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Sikh FormationsReligion, Culture, Theory

ISSN: 1744-8727 (Print) 1744-8735 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rsfo20

1984 – Disinterred Memories

Radhika Chopra

To cite this article: Radhika Chopra (2015): 1984 – Disinterred Memories, Sikh Formations, DOI:10.1080/17448727.2015.1088318

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17448727.2015.1088318

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Radhika Chopra

1984 – DISINTERRED MEMORIES

‘We went in with humility in our hearts and prayers on our lips’.(General K. Sunderji [https://www.allaboutsikhs.com/operation-bluestar/

operation-bluestaran-indian-army-view-point Accessed 6 June 2015)

Despite the retrospective piety expressed by General Sunderji (Commander of WesternCommand in 1984; and subsequently Chief of Army Staff), the orchestrated militaryassault on Sri Darbar Sahib, the Golden Temple complex in Amritsar, by the IndianArmy during ‘Operation Bluestar’ is most frequently spoken of as a deeply traumaticevent evoking intense but uneasy remembrances. Maps of the operation circulatewidely on the internet. Even many years later, these maps and battle plans arouseshock and awe. The map (figure 1) shown here is preserved in the Library of theDurbar Sahib. It demonstrates how the complex was entered through different gate-ways. The 10th Guard entered at the north end, through the main gate or theGhanta Ghar entrance; the 26 Madras was expected to enter eastern side, but didnot manage to do so, confronted as they were with intense firing from the Langar,the Guru Ram Das Serai, and the offices of the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Com-mittee. Two companies of 9 Garhwal were brought in near the southern entrance. Allaccounts speak of the fierce fighting, sometimes in hand-to-hand combat in rooms sur-rounding the parikrama, the walkway around the Sarovar. The army entered the sacredcomplex on 5th June 1984, and declared it ‘secure’ by 7th June 1984. In his book Oper-ation Bluestar: The True Story (1993), General K.S. Brar, who commanded the army oper-ation, speaks of the operation beginning at 10.30 pm on the night of June 5th, and thefighting dying down by the early hours of June 7th. The routes leading to the complexwere cordoned off, and the 15 Infantry Division sealed all roads leading into the city ofAmritsar.

Residents of Amritsar confined to their homes during the course of a 32 hourcurfew imposed on the walled city from 1 June 1984, recalled hearing the staccatogunfire of battle and feeling the ground shake beneath their feet, a memory thatremains fresh in their minds. Standing on the balconies of their homes, some residentswatched the troops enter the narrow gullies leading to the complex. ‘We sat huddledtogether inside our homes as a never-ending succession of explosions and continuousgunfire ripped through the night. It was dark and terribly humid. The electric supplyhad been shut down and all telephone lines had been cut,’ recalled Kanwarpal SinghBittoo, at the time a young student at the Khalsa College in Amritsar (BBC News Flash-backs/Golden Temple Attacks/3 June 2004). When curfew was finally lifted, many ran

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

Sikh Formations, 2015http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17448727.2015.1088318

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through the narrow gullies towards the Golden Temple, in frenzy akin to mournershearing the news of death. Looking at the damaged dome, women broke out into spon-taneous mourning laments. The first viewing of the destruction is a hurt remembered,and people come back again and again on successive anniversaries of Operation Bluestarto mourn the ‘death’ of the Temple and the Takht.

Remembrance of things past (to use the title of Marcel Proust’s seven volumework on memory) is a fundamental resource for actors and social groups living inthe present. We do not leave our past behind; it is a palpable presence in ourpresent and we actively commemorate and remember the past. Like monuments,rituals of commemoration are repositories of collective memory; 1984 is commemo-rated every year, evoked and remembered in ritual commemorations performed atthe site of desecration. The recitation of Ardas ‘remembers’ martyrs both pastand present (figure 2).

Vars – heroic poetry – sung by balladeers (figure 3) stress deeds of valor with theinsistent beat of the Dhad, a small hand-held percussive instrument, while their audiencesits in rapt attention (figure 4) listening to the evocations of an imagined history.

Different pasts fuse and diverge across spaces. For migrant Sikhs, the return ofsacred arms of the tenth Guru by the decedents of Lord Dalhousie (figure 5) and theceremonial reception of these arms by the Indian Government was an importantmoment to commemorate a connection with Punjab. For others, the bringing of thekhanda or double-edged sword from the tosh khana of the Golden Temple and placedin the Southall gurdwara at Havelock Road was an equally significant moment. Withinthis discourse of connection, and the value placed on sacred relics and sacred spacesin creating and maintaining identity, the storming of the Golden Temple by theIndian army in June 1984 was felt as a seismic shock.

Figure 1. Map of the progress of Operation Bluestar in K. S. Brar, 1993. Operation Bluestar: The True Story. New Delhi: UBS

Publishers Distributors, p. 90. (Library, Darbar Sahib, June 2007) (Photograph of map, Author’s own.)

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The painted representation of assassination of Indira Gandhi by her two Sikh body-guards as revenge for Operation Bluestar is titled ‘Shaheed Bhai Satwant Singh, Bhai

Figure 2. Remembering the martyrs: Ardas performed in the forecourt of the Akal Takht, 5 June 2007 (Image

Author’s own).

Figure 3. Singing heroic histories: Dhaddi Jatha reciting and performing a Var, Darbar Sahib, Amritsar, June

2007 (Image Author’s own).

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Beant Singh’. The painting (figure 6) hangs in a gurudwara located in the town of Novel-lara, in Reggio nell’Emilia in Emilia-Romagna, Italy. The image might be viewed as apainted counterpart of heroic ballads – the Vars sung in the Darbar Sahib on the com-memorative anniversaries of Operation Bluestar – a parallel made apparent by the verseat the bottom of the painting ‘Indira, Takht Akal, Akal da hai, hamla karan lagiyan, naaiyan dar unnu, Beant Singh- Satwant Singh [… ..] ne, bhari [… .] ditta hai kar tannu’.Images like these circulated within the Diaspora; whatever their provenance, their cir-culation were transformative of the politics of how home itself was envisioned in Dia-spora imaginings.

Operation Bluestar and the Delhi Riots following the assassination of Indira Gandhiare remembered and commemorated in the rituals and recitations of the Never Forgetrallies that have become an annual feature of the civic and ritual calendar of the SikhDiaspora. In Diaspora commemorations, enunciations of hurt intersect with humanrights discourses to create new styles of memorializing. Objects of protest – placards,banners, armbands and gags – drawn from modern art esthetics and appropriations fromexhibitions of human rights violations inserted within spectacular displays of ‘traditional’ritual performances reveal a fine understanding of maximizing international mediaattention.

The transnational evocation of hurt is a public ritual and the theatrics of exhibitionand display, a form of witnessing a past. The public performances of trauma in the Never

Figure 4. An audience of believers sits in rapt attention listening to an imagined history of war, persecution and

heroism, sung by Dhaddi Jathas, June 2007. The body is emblematic of the past of heroic history, defense of faith

and bounded identities (Image Author’s own).

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Forget 1984 processions wind their way through the streets of London and Hyde Parkculminating in Trafalgar Square in the first week of June of every year. The processionsdraw simultaneously from specific religious idioms and from more widely recognizedpolitical symbolisms. Placards and posters carried in procession are laid on the stepsof India House (the Indian High Commission) after candle-lit vigils and protestmarches (figures 7–9).

The procession I witnessed in 2006 was headed by the Panj Piyareh, the five ritualelect, who marched bare footed in full ritual regalia into Trafalgar Square, cateringperhaps to the international media who gathered to capture the visually striking,exotic-looking men in their orange turbans and white chogas. Following closelybehind them, however, were pall bearers, bearing coffins on their shoulders. Eachpall bearer has his mouth bound with a patka (figure 10), a cloth usually worn underthe turban, here used as a gag to signal the muffling of free speech. Coupled with ablack arm band, the act of bearing the coffins in silence merges protest and mourningin a single moment, and becomes a way of keeping the issue of loss alive.

I want to dwell briefly on the coffin, an emotive symbol producing for those whobear it, and those who view it, the troubling issue of where home lies. Coffins asmaterial symbols are affective objects that convey not just ideas, but communicateand evoke emotion. Despite the fact that coffins are not part of material cultures inIndic mortuary ritual, empty coffins are increasingly carried in procession in the

Figure 5. Return of the arms of the tenth Guru, Gobind Singh by the great grand-daughter of Lord Dalhousie,

Lady Edith Broun-Lindsay, in December 1965. The arms and other relics of the Guru had come into the possession

of Lord Dalhousie sometime after the Second Sikh War of 1848–1849, and the annexation of Punjab (India Office

Library, Select Materials Shelf-mark Photo 31). The arms were received and displayed at the Indian High Com-

mission before being flown back to India, where they were met with a full Sikh guard of honor on parade at Palam

Airport, New Delhi (Photograph taken in the Central Sikh Museum, Amritsar. Image Author’s own).

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commemorative rituals. Their use in Never Forget rallies in London is strategic – in thatthe coffin is a global symbol that concretizes death and mourning (figure 11). But as I seeit, the coffin a material object symbolizing trauma for immigrant audiences has its ownstory. The story goes back into migrant histories of exclusion and loss borne by migrantsin the UK. In 1979 riots broke out in Southall. The immigrants objected to an electionmeeting in the Southall Town Hall held by the National Front, a neo-Nazi party, with astrong racist agenda and an anti-immigrant ideology. Local community leaders protested

Figure 7. Protest art at commemorative rallies. Never Forget 1984, London, 2006 (Image Author’s own).

Figure 6. The assassination of Indira Gandhi, depicted in a painting, titled ‘Shaheed Bhai Satwant Singh, Bhai

Beant Singh’ [Martyr Brother Satwant Singh, Brother Beant Singh] hanging in the Gurdwara Noveralla, Italy.

Artist- unattributed, not dated. (Photograph courtesy Rosy Hastir, 2011).

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and requested the police to prevent the meeting from being held in a neighborhoodinhabited by exactly those whom the National Front sought to expel or exclude fromthe British polity and nation. The choice of the Town Hall located in the High Streetright in the heart of the largely migrant neighborhood was deliberately provocativeand everyone knew this. But the police and other officials argued that their job wasto protect a more general principle – that of free electioneering at any location, a prin-ciple that lay at the heart of British democracy. They could not prevent anyone’s right tomeet and speak anywhere. In the course of the protests that took a violent turn, a 33-year-old activist of the Anti-Nazi League, Blair Peach, who had come to Southall to takepart in the protests against the National Front and its policies, was beaten to death by thehorse-mounted Special Patrol Group of the Metropolitan Police. The death of BlairePeach was mourned throughout Southall. His coffin was carried by South-Asian immi-grants through the streets of the neighborhood and everyone came out to witness theprocession and bless the dead boy, in their own familiar language of gestures – theytouched the coffin in small acts of blessing and remembrance.

The attitudes toward the coffin in the 1979 funeral procession for Blaire Peach, theyoung Irish school teacher killed in the riots in Southall, and the coffins borne in theNever Forget processions suggest an engagement with being pararya – the other whois also a stranger (Brah 1999), but coffins are also objects of thought that makepeople reflect on who they are and where they belong. The single coffin of Blair

Figure 8. Discourse of the Disappeared, Never Forget rally, London, 2006.

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Figure 10. Pall bearers carrying coffins symbolizing loss and trauma. The legend on their gags reads ‘The Dead

Have No Voice’ (Image Author’s own).

Figure 9. Performing memory in placards and poster art (Image Author’s own).

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Peach clearly evoked a sense of sorrow. In her moving essay ‘The Scent of Roses’, Brah(1999) reflects on racial violence and migrant imagination dwells on the meaning of thedeath of Blair Peach, bludgeoned to death by the mounted police in what have famouslycome to be known as the Southall Riots. Brah says:

I saw older Asian women file past his coffin, calling him ‘put’ (my son) as tearsstreamed down their agonized faces. He was no ‘outsider’, as far as they were con-cerned, although they did not know him. He was very much ‘our own’, laying hislife down for a future where racist and fascist activity would not stalk their neigh-bourhood. The women’s lament was no superficial gesture of sentimentality, assome forms of ‘hard politic’ might maintain. It was a profound expression oflove and inclusion.

(1999, 19)

The coffin of the white school teacher became a way for the community to reflectupon itself. Like the Balinese cockfight, it was a moment when a connection to aplace was realized and made apparent to everyone who carried the coffin of thedead boy or those who walked in procession, or those who blessed the coffin as itpassed them. The boy in the coffin was apna, a son or a brother and everyonemourned him collectively (Brah 1999). An emotional connection turned to a politicalclaim on the very streets where the violence of exclusion had been ferociously imposedthrough barricades, mounted police and batons. For the migrant residents of Southall,carrying the coffin and blessing the dead white Irish boy was at once a gesture ofinclusion converting the paraya to apna, as well as a symbolic claim upon thestreets and space of the neighbourhood as their home. It was in and through the affec-tive language of symbolic gestures that a sense of otherness was challenged and a formof belonging reclaimed. The coffin of the Irish boy produced a moment of self-recog-nition of the community to itself.

The coffins carried in the Never Forget 1984 processions are more politically pur-posive. There is a strategic garnering of symbols that reach out to international media

Figure 11. Coffins as art installations, coffins as symbols of loss, June 2006 (Image Author’s own).

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and to international laws, simulating through the use of symbols a charter of demandsaddressed toward India and the UK. In the face of new immigration, regimes that regu-late and severely curtail the entry of migrants into Europe and the UK, as well as thereassignment or re-categorization of asylum seekers as ‘migrants for economicreasons’, the rights of residence, work and citizenship are no longer as easily available.Those who continue to claim the status of political refugee must find a more publicforum to raise their demand. Those who participate in the Never Forget processionseach year keep alive the claims of political asylum. They must be given a homebeyond India, these coffins seem to claim, for in India they have none – their homesare ‘dead’.

The Never Forget coffins are thus both empty and full. They are full of the imaginedcollective corpses of those killed in the army action in Amritsar and the Delhi riotswhich cannot be forgotten. But the coffins are also empty of any sense of home, ahome that has become ghair ajnabi, completely strange, opaque and unknowable. Aloss of home mourned in mute silence. Mimetically replicating funerary practices ofthe host state (bearing coffins) but evoking the sense of collective or community mourn-ing familiar to Sikh and Hindu mourning practices, the coffin bearers suggest themselvesas a community without a home. It is the death of home which is mourned, and it ishome that is the corpse in the coffin.

References

BBC News Flash-backs. Golden Temple Attacks, 3 June 2004. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/3774035.stm Accessed 24 October 2006

Brah, Avtar. 1999. “The Scent of Memory: Strangers, Our Own, and Others.” FeministReview 61 (Spring): 4–26.

Brar, K. S. 1993. Operation Bluestar: The True Story. New Delhi: UBS Publishers Distributors.

Radhika Chopra. Address: Department of Sociology, University of Delhi, New Delhi, India.[Email: radhika.chopra@gmail.com]

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