally over” (133). Just like that. And then, “Kaju woke up that day, feeling, for the first time, whole rather than fragmented” (133). As the sunshine glints on Amu’s kara (one of the Sikh’s Five Ks) as she walks with Kabir, the son of the state official who stood by during the pogrom, the narrator states, “There was no need for words, nor for tears. Only silence” (136). Therefore, it is suggested, there is no need for words, retribution, forgiveness, or reconciliation. There is no question of “What now?” Only silence prevails. Such “narrative obstacles,” like an indirect point of view, that block the reader from understanding the psyche of the character show, as Kacandes argues about holocaust writing, that the “text too is blinded by the shock—traumatized—and therefore neither witnesses to nor transmits to the narratee nor to the readers the site of transgression” (Kacandes 65). Thus, “the society is perpetrator, the society is victim” (65). According to Gabriele Schwab’s argument regarding bystanders in terms of Germany and the history 150

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of the holocaust, members of perpetrator nations are subject to psychological pathologies that correspond to those in victims: With every single extinguished life, something in the murderers died with the murdered in the trenches, gas chambers, and ovens. Denial and violence and oppression will inevitably come back and haunt the perpetrators. For generations to come, German people will and should be haunted by their past, despite the war generation’s denial and, as a transgenerational effect of this denial, an already observable reduced awareness in the generation of grandchildren. This transgenerational haunting is true of other participants in violent histories as well, even in cases where it remains banned from public discourse. (Schwab 108) Such hauntings are also present in many members of the Hindu bystanders in India, as can be seen by Keya’s reactions in Amu. As the discussion ends, I’m only left with questions and not answers. Why is it that the trauma of violence is fictionalized by non-Sikhs in a manner that shows them becoming “surrogate victims” (Hirsch)? Who is the audience of the texts? Who is bearing witness to the narratives? How would the Sikhs, who witness the trauma first hand, view such texts? Could “narrative witnessing” lead to healing, or would such narratives simply retraumatize them? According to Gobodo-Madikizela, forgiveness can also “reawaken the victim’s feeling of powerlessness instead of shifting the power dynamics … So, some victims, not used to claiming their rights, may not be able to express rage against the perpetrators even when the perpetrators no longer pose a real danger” (100). On a symbolic, cultural, and historical level, Amrit or Amu, who represents Sikhs nationwide, can be seen as someone, in Gobodo-Madikizela’s words, “lacking self respect,” as she shows no resentment for the injustices done to her (100). Gobodo-Madikizela claims that “a victim’s response of hatred and resentment is a necessary prior condition for an expression of forgiveness” (100), and since Kaju or Amrit/Amu shows none of these emotions, it can be deduced that she did not heal from the wounds, but was “acting out what [she] had internalized” as a victim (101). When there is only silence in the moment of the enactment of forgiveness and reconciliation between people with power differentials, as Keya and Amu are, then the moment only serves to take away the dignity of the victim (102). How can the wounded and traumatized Sikh community members “explicate the incompleteness” (Kacandes 55) of such narratives as Amu, and how can they become agents in their nation-state or in the diaspora when the violence and massacre are elided in dominant narratives? The stories of pain and massacres must be told and acknowledged in a public space, apologies and forgiveness must be given in a public space, and reconciliation, retribution, and transformation must also be worked out in a public arena. Only then will the old wounds and scars begin to heal for the Sikhs. 151

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Only then can real democratic ideals be said to be in place in India and within various communities of the nation.

Notes 1 For example, see South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report; although it had its flaws and weakness, it still allowed a traumatized nation space for discussion and some sort of resolution, even if not complete justice. 2 For more on the work of memory, mourning and melancholia, see Marianne Hirsch’s “Projected Memory: Holocaust Photographs in Personal and Public Fantasy.” 3 Gobodo-Madikizela notes, “none of the Nazis gave any evidence of even a trace of remorse” (121). 4 While domestic violence is rampant in the Sikh community, as it is in most patriarchal communities, the issue does not get much airtime or narrative space. One film that does justice to the issue is Deepa Mehta’s film Heaven on Earth, which showcases diaspora Sikhs, their displacement, fragmentation, and cyclical violence in the form of domestic abuse.

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11 ONCE AGAIN, THE TURBAN Terror and Gendered Sikh Identity in Liam Dalzell’s Punjabi Cab, Satdeep Singh’s Taaj, and Sarab Singh Neelam’s Ocean of Pearls

How are Sikhs represented in the literature of the Global North after the 9/11 terror and the backlash against many minorities? Once again, male amritdhari Sikhs become the focus of representation as they are othered and feminized in the diaspora. Female Sikhs are again missing from the larger narrative of the construction and representation of the Sikh identity. After 9/11 and the Global War on Terror, many Sikhs attempt to show themselves as assimilable, as opposed to what many in the US consider as the unassimilable Muslims in representations in the Global North. Are these texts multicultural, and do they lead to idea of pluralism for the marginalized community? How has the idea of race changed from one of biology to one of culture, and what are the outcomes? One of the challenges faced by many racial minorities in the postcolonial/postmodern/globalized world is continued racism. According to Guy Hardt and Antonio Negri, while “politicians, the media, and even historians continually tell us that racism has steadily receded in modern societies, it is clear that racism has not receded but actually progressed in the contemporary world, both in extent and intensity” (482). This can be seen in US President Donald Trump’s rhetoric of racism, in which he referred to many nations from the Global North as “shithole countries” (Foley and Cook) in his opposition to providing citizenship through the Dreamers project to Haitians and Salvadorians; his continued rhetoric of racism and immigrant bashing are examples of the intensity of racist language in the US. What, then, is the difference between classical, modern, or postmodern racism? If ideas of “blood and genes” were used by modern race theorists, Hardt and Negri argue, modern anti-racism, “positioning itself against the notion of biological essentialism … insists that differences among the races are constituted instead by social and cultural forces” (482). Within Trump’s rhetoric, many racial minorities are constructed as undesirable. Jasbir Puar, arguing about new forms of racism and ideas of cultural difference through feminization of the other, notes, “Like the burqa, the hijab, and the headscarf, turbans mark gender (though women, usually converted white American Sikhs, do don turbans), religion, and region, as well signal to the untrained eye, the 153

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most pernicious components of oppressive patriarchal backward cultures and traditions, those that have failed at modernity” (Terrorist Assemblages 181). “Those that have failed at modernity” are most of the people of color from the Global South and those that are marked as queer and threatening through difference. Biological difference is now replaced by social and cultural differences in modern racism. Hardt and Negri note that the entire anti-racist western “society can appear to be against racism,” yet enforce social hierarchy through culture; “racial superiority and subordination are not theoretical questions, but arise through free competition, a kind of market meritocracy of culture” (483). They provide the example of the Asian model minority myth that is often used by antiracist theorists to compare African Americans and other minority communities as less desirable than Asians in terms of cultural differences (483). Sikhs, in spite of belonging to the so-called model minority, still face racism, and particularly the turbaned amritdhari Sikhs. According to Puar in “‘The Turban is Not a Hat’: Queer Diaspora and Practices of Profiling,” after September 11, 2001, the Sikh turban became an educational tool for differentiating Sikhs from Muslims in the US after 52-year-old Balbir Singh Sondhi was murdered in Arizona by an American man who, when arrested, shouted, “I’m an American. Arrest me and let those terrorists run wild” (3). Because of this “mistaken identity” (Puar 1), and due to fear and racism, as we witnessed in many cases over the past decade, including the recent Wisconsin gurudwara case where a racist slaughtered many Sikhs, many Sikhs are assaulted and murdered in the US (Steven Yaccino, Michael Schwirtz, and Marc Santora). Puar explains, “The attacks were becoming increasingly bizarre in their execution. Often the turban itself was the object of assault, and the unravelling of hair signified a humiliating and intimate submission, hinting at homosocial undertones;” in this example, the amritdhari Sikh is being constructed in opposition to the heteronormative masculinity of White America—“as failed masculinity and part of the perversely failed bodies and populations” (Puar, Terrorist Assemblages 167) of queered terrorists. Sikhs, then, attempt at any cost to be seen as normative. Sikh communities in various US cities have launched campaigns to educate the American public about the difference between the Sikh turban and a hat. The Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund (SALDEF) joined forces with Stanford University to conduct the first ever effort to understand public perception of the turban, called the “The Turban Myth” (SALDEF and Stanford University). According to the website: The research has spurred dialogue and raised awareness at the highest levels. It has been cited in memoranda that have gone to the Department of Justice, the Attorney General, and Capitol Hill. Turban Myths has also been used by Asian American organizations and working groups to demonstrate the impacts of unconscious and implicit bias and it has influenced future FBI trainings. (SALDEF, “Why Turban Myths”) 154

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The efforts by the Sikh community continue to differentiate the Sikh turban from others in attempts to normalize Sikh men in opposition to Muslim terrorists. According to Puar, “These efforts were driven by a desire to inhabit a proper Sikh American heteromasculinity, one at significant remove from the perverse sexualities ascribed to terrorist bodies” (Puar, Terrorist Assemblages 167). Sikhs, then, attempt to belong to the nation through representing themselves as normal Americans working towards the American Dream. For example, Comcast donated “nearly $1.2 million of airtime during the month of June” as a video clip showing a successful turbaned Sikh man in the United States “aired almost 103,000 times” during the past four years (SALDEF, “Support Sikh American Awareness”). The diasporic Sikh community in the West variously constructs itself in opposition to other cultures, such as American, African-American, Latin American, and, after the terror attacks, in opposition to Arab Americans, who are seen as inassimilable. Even though one can belong to the model minority community, cultural difference will still be used to target individuals. Hardt and Negri claim that Today it is increasingly difficult to the ideologues of the United States to name a single, unified enemy; rather, there seem to be minor and elusive enemies everywhere. The end of the crisis of modernity has given rise to a proliferation of minor and indefinite crisis, or as we prefer, to an omni-crisis. (Hardt and Negri 482) In the US Trump era, one of the omni-crises is the face of the immigrant, the refugee, the displaced, and the religious Other, the terrorist. Thus, in the Global War on Terror, during this omni-crisis, cultural difference defines the face of the Other, the Muslim, or other Arab-look-alike, and essentially most people of color from the Global South, particularly those, like the Sikhs, whose difference is easily identifiable. Many turban-wearing Sikh Americans attempt to assimilate through various means. Liam Dalzell’s 2004 documentary film Punjabi Cab follows several Sikh taxi drivers in the San Francisco/Bay Area, who talk about Sikh identity and what it means to be Americans as they go about their daily lives. According to Puar, post-9/11 hate crimes against turban-wearing Sikhs created a spaced within the US for a discussion of “mistaken identity” and a “liberal push to educate the unknowing citizenry” (Puar, Terrorist Assemblages 167) with the assumption that the viewers will know the differences between a Sikh and Muslim turban, and that the attacks against Sikhs are due to errors of judgment in the time of terrorism. She claims such political tactics “encourage amnesia of the turban assault that stretches back to late 1800s, when the ‘tide of turbans’ came forth to the northwestern United States, and more recent spates such as that following the 1984 assassination of Indira Gandhi” (167). The Othering of Sikhs has been an ongoing issue in the Global North since their arrival in 1906 to work in the lumber mills in the Pacific Northwest, where they 155

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were labeled as “Hoards of Hindoos” and as “Rag Heads” and were driven out of Bellingham by a group of rioting white mill workers.1 Komagata Maru, a Japanese ship carrying hundreds of Sikhs, including a few women,2 escaping British colonial terror was turned back from Canada in 1914 due to racism and xenophobia, and many perished on the way back. Of course, these Othering mechanisms have become visible and magnified in the current era. Puar claims that, At the limits of this discussion is the acknowledgement of the perverse masculinities encrypted into Sikh bodies, especially through the rescription of these masculinities via an enactment of anti-Muslim sentiment. The disavowal of the perverse queerness attached to Muslim terrorists’ bodies thus functions as a rite of initiation and assimilation into US heteronormative citizenship. (Puar, Terrorist Assemblages 168) Sikhs and Sikh bodies, always othered and seen as uncivilized in the Global North, now must contend with the turban as a threat—to be taken off and unveil the real terrorist, or to be taken off and assimilate into the mainstream culture as a true American. The turban has become a marker for the unassimilable terrorist. Frantz Fanon, writing about the politicization of the veil in colonial Algeria, argues that for the French colonizers it became imperative to unveil the Algerian women in order to civilize and control the colonized; speaking from the perspective of the French people, he states, If we want to destroy the structure of Algerian society, its capacity for resistance, we must first of all conquer the women; we must go and find them behind the veil where they hide themselves and in the houses where the men keep them out of sight. (Fanon 23) Toward that end, the French conducted the spectacle of mass unveiling of Algerian women to show control of the colonized culture. In the current political climate in the US, it is the turban that becomes the target of racists who makes it their goal to “unmask” and deturban the Sikh man. Turbans, according to Puar, “are emerging as a signal of an other masculinity” (Puar, Terrorist Assemblages 181). This “other masculinity,” perverse and monstrous, then becomes the target for disciplinary measure in the Global North, explaining the spate of violent attacks against the Sikhs in the US. These attacks have also generated artistic expressions in order to counter the stereotypes. Sikh men and women are othered in the Global North, but with a few exceptions, only a few texts—novels, academic texts, or news media—from Sikhs showcase racism or oppression against the female body. The turban, and therefore, the amritdhari male Sikh, is once again the focus of representation. 156

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Inderpal Grewal, in a panel discussion of Under the Turban, a documentary film about male Sikhs in India and the diaspora, states: Masculine storied representations often silence intersectional readings of the Sikh identity, erasing narratives pertaining to the critical gender gaps [due to female feticide] plaguing Sikhs today … Violence against women, especially women from lower castes and social classes, often goes unreported. (Satveer Kaur-Gill) In an effort to normalize the turbaned Sikh male in the US, almost all narratives completely elide the female Sikh and the racism and sexism that she faces— within her own community and within the nation-state. In Dalzell’s 2004 documentary Punjabi Cab, once again we see the narrative focus on Sikh males after 9/11, eliding any reaction or discrimination Sikh women face in the diaspora. Due to my name, I too was the target of increased searches and incivility at airports after 9/11. When told by one of the agents at Chicago O’Hare international airport that I was on a list due to my name, I, finally, after years of often terse and cold treatment, enrolled in the Pre-TSA (Transport Security Administration) program as well as the Global Entry Visa program. My sisters, my daughter, and I have frequently been targets of racist acts in the US, and especially after 9/11. Strangers shouted at us to “go back home,” and my daughter, with her long braid, was harassed by boys at her school, pushed, shoved, and threatened with violence. Punjabi Cab showcases three amritdhari Sikhs—Makhan Singh, Amrik Singh Mahli, and Dhanwant Singh Mahli—all college-educated Sikhs making a living in San Francisco, California, as cab drivers in a post-9/11 world. The film is dedicated to the Sikhs who became the target of hate crimes after 9/11. Many Sikh scholars, academics, community members, social welfare organizations, and others have mobilized to address the issue of cultural belonging and identity construction for the turbaned Sikh male in the diaspora. Sikhs, who still have yet to reconcile the trauma of 1984, face retraumatization. Diasporic Sikhs are impacted by events in the nation of domicile as well as the nation of origin. In India, Sikhs have been othered since the partition of India, but they have faced increased hostility since the 1984 Massacre. In the US, where they have been fighting to belong to the nation since their arrival in the early 1900s, the 9/ 11 crisis and the backlash against the turbaned Sikhs have revived all the trauma that Sikhs have suffered throughout their short history as a separate religious community. Colonialism, the Partition of India, and the historical events of 1984 and their aftermath created a large diasporic Sikh community in the US. The aforementioned moments, many of them traumatic, are cultural and historical, and are embedded within the communal psyche. These traumas become 157

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intergenerational and many are victimized, whether they live in the diaspora or within a nation-state. Makhan Singh, one of the young Sikh men in the documentary, asks a young white woman who gets into the cab: “Where do you think I am from?” and the young woman answers, “the Middle East.” Amrik Singh realizes that his turban marks him as an Other, as a terrorist-lookalike after 9/11. He remembers Balbir Singh Sondhi, the cab driver who was slaughtered in Arizona in the aftermath of 9/11: “I lost two good friends from Arizona, Balbir Singh Sondhi, five years ago and his brother was killed here.” Amrik recounts how Balbir’s brother, Sukhpal, was gunned down because of his turban. He was shot, and as he fell down, he hit a pole and died at the scene. The camera then pans on the photographs of four young men who were murdered because of hate crimes in the US. Then a shot shows a visual of graffiti which states, “This is not your country.” The narrative then moves to Sikh gurudwaras in India and the US with the following intertitle: “Sikhs left India to escape religious persecution.” The narrative shifts to the family life of Makhan Singh, his wife, and a young daughter who we assume sought asylum in the US after 1984. Finally, there’s a scene of a gurudwara in India with Sikhs worshiping at various temples. The intertitle states that Sikhism is the fifth largest religion in the world, noting the turban is a symbol of the Sikhs. In Punjabi Cab, Sikh men are the main focus and once again the male turban (as opposed to female turbans, which many girls and women do don, as I will discuss in Chapter 12) becomes the marker of Sikh identity. Texts such as Punjabi Cab are then read or taught in the US as multicultural texts to fill the gap in mainstream understanding of minority cultures. Multicultural literature considers texts, written or visual, about minority communities, be they racial, sexual, linguistic, religious, and so forth, in order to examine and understand cultural differences and similarities. In a 2012 diversity video competition, conducted by the Sikh Coalition based in New York, the themes of the videos were: “How does it feel to be a Sikh? Why don’t you try! Walk a mile in our shoes” (original emphasis). And how was the goal to be accomplished? Non-Sikhs were asked by Sikhs to don the turban. The caption for the competition read: Film-makers are encouraged to create a 5-minute video (or less) which depicts a non-Sikh adorning/wearing a Sikh turban for a day and presenting himself/herself as a Sikh. The turban is a Sikh article of faith and should always be treated with respect. The film should capture the reactions of passersby, friends, and family members. Pre and post interviews with main characters are encouraged. (Sikh Coalition) A short video from this competition by Satdeep Singh, called Taaj, is about a young non-Sikh person donning the pugree/turban of a Sikh man and walking 158

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in his “pag,” so to speak, for a few minutes. The narrative is about two young men, presumably roommates, who are returning home from either college or work. One takes off his cap and the other his turban. But when they discover there is no food in the apartment, one of them, the non-Sikh, leaves to pick up some noodles from the corner store. As he is about to pick up his cap, he sees his roommate’s still constructed turban lying next to it and on impulse picks it up, wears it on his head, and takes off on a motorcycle. At the shop, a non-Sikh man is sitting, smoking a cigarette, but on seeing the presumably Sikh man, he extinguishes it in respect, since Sikhs are prohibited from smoking tobacco. When the young man is about to pay for the noodles, he realizes he doesn’t have his wallet, and asks the shopkeeper for credit, which he readily agrees to. After he leaves, another shop employee asks how the shopkeeper could trust a complete stranger, to which the shopkeeper answers, “He is a Sikh. They are very trustworthy.” The young man overhears this conversation. He then stops for a soft drink at another place, and as he does so, he sees a young woman standing alone at the bus stop and stares at her. He thinks, “what a beauty,” but then the girl starts walking towards him and he is completely taken aback, especially when she asks, “can I stand next to you for a minute?”. After a moment, he looks up to see two boys on a motorcycle leering at her. Seeing her standing next to him, they leave. The young woman then looks up at him with teary eyes, saying, “You guys are the real saviors. Pride of this country. There are very few people that you can trust. Thank you.” When he returns home, he looks in the mirror and slowly unwinds the turban. His Sikh roommate tells him not to unwind the turban, but take it off slowly like a hat, as he wanted to wear it the next day. His eyes full of tears, the non-Sikh youth says, “It is a crown. Not a hat,” and continues to slowly unwind it. Here, walking in a Sikh man’s shoes or “pag” is supposed to allow understanding of Sikhs and Sikh culture for a non-Sikh youth, which is to lead to cultural pluralism. On Satdeep Singh’s Vimeo website discussion, an Australian man, whose daughter is married to a Sikh, says, “Since my Anglo daughter married into a Sikh family, I am learning about Sikhism. This film put into pictures what I am feeling about my ‘new’ family. It crystalized the words I didn’t have before about the honor, sincerity, acceptance, and love I feel from them. I am very proud to have my two grandchildren raised with this tradition. Thank you” (Patricia Foote). Thus, the turban, especially as worn by the amritdhari (women too don the turban, but they do not accrue the same power of representation), is increasingly employed in the media, as seen from this film and from the efforts of the SALDEF group, to create understanding of Sikhs.3 Ocean of Pearls, a 2008 feature length film produced and directed by Sarab Singh Neelam, based partially on his experiences in North America, attempts to create understanding in the diaspora through visual representations of the Sikhs, Sikh faith, and Sikh work ethics through various tenets of Sikhism. This film, too, falls into the category of films attempting to represent the turbaned amritdhari Sikh male as normative and assimilable. Once again, Sikh women are present only in supporting or secondary roles. 159

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Amrit Singh, a young turban-wearing Sikh surgeon in Toronto, is “of two worlds, but belongs to neither,” according to the abstract provided on the jacket of the DVD. The narrative commences with a shot of a Sikh man slowly combing his long hair, tying it in a topknot, and then carefully wrapping the turban one wrap at a time to the background of kirtan, Sikh hymns. When he returns home, Amrit’s voiceover reveals the story of the Indian diaspora in Canada, and particularly about Amrit’s parents. They had come to Toronto, the new world in the 1960s, but had continued to live in the old world. The important thing for his parents, reveals the voiceover, is the turban; he, however, has other crucial things to consider in life, and one of them is to take a flight to Detroit to make a job presentation. At the crossroads between East and West, Singh is unable to understand his parents, and especially his father’s insistence on keeping all the articles of faith, particularly the turban. He tries to resist his parents’ attempts at keeping the faith alive through various community Khalsa camps. When offered a prestigious job, where he is promised the freedom to choose his own team of doctors and potentially head the transplant division in Detroit, he leaves his parents and his Sikh girlfriend in Canada. However, it soon becomes obvious that his turban and bearded look elicit racist responses, not only at the airport and various clubs in Detroit, but also at his work. When he attends a club with a white female colleague and is denied entrance into it due to his “hat,” they go to his place where she asks Amrit to explain the significance of the turban. He tells her it is an article of faith for the Sikhs, reciting the first lines of the Gurugranth: Ek Om Kar, Sat Naam (There is one God and his name is truth) and explaining the significance of seva (service) within Sikh religion and culture. He puts the turban on her head, romanticizing the article of faith. Soon, the turban also elicits a racist response with the Board of Directors of the hospital. It is hinted that they need a more mainstream face to represent the unit in order to get funds from the donors. When he finds out, Amrit is heartsick. He takes a long look at his face in the mirror and deliberately unravels each wrap from his turban. Carefully, he unravels his knotted long hair and lets it cascade down his back and around his face. In slow motion, the shot shows him lifting a clump of hair from the back of his head, staring at it, and then gently snipping it with a pair of scissors. He continues to snip each and every piece of his hair until all of his cut hair is pooled around his feet. As he looks in the mirror and talks to himself, he becomes double. The character splits and fragments, as his identity becomes compromised. In spite of his effort at assimilation, the board eventually favors a white American surgeon; he is told he needs to be more progressive and to compromise more.4 Crying, he points to his head and says, “don’t you think I’ve learnt that?” In the meantime, he returns to Toronto to help with the Khalsa camp and wears a turban. However, he arrives too late to partake in the opening ceremonies and prayers; consequently, his father ignores him. When the Sikh children sit by the campfire and share stories of Guru Gobind Singh, who fought the Mughals to keep the Sikh faith alive, Amrit begins arguing with his father, saying that the need for turbans was historical and was presently 160

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irrelevant. His father states that it is a matter of value. Amrit, angry and wounded, acts out against his father, saying that it was okay for his father to live in a bubble, but his son has to live in the real world and to do so, one has to cut his hair. He then takes his turban off. Horrified, the children and the rest of the community leave the room. Amrit decides to pack and leave. His father asks him to apologize to the children for traumatizing them in such a way. An argument ensues and his father, visibly shaken, says “you will never understand what I have been through.” Amrit angrily responds, “You never talk to me; you only shout or lecture.” For the first time, the audience sees the character of the father transform, as he narrates the story of the 1947 Partition and the subsequent massacre of the Sikhs, including his 12-year-old brother and his father. During the Partition, Christian missionaries rescued many of the Sikhs, who were at refugee camps in Pakistan. They told them to cut off their hair in order to save themselves. Many chose death over the death of their conscience; they had refused to cut off their hair. Amrit sobs. Repression of trauma, transference, and mourning are issues facing the family and, by extension, the community. It is the first time, it seems, that the father narrates his trauma and Amrit, as the witness, helps him work towards healing. My nephew, my older sister’s son, cut off his hair at the age of 16 and vanished for a night after leaving a note professing his remorse; my distraught sister thought he might have committed suicide. My nephew returned the next day after his father, a staunch amritdhari, reported him missing at the police station in Chicago. When his son returned, my brother-in-law refused to say a word for the next few decades, and until today has not discussed his son’s acts. His son remembered his father’s words uttered throughout his young life: No son of mine will cut off his hair and live in my house. However, their relationship continued in a troubled way throughout their lives, and even though they now appear on cordial terms, as my brother-in-law is in his late seventies, they never resolved the issue of his son cutting off his hair. My brother-in-law was six years old when he was uprooted from Lyalpur, now in Pakistan, due to the riots and communal violence. His family was torn apart. Some of the family members arrived in Moti Nagar in Delhi; others, his sisters included, were lost for months. His father, too, was left behind in Pakistan, but eventually, they were all reunited. Once, when I had asked him about the Partition, he remembered many of the details, but cannot recall how they reunited with his two sisters. The director of Ocean of Pearls, Sarab Singh Neelam, seems to hope that when audiences like my brotherin-law and nephew view his film, they might be able to witness the trauma and work towards healing. Amrit and his father appear to be on the way to healing, as the next scene in the film shows: it is of the gurudwara camp where a number of young Sikh boys in saffron turbans and young Sikh girls in saffron chunnis (head covering for Sikh girls and women) walk by, reciting the Japji Sahib, the Sikh morning prayer, while Amrit stands in the foreground, looking at them. He is a sevadar, volunteering his service to the Sikh community. My daughter, an amritdhari, 161

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who attended Sikh youth camps in North Carolina and Texas in the late 1980s and early 1990s, became a Sikh youth counselor. I used to help out in the Sikh camp in North Carolina. However, once she trimmed her hair and I cut my son’s hair, we no longer felt welcomed and stayed away from the activities. Our children occasionally still attend gurudwara, and although their father, my exhusband, is an amritdhari and is active in the Sikh community, the children’s identity as the Khalsa Sikh, which they had acquired at the camps, is no longer available to them. Thus, the children in the camp with saffron turbans and chunnis signify Sikh identity, yet the film’s focus is on the male Sikh and his turban. Thus, the youth too become backgrounded for Amrit’s struggle and identity as a Sikh man in North America. When the focus of a text appears to be about Sikh identity, the representations are almost always about the amritdhari man, while the rest of the Sikh community members, and particularly Sikh women, are sidelined in most narratives. When Amrit returns to Detroit, he saves a woman’s life through a transplant surgery. She does not have medical coverage, so he pays for it out of his own pocket. He is unable to accept the health system in the US. And even though the hospital finally gets the liver transplant unit, Amrit’s dream, he decides to return to Toronto and to his Sikh community and identity. The film ends with his father tying a turban on Amrit’s head, returning him to his identity as a true Sikh, with his traditional Sikh girlfriend by his side—an Amrit who will no longer compromise his values. While the film brings out the complexities of race and culture for the diasporic subject, it also brings into focus the violence and discrimination Sikhs suffer, not only in India as religious minorities, as witnessed during the 1947 and 1984 massacres, but also as religious and racialized minorities in the west. The film attempts to explain Sikhism through Amrit’s interaction with his date, a white woman. He shows her how to tie a turban and explains the meaning of the article of faith and the stories of the Sikh gurus, signifying his attempt at finding acceptance into the mainstream culture. Since this film is set in, and distributed in, the west, the audience is not only Sikhs but also many other communities. Unfortunately, the film was not a huge commercial success, and although it won many awards, such as the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival Grand Jury Audience Award; Best Feature, Detroit Windsor International Film Festival; and the Toronto ReelWorld Film Festival Audience Choice Award, among others, it remains relatively unknown. Films such as Punjabi Cab, Taaj, and Neelam’s Ocean of Pearls do not work as a means for the minority community to work towards inclusivity and pluralism, since they only provide a heteropatriarchal perspective of racism and communal violence, and a monocentric understanding of Sikhism—the turban and the male gaze only provide a limited understanding of what being a Sikh means. The Sikh female is not allowed narrative space and so does not become part of the dialogue about Sikh identity formations. The trauma that Sikhs suffer due to communal and racial violence becomes only about the male amritdhari Sikh, and Sikh women, 162

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who also face communal and racial violence along with domestic violence, appear to suffer either in silence or, as Chapter 12 shows, are compelled to take up the pen to create a niche for themselves and for other oppressed and violated Sikh women to resist and to empower themselves and the women in the Sikh community.

Notes 1 For more on the riots, see David Cahn’s “The 1907 Bellingham Riots in Historical Context.” 2 See Ali Kazimi’s 2004 documentary film Continuous Journey for more on the Komagata Maru. 3 For more on orthodox and diverse Sikhs, see Harjot Oberoi’s The Construction of Religious Boundaries: Culture, Identity, and Diversity in the Sikh Tradition. 4 My husband, a highly educated amritdhari Sikh, to whom I was married for 25 years, was a Director of Research and Development of a fiber filtration company in Oregon, but was told he couldn’t be made the Vice President as he wasn’t aggressive or forthright enough. Time and again, he hit the glass ceiling.

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12 GENDERING THE SIKH DIASPORA AND TRANSNATIONAL FEMINISM The Construction of Sexuality in the Poems of Sukhjeet Kaur Khalsa, Sharapal Ruprai, and Rupi Kaur

Regarding violence and trauma, be it due to race, class, gender and sexuality, or religion, whether in the Sikh community in India, or in the United States, or indeed anywhere else in the world, yes, it is time to fight back. And yes, it is time for solidarity and a time for healing for the beleaguered Sikh community, but time and again, women are left out of the Sikh violence and trauma narratives. The sexism and gender violence that occur in the Sikh community is hidden or rarely mentioned in public or private narratives, meaning that women are effectively silenced and left out of the process of healing. How can Sikh women become agents of their own identities within a sexist and hypermasculinist Sikh community in India, and within the larger, hetero-normative diasporic spaces, if their experiences are denied narrative space? Although I’ve discussed my identity as a diasporic Sikh woman from Burma, let me briefly restate it here, as my identity impacts my reading and interpretation of Sikh texts, for I intend to conduct a postcolonial and intersectional feminist criticism of the poems. As someone who was exiled and displaced numerous times from different nations and now living in the US, and as a woman from a besieged Sikh community, I examine poems written by diasporic Sikh women writing about gender and violence, and analyze the difficulty of speaking out at a time when attacks against male Sikhs are on the rise. How do private and public narratives intersect in the making of meaning? How do postcolonial critics provide intersectional reading of texts? Through a postcolonial feminist critical reading, I aim to construct a circle of witnessing with my texts and readers. Postcolonial critical thought seeks to unmask colonialist assumptions in colonial texts, while postcolonial feminist criticism attempts an intersectional approach which keeps in mind the larger political structures and hierarchies of power. Who gets to speak? Whose voice is heard? How is the narrative received? How do constructions of race, gender, and sexuality impact identity in a globalized world? As a child of refugees from the Partition of India, as a refugee from Burma, and as a stateless citizen in India for five years, 164

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an alien in the US for five years, and now an American citizen and a diasporic Sikh Indian woman, as well as a mother, an academic, an activist, and a poet, I often wonder at my condition of exile and my ability or inability to have a “voice” within my community. My grandparents, who were suffering under British colonial rule in Punjab, had migrated to Burma, a part of British India, in the early 1900s to earn a livelihood. In 1946, during the Japanese occupation of Burma, my parents, born and brought up in Burma, “returned” all the way back to their ancestral village in West Punjab. They, however, were forced to leave in the middle of the night in March 1947 with two small children along with their parents when the Partition riots started. They had to walk miles at night and then took one of the trains to India that narrowly missed becoming one of the ghost trains—where enemy communities were sending slaughtered Hindus/Sikhs or Muslims on trains across the border—although it was also attacked. After my two brothers and one more sister and I were born and raised in Burma, my father finally returned (when we had never been to India before) us (the children along with some relatives) to India in 1970, as he was afraid for the wellbeing of his daughters under the extremely xenophobic and hypernationalist military regime in Burma. After being hounded by the Burmese military for years—where my father’s general store was nationalized, where the Burmese currency was de-monetized, where our house was routinely invaded and searched by the Burmese police and military personnel—we arrived in India in the early 1970s as refugees or stateless citizens. In order to migrate, we had to give up our Burmese citizenship, relinquish the rights to our home and business property, and become stateless for five years in India, where we were regularly mistreated by the authorities at the immigration office. Once I became naturalized as an Indian citizen, my belonging to the nation, at least on paper, looked solid. My father, once he could attain his travel papers, which the Burmese Government refused to provide for over three years, finally joined us in India. He was allotted a piece of land in West Delhi due to his Indian ancestry. He felt he could now belong to the nation and be safe. However, as the history of the 1984 state-sponsored Sikh Massacre shows, Sikhs, both male and female, became the target of state-sponsored violence, and even though many Hindus obviously did not take part in it, they stood by and became “bystanders” (Gabriele Schwab) while the massacre occurred. After these events, the feeling of national belonging was shattered for most Sikhs. I had left Delhi for the US just before the massacre, as an immigrant on a green card, and suffered from extreme anxiety due to “idiopathic identification” (Marianne Hirsch, “Surviving Images”) with my family members who were brutalized and other Sikhs who were raped and murdered. Many see the condition of exile “as a spur to humanism or to creativity,” but to see it as such, Edward Said argues, is “to belittle its mutilations. Modern exile is irremediably secular and unbearably historical. It is produced by human beings for other human beings; it has torn millions of people from the nourishment of tradition, family, and geography” (Said, “The Mind of Winter” 440). Said adds, 165

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“For exile is fundamentally a discontinuous state of being. Exiles are cut off from their roots, their land, their past” (440). As I discuss poems by the Sikh diaspora—exiles, migrants, and immigrants—in the Global North, I examine their sense of communal and national belonging as women from a minority community, the Sikhs, who continue to face increased racism in the Global North. How do they write about gender identity and gender violence within the community in a nuanced way? The banning of immigrants from Muslim majority countries to the US, and the fear of the Muslim refugee in the contemporary anti-immigrant culture of the US, indicate that the construction of the Other as evil still resonates in a postmodern and postcolonial world, particularly in the US. Due to such a mindset, as seen in the rise of hate crimes and assaults on minorities and religious Others in the US, many easily fall prey to fear and xenophobia, especially when incited by the commander in chief. According to Edward Said, All cultures spin out a dialectic of self and other, the subject ‘I’ who is native, authentic, at home, and the object, ‘it’ or ‘you,’ who is foreign, perhaps threatening, different, out there. From this dialectic comes the series of heroes and monsters, founding fathers and barbarians, prized masterpieces and despised opponents that express a culture from its deepest sense of national self-identity to its refined patriotism, and finally to its coarse jingoism, xenophobia, and exclusivist bias. (Said, “States” 637) In the dialectic of the US/Self and the Terrorist/Other, those claiming to be patriots have placed Sikhs in the realm of the barbarian. As a Sikh Indian woman, I’m always aware of my Sikh brothers, sons, and fathers being Othered. When we were children in Burma, we were seen as the kala Mai, the black foreigners; we used to hear Burmese boys taunting Sikh boys with chants, “Punjabi, gaun paun ni, nandow auck ko win, nandaw auck ka tasey chau, Pancha gaun paun pyawn!” (Punjabi, red pugree [turban], went under the convent, when the convent ghost chased him out, Puncha’s—Punjabi’s—turban is lost!). Such xenophobia ultimately turned to violence against all racialized Others in Burma and many, like my family, fled the country and became refugees. I feel a similar situation arising in the US in the past few years, and particularly so under the Trump administration. On March 24, 2017, Rajpreet Heir, a young Sikh woman born in Indiana, was riding the L train in Manhattan on her way to a friend’s birthday party, when a white male shouted: “Do you even know what a Marine looks like? Do you know what they have to see? What they do for this country? Because of people like you.” He then told her that he hopes she was sent “back to Lebanon,” adding, “You don’t belong in this country” (Anna North). My daughter, during the Gulf war, when she was still in high school, was shoved and yelled at in a similar way. Hate crimes are on the rise. On March 5, 2017, a Sikh man, 166

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Deep Rai, age 39, was shot at in Seattle (Bacon). On February 22, 2017, a white man shot at South Asian men Srinivas Kuchibhotla and Alok Madasani in Kansas; Mr. Kuchibhotla died while Madasani was wounded. In such a climate of violence against minority men, there is a burden of representation, as women who write and discuss gender disparity and domestic violence are seen as traitors to the community.1 Sharanpal Ruprai, the daughter of Sikh immigrants from Kenya via the UK, and now living in Canada, is the author of a book of poems titled Seva, which in the Sikh tradition means service. In her doctoral thesis, she writes, Over the years, I, a Sikh woman, have shed the Sikh religious symbols; however, the last symbol, the Kara, is still around my right wrist. My religious detaching has stopped for now, and I am compelled to leave this one symbol in place. For non-Sikh people, the Kara is just another bracelet that any person might wear; however, I have found in recent years that the Kara signals to other Sikh people that I am of that faith. (Ruprai, Seva 2) Ruprai feels a struggle between her identities as a Sikh and as a woman. She writes as a Sikh woman growing up in Sikh Canadian household, “I feel a tug of resistance, that is, ‘being Sikh’ on one side and ‘being a woman’ on the other” (Seva 33). Being a Sikh woman seems to fragment Ruprai. Is she able to reconcile her identities as both Sikh and woman? She writes, “The interconnection between the two is lived within my own body and both shapes and is shaped by my personal environment” (33). As a member of the Sikh diaspora, Ruprai, aware of gender disparity within a heteropatriarchal household, is also mindful of the Sikh patriarchy that was dragged, willfully or forcefully, from one territory to another. In a poem in Seva, she writes about her father moving from the village in India and first moving to Africa, then England, and on to Canada, and then back to England, adding that the same occurred with her Naniji, her maternal grandmother (53). Ruprai writes about racialized gender identity as a Sikh woman growing up with a turbaned Sikh brother and father, who she tries to emulate. She puts on her father’s turban and writes that she would see a boy in the mirror (Seva 16). The boy in the mirror is her “twin,” as the title of the poem indicates. She knows her father faces terror in his new nation. In a prose section of Seva, she writes about her father being violently attacked by racists in Canada who man-handled and intimidated him early one morning. Her brother, whose long hair and red turban make him an easy objective for racism, tries to protect himself from bullies when they see him and sling racist slurs at him (37); Ruprai’s words are evocative of Sikh wounding, as she writes that after school, when he runs home in the rain, the color of his red turban mingles with the tears he sheds (37), reminding me of my brothers in Burma with their turbans in their hands, their juda loose, and tears running down their faces after Burmese bullies chant, 167

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“Punjabi gaun baun ni.” It reminds of the day when my 12-year old daughter came home from school and tearfully told me about bullies teasing her younger eight-year old amritdhari brother, and I cut off my son’s hair with pair of blunt sewing scissors while he struggled and cried in my arms. Ruprai’s resistance against gender disparity within the community commences when she’s in the gurudwara as a young girl and sees turbans on one side and chunni on the other side (Seva 72). She is concerned about the segregated gurudwara space where women and men sit on opposite side of the divide. While seva, service, to the community is ordained for both genders, women and girls are pushed back into smaller rooms and kitchens, while men are located in the larger and visible spaces of the temple. In her doctoral dissertation, Ruprai writes, I was participating in the Gurdwara serving food when I was told by one of the men also serving that I should be in the kitchen making rotis, not out in the langar hall serving people. When I looked up, I realized that all the women were in the kitchen rolling out rotis and all the men were serving the food. Now, this may seem like a little detail, however, it is an example of how participants, like me, are seen as upsetting the ritualization of power and control. The man who was “policing” me was defining what it meant for me to be a participating member as a Sikh woman. The women in the kitchen were modelling the ritualization of control by staying in the kitchen. (Ruprai, “Being Sikh, Being Women” 35) She resists such manipulation of the idea of seva by continuing to serve in the langar hall rather than in the confined and gendered space of the kitchen. Ruprai is able to create gender solidarity within the oppressive Sikh community due to female community, even though her sister is “returned” to the abusive in-laws by her parents. Ruprai writes about her sister, who is being returned to her in-laws’ home after she came to stay with her family due to, we realize, domestic violence. Her sister hands her a kirpan and urges the poet to use it without fear (Seva 33). Ruprai understands the meaning of the kirpan, the sword, one of the Five Ks of the Sikhs, for she writes that on that day she felt that god turned into a woman who needed warriors, so she strides out of the gender-segregated gurudwara in Winnipeg with her kirpan across her body (32) as her battle against the Sikh patriarchy begins. In a poem titled “Baker’s Dozen,” Ruprai hints at female feticide (81), and the roar of such moments finds echoes in other young Sikh writers. In her second poetry book, Pressure Cooker Love Bomb (2019), Ruprai asks the following question about being Sikh and about queer sexuality: “What does it mean to have a desire for the same sex, to be bi, when you don’t really have the parents or the community or even the vocabulary to understand it? It is like living in a pressure cooker” (Heath McCoy). In this volume, one is able to see 168

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the narrator exploring, among her other identities, her queer sexuality and sexual identity as a Sikh woman in Canada. In this way, she deviates from her earlier work exploring gender and race in Canada to issues of gender and sexuality, dedicating a number of poems to queer desire and same-sex love. Although Sikhism teaches gender equality, when persecuted, many Sikhs become hyper-vigilant and hyper-critical of those they feel are resisting communal identity—be it from the outside community, enemy communities, or from women within their own family and community. For such exiles in the diaspora, Edward Said writes: “At the bottom, exile is a jealous state” and what it brings forth “is an exaggerated sense of group solidarity as well as a passionate hostility towards outsiders, even those who may in fact be in the same predicament as you” (“States” 440–441). When Sikh women speak out against gender, sexuality, and domestic violence, they are seen as “selling out” and can become targets of Sikh hate. One such example of a Sikh woman who steps out into the public space and is seen as a traitor due to her bold and unapologetic stance as an empowered Sikh woman is that of Australian Sukhjit Kaur Khalsa. Khalsa, a young Sikh woman who embraces her Kaur identity and advocates for her Sikh Brothers’ Khalsa identity, shot to stardom in Australia through the Australia’s Got Talent show. In an interview with Aimie Rigas and Tom Compagnoni, she discusses the Sikh turban. I remember one day [my brother] told me a story that I’ve translated into a lot of the work I do and the feelings I have towards other people. It was about a woman he was meeting, she came up to him and they met for the first time, the second time, then they met for the third and fourth time. And when they met for the fifth time, she squinted her eyes and said ‘You have a turban, Hajit.’ (Rigas and Campagnoni) It wasn’t that the woman had not seen his turban, but because his energy and personality were so “awesome,” she hadn’t noticed; her brother Hajit shared this story with her so that one day her “personality [would] be so kickass that people don’t even notice your hair, your religion, that you’re a woman.” Sukhjit’s personality did become “awesome” and “kickass.” In the talent show which aired on February 8, 2016, she speaks about identity—Australian, Indian, Sikh. With long uncut hair flowing down her back, Sukhjit begins, “When a teen rips off my uncle’s turban, I’m an enraged flame of pain and shame and sorrow … So when people tell me and my family to go home to where we came from, I reply with a smile, tongue-in-cheek, ‘mate, we’ve been right at home for the past 150 years!’/I’m not the one that’s a freak, I’m fully Sikh” (Khalsa, Youtube). Sukhjit is not only a spoken-word artist, but she’s also an activist and an educator. Sukhjit proclaims a Kaur identity and promotes her Sikh brothers’ Khalsa identity to such a extent as to occasionally wear the turban as an identity 169

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marker. She was interviewed online on a blog called “Fickle” regarding her autobiographical blog, “Indian accent sold separately.” The interviewer asks: “You’re a ‘part-time’ turban wearer. Why do you wear a turban?” to which Sukhjit replies: Turbans were traditionally a symbol of royalty and status in society. Only the kings and rulers of India were allowed to wear them. Then Sikhism came along and shifted that paradigm by giving the turban for all to wear, because we are all Kings and Queens. 99% of the people you see wearing a turban in Australia are actually Sikh. The turban has a lot of personal meaning depending on who you ask. I wear the turban because I believe in equality whether that be gender, economical or racial. By wearing the turban, I take a stand against the oppression of minorities in society. (Khalsa, “Kaur-ageous”) Can Sikh women appropriate Sikh masculinity implied by the turban in order to work towards equality? Why do certain articles of faith take on particular meaning at various times in history? If the Sikh turban was to signify courage in the face of oppression, it is surely an article of faith that can get one murdered. Sukhjit also notes she is afraid to wear one now in public, as are many Sikhs around the world. Many Sikh women are taking up the turban as a sign of Sikhism’s egalitarianism and as an empowering tool (Mahmood and Brady); however, the numbers are not significant enough to draw a critical conclusion regarding the efficacy of the act. I see the act as a performance, as an imitation. One woman who wears the turban and is easily located online via Google is Canada’s Palbinder K. Shergill,2 a turban-wearing Sikh woman who, in 2017, was appointed to the B.C. Supreme Court in New Westminster, becoming the first turbaned judge in Canada (Andree Lau). A Huffington Post report carried the headline, “Palbinder K. Shergill of B.C. Supreme Court Becomes 1st Turbaned Sikh Judge in Canada.” The fact that almost all Sikh women are amritdharis, even without wearing the turban, is not understood by mainstream culture. Also, the fact that the headline notes Shergill as a Turbaned Sikh neglects to mention the fact about her being a woman. In almost all the newspaper report about the appointment, the turban, fetishized, is mentioned. CBC News reported the World Sikh Organization of Canada’s Balpreet Singh as saying the appointment was special particularly: “given that she’s a woman and mostly the turban is associated with Sikh men” (Yeung). Shergill, like Rupi Kaur, was born in Punjab and migrated to Canada when she was four. The female turban-wearing phenomenon is occurring mostly in the diaspora. Sarabjoth, a young Sikh woman from Manchester, England, is part of this phenomenon. She started wearing a turban in spite of resistance from her family, as they told her, “How would [you] find a husband?” Her reason for donning the turban? 170

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Sikh women are meant to be strong. They’re still khalsa (saint soldiers of the Guru) and the khalsa isn’t differentiated on gender. When I tie my turban every morning I want to see my Guru. I feel a great sense of pride when I see my reflection as I think this is what my Guru looked like, this is what the khalsa looks like. (Rajiv Gupta) She sees the image of the Guru in the mirror and feels empowered. Rather than seeing women wearing the turban as an empowering act due to the ethos of gender equality and spirituality that is imbued in the turban worn traditionally by the male sex, I see it as fetishism, or as drag performance, indeed as parody, in order to show the constructedness of sex and gender. As Judith Butler claims, In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency … part of the pleasure, the giddiness of the performance is in the recognition of a radical contingency in the relation between sex and gender. (Butler, Gender Trouble 187, original emphasis) The parody in this case is the parody of Sikh males being empowered by their sex, as the power that they accrue is due to the performance of gender. Drag shows the imitative and unoriginal construction of gender. As can be seen, Sikh women wearing the turban, such as Sukhjit, demonstrate the constructedness of Sikh men with turbans as empowered, and are seemingly mocking and deconstructing ideas of gender and sex. As Butler argues, there “is only a taking up of the tools where they lie, where the very ‘taking up’ is enabled by the tool lying there” (Gender Trouble 145). If the turban is available, take it up and use it, as Sharapal Ruprai and Sukhjit Kaur Khalsa do. I did so when I was a young girl, tying my long uncut hair in a juda, taking up my father’s turban, wearing it on my head and parading around the house with it; when my father passed away about ten years ago, his red turban, neatly tied, was lying by his bedside. My brothers and sisters decided to give it to me; I’m the fourth child of my parents and the third daughter, so I knew that I was being honored. I keep it in one of my hatboxes and I still take it out and wear it occasionally. I know I do not become empowered by the act. I see myself in the mirror with my late father’s red turban on and feel he could have been me and I him. Is Sukhjit empowered by her act of wearing the turban in Australia? She continues to fight for cultural and gender equality in Australia, and occasionally dons the turban, but she also became the target of Sikh male hate when she wore shorts at the beach and posted a picture of herself online (Dipanjali Rao). So, as resistance, she writes and performs her spoken word poetry: “I’m disrespecting the turban by wearing a dress … The conversion started at half past six/when my strength would be tested as a practicing Sikh/They saw a picture posted of me, 171

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parading denim shorts:/‘This is not appropriate clothing, please give it some thought!’”. She writes on the Kaur Life website: “Singhs can express themselves. Kaurs should behave themselves and face shame for questioning or expressing opinions. Singhs can have personalities and be their own person. Kaurs with a dastaar [smaller under turban] are categorized as ‘Singhnis’ and thus, must not talk to boys, must wear white and be peaceful and pure” (Khalsa “A Dress/ Address”). The majority of Sikh women and girls feel that to speak out is to betray, or that the community shames them for being manly, or not feminine enough, or being impure. So, imagine women in a Sikh community trying to talk and write about domestic violence and gender oppression! On Sikhnet.com, a Sikh website, Sukhjit Kaur Khalsa narrates regarding the appearance of a Sikh woman: So I ask you what does this “Singhni” look like. What does she wear? An important history of a Kaur’s identity Disappeared or doesn’t exist, conveniently. And so this Sikh is neither here nor there. (Khalsa “A Dress/Address”) Women’s narratives of empowerment or agency are either elided or denied, and therefore, erased, in most dominant Sikh representations. As Ruprai states in “Being Sikh, Being Women”, the “interconnectedness” of being a Sikh and a woman is lived within her body; these two identities are in conflict, but Khalsa, like Ruprai, tries to reconnect the fragmented parts of her being to reconstruct a powerful and whole female Sikh identity in her poems. For many Sikh women, the internet has become the only venue for finding a voice to discuss gender and domestic violence within the community. However, most of the discussion remains localized and enclosed. Yet, some voices are suddenly resounding as they are breaking out of the virtual word into the public narrative spaces of the published world. Rupi Kaur, a 24-year-old Punjabi Sikh poet from Canada, known as an “Insta” poet, has gained fame from her Instagram poetry posts. She sold over a million copies of her poetry collection, Milk and Honey, and became a New York Times bestseller in 2015 (Rob Walker). She was 21 years old when she self-published the collection in 2014, and then Andrews McMeel published it in 2015. To date, Milk and Honey sales have reached over 2.5 million copies. Rupi Kaur shot to fame after Instagram twice took down her posted photograph of herself in a period-stained garment. Her second poetry collection, The Sun and Her Flowers, published in 2017, has become another success story. She has 393,000 followers on Instagram as of 25 March 2020. Through her online fame, Rupi Kaur become one of the first Sikh women to be able to write about gender violence within the Sikh community for such a wide audience. In a poem in Milk and Honey, she writes about domestic and sexual abuse within the community leading to fear and isolation. We are afraid 172

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because we think to speak is to betray, and we are taught silence. My sisters and I remained silent when one of our father’s brothers physically tortured and beat us while another sexually molested us when we were children. As I’ve mentioned in this study before, when her 15-year-old cousin molested my fiveyear-old daughter and I spoke out to my husband, saying I would confront the youth, my husband demanded that I would remain silent, saying he would handle the situation on his own terms. Years later, when my daughter confronted her father, saying he is still intimate with her cousin in spite of her molestation, he retorted, “You were both children and he was simply playing with you.” We are constantly told by our male family members not to be troublemakers, and our voices are forcefully or coercively silenced. Kaur writes that being born a woman and learning to erase one’s self becomes an art of self-effacement; this act is so insidious that one only learns one is alive because of the movement of one’s body by the very act of breathing (Milk and Honey 33). As a diasporic, she realizes the trauma of South Asian immigrants, yet she also knows that sexuality and abuse are issues that she needs to write about. In an interview, Kaur states, “our bodies are not our property. We are told we must be conservative. A good South Asian girl is quiet. Does as she is told. Sex does not belong to her. It is something that happens to her on her wedding night. It is for him. We know sexual violence intimately. We experience alarming rates of rape from thousands of years of shame and oppression. From the community and from colonizers after colonizers” (Atisha Jain). The need to speak out, to break the silence, comes from powerlessness; however, not many venues are available: “I felt voiceless for so long, I wasn’t ever able to say what I felt out loud. I didn’t know how to say it. Posting online presented itself as a comfortable medium. I could say what I wanted to say in a way I still felt comfortable. Whenever, however I wanted to” (Jain). In her second collection of poems, The Sun and Her Flowers, Kaur writes, once again, about gender and sexuality, sexual abuse, and female feticide. In a poem whose title comes at the end, “how can i verbalize consent as an adult when i was never taught to as a child,” she writes about the fear of being able to say no to unwanted sex from men (90). I understand what Kaur means, as I still cannot talk about my rapes. For Rupi, now, as an adult and a published poet, she can write about important issues in the family and community and will use her voice for it. Her topics include female feticide (145) in the Sikh community. In a poem titled “female infanticide/female feticide,” Kaur writes that in 2012, 12 hospitals in the Toronto area would not reveal the gender of the fetus until after the first trimester as the population around the area is predominantly Asian immigrants (145). She understands the pain of Sikh women, their desires, their loss of agency as they crossed oceans to raise families. She connects generations in her poetry titled: “I have generations of bellies to eat for” (211); she writes that she is the first woman in her family who gets to fulfil her desires (211). Realizing her mother was voiceless as a new immigrant in a strange land, she provides words of understanding. Kaur writes that for her 173

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mother’s generation there was no precedence or criteria on how to raise families in the diaspora (134). She represents arranged marriage and love in a poem titled, “advice I would’ve given my mother on her wedding day:” She writes that the grandfather, who was abusive to the son, hadn’t taught him how to articulate desire and love, so he wasn’t able to say it to her mother, but he showed his love for her mother through his actions. She advises her mother about sex and how to enjoy it, as sex is not dirty (133). She writes about child abuse and incest in Milk and Honey and repeats the theme in her second collection in the voice of an “I” and a collective “we:” She write that she had seen evil in incestuous uncles who abused and molested her and others when they were children (102). As is expected, Rupi Kaur faces a backlash regarding her use of the “oppressed South Asian woman” motif in her poems. According to Chiara Giovanni regarding Kaur’s use of “we” in addition to the “I” in her trauma narrative poetry in her second collection, Kaur indeed seems to note little difference between her educated, Western, Indian-Canadian self and her ancestors, or even modern South Asian women of a similar age in rural Punjab. She suggests that the way all South Asian women move through life is universal, uniting herself with them by insistently returning focus to the South Asian female body as a locus of “shame and oppression” in her collection. (Buzzfeed) Even though many of Kaur’s poems are personal, her self-identity as a person of diverse background, “a young brown woman,” troubles Giovanni. “Rather than self-defining as a Canadian poet, she stresses her marginality as ‘a Punjabi-Sikh immigrant woman,’ deliberately rejecting a mainstream Western identity in favor of alterity” (Buzzfeed). When Bharati Mukherjee, novelist and writer, had denied her Indian heritage and instead embraced an American identity by wrapping an American flag as a sari, she faced a backlash from postcolonial scholars (see Jaspal Kaur Singh, Representation and Resistance), so Rupi Kaur’s self-identity as a “Punjabi-Sikh immigrant woman” should not be troubling. According to Kazim Ali, “Kaur’s verses touch the surface of situations. They identify; they do not interrogate.” For now, we will have to do with a Sikh poet who identifies issues of gender and domestic violence within the Sikh community. We will have to wait a while for another Sikh woman artist/writer/poet to interrogate heterosexism and racism in such a way for social change and gender equality to occur. In the meantime, reconnecting, reconstructing, and regenerating intergenerational support and love will have to do, as Rupi Kaur does in The Sun and Her Flowers, where she wonders if she wished really hard her mother’s soul would return to her in her next life as her own daughter, so that she could provide the comfort that had been given to her in this lifetime (142). Kaur hopes to be able to live for her mother in the future when her mother is no more; maybe, she will be reincarnated as her daughter, to be loved, 174

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nurtured, taught equality, justice, and acceptance. I, too, look towards my daughter’s and my granddaughter’s faces for traces of my mother and grandmothers’ stories in their narratives and gestures, connecting generational struggles and victories, creating a circle of communication, finding empowerment in simple or grand resistances; but always, I hope, even in the face of continued oppression and sexism, my daughter’s voice, adding to the contemporary empowering movements for gender emancipation and social change, will surely add to the feminist waves and create a tsunami whose effects will wash over old and oppressive structures, engendering renewal and growth for all genders in our communities.

Notes 1 See, for example, the backlash against Alice Walker and her novel The Color Purple, published in 1982, which won the Pulitzer prize; many black males saw her representations of oppressive black males in the novel, and later in a film by the same name, as an “assault on the black male image. ‘It is degrading to black men … makes us all look like wife beaters and rapists,’ one man told the Los Angeles Times” (Ronda Racha Penrice). 2 Shergill and I were at the 2014 SAFAR (Sikh Feminist Research Institute) conference in Toronto and I had noted her turban; when I googled “Sikh woman wearing a turban,” she was one of the first persons to appear on the net.

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188

INDEX

Bal, Mieke 4, 53, 125 Baldwin, David 43 Baldwin, Shauna Singh 4, 34–35, 43–53, 57–58, 86 Ballantyne, Tony 33, 34, 36, 40 Banerjee, Abhijit 89 “Being Sikh, Being Women” (Ruprai) 172 Between Colonialism and Diaspora (Ballantyne) 33 Bhandari, Laveesh 145 Bhasin, Kamla 135 Bhatia, Nandini 92 Bhattacharya, Sumit 146 Bhindranwale, Jarnail Singh 97–100, 119–120, 129, 134, 140n4 Bose, Shonali 4, 143, 145–152 Bose, Subhas Chandra 19 boutiques 16 Brison, Susan 84, 87, 91, 92 British colonialism 141–142; civilized Christians 141; “Divide and Rule” policy 2, 48, 50, 62, 63; recruitment 34–35; selective policies 36; Tat Khalsa Movement 33–34 British Columbia 61 Burma 7, 9–15, 17, 18–20, 50, 59, 62, 65, 79, 86, 99, 106, 130–131, 133, 137, 164–168 Butalia, Urvashi 5–6, 21, 28, 29–30, 40, 41, 58–59, 61, 94–95 Butler, Judith 101–102

9/11 terrorist attacks 1, 153, 154 Abdali, Ahmed Shah 98 Abducted Persons [Recovery and Restoration] Act 7 Africa 26 Ahmed, Istiaq 89 “Aj Akhan Waris Shah Noon” (Pritam) 86–87 Akali Dal 45, 97, 113–114, 119–120, 128–129, 137 Akal Takht 98 Algerian women 156 Ali, Kazim 174 Allied Army 9–10 American Baptist Mission School, Taunggyi 13 amritdhari Sikhs 15, 17, 26, 99, 130–135, 162; Axel on 103, 130; British colonialists and 34–35; construction and representation 102–103, 153, 159; feminization of 24; as hypermasculine 58; image of 35; state-sponsored massacre of 1984 97; as terrorist 102, 107, 115; women 170 Amu (Bose) 4, 143, 145–152 Anand, Reema 121–122 Anandpur resolution of 1977 129 Anglo-Sikh wars 36, 37 Apel, Dora 25 Appadurai, Arjun 128 approaches to Sikh historiography 33–34 arranged marriage 15, 88, 90, 93, 94, 174 artists 121 Arya Samaj Movement 34, 37, 38 Australia’s Got Talent 169 Axel, Brian Keith 1, 24, 27, 35, 101, 103, 130–133, 136, 137–138

Cameron, Deborah 121 CBC News 170 Chakraborthy, Minakshi 145 Chatterjee, Partha 40–41 child abuse 174 circuit of communication 31, 43, 44, 53, 58, 60, 66, 87, 106, 115, 149

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economic oppression 137 Eid 12, 15 electronic media 128 Elm, Michael 126–127 empowering movements 175 ethical relationship 22, 31 Everett, Chris 79 everyday ordinary accounts 5–6, 29–30 exile 14–15, 86, 99, 165–166, 169 externalist approach 34

civil disobedience movements 119–120 civilizational clashes 2–3 Cohn, Bernard 133 Color Purple, The (Walker) 175n1 Comcast 155 communal violence 2, 3, 4, 52, 85, 163; see also Partition of India Compagnoni, Tom 169 Construction of Religious Boundaries, The (Oberoi) 35 contact zone 30–31 critical memory 80–81 cross-border interactions 3 cultural influences 44 cultural memory 85, 125 cultural resistance 80 cultural survival 80 cultural violence 144

Fair, Christine C. 41 Fanon, Frantz 30, 156 female-centered narratives 44 female feticide 173 Five Ks 35 forgiveness 141–145, 150–151 “Fossil and Psyche” (Petersen and Rutherford) 26 Fox, Richard 36, 136–137 Frazer, Elizabeth 121 French colonizers 156

Dalhousie 132 Dalzell, Liam 155, 157 Das, Veena 4, 51, 56, 57, 92, 121 Datta, Nonica 85 Delhi 14–15, 18, 19–21 Delhi University 14, 15 Delzell, Liam 4 Des Hoyaa Pardes (film) 4, 135–140 Dhaliwal, Sukh 101 Dhillon, Kirpal 100–101 Dhillon, Simrat 99 diaspora 1–2, 5, 7, 8–9, 26, 33, 41, 43; communal identity 130–131; hate crimes 1, 155–158, 166–167; Khalistan/ Khalistani movement 36, 99, 129–130, 131, 134–135, 139; poems 164–175; post-9/11 discrimination 21, 102–103; traumatic events and 157–158; visual representations 61–62, 65, 135–140, 157–160 diasporic approach 34 Didur, Jill 5, 9, 22, 29 “Divide and Rule” policy 2, 48, 50, 62, 63 divisive identity politics 102 domestic abuse/violence 4, 7, 16, 18, 21, 22–23, 53, 58, 152n4, 167, 168, 169, 172–174 Dosanjh, Diljit 112–113 Dosanjh, Ujjal 101 Dror, Eshter 7, 17 Durani, Abdul Shah 37 Dwivedi, Chandra Prakash 89

Gadar (film) 4, 67–71 Gandhi, Indira 3; assassination 3, 20, 27–28, 97, 98, 100, 155; Operation Blue Star 98 Gandhi, Mahatma 22 Gandhi, Rajeev 97, 98 gender 26; heteropatriarchal societies and 47; see also Sikh women; women gender disparity 167 gendered violence 16 gender queering 47 gender violence 3, 51, 86, 164; circuit of communication 115; representation of 56, 121; resistance to 7; Sikh women writing about 166, 172; stories of 21, 43 genocidal violence 24, 26, 146 Giovanni, Chiara 174 Global North 153 Global War on Terror 1, 2, 8, 21, 24, 102–103, 153, 155 Gobodo-Madikizela, Pumla 143, 144–145, 150, 151 Golden Temple 3, 98 Grand National Narrative 6, 30 Grewal, Inderpal 157 Grewal, Jyoti 99–100, 128, 129, 141 Gulzar 4, 104, 105–107, 111, 116 gurmukhi 15 Gurubani 10

190

INDEX

Kaur, Laaj 9–10, 12–14, 15, 18 Kaur Life website 172 Kaur, Rupi 4, 172–175; Instagram poetry posts 172; Milk and Honey 172–173, 174; The Sun and Her Flowers 172, 173–174 Kaur, Tej 9, 10 keshdhari Sikh 78 Khalistan/Khalistani Movement 18, 27, 36, 98–101, 105, 108, 129–135, 139 Khalsa 37–38, 40, 49, 97, 112, 132, 135, 143, 160, 162, 169–170; see also Tat Khalsa Movement Khalsa Kingdom 37 Khalsa Raj 132 Khalsa, Sukhjit Kaur 4, 169–172 Khamosh Pani: Silent Waters (film) 57 Khan, Zakaria 37 Kher, Kirron 114–115 Khurana, Gurveen Kaur 142 Kishwar, Madhu 122 Köhne, Julia B. 126–127 Komagata Maru 156 Kopf, Martina 139–140 Kuchibhotla, Srinivas 167

gurudwara 17, 55, 78, 80, 99, 109, 110, 129–131, 133, 134, 147, 148, 154, 158, 161, 162, 168 Guru Granth Sahib 44 Ham Hindu Nahin (Nabha) 141 Hardt, Guy 153, 154, 155 Hargovind (Sikh Guru) 98 hate crimes 1, 155–158, 166–167 Hawayein (film) 4, 118–127 Heir, Rajpreet 166 Herman, Judith 115–116 Hindu Fundamentalist terrorism 97 Hindus 2 Hirsch, Marianne 6, 43, 103–104, 122 Hoffman, Eva 96 Holocaust 84 honor killings 22, 29 Huffington Post 170 Human Being Died that Night, A (Gobodo-Madikizela) 143 Huntington, Samuel 2 I Accuse: The Anti-Sikh Violence of 1984 (Singh) 143, 147–148 Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (Sen) 2 immigrants 166; South Asian 173 incest 174 Indian Express 147 Indian National Army 19 Instagram 172 internalist approach 33–34 Iyer, Lakshmi 89

Landy, Marcia 104 langar (community kitchen) 99 language of trauma 30 last name of Sikh women 34 liberation 3 Life and Words (Das) 121 Linn, Ruth 7, 17 literature 4–5 Loureiro, Angel G. 24, 25 love 174; marriages 88, 94, 96n6

Jacobsen, Knut A. 24 “Jai Ho” (song) 105 Jallianwala Bagh Massacre of 1919 85 Japanese occupation/violence 9–10 Jewish holocaust 27 John Company 36 Joshi, Lalit Mohan 54 Jussawala, Firoza 54–55

Maachis (film) 4, 104, 105, 106, 107–112 Maan, Ammtoje 4, 118–119, 121 Maan, Babu Singh 118 Maan, Gurdas 136 Madasani, Alok 167 Mannerism Productions 127 Mann, Harveen 44 Manto, Sadaat Hasan 121 Marxist 88 Maskiell, Michelle 12 McMeel, Andrews 172 memories 4, 7–8; narrative 44, 53, 82, 84–85, 87, 91, 95, 106, 122, 149; narrative witnessing 7–8, 23, 24–31, 43,

Kabalek, Kobi 126–127 Kacandes, Irene 23, 24, 25, 27, 55, 80, 81–82, 87, 111, 149, 150 Kalra, Sampooran Singh see Gulzar Kamalistan Studio 127 Kanishka Air India 101, 143 Kaur, Bishan 17–18 Kaur, Channa 13, 14

191

INDEX

Didur on 5, 9, 29; exchange of abducted women 26; gendered violence 9; mortality 2; narratives 6; Othering of Sikhs 24; in Pinjar: The Skeleton 4, 57, 82, 84–96; postcolonial novels and films 54–72; Sen on 2; in Tamas (Sahni) 54–55; in Train to Pakistan 71, 73–82, 88; traumatic events 6; in What the Body Remembers 4, 34–35, 43, 44–53, 57–58, 81; women survivors 17 patriarchy 53 perpetrator nation of Sikh Massacre 141–152 Petersen, Kirsten Holst 26 Phoolka, H. S. 143–144, 147 phulkaris 12, 13–14, 15, 86 Pinjar: The Skeleton (Pritam) 4, 57, 82, 84–96; narrative 88–89; translated into English 88 poems 85, 164–175; Milk and Honey (Kaur) 172–173, 174; Pressure Cooker Love Bomb (Ruprai) 168–169; Seva (Ruprai) 167–168; The Sun and Her Flowers (Kaur) 172, 173–174 polyphonic reading of national identity 5, 29 postcolonial analysis and reading 3–4 postmemory 8, 9–23, 31, 43, 82, 149 Pratt, Mary Louise 30 Pressure Cooker Love Bomb (Ruprai) 168–169 Pritam, Amrita 4, 57, 82, 84–96 private narratives 5, 8–23 protests in Punjab 120 Puar, Jasbir 24, 58, 102–103, 153–157 Punjab: Anglo-Sikh wars 36; as bread bowl of India 129, 145; British annexation 37, 132; Indira Gandhi and 129; Khalsa Raj 132; population 145; poverty and cyclical violence 145 Punjab 1984 (film) 4, 104, 105, 112–116 Punjabi 20 Punjabi Cab (film) 4, 155, 157–158 Punjab Land Alienation Act of 1900 136–137 Punj, Manoj 4, 59, 60, 135–139

58, 60, 82, 115, 140, 149, 151; translated 28–31; traumatic events 24–31 Menon, Ritu 135 Milk and Honey (Kaur) 172–173, 174 mistaken identity 155 Mitta, Manoj 143–144 Modernity at Large (Appadurai) 128 Mughals 1, 3, 33, 34, 36–41, 70, 98, 112, 131, 134, 142 Mughal terror/violence 37–38 Mukherjee, Bharati 174 multicultural literature 158 Muslim League 49, 55, 67 Muslim nation-state 5 Muslims 2, 5, 10, 11, 12–15, 26, 37–39; see also Partition of India Myrvold, Kristina 24 Nabha, Bhai Kahn Singh 141 nagar kirtan 142–143 Nanak (first guru) 19, 35, 36, 78 narrative memory 44, 53, 82, 84–85, 87, 91, 95, 106, 122, 149 narrative witnessing 7–8, 23, 24–31, 43, 58, 60, 82, 115, 140, 149, 151 nationalism 9, 92, 136 Neelam, Sarab Singh 4 Negri, Antonio 153, 154, 155 Nihalani, Govind 54 Nihangs 55–56 North Carolina State University 15 Northern Michigan University 18 Oberoi, Harjot 35 Ocean of Pearls (film) 4, 159–162 Operation Blue Star 97–105, 112, 113, 119–120, 129, 137, 139 Operation Wood Rose 119, 129 Oregon State University 16 Othering of Sikhs 155–156 Other Side of Silence, The (Butalia) 21, 58–59, 94, 95 Pain, Bedabrata 146 Pakistan 2, 9, 11, 26, 50, 55, 57–71, 73, 92, 95, 106, 107, 124, 128 Partition (film) 4, 58, 60–67 Partitioned Lives (Roy and Bhatia) 92 Partition of India 28–30; abduction and violation of women 7, 26; accounts of 5–6; Butalia on 28, 29; communal violence 2, 5, 6, 28–30; Das on 6–7, 26;

Raavi Paar and Other Stories (Gulzar) 105–106 racism 153–154, 166, 174; hate crimes 1, 155–158, 166–167; social and cultural differences in 154; Trump’s rhetoric 153

192

INDEX

the “Lions of Punjab” 36, 38; as minorities 8; Othering of 24; as a political community 142; reconstruction of 38; reconverted into Hindus 34; as spiritual warriors 38; subjectification 35–36 Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund (SALDEF) 154–155 Sikh Coalition, New York 158 Sikh diaspora 134–135 Sikhism in Global Context (Singh) 142 Sikh Massacre of 1984 3, 8, 9, 20–21, 26–28, 51, 65, 66, 70–71, 73; in Amu 143, 145–152; counterterrorism acts 103; in Des Hoyaa Pardes 135–140; diaspora and 128–140; forgiveness 141–145, 150–151; gendered violence 9; as a genocide 101, 144; in Hawayein 118–127; historical background 97–105; in Maachis 104, 105, 106, 107–112; moment of retraumatization 142; perpetrator of 141–152; in Punjab 1984 4, 104, 105, 112–116 Sikh women 4; baptism of 34; colonialism and 45; in history and literature 5; identity through socialization 22; insurgents 18; last name Kaur 34; in poems 164–175; positions within domestic spaces 45–49; self-sacrificing 57; sexuality 41, 164–175; sexual violence against 28, 54; traumatic memories 22–23; turban wearing 170–171; as victims of violence 57 Silverman, Kaja 127 Singh, Amarinder 147 Singh, Anurag 4, 105, 112 Singh, B. 37 Singh, Baba Dayal 34 Singh, Balpreet 170 Singh, Bhai Balak 34 Singh, Bhai Vir 4, 36–42 Singh, Duleep 130, 132, 134 Singh, Guru Gobind 35, 38, 143 Singh, Harbans 36 Singh, Jarnail 143 Singh, Jaswant 9, 11, 13 Singh, Khushwant 4, 35, 71, 73–82, 85, 87, 88, 96; “Last Days in Lahore” 74 Singh, Manmohan 102, 142, 143, 147–148 Singh, Meher 9–11, 12, 15, 100, 137 Singh, Nanak 9, 13, 14, 19, 20–21, 100, 131 Singh, Pashaura 142 Singh, Prabjoth 9–10, 12, 13

Rai, Bina 13 Rai, Deep 167 Rajan, Anjana 43 Raleigh-Durham 99, 130, 131 Ramayana 10 rapes 21, 22 Rawalpindi 10, 11, 18, 19, 79, 100, 137 reconciliation 141, 142, 144, 145, 148, 150, 151 reconstruction of self 84 reform movements 34 regional approach 34 religious identities 51, 137 Representation and Resistance (Singh) 47, 94 restorative justice 141, 143, 144, 148 retraumatization 104 Ricoeur, Paul 126 Ringelheim, Joan 28, 44 Roy, Anjali Gera 92 Ruprai, Sharapal 4, 110, 167, 171, 172 Rutherford, Anna 26 Sahni, Bhisham 4 Said, Edward 165–166 Sandhu, Amandeep 145 Sarabjoth 170 Sarbat Khalsa (Sikh army) 38 Sarin, Vic 4, 58 Schwab, Gabriele 148, 150–151 Scorched White Lilies of ’84 (Anand) 121–122 secondary witness 25 self: Brison on 84; reconstruction of 84 Sen, Amartya 2–3, 50, 102 Seva (Ruprai) 167–168 seva (service) 11, 19 sex 173, 174 sexuality 41, 155; in poems 164–175; as resource 7, 17 sexual violence 7, 12, 16, 17, 28, 51, 54, 85, 88, 92, 122, 172–173 shabad kirtan 153 Shaheed-e-Mohabbat Boota Singh (film) 4, 59–60 Shah, Waris 86 Shan States, Burma 9–10 Sharma, Anil 4 Shergill, Palbinder K. 170 Sikh 3; feminization of 1, 7, 24; generations of 31; genocidal violence of 24, 26, 146; historiography 33–34; as

193

INDEX

Singh, Ranjit 36, 132 Singh Sabha Movement 34, 36, 37–38, 69, 141 Singh, Saran 9, 11 Singh, Satdeep 4, 158–159 Singh, Seva 19, 20 Singh, Zail 129 Slumdog Millionaire (film) 105 Smith, Valeria 6, 103, 122 Sondhi, Balbir Singh 154 South Africans 31 South Asian immigrants 173 “Speech at a Prayer Meeting” (Gandhi) 22 Spitzer, Leo 73, 74–75, 77, 80 split memory 44 Stanford University 154 Stumm, Bettina 8 Sugirtharajah, R. S. 3 Sumar, Sabiha 57 Sun and Her Flowers, The (Kaur) 172, 173–174 Sundri (Singh) 4, 33, 36–42; Fair on 41; as feminist novel 41; Mughal terror in 37; story/plot of 37 Swami Dayanand 34

discrimination/violence 21, 102–103, 155–158; public perception of 154–155; as respect and honor 133; as Sikh nation 134; Sikh women wearing 170–172; as targets of violence 1, 2; as terrorist 102–103, 156 Tytler, Jagdish 147 Under the Turban (documentary) 157 United States (US) 7, 9, 15; anti-immigrant culture 166; diasporic Sikh community in 157; Punjabi Cab 158; Trump administration 166 violence: communal 2, 3, 4, 52, 85, 163; cultural 144; domestic 4, 7, 16, 18, 21, 22–23, 53, 58, 152n4, 167, 168, 169, 172–174; genocidal 24, 26, 146; repressed stories of 3–4; sexual 7, 12, 16, 17, 28, 51, 54, 85, 88, 92, 122, 172–173; see also gender violence; memories; Partition of India; Sikh Massacre of 1984 Visa (ship) 11 Walker, Alice 45, 175n1 Walker, Susan 62, 64, 66 watna (exchange marriage) 9 western modernity 141 What the Body Remembers (Baldwin) 4, 34–35, 43, 44–53, 57–58, 81 When a Tree Shook Delhi (Mitta and Phoolka) 143–144 Wilde, Oscar 2 Win, Ne 19 Wisconsin 154 women: dominant narratives 7; empowerment 172; as nation 18, 22; patriarchal societies 17; sexuality as resource 7, 17; sexually assaulted 51, 52; violence against 6–7, 21 World Sikh Organization of Canada 170 World War II 9, 134 writers 121

Taaj (film) 4, 158–159 Tamas (Sahni) 4, 54–55 Tat Khalsa Movement 33–34, 37, 38, 40, 69 Train to Pakistan (Singh) 4, 71, 73–82, 88 transnational feminism 164–175 trauma 4; collective 18, 22–23; language of 30; narration/representation of 23; Stumm on 8; textbook formulations 29–30; victims of 25–26; witnessing 7–8 “Trauma, Narrative and the Art of Witnessing” (Kopf) 139–140 traumatic memories 4–5, 24–31; generational nature 44; retelling of stories 4 True Khalsa 38 Trump, Donald 153 “‘The Turban is Not a Hat’: Queer Diaspora and Practices of Profiling” (Purar) 154 turbans 34–35, 36, 153–163, 167–168; feminization of 24; importance of 133–134; Khalsa, Sukhjit Kaur on 169–170; politicization 156; post-9/11

xenophobia 156, 166 Yuba City 142–143 zone of occult instability 30

194