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The assassination
of memory
Kalam Nishan Singh
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Who is left to recall the violent period of the '80s and the
'90s? With the top leadership itself denying the legacy of blood
and struggle, the collective memories are dying fast. Soon, the
few who are hanging on to these memories will also pass into
history, into nothingness. And the masses will be left with the
corpses of many dead memories. How is life with the corpses? Ask
those Indians whose last wish was to Bury My Heart at Wounded
Knee |
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 Punjab is currently in the throes of an election campaign, but
listen to the debate carefully and the deafening silence of what is
not heard will shock any disinterested student of history.
Parties competing for the power pie are burying their history alive,
mainstream Akali Dal led by Parkash Singh Badal virtually makes no
reference to the fifteen odd years of politics
in
Punjab which left deep scars on the socio-cultural milieu and psyche
of Punjab. The fact that the questions raised by that volatile
period still beg for answers hardly seems to matter for the Akalis,
the forever self-styled representatives of the Panth.
The manifesto of the Badal-led party has a foreword by the president
beginning with 'Bahadur Panjabiyo!' and ends with 'Guru Panth Da
Das'; in between he recalls the Akalis' role in the freedom struggle
and then the emergency before returning to the allegedly bad regime
of the Congress.
Whatever happened to the fifteen-year-long period during which Badal
and his party were very much in the political domain? (By the way,
even PM Manmohan Singh ended his election speeches with Waheguru Ji
Ka Khalsa, Waheguru Ji Ki Fateh).
The decision to disown legacy and live in a denial mode is a
dangerous luxury.
Some social groups, religious or secular, build their identities on
the basis of certain foundational historical events which are
systematically recalled and transmitted over generations.
Such is the case with the Sikhs, the way the religion came to be
founded, the nurturing by the gurus, the compilation of Adi Granth,
the concept of the seat of temporal authority in Akal Takht. Then
came the continuous resistance and skirmishes, battles and wars with
the Moghuls, the chain of martyrdoms, the ghallugaras.
Similar is the fate of the Jews, rendered homeless for two
millennia, for whom history became their defining feature in the
absence of a geography which they only sought to reclaim in recent
times. For the Jews, the exodus and re-entry into the "Promised
Land" are imbued with sacral meaning.
 Sikhs
also only have a history; they had a geography for some time during
the reign of Maharaja Ranjit Singh though the regime had many flaws
when tested on the Sikh agenda Collective remembrance also
reinforces the identity of the Shia who annually mourn the martyrdom
of Husayn at the battle of
Karbala,
or that of the Sikhs who are daily reminded of their largely
troubled history in the gurdwaras.
The Hindus' annual burning of Ravana's effigy is a study in
contrast: although reenacting Ravana's destruction by Rama is more a
universal symbol than a unique historical event.
Continuing their narrative, the Jews have not failed to further
record and transmit their experiences in exile, nor the Sikhs their
struggles and battles right up to modern times. The Sikh militancy
climaxing in the storming of the Golden Temple may be subject to
contentious interpretations, but the bare facts are not in dispute
in contrast to the struggle over recognising the causes and course
of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots.
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This is the time for the community to watch out for those
denying us our past, for then we will not have a future, but
only a catastrophe. Holocausts are not only denied; denials also
bring holocausts. |
In
the case of the gigantic proportions of the Holocaust of the 20th
century, however, in which over six million Jews were subjected to
dehumanising abuse and systematically put to death, there has been
in
Europe
a certain amount of revisionist history-writing which
seeks to diminish or deny it, echoed in
West Asia
for obvious political reasons.
Margaret Chatterjee, in her Hinterlands and Horizons Excursions in
Search of Amity (Lexington Books 2002), devotes a chapter to the
"assassination of memory." Of course she wrote before Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad in Iran started the campaign of denying the Holocaust.
But there is more to such denial than political objective, though
that is grave enough. The aim of the perpetrators of the Holocaust
was virtually one of "assassinating memory." Not only were six
million Jews eliminated, but their memories died with them,
individual and collective memories of their personal lives, their
history, learning, culture, that would have, in the normal course,
formed part of the flow of Jewish social and cultural inheritance.
All Jews and Jewish culture were slated for disappearance so that
for all the world they might never have been. Such a fate in fact
overtook the Tasmanian islanders who were not only completely
eliminated by Australian whites, but of whom no physical trace
remains in their native land, since their very bones were
disinterred and transported overseas to satisfy western "scientific
curiosity."
Strangely enough, we know of them through Australian records, as we
know of the Jews, gypsies (who originated in
India)
or other Nazi victims through concentration camp records. Similarly,
Native Americans were heavily decimated and remained for long mere
curiosities in their reservations: again much of their history is
gleaned from the records of their conquerors. Currently a similar
fate threatens the Tibetans in Tibet where they are being reduced to
an ethnic tourist curiosity in their own country now flooded with
Han Chinese. Turkish officialdom continues to deny the Armenian
genocide of 1915.
Orhan Pamuk, Nobelist, was prosecuted for affirming it and Hrant
Dink, Armenian editor, was recently shot dead (not by the
government) for his campaign to put it on record. "To have genocide
denied is to die twice," reads a locally published advertisement on
the Armenian genocide.
Perhaps the most chilling literary account of erasure of memory can
be found in Gabriel Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude, where
striking workers of a banana company in a public square (along with
3,000 innocent passengers waiting for a train) are to a man
machine-gunned to death, their corpses bundled into compartments of
a ghost train and clandestinely debouched into the sea. Press
disinformation projects an Orwellian account of the massacre as a
peaceful demonstration which quietly dispersed, so historically the
event "never took place." The one chance survivor slowly goes mad
with his uncorroborated memories.
Who is left to recall the violent period of the '80s and the '90s?
One Simranjeet Singh Mann? One Daljit Singh Bittu? Two? Ten? Soon,
they too will pass into history, into nothingness. And the masses
will be left with the corpses of many dead memories. How is life
with the corpses? Indians at the reservations knew.
The horrific power of this act of negationism is achieved through
multiple assassinations, of the victims, of their memories and of
the memories others might retain of them. Indian communists and
students of the Left movement in India know very well the fate of
M.N. Roy. He fell out with the communist leadership, his name was
eliminated from all records and his photograph doctored out from the
snapshots with Lenin and other communist dignitaries. The negation
was effective within the USSR and amongst its fraternal allies and
sympathisers: there was no M.N. Roy in the official history of
communism.
Prejudice and untruth can also be propagated and transmitted over
generations. Preserved alongside the self-history of the Jews are
the Christian myths of the Zionist protocols, the blood myths of the
Seder and so on, now appropriated by Judaism's current enemies. We
live in a world of mass communications in which "spin" has become a
ubiquitous component of information dissemination, not to mention
sheer disinformation.
Thus it is possible to misinform huge populations living in closed
(but also open) societies where freedom of research and information
is subordinated to political exigency, and where spin or illusion
can be used to arouse and channel public resentment. It is vital for
the sake of preserving our humanity to carry remembrance into the
future. For lack of remembering we become passive accomplices in new
catastrophes.
This is the time for the community to watch out for those denying us
our past, for then we will not have a future, but only a
catastrophe. Holocausts are not only denied; denials also bring
holocausts. Assassins of memories should keep that in mind.
(From World Sikh News,
Feb 7-13, 2007
edition)
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