UNEARTHING: PAST

IN
PRESENT AND
FUTURE
(Associative Interactions in the Orbit
of Memory Studies)

Edited By
Dr. Bhawna Vij Arora

1
 Text © Dr. Bhawna Vij Arora 2023
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way
of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, or otherwise circulated without
the copyright owner’s prior written consent in any form of binding
or cover other than that in which it is published and without a
similar condition including this condition being imposed on the
subsequent purchaser and without limiting the rights under
copyright reserved above.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or
introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by
any other means without the permission of the copyright owner.
Publisher
ASIAN PRESS BOOKS
509, Saltee Plaza, 5th Floor,
No-1 Mall Road
Dumdum, Kolkata-700080
Contact: 7001813717
www.asianpress.in
ISBN: 978-93-5788-005-3

1st Edition April ,2023

MRP ₹ 850/-

2
3
DEDICATION

for
Ekshith
&
Anshul

4
 Acknowledgments
To be an editor is to unerringly assume a supercilious, lettered strain
about oneself, by imposing a meticulous yet, cosmetic homogeneity to
the disparate parts of the whole. These parts would not have been
completed without the shared efforts of over fifteen contributors who
have helped me in conceptually cementing this enchiridion of a
promising field of Memory Studies. I am beholden to their unfailing
support for responding positively to all my suggestions. I also look
ahead to continuing this academic camaraderie with all of my learned
co-authors: may our tribe grow as we ascend these flight of steps
joyfully and triumphantly.
These scholars who write from different soils across the globe
and pan India, clearly fortify the idea that Memory Studies transcends
boundaries, eras, and echelons academically or otherwise. Cicaro’s
essentia to be and I am is a corollary to memory, it exists for each
one of us to memorialize and memorize, entrap, and preserve our
ever-shifting, ephemeral corporeality and verity of existence. The
objective of the handbook would be to integrate interdisciplinary and
theoretical reflections, and look beyond the current synthesization of
knowledge in history, literature, and cultural studies.
I would also like to thank Asianpress publishers for their
prompt responses and forbearing, to my persistent queries, anxious
cynicism, reluctance, hesitation and uncertainty over the viability of
the project.
Last, but not in the least amount, my indebtedness is to my family,
and to that invincible power for guiding me through this journey. For
me in the words of Maharaj Charan Singhji, “everything was created
by him, nothing was created except by him and none else was there to
make anything”. If there be faults in the project, I regard them as to be
mine and my fellow scholars, for his ways are too perfect to be ever
imagined at any fault. Any lapses due to negligence, over sightedness
or slip-ups are unintentional and should be overlooked.

Dr. Bhawna Vij Arora

5
 CONTENTS

Memory Studies in Theory and Praxis ............................................. 10

An Introduction
Bhawna Vij Arora
SECTION ONE: CULTURAL HISTORY AND MEMORY 19
1.Role of Memory in the Epistemology of War ................................. 20
Debojyoti Dan
2.Roda Mundansa: Excavating and Revitalizing a Creole-Indigenous
Approach to Deep Time in Singapore Kristang ..................................... 35
Kevin Martens Wong
3.Gastro-Nostalgic Reconstruction of the East Bengali Refugee Identity:
Unearthing the Culinary Legacy through Select Partition Fiction ............. 57
Namrata Chowdhury
4.Embodiment of Mnemonic Sites: Representation of Theyyam in Kantara
Movie............................................................................................... 72
Anuranj C. K.
SECTION TWO: LITERATURE AND MEMORY .................... 83
5.Recollecting the Nation’s Trauma with Retrospective Eye: Politics of
Memory in Select Poems of Seamus Heaney .............................................84
SANDEEP.T.G
6.Decoding the Violence of Archival Memory in Margaret Atwood’s The
Handmaid’s Tale .........................................................................................92
Dr. Jasmine Sharma
7.Interplay of Memory and Time in Harold Pinter’s Old Times ...........104
Abhinaba Chatterjee

6
 8.Mnemonic Interplay in Rohinton Mistry’s Family Matters...............118
Suyasha Dwivedi
9.The Metaphysical Aspect of Nostalgia: Romanticization of Memory
...............................................................................................................134
Ayushi Rakesh
10.The Mnemonic Reading of “"The Waste Land"”: A Cultural Text of
Memory, Myth & Mnemotechnics ..........................................................148
Bhawna Vij Arora
SECTION THREE: CULTURAL MEMORY AND MEDIA156
11.Affective Synthesis: Sensation, Emotion and Prosthetic Cognition in
Contemporary Motivational Cinema .......................................................157
Manodip Chakraborty
12.Understanding the Obsessive Nature of Fandoms through the Eyes
of a Sasaeng ............................................................................................169
Sheeba Chithra S. Rajan and Dr.T. Sridev
SECTION FOUR: RETHINKING LIEUX DE MEMOIRE 181
13.Of Memory and Forgetting: The Role of Oral History and Popular
Culture in Conserving the Legacy of Bengali Revolutionaries .................182
Shriya Dasgupta and Oyeshi Ganguly
14.Memory, Witnessing, Violence: A Study of Select Poetry of Nelly
Sachs ......................................................................................................195
Jaspreet Kaur
15.Durga Visarjan (self-immolation): Revisiting the Memory of Violence
Exposing Vulnerability of Women during Partition ................................208
Abhishek Sarkar

7
SECTION FIVE: MEMORY IN THE CONTEMPORARY
LANDSCAPE .......................................................................... 224
16.Influence of Sikh’s Collective Memory in Indian Farmers’ Revolution
2020-21 ..................................................................................................225
Rajashri Ghosh
17.Tremors of Trauma amid the Debris: Unearthing Memories from
Syria-Turkey ...........................................................................................248
Sruthi Mohan
Contributors ............................................................................. 255

8
9
 Memory Studies in Theory and Praxis
An Introduction

Bhawna Vij Arora

Why does one need to initiate enquiries into Memory Studies?

What is the need to press for comprehensive and widespread probings into the
field of Memory Studies?
Amid different social-frames, the need to constantly survey the field,
arises from the current revolution of mind-numbing, multifarious
realities: human/hybrid/automated/cyborgs, life in small-size
packages, programmed or inadvertent, digital, non-digital, perceived,
un(non)-perceived, sense of existing under infinite systems,
structures, micro/macro worlds of epistemologies in which a human
drowns everyday and swims everyday to save one’s neck against the
shifting tide of receding into incognito or as an end to a fuzzy logic.
It arises from the need to remember, reclaim, rescue, salvage, and
memorialize the temporality of human experience, to de-tangle the
knotted facets of remembering, creating the astray and vacuous
realities by way of a number of heuristic elements and devices.
The assiduous dedication to the discipline since the 1980s has
accrued a pivot role while contributing immensely to re-establish, or
resurrect a legion of dimensions to the cultural production in a bid to
revitalize the renascence past of loaded cultural history. Within the
theoretical chassis of interpretations, the theme of Cultural Memory
Studies is unbounded and never-ending. From personal accounts of
remembering of individuals to shared aspects of creating ‘absent-
realities’ through social traditions formulated, developed and devised,
memory finds itself at the nub of almost all cultural practices. At a
broader level, national/transnational memory, the contested events,
lieu de memoire, run the risks of becoming the “invented traditions”
(Hobsbawn, Ranger) as opposed to memory plurality, memory itself
assumes a hegemonic position, non-dominant and marginal
10
discourses usually running into abeyance, suspended into
invisibilization. Keightley and Pickering’s astute realization, indeed
works as an appropriate reminder and need for a sustained
commitment to the discipline :
In many ways the field has developed over the past twenty years
or so by proceeding outwards from individual memory and
concentrating on broad dimensions of social memory and the
politics of public remembering, especially those channeled through
communications media. The explana- tory focus has generally been
on how these forms of remembering operate as collective
representations of the past, how they constitute a range of cultural
resources for social and historical identities, and how they privilege
particular readings of the past and subordinate others. (203)
The contributors in this functionary handbook serve to
transcribe, and supplement the existing potentialities of a number of
practices, cultural traditions, rituals and myths of language, food,
dance, and oral histories from the quintessential lens of memory.
The meshing and reciprocity of various social phenomena on
literature, media, history and invariably on the contemporary
landscape forms and shapes the material memory. The non-material
social currents, art-forms, long standing principles, ingrained ethos
are represented through cultural history which shapes the mnemonic
signifiers in relation to the temporal configuration of these contexts.
As Erill notes in regard to the cultural history:
cultural memory refers to the symbolic order, the media,
institutions, and practices by which social groups construct a shared
past. “Memory,” here, is used metaphorically. Societies do not
remember literally; but much of what is done to reconstruct a shared
past bears some resemblance to the processes of individual memory,
such as the selectivity and perspectivity inherent in the creation of
versions of the past according to present knowledge and needs.(5)
Created through individual/collective narratives, acts of
conscious recollection, evocative or factual reminiscences, the
academic repertoire on Memory Studies, is in no dearth of identity
constructions of, frameworks of emerging social attitudes by way of
intentional remembering, but for implicit and unintentional ways of
remembering, this is an exciting field to unearth, and discover the
11
past in present and future. The event of memory which sustains in
temporal space, mediates between past and present and “this present
forms itself in the junction between the space of experience and the
complementary horizon of expectation” (Feindt 29). The future thus
would always be ascriptive of the present and past in present.
II
This critical companion serves to integrate interdisciplinary
theoretical reflections in a bid to move beyond the current
synthesization of knowledge in literature, liberal arts and cultural
studies. The essays appended here point out the texts, cultures and
material configurations and parts of cultural history, art,
philosophy, literary and media studies as mnemonic devices or
signifiers and its signification achieved by way of plurality of
occurrence. The same fact/occurrence takes shape and results in
polyphonous conjectural frameworks, collective memories often
lends a plurality of experience to the same. To these events, the
diachronic dimension simply repeat, reinforce and iterate “the same
mnemonic signifiers, from different points in time” (Feindt 35). In
an attempt to methodize and reconcile the divergent range of
essays, the critical and research-based persuasions are furcated into
five sections. These sections consist of strong viewpoints from a
divergent field of liberal arts and numerous facets of culture.
The first section Cultural History and Memory opens with
an uncanny sui generis upon the scope and range of repressed
memory in the epistemic nuancing of war. The paper titled “Role
of Memory in the Epistemology of War” by Debojyoti Dan, takes
the war films Hiroshima mon Amour and Le Pianiste to reveal the
capacities of melody and music to record the smothered desires of
the subconscious. Piano becomes connective to the ontological
coordinates making it a ‘zeitobjekte’ or time object. The author
writes, “in the scope of Memory Studies we find the biopolitics and
necro-paradigms conflate aesthetic projects.” The essay further
shows how “borders are the halo-centric agenda of disfigured
humanism where violence is a cognitive manifesto to defend the
identity”. Memory serves to rescue, safeguard and conserve the
strands of culture with the parochialization and hegemonization of

12
languages, vernacular cultures and identities. The next chapter
“Roda Mundansa: Excavating and Revitalizing a Creole-Indigenous
Approach to Deep Time in Singapore Kristang” by Kevin Martins
brings to the fore the long standing conflicts and intergenerational
traumas associated with the mixed creole-indigenous community of
Kristang or the Portuguese-Eurasians of Melaka and Singapore. The
paper illuminates the past and future of civilizational preservation by
outlining the Kristang way of excavating them from myth, legend,
contemporary science fiction and fantasy known as Sunyeskah
/Dreamfishing, primarily founded on the Kristang principle.
One of the important locus of mnemonic engine is the space of
gastro-nostalgia, where the undivided ‘homelands imagined,
narrated and lived exist on the cartographies of memory’. Namarata
Chawdhary in “Gastro-Nostalgic Reconstruction of the East
Bengali Refugee Identity: Unearthing the Culinary Legacy through
Select Partition Fiction” traces the refugee narratives to cater to the
ambivalences of deracination, emerging in the gastro-political
identity. As Erill notes, “identities have to be constructed and
reconstructed by acts of memory, by remembering who one was
and by setting this past self in relation to the present self” (5). What
if these identities and its unconscious memory is surreptitiously
inbred and is materialized in the folk-art? The closing chapter in
this section “Embodiment of Mnemonic Sites: Representation of
Theyyam in Kantara Movie” by Anuranj C.K. takes the cinematic
narrative to explore the oppressive dialectics of the feudal system in
the ritualistic dance form Theyyam from Tulunadu.
Renate Lachmann’s observations about preserving by way of
writing is seen both as “an act of memory and a new interpretation
by which every new text is etched into memory space” (301). The
next section, Literature and Memory, opens with Nobel Laureate
of Irish lineage Seamus Heaney’s poetic consciousness, who traces
the episodes of rebellion and expansive traumatic past of his nation
through his poems. In “Recollecting the Nation’s Trauma with
Retrospective Eye: Politics of Memory in Select Poems of Seamus
Heaney”, the author Sandeep T.G explores how his poems articulate
the cultural memory against the homogenized and mixed discourses of
Ireland. Lachmann reminds that it is the “image producing activity of
13
memory which incorporates the poetic imagination” (303). The author
uncovers these images and writes how “the spirit of his poetry
emanates from the political act of remembering”, almost reinstating
and reclaiming from the glorified nostalgia, the corporeal memory of
crisis and violence.
Archived memory often falls into the negative stereotyping and
mishandled appropriation, and risks becoming non- negotiable.
Various modes and tokens including the semiotic and technological
ones can be seen as tools of construction of memory and can offer the
epistemological investigation into the praxis of memory. The author in
“Decoding the Violence of Archival Memory in Margaret Atwood’s
The Handmaid’s Tale” interrogates the ‘reliability of the archival source’
and its potentialities to get conflicted and entangled in “perspectival
shift between the producer and the consumer of the technologically
archived memoir.” Through Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and
sections of “The Historical Notes”, Jasmine Sharma traces conflicts
and violence meted against the archival world of characters. Similarly,
when a dramatic poet confiscates memories of past and coagulates it
with present, what appears is a dramaturgical innovation which
initiates inquiries into the events of its reliability. The next chapter,
“Interplay of Memory and Time in Harold Pinter’s Old Times” in a
typical Pinteresque style, demonstrates how memory, as ambiguous
and shapeable materializes through competing discourses, which
engage in the dialectics of what really happened.
Halbwachs in La Memoire collective, argues that ‘all remembering
relies on the dynamics of groups such as families, social classes, and
religious communities. An individual's social interactions with the
members of his or her group determine how one remembers
experiences from the past and what it is that he or she remembers .
. . groups reconstruct their past experiences collectively, and so
even though an individual does have a particular perspective on this
group reconstruction of the past, he or she does not have an
independent memory of the past’ (Russell 796). The next in the
section is “Mnemonic Interplay in Rohinton Mistry’s Family
Matters” which uses Mistry’s novel as a bed-rock of case study to
question the collective cultural memory based on the problematic
foundation of individual and collective memory with a tumultuous
14
panoramic context in the backdrop. Similarly, The Kite Runner and
To the Lighthouse are examined for its displaced memory and
nostalgia in the zeitgeisty ardor of the diasporic self. The closing
chapter is my own analysis of T.S. Eliot’s seminal text “The
Waste land” which traces and sketchs the masterpiece as a
‘mnemonic piece of art par excellence,” a poem that occupies a
macro space of mnemonic mesh through intertextual material,
varied cultural references, fables, and allusions, reconstituting
them to establish innovative remembering and recollection.
Other than the semiotic tools and instruments, cultural memory
indispensably banks on media, and technologies, and other digital
modes. The next section Cultural Memory and Media has the piece
“Affective Synthesis: Sensation, Emotion and Prosthetic Cognition in
Contemporary Motivational Cinema” which discusses the genus of
Indian motivational cinema and its affective aspects upon memory of
the viewer. Manodip Chakraborty argues, how through the acts of
remembrance “an exposed subject is perpetually paralyzed in his
cognitive abilities; his desires become mimetic, and he starts hankering
after an opaque ‘object’ – ideologically ‘present’ yet epistemologically
‘absent’. In this duality, the existence of a subject is a negotiation
between ‘ideality’ and ‘reality’.” With the upsurge of digital platforms
and soapboxes, memory not only records the past, but also embodies
and reconstructs it for a premeditated future. Technology has
ascended to a number of popular shows, soap-operas, reality shows,
etc. giving an augmented virtual space to experimental and often
peripheral and stigmatized matters of imitating reality. The rise of
Sasaeng cultures in the aftermath of the success of the Hallyu wave
since 2000 has ameliorated the cult of fandom, adding distressing
patterns to the structures of social systems. The closing chapter in this
section “Understanding the Obsessive nature of Fandoms through the
eyes of a Sasaeng Memory and Digital Media” discusses how
“memory carries out a continuous test of coherence” (Erill 186) with
the world of system becoming . . . more open to the abilities and
structures of memory” (186).
Political memory often relies on the relics of recalling consciously
which further depends upon the accounts which are marginalized, and
pushed to the corners. Almost invisibilized, these remembrances
15
struggle between the synchronic and diachronic dimensions, often
entangled in the acts of remembering. This social forgetting of
countless narratives against the lieux de memoire, also the next section
in analysis Rethinking Lieux de Memoire which caters to the gaps
in knowledge accounted for by heuristic devices of cultural memory.
The chapter “Memory and Collective Amnesia:The Role of Oral
History and Popular Culture in Conserving the Legacy of Bengali
Revolutionaries”, “dissects the knowledge gap that has been created in
the holistic understanding of Indian history as a result of the
government-prescribed narrative of the Indian freedom struggle in
postcolonial India.” Using stratified sampling, python coding,
examination of different curriculum of educational councils, the analysis
resurrects this uncommon excavation of the contribution of local,
organized armed revolutions in the freedom struggle. A move to
reimagine Pierre Nora lieux de mémoire, the chapter challenges the
‘invented traditions’ of the metanarratives of the Indian freedom
struggle, which now stands ossified and condensed. The massive corpus
of writings of Holocaust, from survival narratives, memoires, accounts
of destruction, pain and trauma has systematically created institutional
studies of deconstructing trauma, with its aftereffects of the damages on
the psycho-emotional well-being of survivors. The succeeding chapter
of the section “Memory, Witnessing, Violence: A Study of Select Poetry
of Nelly Sachs” takes into analysis the Holocaust memories through the
vantage position and optics of poetry of Jewish-German origin Nelly
Sachs. Emily Keightley observes that, “trauma is the disruption of the
remembering process caused . . . so much at odds with our usual
framework of remembering that it can not be remembered in any
conventional fashion”(153). It is however not to acknowledge the logic
of trauma, as Weinberg says, “trauma is always already inscribed in
memory and has particular epistemological value, although, . . . any con-
scious representation of trauma remains by definition “inadequate”
(205) because “trauma is the inaccessible truth of remembering” (231).
With a similar approach, the next chapter, as the author Abhishek
Sarkar states “focuses to investigate and understand how the memory
of violence spawns severe phobia and response in the migrating
women with reference to Jotirmoyee Devi’s short story “Epar Ganga
Opar Ganga.” With Partition of Indian continent in the backdrop, the
16
study “Durga Visarjan (self-immolation): Revisiting the Memory of
Violence Exposing Vulnerability of Women during Partition”, reveals
some of the glaring social conditioning, essentially sexist and
inhumane, hardened through the epochal remains of the collective
memory of the society.
The last section of the book Contemporary Landscapes in the Memory
Lane encompasses two acute and vital examinations of issues of
contemporary relevance, an importunate commitment to natural
disasters and man-made cataclysms. In “Influence of Sikh’s
Collective Memory in Indian Farmers’ Revolution 2020-21”,
Rajashri Ghosh discusses the role of protests in democratic nations
and its prolonged impact on the collective memory of the nation.
The closing essay “Tremors of Trauma amid the Debris:
Unearthing Memories from Syria-Turkey” pays a lugubrious
genufaction upon the victims of the earthquake 2023 while
portraying “the psychologically inflicted tremors of trauma” that
“can bring in distorted memories, which usually have lasting
impressions in the survivor’s minds.”
Though there remains a deep chasm between experiencing
memory and acts of retrieval/preserving to theorize it at the
conceptual level, working on mammography, by reducing the gap
between the empirical and pragmatic research to theoretical framing-
up of abstractions and postulations (Freindt), the theoretical and
methodological tools suggestions . The book in no manner attempts
to make tall claims of creating a privileged viewpoint in the field of
memory research, which in itself is highly extensive, expansive and has
forayed into collaborative and transdisciplinary exchange of research.
This book is a humble endeavor to look beyond the current
synthesization of knowledge and would serve as a literary and non-
literary consortium to the scholars, researchers of Humanities, and
even Social Sciences or anyone who wishes to look beyond the critical,
dynamic, and multi-dimensional gaze offered by current theoretical
equipment.
ENDNOTES
Astrid Erll, and Ansgar Nünning. Cultural Memory Studies : An International
and Interdisciplinary Handbook. De Gruyter, 2008.

17
 Feindt, Gregor, et al. “Entangled Memory: Toward a Third Wave in Memory
Studies.” History and Theory, vol. 53, no. 1, 2014, pp. 24–44. JSTOR,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/24543010.
Keightley, Emily, and Michael Pickering. Research Methods for Memory Studies.
Edinburgh University Press, 2013.
Russell, Nicolas. “Collective Memory before and after Halbwachs.” The French
Review,vol.79,no.4,2006, pp. 792–804.JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25480359.

18
SECTION ONE: CULTURAL
HISTORY AND MEMORY

19
 Role of Memory in the Epistemology of War

Debojyoti Dan

Je ne peut être défini qu'en termes de 'locution,' non en termes

d'objets, comme l'est un signe nominal. Je signifie 'la personne qui
énonce la présente instance de discours contenant je.' Instance
unique per définition, et valable seulement dans son unicité. ....
.Mais, parallèlement, c'est aussi en tant qu'instance de forme je qu'il
doit être pris; la forme je n'a d'existence linguistique que dans l'acte
de parole qui la profère. II y a donc, dans ce procès, une double in
stance conjuguée: instance de je comme réfèrent, et instance de
discours contenant je, comme réfère » (Benveniste 252).
(Self-translated as: “I can only be defined in terms of 'locution,'
not in terms of objects, as a nominal sign is. I mean 'the person
who is speaking the present instance of discourse containing I.'
Unique instance per definition, and valid only in its uniqueness ....
But, at the same time, it is also as an instance of form I that it must
be taken; the form I has no linguistic existence than in the speech
act which utters it. There is therefore, in this process, a double
conjugated instance: an instance of I as referent, and an instance of
discourse containing I, as referred.). This quote is also
mentioned by Eugenio Donato in his essay 'Of Structuralism
and Literature' where the significance of structural “I” is debated
at length by him which inspired me to delve deeper in the
concept of “I” while studying the films like Hiroshima mon Amour,
Un Chien Andalou and Le Pianiste.
This chapter opens the discussion of memory and its identity in
the space of “I” not only as a grammatical plural of the being but as
a Being-with who confronts us with the plurality of historicizing of
“now” and “now that” in context of war films like Hiroshima mon
Amour or the surrealist traumascape of Salvador Dali: Un Chien
Andalou and also Roman Polański’s unique undertaking in his film
Le Pianiste. It is not just the trauma-scape/scope that let me look at
them together but rather the labyrinthine chronology of time where
20
the discourse of “I” is beyond the instances of being and becomes
a vacuum to be filled with endless signifiers. Agential performative
spaces are disrupted/enhanced by the war in corporeal
epistemology when the flat ontology of death corroborates with the
biome. In the scope of memory study we find the biopolitics and
necro-paradigms conflate with aesthetic projects. Foucauldian
biopower has been an apparatus to study the rubric of disability
with multiple praxality and the denominative power relations talk of
both the docile bodies and the disable bodies. Biological
coordinates of human anatomical geometry creates bifurcated
narratives of healthy inured body in relation with philosophy. Body
is a textuality within the space of bio-political cartography of war
and death and memory is the sub-text which refracts the Cartesian
dictum into ‘I remember, therefore I am’. The therapeutic balance
is the hospital space which makes memory bind us to the time and
space. Political sovereignty created the anatomy of disabled in the
cultural and social terminology as well as in epistemology. The
continuity of “Elle” in the space of music in Hiroshima Mon Amour
is the reconstruction of the memory of ontological home through
the perceptive continuity of experiences much in the same way that
Wladek does in Le Pianiste. The narrative eros in both the films
create the nuanced past establishing an absence presence through
melody. In all the three films Un Chien Andalou, Hiroshima mon
Amour and Le Pianiste time and memory is utilised as an apparatus
and the absence is not something that is negative in its absolute
sense and as the characters are trapped in a time without presence,
it does not refer to the past as Maurice Blanchot points out:
The absence of time is not a purely negative mode. It is the
time in which nothing begins, in which initiative is not possible,
where before the affirmation there is already the recurrence of the
affirmation. Rather than a purely negative mode, it is a time without
negation without decision, when there is also nowhere when each thing
withdraws into its image and the ‘I’ that ‘we’ recognize itself as it sinks
into the neutrality of a faceless ‘he.’ The time of the absence of time is
without a present, without a presence. This ‘without a present’
however, does not refer to a past. (Blanchot 410)

21
 Mathematics of politics has telos-centric closure, but the
geometric hypotenuse of memory is tangent to the cosine of
narrative and the sine of time. Borders are the halo-centric agenda
of disfigured humanism where violence is a cognitive manifesto to
defend the identity. In the Foucauldian era of post-mortem of
power psychosis, individuation is different from the individuals and
the identity of one is not the oneness of identity. While dealing with
the Cantonian infinity set and the infinity loop in Hiroshima mon
Amour or in Un Chien Andalou we cannot leave out the aporia of
time that is an absence-presence in the story and Paul Ricœur’s
magnum opus Temps et récit can be the formative deconstructive to
provide a dénouement of the aporetic time. “The basic aporia of
time is drawn from Augustinian dictum: “si nemo a me quaerat,
scio, si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio” (What then is time? If no
one asks me, I know, if I want to explain it to someone who asks, I
do not know)”( Babu Thaliath 7). Husserl explains how every
attempt to constitute temporal objectivity in the subjective
consciousness can fail and thus form an aporia. In the realm of
Hiroshima mon Amour textuality of trauma and temporal objectivity
of the woman’s subjective consciousness inside the text, there is an
aporicity of the present. The retentional value of “now” for “She”
is its protentional extension to “now that” which is “Zeitz” and
here the existential question of now is determined by the present
preoccupation of what is called in Narrative Time “making-present”
(Ricœur 173). Saying ‘now’ says Heidegger in Being and Time “is the
discursive Articulation of a making-present which temporalizes itself
in a unity with a retentive awaiting” (Heidegger 469). The conversation
between them further elaborates the discursive apparatus:
“HE: You saw nothing in Hiroshima.
SHE: I saw everything. Everything...” [Original emphasis] (Duras 15)
Everything here shows the fruit of this retentive awaiting and
the patience of the provocative thinking on the part of the “She”.
This finally leads to the creation of the time of soul as distentio animi.
The time consciousness thereby becomes what Husserl calls “das
punktuelle Jetzt” as the punctiform of “now” in the philosophical
suite of “He”. Paul Ricœur in his seminal work Temps et récit
mentions the basic chaos of time and narrative and “l’identité
22
narrative” where time present and time past is neither a negative
plain nor something that creates the fracture. Rather a time as
pointed out in Life Stories is explained as “When it [experience] is
not explicitly present.” (Colin 119). The objective of this paper is to
look into war films like Hiroshima mon Amour and a few others
where time is the performative guide and the narrative is corrective
and critical surgery. It is the primal inauthenticity of our relation to
things and to time that I will explore in the Heideggerian episteme
of “das Vorhandene” and “das Zuhandene” when I look at the
cinematography and the narrative. The “retentive awaiting” is not
the parameters set down by chronology but by what Ricœur calls in
Narrative Time the “Illusion of sequence” (Ricœur 169).
The epistemological investigation of the constitution of a time-
object (zeitobjekt) in Le Pianiste thus finds adequate expression in
Chopin's melody. The subjective perceptibility of "Ballade in G
minor" Chopin and the objective existence of time creates time and
temporality. The epistemological problematization of temporal
dreams becomes the phenomenological question of creation in
dreams. The ontological abundance of free play outside the realm
of language makes language aporetic. So we are within the present
but are also inside the aporetic relationship of language and time of
the givenness of the present and the persistence of the present as
the presence of a time object. The noesis of consciousness of the
present (Gegenwartsbewusstein) is finally transcended by music in
both Le Pianiste and Hiroshima mon Amour.
The narrative eros in the films Hiroshima mon Amour and Le
Pianiste is the past but the piano is connective to the ontological
coordinates. For both him and her (Hiroshima mon Amour) and
Wladek (Le Pianiste), the music becomes the ‘zeitobjekte’ or time
object. The melody which, according to Brentano, is admitted more
or less unchanged into the consciousness in the direct perception is
what creates the consciousness of “everything” and “nothing” in
the film. Through the piano, Resnais creates a noetic and noematic
constitution of time consciousness. Brentano’s time object, which
enters immediately into consciousness, is opposed to the prevailing
Kantian notion of the mere apriority of time. Here the time is
externalized by the medium of the lovers’ consciousness. The
23
sensory data of melody is deeper than ‘noematic contents in
consciousness’ and it becomes ‘das hyletische Datum’. On the other
hand, his homeland (Hiroshima) is absent from his consciousness at
the end of the film revealing that it is not apriori data or which has
‘noematic contents in consciousness’. The memory of Hiroshima is
reconstructed with the music from the piano from the very first scene.
Quite in similitude in the essay ‘The aporicity of the present’
Babu Thaliath writes in his seminal paper:
Husserl later extended Brentano’s notion of the intentional in-
existence of objects in the context of his phenomenology – to
noesis and noema or to the noetic constitution of noematic
contents in consciousness. However, Husserl's phenomenology
points to a deeper level of consciousness – deeper than noema –
namely the hyletic datum (das hyletische Datum) – e.g. the sensory
data such as color, sound, etc. –, which is not subject to
phenomenological reduction, and therefore remains as a residuum
in the consciousness. (Thaliath 7)
In the case of Władysław, the sensory data of Chopin's melody
goes much deeper than simply becoming ‘noematic content in
consciousness’ and therefore it becomes ‘das hyletische Datum’.
On the other hand, his homeland is absent from his consciousness
at the end of the film revealing that it is not an apriori data or has
‘noematic contents in consciousness’. That is the reason why the
film begins and ends with Szpilman playing a piano. His memoir
provides a telling elaboration of this, where the reality of time
brutally interrupted is transformed into a reparative phantasy
ensconced in music. He writes of
“the Marne [the famous First World War battle in September
1914 in which the French and British forces eventually succeeded,
at great cost, in halting the German invasion of Paris]—that classic
line of defense where everything must come to a standstill, the way
it does in the fermata of the second section of Chopin’s B minor
Scherzo, in a stormy tempo of quavers going on and on, more and
more tempestuously, until the closing chord, at which point the
Germans would retreat to their own border as vigorously as they
had advanced” (Szpilman 57)

24
The music used by Polański is "Ballade in G minor" of Chopin at
the end of the film, whereas in the original memoir, Szpilman
mentions ‘Chopin’s B minor Scherzo’. Similarly, Polański’s
adaptation changed the introductory performance of Szpilman
from ‘Chopin’s B minor Scherzo’ to Chopin’s Nocturne in C#
minor, Op. Posth. (Lento con gran espressione). This is music, to
borrow Burnham’s trenchant observation regarding the music of
Schubert, which is ‘the sound of memory, not the sounds of
memories’ (658). The sound of music becomes ‘das hyletische
Datum’ and Szpilman’s finds this to be his ontological home as
different from Poland, which is his topological home. The melody
is a “retentional and protentional extension of ‘now’ (Jetzt), the
present… [So] the musical vocabulary coalesces with the syntax of
consciousness to become the Augustinian distentio animi”. (Thaliath
1). [For Augustine time is distentio animi, that is the distention of the
soul by time. In the Confessions, Augustine observes: “But the
mensuration of time by these methods yields no result that is
absolute, since it may happen that the sound of a shorter line
spoken with a drawl, actually lasts longer than that of a longer one
hurried over. The same holds for the whole poem, a foot, and a
syllable. I have therefore come to the conclusion that time is
nothing other than a distention [distentio]: a distention of what, I do
not know, but I would be very surprised if it is not a distention of the
mind distentio animi” (XI.26.33) The initial melody of Chopin and the
final one played by Szpilman’s creates ‘aporia of time [that]
presupposes an aporetic identity between the present (Gegenwart) as
the unity of a time-consciousness and the objective presence or
appearance of the present as a time-object (Zeitobjekt).
The rich texture of the narrative here becomes a critical and
decisive corrective to time itself like that of Hiroshima mon Amour
and the consciousness here is not based on hyletic data so what we
are offered here is the datum of writing in itself as the myth that
demythologizes human creativity. “Elle” retinal construction of the
Hiroshima holocaust is what is called in Simulacres et Simulation
simulacrum of ‘order of sorcery’ (Baudrillard 7), a regime of
semantic algebra where all human meaning is conjured artificially to
appear as a reference to the (increasingly) hermetic truth.
25
According to Baudrillard, “The simulacrum is never that which
conceals the truth – it is the truth which conceals that there is none.
The simulacrum is true.” (1). Thus the creation here in itself is a
simulacrum. The dreams simply add layers to this simulacrum. The
fourth order of simulacra “substitutes signs of the real for the real
itself” (1). What is important here is that Resnais is not just
following Baudrillard but creating the refractive and reflective layers
in the image of simulacrum balancing the original equation of
Baudrillard with the specter of Derrida like Buñuel and Dalí who
are intentionally creating a montage of nonsensical dream-like
events to take their viewer on a blind adventure. This becomes
increasingly difficult as a spectator because there does appear to be
a form of logic connecting each sequence. The ontological Freeplay
of Buñuel and Dalí freely uses Derridan concept of writing and
modeling it in its own wax museum of creativity in the mise-en-scene
as mentioned in Of Grammatology:
“the concept of writing…no longer designating the exterior
surface, the insubstantial double of a major signifier, the signifier of
the signifier – is beginning to go beyond the extension of language.
In all senses of the word, writing thus comprehends language. Not
that the word ‘writing’ has ceased to designate the signifier of the
signifier, but it appears, strange as it may seem that ‘signifier of the
signifier’ no longer defines accidental doubling and fallen
secondarity.” (Derrida 7-11)
As Derrida dissolves the structurality of the structure in the
process of writing, he gave birth to the postmodern idea of the
“signifier of the signifier” (7-11) and this is the coordinate Buñuel
and Dalí use surrealism in the destruction of “the concept of ‘sign’
and its entire logic” (7-11) following Derridian code. So Buñuel and
Dalí’s work penetrates the Judio-Christian cosmogonies to the “das
Vorhandene”, especially in the scene where Mareuil’s antagonist
(Pierre Batcheff) is struggling with the weight of the priests, Ten
Commandments, grand pianos and dead donkeys, which suggests
symbolically that he is struggling against the ‘dead weight of a
decaying society chaining the free expression of [his] desire’ for
Mareuil (Ades 53). We are faced with the narrative fallacy of the
Bible and the consciousness here is directed to the intentional-
26
referential access to the act of creation as an object. Just as in
Hiroshima mon Amour, the residue of the hyletic data is the rationale in
the persistence of retention and the product of dream as a
phenomenological dimension rather than the autonomy of time-objects.
The political representation of socio-religious turmoil becomes
visual in the madness of this struggle in all three films. It is
beautifully summarized in Madness and Civilization:
It is no longer the end of time and of the world that will show
retrospectively that men were mad not to have been prepared for
them; it is the tide of madness, its secret invasion that shows that
the world is near its final catastrophe; it is man’s insanity that
invokes and makes necessary the world’s end. (Foucault 14)
The threat of the World Wars, the reaction against the Jews,
and the death of music in Nazi Germany formulate the architecture
of dystopian succubus in Un Chien Andalou, which dissolves reasons
and logocentric expression; hence we are given the chairs of the
audience to cast a panoptic gaze at the end of civilization and
beginning of insanity. That is why in the scene titled “Eight years
later,” which follows “Once upon a time” (where Mareuil’s eye is
severed), Mareuil has depicted exactly the same age as she had been
‘eight years earlier’ and with her eye intact. On a similar note in Le
Pianiste, the politico-psychological impact of the Nazi occupation of
Poland creates a microbiological configuration that caters political
existence of the Jewish body covering the comprehensive
regulations of bio-power in the existential mechanism. This is the
reason the Jews are not killed straight away but are made to toil to
death. Their body is a political economy to be controlled by the
German Schutzstaffel. Foucault supplements that ‘Biopolitics deals
with the population, with the population as a political problem, as a
problem that is at once scientific and political, as a biological
problem and as power’s problem.’ (Foucault 245). Concerning
language, the border is both a ‘biological problem’ and a ‘power
problem’ when it uses the body of the Nation as the text of its
violence. The ministerial discourse with victims regarding necro-
policies orchestrated monologic parameters of death.
Time in all three films is the performative guide and the
narrative serves as a critical and decisive corrective to it this is
27
where I find myself at a crossroads in dealing with the narratives of
Un Chien Andalou. Despite the subject-verb agreement and the
definite units of subject-object, often the text moves away to
subvert them, and the solid ground of syntax is left ashore as we
swim in more soluble polymorphous ambiguity of centreless
Freeplay of dream narrativity. The grand narrative and the
superstructure of grammar tend to bend under the pressure of
pollyglottic babblings and musical hiatus. The performative space
of compound words and coinages makes the syntax elastic rather
than brittle. This elasticity causes the centrality of the center in
grammatology rather than in grammar. Thus the sense of
syntactical linearity is dissolved and we are launched into the
holocaust of sequential grammatology, where Buñuel and Dalí are
true to the Code Derrida where “istoria and episteme (and not only
etymologically or philosophically)” in Of Grammatology becomes
“detours for the purpose of the reappropriation of presence” (7).
Thus the words “insubstantial double of a major signifier” are what
Buñuel and Dalí seek to dissolve in his dream language. So when
Mareuil attempts to flee to an additional room in the home, she
enters a room that is exactly the same as the bedroom she has just fled
– this second room even has the same bed that she had just laid
clothes upon only minutes before, this is an excellent montage of
space in terms of textuality and topology. The dilemma of Mareuil is
the visual representation of the Nazi political system, the Third Reich.
So Buñuel and Dalí is doing what Derrida proposed decades
after to create the absence presence of the identity of words in the
realm beyond signifier. Therefore ontology of Buñuel is delimited
and so is Dalí’s the epistemic closure of logos is not coordinated
they are concerned and the syntax often takes a back seat in this
dreamscape of the montage.
On a very similar note the words in Hiroshima mon Amour: ‘Nothing’
and ‘everything’ may appear opposites, like sex and death, but when
we peer inside and try to locate it outside the authoritarian world of
grammatological order of English sentence we see its true meaning.
When we see everything, we basically see nothing in particular, thus
a person surfing through all the channels of television cannot say
what he has actually seen. Thus in the aftermath of the Second
28
World War, the film Hiroshima Mon Amour does not focus on the
event. Rather we are presented with kaleidoscopic emotions of
post-war trauma and how amazingly Resnais weaves it into the
cultural tapestry.
The intentionality and referentiality to Hiroshima in this film
bring us to the problem of Husserl’s “Zeitdenken” where we
encounter the hyletic interface that in Husserlian phenomenology
connects consciousness and reality. If we borrow a quote from
Babu Thaliath’s essay “Intentionality and Referentiality” we find
that the dream and the creation reveal the delimitation of
“Erkennbarkeit” or recognizability:
“the ontological status of objects is solely determined by the
factum whether the consciousness has its epistemic access to an
object in-existing in consciousness or to a real object that exists
independently of the consciousness. In short, the limit of
cognizability [‘Erkennbarkeit’] of the consciousness in its epistemic
access to objects ultimately determines the ontological status of the
object itself” (Thaliath 3)
The ontological status of dream and creation of simulated
Hiroshima as well as the destruction of Hiroshima has no epistemic
access to any pre-existent cartography of consciousness except in
the holocaust museum. The referentiality is the atomic explosion
but the intentionality here creates space and time in terms of
Kantian “apriori Vorstellungen” so the real objects like the dead
and the wounded are excluded [“ausgeklammert”]. The geometric
optics of the referential objects shows that the referentiality of the
real objects becomes a factor of multiplication of the retinal
discourse and thereby reduces it by half. The retention of the hyletic
data here creates the narrative which is called in Narrative Time the
“illusion of sequence” (Recœur 169).
Topology of narrative recycled through the trauma creates the
referentiality to the holocaust in the film Hiroshima Mon Amour in T0
space or Kolmogorov space (named after Andrey Kolmogorov) if,
for every pair of distinct points of X, at least one of them has a
neighborhood not containing the other. In a T0 space, all points are
topologically distinguishable. This condition called the T0
condition, is the weakest of the separation axioms. Nearly all
29
topological spaces normally studied in mathematics are T0 spaces.
Given any topological space, one can construct a T0 space by
identifying topologically indistinguishable points. And this T0 space
of Hiroshima becomes for the French Actress “Elle” an identifiable
simulation of T1 space in the neighborhood of X through the
museum. The site of the holocaust for her becomes in memory
reconstructed in a neighborhood U of x on the other hand the
Japanese ‘home’ whose memory is constructed not in a museum
but by the historicity of Hiroshima dwells in the topos and a
neighborhood V of y. Thus we can see that U and V are disjoint
(U V =φ) preregular space. This is the reason why the logos of the
French Actress does not become the topos of the Japanese
‘homme’ and the telos of the affair between them is the temporality
of “zeitzu” in the T2 space of the film which occupies a
neighborhood Y of z and so the preregular space finally produces
the equation U V Y =φ. So when the camera zooms into the
corporeal epistemology of the lovers engaged in the act of sexuality
we are led to find in our retinal space the ashes as a tactile
reassurance of traveling from screen to skin and then to scene.
The quadratic equation of Hiroshima Mon Amour and Le Pianiste
can be seen using Jacques Binet’s formula:
Fn= (ϕ-1)n – (-ϕ)n
ϕ-1+ ϕ
where Fn represents the memory and ϕ-1 as the narrative time of
Hiroshima Mon Amour and for Szpilman in Le Pianiste it is –ϕ. It is so
because the preregular space where U and V are disjoint (U V =φ)
in is the home of Władysław Szpilman’s mind. Both the films
present the trauma in their way but the disjoint is in Kolmogorov's
space as Szpilman’s music forms an ontological praxis for him
whereas the music in Hiroshima Mon Amour is not identifiable in
space to either the Japanese man or the French Actress. For her,
there is a kind of negotiation with her memory that leads her to
almost a cathartic position. Thus Goudet Stephane says:
je trouve admirable la transformation de cette femme qui a
acquis une conscience sociale, non pas parce qu‘elle a joué un rôle
d‘infermière dans une quelconque production cinématographique à
Hiroshima, aussi émouvante que vaine, avec présence du
30
monument commémoratif et petites filles lâchant les colombes-de-
la-paix-internationale, mais parce qu‘elle y a reconstitué son drame
personnel et que c‘est cela qui est important, fondamental: à la fin
Okada ne lui dirait plus, ne lui dit plus: ―Non, tu n‘as rien vu à
Hiroshima.
Translated as, “… I find admirable the transformation of this
woman who has acquired a social conscience, not because she has
played the role of a nurse in no matter what cinematographic
production in Hiroshima—as moving as vain—with the presence
of the commemorative monument and little girls who let fly the
doves-of-international-peace. But rather because she has
reconstructed her personal tragedy and because this is what is
important, fundamental: at the end Okada would not tell her, does
not tell her anymore: ‘No, you have seen nothing in Hiroshima’…”
(self-translation)
Things don’t exist ‘in themselves’, but only in their relations. As
a literary analyst, Bakhtin emphasizes the location of particular
authors in the speech genres they deploy, and in their spatial and
temporal context. Here both the male and female characters exist
through their speech in the context of the post-war penumbra.
Bakhtin sees ‘being’ as a ‘unique and unified event’ as mentioned in
Modern Criticism and Theory (Lodge 123). ‘Being’ is always ‘event’ or
‘co-being’ (121). Thus the event of the Second World War is the
‘unified event’ and both ‘elle’ and ‘lui’ are the ‘co-being’.
In his early philosophical work, Bakhtin also insists that each
person is unique and irreplaceable. This uniqueness is ‘given’ in the
case of the ‘elle’ and ‘lui’ both in Hiroshima Mon Amour. Each of us
makes our existence into a particular ‘task’ or ‘project’ by assigning
it meaning. Each of us exists as the relation between particular
coordinates in time and space, differentiating and relating to other
coordinates. At the site of the Second World War, the self cannot
tolerate fixity: what it ‘is’, is undefinable. Both the protagonists
cannot be fully revealed to or known in the world, because of
constant change and ‘unfinalisability’(123). This
‘unfinalisability’(123) is the cue in the discussion of Un Chien
Andalou. Beatriz Caballero Rodríguez in her essay “Gender as
Trauma in Buñuel’s Un chien andalou” comments that:
31
the lack of temporal coherence and of spatial structure as well as its
fragmented narrative (interspersion of apparently disconnected
shots and the lack of a coherent resolution to the action)
reminiscent of the logic of dreams, all mirror the fragmented
identity and fragmented discourse associated with the traumatized self.
Thus, the connection between Buñuel’s early take on cinema and the
subconscious, and by extension trauma, comes to light. (Rodríguez 1)
What we can find in this quote is where the conduit of trauma
and memory meets the telocentric fallacy of ‘unfinalisability’. The
logic that is subscribed to the dream is essential ontological praxis
of this film. This is what Borges calls in his Collected Fictions “In the
dreaming man’s dream, the dreamed man awoke.” (Borges 99). The
allegory of creation turns into the infinite set of natural numbers of
dreams by a procedure of listing and enumerating all the rational
numbers of dreams and then pairing each rational number of dreams
with the successive natural numbers of dreams. Thus we see a
‘denumerably’ of the dreams which is the same size as the infinity of
natural numbers. The dreams in the film become the path of perpetual
ascending and descending in the methodology where the topological
dimension that is given in mathematical terms is: dim X(H) = 1 +
(−1)/0(−1) = ∞. This space is a contested one, where the
phenomenological being only exists in relation to the thing of art and art
becomes a prosthetic to show his trapped identity. The structural space
of his existence can only be defined by mathematical logic as opposed
to anything else as Mary Tiles writes in The Philosophy of Set Theory:
“..it was not by any means an unreasonable hypothesis to
suggest that mathematics, in so far as it is concerned to study the
possible structures on domains of individual objects, might be
reduced to logic, in Frege’s extended sense of logic. As Frege
himself points out (Frege, 1959, p. 100), he has so extended the
power of defining concepts that for him ‘analytic truth’ (following
from definitions by application of the laws of logic alone) no longer
means what it did for Kant, who was working within a basically
Aristotelian framework (assuming that conjunction and negation of
terms (concepts) are the basic means of defining complex terms
(concepts)).” (Tiles 155).

32
 Mathematical logic is not a Kantian critique of reason; it
provides a more spatial power to perform the details of space
within the space of truth. That is the reason why it would be
possible to give a purely logical expression of ‘the (cardinal)
number of Fs is the same as the (cardinal) number of Gs’. Writing
is an employment of the memory of things, of the images that
things have left behind in their absence. If there were not this
absence, the memories could not have been coined as recollections,
images could not have been conceived. For Buñuel and Dalí’s, as
pointed out in The Station Hill Blanchot Reader. Fiction & Literary
Essays, the image is the embodiment of distancing produced by the
history of the ‘thing’ (Blanchot 11). In this very distance produced
by the thing’s absence, its ‘ungraspab[ility]’ is made manifest in the
film. Thus we can end with the famous words from the essay
“Gender as Trauma in Buñuel’s Un chien andalou”:
By opening the doors into the subconscious, surrealist cinema,
and Un chien andalou in particular, not only grants us a glimpse
into our repressed impulses and desires, but it also becomes a
suitable vehicle to expose and express trauma by, first, identifying
those traumas which have been confined to the subconscious and,
second, by expressing them through the use of moving images and
sound in a way that surpasses the limits of common language
and everyday reality. That is to say that avant-garde surrealist
cinema provides an outlet for the articulation of trauma in a
language that is kindred to the language of its native
environment, the subconscious. (Rodríguez 3)
Works Cited
Bakhtin. M.M. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl
Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. 1981.
__________. The Problem of Speech Genres. Eds.C. Emerson and Michael
Holquist. Speech, Genres, and Other Late Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. 1986.
Baudrillard. J. Simulacres et Simulation. Trans. Sheila Glaser. Éditions Galilée
(French) & University of Michigan Press (English).1981.
Benveniste É. Problèmes de linguistique générale, Paris, Éditions Gallimard. 1966.
Blanchot. Maurice. The Station Hill Blanchot Reader. Fiction & Literary Essays.
Trans. Lydia Davis. New York: Station Hill Press. 1999.
Borges. Jorge Luis. Collected Fictions. Trans. Andrew Hurley. New
York.Penguin Classics. Penguin Books. 1998.
33
 Davis. Colin. “Life Stories: Ricœur”. Traces of War: Interpreting Ethics and
Trauma in Twentieth-Century French Writing. Liverpool University Press.
www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1ps33bb.10
Derrida. Jacques. ‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’
Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1978.
____________. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
Baltimore, Maryland, United States: The Johns Hopkins University Press.1994.
Donato, Eugenio. 'Of Structuralism and Literature'. MLN, Dec. 1967, Vol.
82, No. 5, General Issue (Dec. 1967), pp. 549-574.The Johns Hopkins University
Press. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2908278. pdf
Duras, Marguerite. Hiroshima mon amour: text for the film by Alain Resnais,
trans. Richard Seaver, New York: Grove Press, 1961.
Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization, trans. Richard Howard, London
and New York: Routledge Classics. 2001.
French ,Sarah From History to Memory Alain Resnais and Marguerite
Duras..'Hiroshima mon amour .<emajart journal.files .wordpress.com/2012/08
/French.pdf .>web.Seen on 4/1/15
Lodge, David and Nigel Wood, eds. Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader,
Singapore. Pearson Education. 2003.
Heidegger. Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson. New York. 1962.
Hintikka. Jaakko. The Phenomenological Dimension. Cambridge Companion to
Husserl. London: Cambridge University Press. 1995.
May. J. P. E-infinity Ring Spaces and E-Infinity Ring Spectra, Springer,
Heidelberg, Germany, 1977.
Ricœur. Paul. “The Human Experience of Time and Narrative.” Research in
Phenomenology. 1979, Vol.9. pp 17-34. Bril. www.jstor.org/stable/24654326.
___________. Narrative Time. Critical Inquiry. Autumn, 1980, Vol 7. No 1. On
Narrative. Pp 169-190. University of Chicago Press.www.jstor.org/stable/
1343181.
Rodríguez. Beatriz Caballero. “Gender as Trauma in Buñuel’s Un chien
andalou”. The University of Strathclyde. pdf
Szpilman W. The Pianist: The extraordinary story of one man’s survival in Warsaw,
1939–1945. Bell A, translator. New York: Picador/St. Martin’s Press 1999.
Tiles. Mary. The Philosophy of Set Theory. Mineola. New York: Dover
Publication, Inc. 1989.
Thaliath, Babu. ‘The Aporicity of the Present’. Academia.edu. Web. Pdf. Last
seen 3.12.2023
___________. ‘Intentionality and Referentiality’. Academia.edu.

34
Roda Mundansa: Excavating and Revitalizing
a Creole-Indigenous Approach to Deep Time
in Singapore Kristang

Kevin Martens Wong

Sunyeskah / Dreamfishing
Sunyeskah is essentially a particular form of lucid dreaming in my
culture, the Kristang or Portuguese-Eurasians of Southeast Asia,
that involves recognizing and/or making use of the mental
mapping, metaphor or schema
that you are on a boat on the sea of your inner world … that all
ideas, thoughts, feelings, and observations are part of the catch
from the sea. They separate things from your soul. Make of [this]
catch what you will. But you must make something. Because your
soul is hungry! (Wong, “Sunyeskah / Dreamfishing”, 4).
All of contemporary Kristang culture is arguably premised on
dream fishing, including fictional work like that which I undertake
separately as an openly gay, non-binary speculative fiction writer in
Singapore; the ethnomusicologist Margaret Sarkissian, for example,
observes that in the same fashion, my ancestors and cousins in
Melaka in the 1950s were so dauntlessly creative that
unable to learn new Portuguese repertoire from notation, the
talented but musically illiterate Settlement performers began to
compose and choreograph new songs and dances of their own.
What had begun as a literate tradition became, in the hands of new
users, an oral tradition. What had begun as an exotic novelty, a
means for one group of people to tap into a glorious past, was
transformed into a creative vehicle for the consolidation of
community identity (221).
Even within our own language, our receptivity to making up
words to fill in the gap in a song whenever we could not remember
the original ones is well-attested informally within the community.
Indeed, Teddy Sim & Dennis De Witt provide a Kristang proverb
that sums up the Sunyeskah approach, arguably the core of
35
Kristang daily life and evident in all of our own epistemological
and/or ontological endeavors and attempts to construct and
formalize our own identities, and demonstrating our own unique
sensitivity and acknowledgment of the fundamentally unstable and
mutable nature of knowledge, science, history and even identity
itself .
Perhaps the conditions affecting the sub-community to keep or
discard certain cultural practices may be (crudely) encapsulated by a
mixed Portuguese (Kristang) saying “Cuma galinya kereh pusah
obu. Ngka sabeh ki kereh pegah, ki kereh lagah” (15).
This translates to “As when a chicken wants to lay eggs, we
don’t know [which eggs] we want to hold onto, and [which eggs]
we want to let go of.” It is not so much indecisiveness; we are very
comfortable with the indecisiveness that would perturb and disturb
many other scholars and practitioners. It is rather that we try at all
to make such decisions, and try at all to work through the
uncomfortable, the alien, the foreign, the Other; and in this way, we
are also arguably very uniquely predisposed toward supporting the
same work at a species-wide level, with working with a wide array
of material that may challenge us, confound us, and even terrify us.
This understanding is what allows for the excavation of the full
Roda Mundansa, or the Kristang speculative history of all that has
preceded us, below, developed from the fragments of what can be
glimpsed in myth, legend, science fiction and fantasy from around
the world.

The Roda Mundansa

Narrati Mundansa
ve First Second Third Fourth Fifth
Cult of Narind
Shamura Kallamar Heket Leshy
the Lamb er
Aztec Second Third Fourth Fifth
First Sun
Five Sun Sun Sun Sun

36
Narrati Mundansa
ve First Second Third Fourth Fifth
Suns
First Second Third Fourth
Hopi NA
World World World World
Second Third Fourth
Maya NA First Age
Age Age Age
Digimon
televisio
Digimon Digimon Digimon Digimon Digimon
n
Adventure Zero Two Tamers Frontier Savers
franchis
e
Dvapara,
culminati
ng in the
Yuga
Satya Treta events of Kali NA
Cycle
the
Mahabha
rata
Game
Forerunn Forerun
Halo: Path Human- narrati
er- ner-
Combat Kethona Forerun ve
Precursor Flood
Evolved Genocide ner War (UNSC
War War
)

37
Narrati Mundansa
ve First Second Third Fourth Fifth
Fall of
the
Twelve
Exodus Exodus Second
Destructio Colonies
Battlestar of the of the Earth
n of First and all
Galactica Thirteent Twelve (Epilog
Earth four
h Tribe Colonies ue)
seasons
of the
series
The
Passage
The City of
trilogy NA The Passage NA
Twelve Mirrors
by Justin
Cronin
The
Wheel of
The Age The
Time The First
of Third NA NA
series by Age
Legends Age
Robert
Jordan
Warham
Khorne Nurgle Tzeentch Slaanesh NA
mer

38
Narrati Mundansa
ve First Second Third Fourth Fifth
40,000
Chaos
gods
Berserk
Godhan Void Conrad Ubik Slan Femto
d
Steven
Universe
Blue Pink Steven
Diamon White Yellow
Diamon Diamon Univer
d Diamond Diamond
d d se
Authorit
y
The Sang
Raja Sang
Sejarah NA Nila NA
Suran Sapurba
Melayu Utama
Pokémo
Pokémon Pokémo
n Pokémon
Pokémon Pokémon Ruby, n Black
handhel Diamond,
Red, Blue Gold, Silver Sapphire (2) &
d games Pearl &
& Yellow & Crystal & White
franchis Platinum
Emerald (2)
e
Bionicle Toa Toa Toa Toa Takanu

39
Narrati Mundansa
ve First Second Third Fourth Fifth
franchis Metru Hordika Mata Nuva va
e
Dune Creation The The Events
Time of
franchis of Butlerian Great of
Titans
e Omnius Jihad Purge Dune
Westworl
Season 1 Season 2 Season 3 Season 4 NA
d
Person of Season
Season 1 Season 2 Season 3 Season 4
Interest 5
The
Chronicles NA NA NA Charn Narnia
of Narnia
The Beast After the The The
Star Great
Wars up Battle of Ruusan eightee
Wars Hyperspa
to and Malacho Reforma n
Legends ce War to
including r up to tion to issues
(timeline the Beast
the Battle and the final of Star
before Wars
of including death of Wars:
the (5000
Malachor the Darth Legacy
Disney BBY –
(4350 Seventh Krayt Volume
reboot 4350
BBY – Battle of (1000 2
of 2014) BBY)
3950 Ruusan BBY – (2013)

40
Narrati Mundansa
ve First Second Third Fourth Fifth
BBY) (3950 139 (139
BBY – ABY) ABY
1000 onward
BBY) s)
Lord of All
NA NA NA NA
the Rings media
The
Witcher The
televisio Witcher: The
NA NA NA
n Blood Witcher
franchis Origin
e
The Last
of Us Entire
NA NA NA NA
franchis franchise
e
Philip
Reeve’s
Fever Mortal
Mortal
NA Crumb Engines NA NA
Engines
trilogy Quartet
franchis
e

41
Narrati Mundansa
ve First Second Third Fourth Fifth
Golden Bronze Heroic Iron
Hesiod Silver Age
Age Age Age Age
Golden Bronze
Ovid Silver Age Iron Age NA
Age Age
Third Fourth Fifth
Blavatsk First Root Second
Root Root Root
y Race Root Race
Race Race Race
Start of
Deglaciat
ion
Climate Disappear
followin
data and Supererup ance of all The
g the Younger
species- tion of other Holoce
Last Dryas
altering Mt Toba hominid ne
Glacial
events species
Maximu
m
(LGM)
Very
75010 71900 37900 18900 9564
approxi
BCE – BCE – BCE – BCE – BCE –
mate /
71900 37900 18900 9564 2023
provisio
BCE BCE BCE BCE CE
nal time

42
Narrati Mundansa
ve First Second Third Fourth Fifth
period

Table 1: Hypothetical alignment of prominent narratives from

myth, legend, science fiction and fantasy, alongside climate data and
major ‘species-altering’ events discernible in the climate record

The dates for each epoch are highly provisional and are drawn
entirely from extant climate data connected to each major event
listed without regard to most other dating and calendrical systems;
although other attempts have been made by other researchers to try
and align variants of each of the above epochs and/or the calendars
that accompany them in their originating culture’s own cosmology
with Julian calendrical time (e.g. Lebeuf, Simon), these appear to
generally not have been very successful, persuasive or revealing,
likely because whatever psychoemotional damage that was visited
on the species at each epochal juncture (see below) probably
obscured much of the precision that would otherwise have
distinguished such representations as fully formed. There are two
exceptions to this, however, being indeed the very unusual and
precise dates of 9564 BCE, taken from Blavatsky’s writings and
declarations on the myth of Atlantis (e.g. Scott-Elliot 45), and
75010 BCE, taken from Assassin’s Creed: Initiates. Both of these may
be revised further, but again, their odd and very targeted exactitude
remains compelling, especially considering that when controlled for
their time and place, the projection and pressure that Blavatsky
must have been under, and the metaphorical imagery used much in
the same way as Jung and members of my own Kristang
community do, the general contours of her work do approximate
the overall Roda Mundansa, while the Assassin’s Creed: Initiates date
similarly lines up uncannily well with a similarly apparently minor
but very interesting attestation of Cicero’s, founded on what
appears to be quite intense scholarship and study of divinatory
practices in his time (albeit so that he can critique them): as Cicero
43
implicitly takes an axe to these through the persona of Quintus, he
crucially has Quintus say, by way of rebuttal,
let us laugh at the soothsayers, brand them as frauds and
impostors and scorn their calling, even though a very wise man,
Tiberius Gracchus, and the results and circumstances of his death
have given proof of its trustworthiness; let us scorn the
Babylonians, too, and those astrologers who, from the top of
Mount Caucasus, observe the celestial signs and with the aid of
mathematics follow the courses of the stars; let us, I say, convict of
folly, falsehood, and shamelessness the men whose records, as they
themselves assert, cover a period of four hundred and seventy
thousand years;1 and let us pronounce them liars, utterly indifferent
to the opinion of succeeding generations (267).
Again, the very specific number of 70,400 years is very oddly
specific in a context that does not really demand such specificity
and suggests further investigation and unpacking.
Following this alignment, provisional names for each of the
four epochs preceding the Holocene, as well as the unorganized
period before the First Mundansa, were given names in both
English and Kristang, with the Holocene also receiving a name in
Kristang (Wong, “Roda Mundansa”). These are described in Table
2 below, together with a provisional understanding of the event
that likely served as the end-marker for the age in the collective
unconscious.

Epoch-
Epoch-
ending
English ending
Kristang event
name and event
Mundansa name and English
derivatio Kristang
derivation name
n name and
and
meaning
meaning

44
 Epoch-
Epoch-
ending
English ending
Kristang event
name and event
Mundansa name and English
derivatio Kristang
derivation name
n name and
and
meaning
meaning
The
Living Tempu Konkizabid
Conquest
Time Bibiendu a
of Life
Zeroth
from the events of
(unorganize from Halo: Combat
Assassin’s Creed: Initiates,
d time Evolved (2001) and with
Caprica, and Westworld
before First) respect to Australian
involving the creation of
cultural traditions of
non-gaietic life (see
time and space
below)
The
Mundansa
Ekrocene Ravenou Rabnanoti
Kulosa
s Night
from from From the From
First
Proto- Javanese events at Kristang
Indo- kula “yo” + the end rabentah “to
European Kristang sa of the devour, to
*ek “I” <possessiv Aztec consume

45
 Epoch-
Epoch-
ending
English ending
Kristang event
name and event
Mundansa name and English
derivatio Kristang
derivation name
n name and
and
meaning
meaning
e marker> First Sun greedily” +
anoti “night”
Assumed to be
connected to
the Toba supereruption
The
Mundansa
Keirocene Blood Matansang
Varenza
Letting
From
From the Kristang
from
events at matah “to
Second Proto- from
the end kill, to
Indo- Armenian
of the murder” +
European բարեհաճ
Aztec sanggi
*kér-ye “to “fortunate”
Second “blood-
scratch”
Sun relations” +
jirisang

46
 Epoch-
Epoch-
ending
English ending
Kristang event
name and event
Mundansa name and English
derivatio Kristang
derivation name
n name and
and
meaning
meaning
“relations”
Assumed to be
connected to the
extinction of all other
hominids, and the
archetype of the
Zombie Apocalypse in
contemporary science
fiction and fantasy
Mundansa The Rain
Devacene Chuwafogu
Volmanga of Fire
from From the
Proto- events at From
Third from Dutch
Indo- the end Kristang
vollmaakt
European of the chuwa “rain”
“perfect”
dhwer Aztec + fogu “fire”
“door” Third

47
 Epoch-
Epoch-
ending
English ending
Kristang event
name and event
Mundansa name and English
derivatio Kristang
derivation name
n name and
and
meaning
meaning
Sun
Assumed to be
connected to
deglaciation
The
Mundansa
Hedecene Universal Inundansa
Fogosa
Deluge
From the
From
events at
Kristang
the end
incheh “to
Fourth from from of the
flood” and
Greek Portuguese Aztec
English
ἡδυς fogoso Fourth
inundate
“sweet” “frisky” Sun
Assumed to be
connected to the
Younger Dryas and the

48
 Epoch-
Epoch-
ending
English ending
Kristang event
name and event
Mundansa name and English
derivatio Kristang
derivation name
n name and
and
meaning
meaning
Universal Deluge
Mundansa
Holocene
Hierosa
from
from Kristang
Fifth NA NA
Greek hierosa
ὅλος “sacred,
“whole” heroic, gay
/ queer”
Table 2: Names for each of the major components of the Roda
Mundansa
The particular epoch-ending/starting events themselves,
meanwhile, were selected based on their alignment to both the
extant narratives and available climate and archaeological data at
the time of development in August 2022, with further refinement
through to March 2023 at the time of writing of this paper.
From 75,010 BCE to our present day, a full, brief sketch
outline of the overall Kristang Roda Mundansa as was presented to
the community on 27 November 2022 thus follows below,
assembled from myth, legend, science fiction, and fantasy, and
from the major archetypes and psychoemotional/ideational

49
pathways earlier defined in my own novel Altered Straits (2017), as
well as the connections discussed above.
Tempu Bibiendu: The Living Time

All humans were once fully connected to Gaia or the collective

unconscious of the rest of the planet and were once part of the
Gaietic gestalt, having evolved as a sentient species naturally within
that gestalt.
Konkizabida and the Start of the Ekrocene
Gaietic humans attempt to artificially create living but non-sentient
cloned human drones to do menial work for gaietic humans. They
succeed in creating the first artificial non-gaietic humans, but these
non-gaietic humans turn out to still be able to achieve sentience.
War, peace, and intermarriage between gaietic and non-gaietic
humans follow, creating half- or creogaietic humans. Indeed,
connection to Gaia exists on a spectrum, but this is likely forgotten
as it becomes a point of contention and over-reduction to extremes
(i.e. either gaietic or not at all).
Rabnanoti and the End of the Ekrocene
Lake Toba supereruption devastate both the gaietic and non-
gaietic human societies.
The Keirocene and the Matansang
Non-gaietic humans blame gaietic humans for the Lake Toba
supereruption and for creating non-gaietic humans and attempt to
exterminate them and all other extant (still likely completely
Gaietic) hominid species, as well as numerous gaietic megafauna
species that probably supported gaietic human society. As with all
genocides, however, pockets of gaietic humans, Neanderthals,
Denisovans, and other hominids are able to survive for some
additional millennia. Creogaietic humans do not seem to be
targeted, probably because they were also seen as victims of gaietic
humans. Gaia turns fully against nongaietic human civilization
during these atrocities and decimates nongaietic human civilization;
all of this together ensures that there is deep, pervasive, and

50
virulent unresolved intergenerational trauma across the planet,
which begins to take on a life of its own – the Maliduensa.
The Devacene and the Chuwafogu
Creogaietic humans are the last remaining humans with some
gaietic connection and are elevated or elevate themselves to divine
status / the psychoecological niche left by the dead gaietic humans.
Due to only partial gaietic connection, however, they are generally
unable to handle the niche’s psychoemotional pressure and end up
starting a (para) nuclear war that consumes the planet. Some
creogaietic humans are not involved and survive.
The Hedecene and the Inundansa
Non-gaietic humans become distrustful of anything gaietic-
psychoemotional. A group of creogaietic humans tries to break this
by force-uplifting non-gaietic humans by having hybrid children
with them, but only ensure the trauma plague spirals out of control
by denying their full selves and unconsciously encouraging their
children to do the same. Eventually, this group decides all humanity
is unsalvageable and initiates the Inundansa to reset the planet, and
start humanity afresh with no knowledge of its past. This, however,
makes the plague even worse… (K. M. Wong, “Roda Mundansa”).
The Roda narrative above is thus desirable because it not only
supports and foregrounds all extant storytelling and creative
expression as having very strong utilitarian value, but also finally
provides a much more detailed and concrete approach to many
concepts that are still not well understood, even academically,
including:
 the connection between myth and legend, and what we do
know and can document from archaeology and climate data
 concepts and emotional ideas such as species loneliness and
dissociation, which can now be more fully understood and
deconstructed with reference to the idea of a Gaietic
collective gestalt
 the persistent shame and fear, or conversely glory and
power, we still might feel when we ‘play god’ and create life
(and even the English expression ‘play god’)

51
 the persistent belief in gods across all cultures, who can
now be understood as either more individuated human
beings or Gaia
 the concept of a psychoemotional ecology for sentient
humanity, and the idea of empty or lost psychoemotional
niches like that of the Merlionsman archetype earlier
mentioned
 the bizarre and intense shame associated with
homosexuality and queer identity, which is likely tied up
with still-unknown events in the Fourth Mundansa
 the bizarre and intense shame associated with being mixed
race and/or creole, which is likely tied up with race- or
species-oriented prejudices from the Second Mundansa
 the deep fear we have of the night and of darkness in
general, likely intergenerational trauma resulting from the
Rabnanoti / the Ravenous Night / the Toba supereruption
 the increasing global predisposition to and interest in very
specific narratives of apocalypse, especially environmental
and/or psychoemotional disaster and control (First and
Fourth Mundansas), genocide and zombie / plague
narratives (Second and Third Mundansas), and nuclear or
paramilitary holocaust that sometimes is engendered by a
machine or artificial intelligence (Third Mundansa); the
particular focus on these and not other kinds of disasters
(e.g. solar flares, all of our furniture coming to life and
eating us) suggest that we are so particularly terrified of
them because we are unconsciously terrified of them
recurring (i.e. our level of terror is only this high because we
have already experienced such events as a species before)
 the actions of the group of people seeking to manipulate
and control global events as earlier mentioned; the original
intent would have been to somehow escape this apparently
cyclical nature of human creation and destruction (which
would also explain why Western culture still even struggles
with the notion of cyclical time to begin with) by eliding
general awareness of this cycle, while the more malevolent
or unthinking intent that may have emerged as a derivation
52
 of that would be unquestioned fidelity to the narrative of
millennialist apocalypse, to the extent that great lengths are
taken to literally force that narrative into being
 the general lack of understanding we have about most
extant ancient architecture, including most megalithic sites
around the world, and even some geological features such
as the Green Sahara and the Eye of Richat structure; to
understand why they even exist, further excavation of the
threads that the Roda Mundansa has begun to unify need to
be unpacked in greater detail so that the context and
function of these pieces of architecture can be more
carefully renegotiated and reclaimed
 why, as my students often ask me “there is so much trauma
in the world” (see below in the conclusion)
More information about the complete Roda Mundansa, and
subsequent detailed unpackings of each of the particular elements
of the Roda Mundansa, is available in the bibliography, and at the
author’s free online repository for all of this further sunyeskah,
known as The Orange Book (merlionsman.com/the-orange-book).

Conclusion: The Maliduensa and the Trauma of Memory

The sketch narrative above is provisional and still very much
dependent on, and in dialogue with, future archaeological and
archaeoastronomical work as both become available; indeed, it
perhaps will always be in a state of epistemic uncertainty, as has
been described earlier for other aspects of Kristang ways of being
and understanding the world. Nonetheless, by way of concluding
this paper and also framing why it has been a personal endeavor of
deep and sustained effort, one of the most salient and critical
features that the sketch narrative helps to clarify and validate in
particular is the existence of the silent plague of abuse or the
aforementioned Zombie Apocalypse, which both contemporary
Kristang culture and some of my non-Kristang students now call
the Maliduensa, or the Sickness or Disease. I capture it in my own
novel, Altered Straits, in the form of the Concordance, which is
excerpted below:
53
 Take your knife, steady in your hands, and make a small incision along
the back of the prawn. See the vein? Now you gently lift it out with the blunt
end of your knife, and once you have it between your fingers, tug it out.
The Concordance usually wanted the nervous system intact, in
order to ensure the neuro-cybernetic uplink took full effect. Or
something like that. Titus had sat through both mandatory OCS
lectures. Slides filled with walls of text had bombarded their glasses,
sheltering them from the clear, lucid horror of the images, the
videos, which most of his classmates had gone to look up almost
immediately afterward. But Titus hadn’t needed to. He’d been
there. He’d heard the cracking of bodies, the odd, wet, splintering
sound that put a sudden halt to the shrieks and the cries, the whine
of gears, the spatter of fresh, living blood, the thud as the body was
discarded, the snapping of cables as the treasure was reeled back to
the turbine craft hovering overhead.
But for the sounds of their movements, the Concordance was
otherwise completely silent; no crackle in the air, no pulsing, the
scratchy buzz of radio waves, nothing. Exactly how they
communicated remained a mystery; most scientists believed they
were in fact a gestalt, a communion of minds, natural and artificial.
Or just one mind. No one knew for sure. Nor did anyone know
what became of the minds that had once been human, and whether
they had been soldered to artificial ones, or enslaved…or
persuaded. Enticed. Perhaps consumed (K.M. Wong, Altered Straits,
pp. 23-24).
The plague, as so horrifically captured above and in so much of
our other contemporary science fiction and fantasy, appears to have
not only been created by some of our shared ancestors but seems
to have also at one point even achieved some form of sentience as
again represented by the Concordance above, considering further
the salience of the image of two gestalt-consciousnesses or hyper-
powered artificial intelligence, one good and one evil, dueling it out
across the world that has repeatedly emerged in recent science
fiction and fantasy (Wong, “Bong kung Mal”). Today, the
Maliduensa appears to have had that sentience quashed, but it
remains as virulent as ever, inviting so many across the world to
continue to willingly and painfully perpetuate the cycle of
54
intergenerational trauma and abuse that the Roda Mundansa
suggests has extended across 75,000 years of sentient human
history.
The reasons why stepping out of the immense shadow of that
cycle can also be extremely difficult should now also be visible, or
at least comprehensible, to the reader; the weight of so much lost
and incomplete history presses down upon each of our individual
psyches and makes us beholden to what often feels like
uncontrollable fear, shame, and terror at either history repeating
itself, or the control of one of the what seem to be abusive and
authoritarian entities that seek to escape this history by eroding
and/or eliding it taking over us completely. Yet, as my people and
community have repeatedly sought to show, we can also be the
agents and architects of our own freedoms, and the truth-seekers
and storytellers of our own new, very old, and very reclaimed
narratives.
The Roda Mundansa may not have captured the whole truth of
our existence, and may never be able to, but it absolutely speaks to
the persistence and resilience of the human spirit and
psychoemotional constructs that make up who we are today in all
our complex, brittle, broken and fierce sentience. These fragments
of different times continue to bubble to the surface of our inner
oceans, inviting us to explore what kind of new world we might
finally build for ourselves if we were to embrace, at last, all the
possible truths of the old.
Works Cited
Lebeuf, Arnold. Dating the Five Suns of Aztec Cosmology. The Inspiration of
Astronomical Phenomena: Proceedings of the fourth conference on the
Inspiration of Astronomical Phenomena, Magdalen College, Oxford, England, 3-
9 August 2003 and Culture and Cosmos, vol. 8, issue 1 and 2, Spring/Summer-
Autumn/Winter 2004, pp. 183–94.
Sarkissian, Margaret. Playing Portuguese: Constructing Identity in Malaysia’s
Portuguese Community. Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, vol. 11,
issue 2, 2002, pp. 215-232.
Scott-Elliot, W. The Lost Lemuria. Theosophy on Ancient Astronauts, edited by
Jason Colavito, 2012, pp. 27-78.

55
 Sim, Teddy Y.H. & Dennis De Witt. Trade, ethnic diversity and assimilation in
Portuguese-Creole communities in Melaka-Singapore region, 1870-1940. Proceedings
of Centro Científico e Cultural de Macau (Special issue), 2022, pp. 1-24.
Simon, Zoltan Andrew. The fifth sun, with ancient Mexican history an d
astronomy. Arts and Humanities Open Access Journal, vol. 2, issue 6, 2018,
pp. 374-380.
Wong, Kevin Martens. Altered Straits. Epigram Books, 2017.
Wong, Kevin Martens [@merlionsman / @zeekyang]. Bong kung Mal:
Unpacking the archetype of the Metarch and the origins of today’s concept of
good vs. evil in the Hedecene or Fourth Mundansa of modern humanity. The
Orange Book (Chapter 63), pp. 654-663, 7 Jan. 2023, https:/
/www.instagram.com/p/ CnHWck1SEOi/. Accessed 20 Mar. 2023.
Wong, Kevin Martens [@merlionsman / @zeekyang]. Roda Mundansa /
The Wheel of Time: Naming the first four magnata of humanity and excavating a
fuller story of our species since approximately 77,000 BCE. The Orange Book
(Chapter 26), pp. 305-314, 27 Nov. 2022, https://www.instagram.com/p/
ClduGGkSnCo/. Accessed 19 Mar. 2023.
Wong, Kevin Martens.[@merlionsman/@zeekyang].Sunyeskah/
Dreamfishing: Understanding the progenitor Kristang approach to metacognitive
epistemological inquiry. The Orange Book (Chapter 42), pp. 450-459, 8 Dec.
2022, https://www.instagram.com/p/Cl5OCicyOTT/. Accessed 20 Mar. 2023.

56
 Gastro-Nostalgic Reconstruction of the East
Bengali Refugee Identity: Unearthing the
Culinary Legacy through Select Partition
Fiction

Namrata Chowdhury
Introduction
“The shelf life of a photograph is measured in human years,
perhaps the shelf life of memory is measured in human tragedies.”
― Aniket Majumdar, ‘The Shelf Life’ (Majumdar 144)
“Memory (the deliberate act of remembering) is a form of
willed creation. It is not an effort to find out the way it really was
―that is research.” (Morrison 385)
Renowned Bengali author Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay was born
in a village that falls under present-day Bangladesh and thus his
writings are often populated by characters that have come from
East Pakistan. In one of his stories titled Goynar Baksho1 translated
into English as The Aunt Who Wouldn’t Die, Somlata the bride of the
Zamindar family scrunches up her nose when Pishima asks her if
she is cooking dried fish:
‘Is that shuntki you’re cooking? Smells delicious.’
‘Of course not. We don’t eat shuntki.’
‘Eyh! Queen Victoria! We don’t eat shuntki. Why not? Hot and
spicy with chillies and onion and garlic. Why don’t you eat it?
‘It stinks.’
‘Eeeeh! It stinks! Where’s the smell coming from then?’
(Mukhopadhyay 63)
Dried fish, known as ‘shuntki’ in the Bengali tongue was known to
be a favorite of the East Pakistani refugees who had come to the

11Goynar Baksho is literally translated as jewellery box, as the story is about

the post-Partition survival of a zamindar family, who sell of their lands for
survival and with no other valuables, desperately seek to get their hands on the
aunt (Pishima) jewellery box after her death.
57
India post-Partition and were known as Bangals, while the Ghotis2,
the native residents of West Bengal, wouldn’t be caught dead going
anywhere near it. The refugee influx had begun much before the
Partition of 1947, but the names ‘Ghoti’ and Bangal received critical
attention only during the Partition. While the Bangal is used as a
“pejorative term” (Chakravartty 85) to refer to the socio-culturally
impoverished East Bengali ‘other’, it is often intricately linked to
one’s food habits, which becomes the site of establishing
differences. Rizwana Shamshad writes about their ethnic
differences and “their food habits and daily meals” (Shamshad 7)
when he highlights how the Bangals have a fish component in daily
meals but it is not so with the Ghoti. These two categories, identities,
and expressions have been brought into the common parlance post-
Partition, but the duality and the ambiguity that is part of the Bangal
identity regarding citizenship have left scholars puzzled.
The Ghoti and the Bangal have been ubiquitous in their
appreciation of the hilsa, yet they are divided over their love for
football. While Bengal had primarily been divided for
administrative reasons in 1905, this division was later repealed. The
1947 Partition of the nation-state however resulted in the
fragmentation of the Bengal region, with West Bengal a part of
India or Hindustan and East Bengal a part of Pakistan, thereafter
known as East Pakistan. More than a celebration of the
independence of the nation from British colonial rule, what struck
historians about the Declaration of Independence and its aftermath
was the permanent change in the demographic profile of the two
Bengals that were now created. There is then a gradual escalation in
a scale starting with the smallest unit at the local level and going up

22Uditi Sen in the Preface to her book Citizen Refugee: Forging the Indian
Nation After Partition refers to the Partition as “deshbhag” (Sen ix), how it is
usually known in Bengali and provides the definitions of the two terms that
emerge as categories in the aftermath of the Partition, the ‘ghoti’ and the ‘bangal’.
She writes “a Ghati was a Hindu whose family came from the western districts
of Bengal, while a Bangal was a Hindu whose family came from the eastern
districts of Bengal ― those areas, that went to Pakistan, and eventually became
Bangladesh.” (Sen ix) The Ghoti can be spelled as Ghati too. The Bangal can be
spelled as Bangaal too.
58
to the national, from the differences and sameness of the Ghoti and
the Bangal, of the West Bengali and the East Bengali and the Indian
and the East Pakistani later Bangladeshi. The question of identity
then similarly escalates, as the question “edeshi na odeshi” which
translates as “from this country or that?” (Sen, Preface ix) can be
contextualized in Anasua Basu Raychaudhury’s reading of the term
“desh” which corresponds to “homelands” that have been imagined
and narrated and lived, and exist on the maps of memory.
(Raychaudhury 5653) Raychaudhury further confirms that this idea
of the homeland for the displaced “remains only in their memory.”
(Raychaudhury 5653)
Bengal became a witness to large-scale migrations and the
state's struggle to feed the extra mouths even as rations were sent
specifically for the displaced. These two important discourses were
born out of the Partition and the “refugee crisis” (Sen, Introduction
2) in its aftermath ― the first being the recognition of the East
Bengalis as different and the consequent naming of this faction as
Bangal, and the second being the relationship of the Bangal identity
with hunger, survival on government ration, in short, a gastro-
political identity that is at loggerheads with the national identity.
But that is not where scholarship exhausts itself as 1947 is no
longer looked upon as a singular historical event but a “process” as
Sen eagerly points out that “[t]he figure of the displaced minority,
variously classified as migrants, , refugees, displaced persons,
muhajirs and evacuees, emerges as a central figure in these
histories.” (Sen, Introduction 2-3) Sen has been instrumental in
giving a new dimension to this figure as she connects displacement
to the rehabilitation program by the government and argues that
the displaced then “claimed to be both refugees and citizens of their
putative homelands.” (Sen, Introduction 3) For Sen, it is the
“simultaneous iteration of refugee-ness and national belonging”
(Sen, Introduction 3) that sets up an oppositional narrative with the
examination of the oral narratives of the Partition survivors
offering an alternative version to the official history that regards
them as mere numbers. As for the Bangal, the memories of the
homes lost and the places they occupied after they were uprooted
came together to make up their identity.
59
Dipesh Chakrabarty highlighted the dichotomy of memorializing
the stops in their journey and the coinage of the “two different
words for a house, basha and bari” where the former is always
indicative of a “temporary place of residence” and the latter reeks
of permanence and ancestry and lineage. (Chakrabarty 2144) The
gap between the two spaces lets literary scholar Ananya Jahanara
Kabir step in and say that “[m]emory reassembles cartographies
defined by the poetry of place names” (Kabir 5) and the Bangal
could thus have an opportunity to coexist with the two, and not
choose either. The simultaneity of identifying with the bari and the
basha, with the refugee identity at the same time that they claim to
be citizens then leads this chapter to discover how food memory
aids them in drawing over the older maps. As Kabir writes, “East
Pakistan remains an uncomfortable, even embarrassing aberration
within the teleology of the nation” (Kabir 2) and for the Partition
scholar, unearthing the memory of homes lost and a nation lost can
only be recovered in traces. This chapter proposes to look into
select migrant and refugee narratives from the Bengal borders to
address the ambiguity that lies at the heart of displacement, through
the language of food. My chapter would argue that the Bangal
identity exists through affective citizenship as they re-write their
belongingness through food maps that challenge cartographical
borders.
Analysis
Memory is selective, deliberate, unconscious, fragmentary, and
elusive. Unearthing memories is a mammoth task that the
researcher undertakes, visiting archives and literary texts, never
questioning the authenticity of these narratives, but securing
oblique ways of challenging and contesting official recorded
history. Scholars have to this end highlighted “that works of fiction
have specific, genuinely literary techniques at hand to plumb the
connection between memory and history.” (Neumann 333) To this
end when the chapter proposes to focus on the implicit connection
between food and memory in the re-writing of the refugee identity
in the aftermath of the Partition, it refers to fictional retellings in
the novel and the short story. This chapter would attempt to step
60
beyond the “teleological narratives of history” (Matos 428) and
engage with “literature as a medium of cultural memory.” (Erll and
Rigney 111) Literary texts and the narrativizing of a historical
process therefore can be subjected to multiple acts of remembering
and forgetting, as Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney proclaim literary texts
become a “medium of cultural remembrance.” (Erll and Rigney 112)
As For this chapter, I consider fictional texts, a novel by Bhaswati
Ghosh titled Victory Colony 1950 and a short story titled ‘The Shelf
Life’ by Aniket Majumdar, published in the collection No Return
Address, edited by Manjira Majumdar.
Bhaswati Ghosh’s Victory Colony 1950 finds Amala in the
Sealdah station premises with her young brother Kartik, whom she
loses in the chaotic crowd of refugees that has swamped the area.
Amala is rescued by Manas and a group of other boys who have
come from the Gariahata Refugee Relief Centre. Manas takes her to
the Relief and Rehabilitation Office where she if officially labeled a
refugee and then transports her along with the other refugees they
have collected to the camp. Manas’ diary entry dated 16th December
1949 is a grim reminder of the circumstances: “All of them had a
home, a patch of land, cows and hens to call their own” and yet they
have been left with neither their “dignity” nor their “freedom.”
(Ghosh 15) The novel documents Amala’s journey as she finds herself
in the camp and eventually makes her way to a land they forcefully
occupied and settled in, naming the colony “Bijoy Nagar (Victory
Colony).” (Ghosh 96)
Amala remembers her bari by her memory of the tank full of
fish that her father maintained. This memory of hers was triggered
when she gets in the queue to receive “their daily dole of watery
rice-lentil porridge” (Ghosh 9) in the refugee camp and even Manas
would confirm that the “gruel” cooked for the refugees at the camp
tasted liked “sand.” (Ghosh 12) The image of plenty that she
remembers comes in the wake of the food scarcity they are faced
with at the camp, “the inadequate food rations” (Ghosh 17)
narrativizes Prafulla Kumar Chakrabarti’s claim in The Marginal Men
that these refugees fought their “rootlessness, their poverty and
hunger.” (Chakrabarti 48) There’s also a government sanction “for
a hundred millimeters of milk” for a child below the age of nine
61
which is welcome. But the government sanctions for food
provision for the adults were not as interesting as the former as it
took the responsibility to provide the refugees with “one meal a
day: the afternoon gruel.” (Ghosh 19) The volunteers at the camp
had to contribute their own money to ensure that the residents at
the camp received breakfast.
The refugee identity at this juncture is fashioned when after
their consumption of the government dole, and eating guarantees
the maintenance of their refugee status. The “migration juggernaut”
(Ghosh 35) as Manas calls it, looks into these refugees as mere
numbers, but through an exchange of food and memories of the
bari they left behind, individual voices can be heard. The
camaraderie between Amala, Urmila, and Chitra Mashi3 over “muri
makha”4 (Ghosh 56) is unmistakably a sign that the refugee is at the
same time a citizen. Chitra Mashi takes this opportunity to go into
the details of this preparation, and she lists out the ingredients that
would make a mouth-watering muri-makha: “chopped coconut,
green chilies, chanachur 5 , finely-sliced onions, roasted chickpeas,
cucumber pieces, and extra-pungent mustard oil.” (Ghosh 57)
Amala remembers how her mother used to prepare the same for
them back in their bari and through her fond remembrance she
belongs to both homes, both nations. Amala remembers picking up
the “shapla, the slender water lily” (Ghosh 83) stems along with her
friends back home when they had been out playing. These grew in
abundance in ponds and were foraged to be either eaten raw or
converted into “shapla boras, fritters.” (Ghosh 83) It is interesting to
note here how Amala remembers details of this recipe, from how

3 Mashi is a Bengali term of address for an aunt. This is used even when one is not
referring to actual blood-relatives but the term doubles as endearment for someone
who is older than the addressee, and also speaks of their respect for the person.
4 Muri-makha as Chitra Mashi would say is a “puffed rice snack irresistible.”

(Ghosh 57) This is a snack which is eaten in Bengali households and even in
other states, but the difference lies in the other components that are mixed with
the puffed rice. This is a snack that is sold by vendors on trains and even on the
streets of Bengal.
5 Chanachur is often called a Bombay mix which is consumed as a snack and

consists of fried lentils and chickpeas and gram flour fried savouries and peanuts
and salt and a spice mix.
62
the lily stems would be chopped to how they would then be
washed and thoroughly cleaned, soaked in brine, and then coated in
batter and deep fried in oil.
The tenth chapter in the novel has Amala remembering and
reminiscing about her bari, as she is now within the camp. All of
her memories flood her at once, right before she joins the party of
agitators who would grab the empty land where they would later
settle. She further remembers the “jackfruit-roasting, mango-
bursting Baishakh6 day” when she was helping her mother, Sumitra,
make “boris”, “sun-dried lentil nuggets”, that would be put into fish
curries and other vegetable preparations. (Ghosh 85-86) Amala was
very fond of these nuggets and her brother hardly got any, as she
ate as many as she could. She remembers this, now that she has lost
her brother at Seldah station, because this day when the “boris” was
made was the day that Karik had gone away with his friends to look
at a steamer launch, leaving everyone at home worried about his
whereabouts.
That Amala is a “citizen refugee” (Sen, Introduction 3) her
relationship to the camp food, or the one that she had back home,
seeks to etch out a “memorial topography shaped by contradictory
feelings of guilt, hope, fear, shame, and euphoria.” (Kabir 4) To
Amala, it is not to Barisal (Ghosh 14) that she belongs, but actual
places have been erased and in her mind map remains memories of
food that her mother cooked, food that she ate, food that she
loved, and food that she shared, and fought over, thus spaces she
inhabited, spaces she called her bari, fragments of which remain
with her through her memories. A.J. Kabir has in this light rightly
pointed out that: “The [food memorial] maps are constituted
through the distinctions between ‘bari’ (ancestral home) and ‘basha’
(temporary place of residence).” (Kabir 5)
In the colony set up by the refugees, Manas, and the other
volunteers were treated to lunch cooked by Malati Mashi, an

6Baisakh is a month accorsing to the Hindu calendar which corresponds to the

months of April May, from the mid of April to mid-May. According to this
calendar, all Hindu months usually begin in the middle of the Gregorian calendar
month that is normally followed and accepted worldwide.
63
“elaborate meal: mashed pumpkin served with a dash of mustard
oil, fried pumpkin peels, and khesari dal, grass peas cooked in a
thin, runny soup, and thick grains of rice, malodorous with age.”
(Ghosh 100) Cooking and producing dishes they ate back home,
and feeding it to these Ghoti volunteers, they continuously challenge
the binary that separates them, and lay claim to citizenship, as Anita
Mannur would say “food becomes both intellectual and emotional
anchor” for the rootless. (Mannur 11) Some of these refugees were
working from within the camp, “making pickles and bori” (Ghosh
101) which they would then sell to the zamindars and make money.
These women in the camp possess the skills necessary for making
the pickles and the lentil nuggets, as they had assisted their families
back home, as Amala did, and by selling these and feeding it to the
Ghotis they find their own identity. It is not only the memory of
what they ate in their bari but replicating these dishes in their basha
that empowers them, and as Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney would say
this “memorial medium” goes beyond the “institutionalized
historiography” (Erll and Rigney 112) of the refugee as either “the
victim or the victor.” (Sen, 37)
When Amala is invited to Chitra Mashi’s place, she eats the fish
curry, but is immediately questioned by Mashi if she found it to her
liking as she was “a Bangaal girl” and the fish is cooked differently
in a “Ghoti” household. Amala promises to feed Chitra Mashi and
Manas when she proposes to “cook the things my mother used to
make” (Ghosh 106) and Tulasi Srinivas deems it one of the ways in
which women engage “gastro-nostalgically” (Srinivas 193)
recreating their lost bari. For Srinivas, attempting to recreate recipes
“as their mother made it” helps the individuals map themselves
onto fictional spaces of belonging, where their act of “food
provisioning” is “fuelled by” what she calls a “meta-narrative of
loss.” (Srinivas 193) When Chitra Mashi brings Amala and Malati a
bag of “edible treats”, it is time for them to celebrate not their
differences, but their sameness. Amala is nostalgic as she smells the
“chalta7 pickle” that Chitra Mashi had brought her, and “the taste of
chalta pickle as her mother made it tickled her tongue’s memory” of

7 Chalta is the Bengali name for elephant apple.

64
her lost bari. (Ghosh 113) She remembers how Firdous Chachi
would present them with the fruit that her mother would proceed
to turn into “several weeks’ worth of chutney and pickle” and
Amala needed to help her mother with the “cutting and peeling”
and boiling it in turmeric and salt water. (Ghosh 113) That is not
all, the whole process floats before Amala remembers the heady
scent of the pungent mustard oil tempered by “paanchphoron”8 and
then the elephant apples and the jaggery all put in the wok in a
synchronized and rehearsed movement. (Ghosh 113) Chitra Mashi
also brought them containers filled with “shrimp cooked with fresh
coconut and mustard paste, narkel naaru9, coconut balls drenched in
melted jaggery” (Ghosh 113) Another such moment of nostalgic
recreation comes later in the novel when Moyna, a resident of the
colony is seen “frying soru chakli, thin rice-lentil crepes” and sharing
it with a few other families. (Ghosh 187) However, what is
remarkable in this instance is that she serves it with a side of
“freshly-made mango pickle”, and not as Amala remembers her
mother serving it with a side of a “dry potato tawrkari.10” (Ghosh
187) These “substitutions” have existed and been a very part of
nostalgic remembrances of the homeland and as Tulasi Srinivas
argues, “authenticity is not questioned, as long as the copies that
appear authentic are provided, as symbolic anchors on which
identification can unfold.” (Srinivas 207)
The exchange is not one-way as Amala brings Chitra Mashi
boxes of “khichuri” and sides of potato and brinjal fry to be had
with it, so Mashi could taste the food that is cooked by the Bangal
and give her seal of approval or reject it by failing them in the
department of superior or inferior cooking and taste. Chitra Mashi
is not satisfied eating out of the lunchboxes that Amala would pack

8 Paanchphoron is a mixture of five whole spices used to temper a variety of

vegetable dishes in the Bengali cuisine.
9 This is a coconut dessert that is made out of grated coconut which is heated in

a wok along with a sweetener that is usually jaggery or sugar and often dried
whole milk chunks. There is a variation in the recipe as different households
tweak the recipes according to their taste preferences.
10 Tawrkari is a Bengali term for a curry, which could be a dry preparation or

even with gravy.

65
the meal in, and would thus make her way to the colony to share
the communal meal on a table with the refugees themselves, deeply
appreciative of its taste. Her participation and her “raving about”
the meal that was offered to her as “scrumptious” (Ghosh 141)
establishes a moment that contests and challenges the stereotyping
of the East Bengali Hindu refugee as a Bengal based on their
culinary alterity. Amala also manages to surprisingly win over
everyone with her capacity to excel with her cooking skills as she
creates a dessert that hits the right notes on the Ghoti as well as the
Bangal taste palate. She creates a unique “sandesh” by flavoring it
with “fresh nolen gur, the palm jaggery that intoxicated taste buds
across Bengal every winter” that was gifted to them by a neighbor
who had acquired it from his relatives who owned palm trees.
(Ghosh 134) Not only did Manas and Chitra Mashi approve of the
Amala’s dessert, but even Manas’ mother approves of the “nolen
gurer Sandesh.” (Ghosh 137)
Eating food that reminds one of home is not the only way of
problematically recreating affective domains of culinary citizenship,
as the residents of the colony have multifarious ways of engaging
with food, memory, and identity. In the colony that came up as a
result of “jabar-dakhal”11 has the women pool all their ingredients
together to cook “around an open fire”, so this “communal
cooking” facilitated “camaraderie” as well as “economic prudence.”
(Ghosh 108) The other method is which they attempt to recreate
their lost past is by growing their own produce of foraging for the
same ingredients that were available to them back home. Amala
speaks of the “greens” they would collect from the pond close to
the colony, which would then be fried in mustard oil, with a
tempering of nigella seeds to be had with rice. This pond also
became their source of fish, which the “resident fisherman” would
visit and bring in their catch of “small fish” to be had with their
meals. (Ghosh 113) Nitai, one of the colony residents from Khulna

11 Jabar-dakhal is the Bengali term for forceful occupation, and it is connected

to a land in this case. The ones who have staked their claim on the land are not
the legal owners of the land or property and thus had to fight with the owner , to
maintain their hold over it.
66
district, had originally descended from a family of farmers and he
immediately “work[ed] his magic on it” and planted sweet potatoes
and engages in “small-scale farming”. (Ghosh 139) This
engagement with the land can be seen as an attempt to “keep the
tradition alive” as these social actors would have done had they not
been displaced and therefore create an instance of food production
as a “narrative of affiliative desire” (Srinivas 193) for one’s bari and
desh. In the colony as in the camp and the food map on which
exists the Bangal identity, there is an erasure of smaller differences
of actual districts and places, and people from Barisal and
Mymensingh, and Jessore is all cohesively imagined to lament the
loss of a common bari and recreate it through their communal
cooking and eating practices.
The final chapter in Amala’s life that turns her into a “citizen
refugee” as Uditi Sen would say in a performance of “simultaneous
iteration of refugee-ness and national belonging” (Sen, Introduction
3) she is introduced to the Ghoti homecooked delicacies when she
marries Manas and at the same time to the famous food joints in
the city of Kolkata. The food prepared by Sharoda, the Brahmin
cook employed by Manas’ family is served to the new bride and
Amala sits down to eat “the luchi and dry potato dish, along with
some split Bengal grams cooked with coconut” and to her surprise,
it tasted “a bit sweet.” (Ghosh 233) Her reaction to the Ghoti food
is summed in a single remark that celebrates her alterity and refuses
complete assimilation: “The food here is definitely different” (Ghosh 233)
However, her introduction to the spice shops in New Market has
the exact opposite effect on her as she finds herself not appalled
but in a comfortable space among the “sea of spices.” (Ghosh 168-
170) She is mesmerized by this collection and speaks to the Muslim
shopkeeper to identify the spices and learns from him the variety of
dishes they go into. She buys two of these for her home in the
colony, to be used by Malati Mashi who took care of the cooking
while Amala was away working. To Amala both the spices she has
chosen are different from the ones she has previously seen but she
nevertheless compares them to the ones she is familiar with,
engaging in a narrative of circular self-referentiality that brings her
back to her memory of the spices used at home. The “shahjeera”
67
appears to be “a darker and slimmer variety of cumin” and the
“kababchini” resembled the black pepper “globules”, “but
apparently had a different aroma, stronger and warmer.” (Ghosh
171) Both of these experiences that Amala has, lead one to
question the very notion of “loss and retrieval” that is built on the
understanding that a “recovery” is possible of something that is
“unchanged” and “essential” (Srinivas 210) which is never the case
for the displaced, or the Bangal in this context.
A line from Aniket Majumdar’s short story ‘The Shelf Life’ is
quoted at the beginning of the paper, and refer to it here, this is a
story about a second-generation migrant who immigrates to
Phoenix in Arizona, United States of America after spending a
considerable amount of time studying in South Carolina. The story
is about an old photograph that Pathik finds in his father’s room,
of the two of them, arrested in time, and although it is not ‘lost’, its
‘retrieval’ sends Pathik into a rumination of the past. Pathik’s
memory of growing up in the city of Kolkata is intricately linked to
his memory of the stories he has heard of his father’s ancestral
home in East Bengal. Pathik remembers the story of an uncle who
had traveled to Rajabajar in Kolkata all on his own aged nine, as he
“boarded the Dhaka Mail from Pangsha, his ancestral village in East
Bengal” in the year 1942. (Majumdar 135) Pathik’s story is different
from Amala’s as he had never been to East Bengal, but he has only
heard of stories about the ancestral home and his father leaving
behind the village of Goalondo, and imagined meeting Karim
Chacha, a figment of his imagination, born from the stories he has
heard. (Majumdar 143-144) He could imagine the train route as he
knew the places' names and imagined traveling through these in his
mind, starting from Sealdah and culminating in Goalondo. Pathik
lays claim to his East Bengali identity when he speaks of the space
he had imagined as “his ancestral village”, which he would reach
traveling through “places like Chandpur, Narayanganj, Madaripur,
Barisal.” (Majumdar 143) It is to be noted here that any attempt to
“retrieve a glimpse of the past” that was “erased―and, on
prompting, recalled,” (Kabir 2) necessarily involves a “consequent
warping of time and space” (Srinivas 192) as the “memorial
topography” (Kabir 4) subjectively re-maps spaces.
68
 Pathik brings a box of pastries from Nahoum’s, the Jewish-
owned bakery in New Market, which the two had visited back in
1962 when Pathik was quite young. Upon holding that box Pathik’s
father “closed his eyes briefly and inhaled deeply” (Majumdar 143)
and the aroma turned him suddenly into the young man that had
taken Pathik to the shop years ago. The “man with wispy silver-
grey hair and bushy eyebrows” is immediately transformed and
transported to a memory both father and son had hoarded from
their visit, when they had bought three kinds if pastries and had
carried it home neatly packed in a “cardboard box, with Nahoum’s
written in blue on top.” (Majumdar 142) While this is an act of
remembering, Majumdar insists on putting on Pathik’s food map a
notable loss as he would write: “His [Pathik’s] family’s post-
partition life began when they left behind the memory of the
anadromous ilish (hilsa) and left for Kolkata in 1948.” (Majumdar
144) The final space on Pathik’s map is Phoenix and his kitchen
gardening and tending to his own roots has led him to grow
“Malabar spinach and Rajanigandha bushes” (Majumdar 134) that he
had been tending to for over two years, with close attention and
monitoring, like his well-preserved memories. Pathik and his
construction of an identity that is no longer that of an East Bengali
refugee but one where he is a participant in simultaneous
participation in culinary legacy and experimenting with culinary
novelty. The ambiguity in Pathik’s identity vis-à-vis the hilsa,
Nahoum’s, and the Malabar spinach can be summed up by Anita
Mannur’s words which argues that “the experience of dislocation,
modulated by a nostalgic longing for the familiar, is also deeply
rooted in the creation of imaginary fictions which distort the lived
realities of food…" (Mannur 11-12)
Conclusion
This chapter uncovers the role of food and memory in the re-
writing of the refugee identity in the case of the East Bengali
refugee, as it offers them a privileging of the “affect and emotions”
in the claim to citizenship, thereby destabilizing “citizenship as a
purely rational and administrative exercise of state authority
through attention to the role of affect in production of regimes of
69
inclusion and exclusion.” (Gregorio and Merolli 934) Matters of
citizenship have been a discursive interdisciplinary field in the
construction of the identity of the migrant and the refugee and the
displaced as scholars would say,“the practice of citizenship has a
central role to play in any understanding of the conditions under
which one can participate or be excluded from political life.”
(Gregorio and Merolli 934) Citizenship studies have been through
what is called an “affective turn” and the term used “to designate a
generic category of emotions and feelings, including embodies and
sensory feelings through which we experience the world, and
through which world, and through which worlds, subjects and
objects are enacted and brought forth.” (Fortier 1038-39) The East
Bengali in the aftermath of the Partition emerges as a refugee and a
citizen, not mutually exclusive categories, but a rare combination of
both in Uditi Sen’s coinage “citizen refugee.” (Sen, Introduction 3)
The ‘citizen refugees gastro-nostalgic reconstruction of their bari
and desh is a continuous performance that leads one towards gastro-
political12 citizenship and belonging.
Works Cited
Appadurai, Arjun. "Gastro-politics in Hindu South Asia." American Ethnologist
8.3, Symbolism and Cognition (1981): 494-511. <https://www.jstor.org/
stable/644298 >.
Chakrabarti, Prafulla Kumar. "The Squatters' Colonies." The Marginal Men: The Refugees
and the left political syndrome in West Bengal. Calcutta: Lumiere Books, 2005. 33-66.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. "Remembered Villages: Representation of Hindu-
Bengali Memories in the Aftermath of the Partition." Economic and Political Weekly
(1996): 2143-2151. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/i397454>.
Chakravartty, Gargi. "The Crossover: Towards a New Social and Cultural
Milieu." Coming Out of Partition: Refugee Women of Bengal. Bluejay Books, 2005. 79-107.
Erll, Astrid and Ann Rigney. "Literature and the production of cultural memory:
Introduction." European Journal of English Studies 10.2 (2006): 111-115.
Fortier, Anne-Marie. "Afterword: acts of affective citizenship? Possibilities
and limitations." Citizenship Studies 20.8 (2016): 1038-1044.

12The term ‘gastro-politics’ has been borrowed from the work of anthropologist
Arjun Appadurai. Appadurai looks upon ‘gastro-politics’ as the “complex”
sphere of laws and policies that have “two diametrically opposed semiotic
functions”, either to celebrate heterogeneity of the food actors or to essentialize
and homogenize them under a social rubric. (Appadurai 494)
70
 Ghosh, Bhaswati. Victory Colony 1950. New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2020.
Gregorio, Michael Di and Jessica L. Merolli . "Introduction: affective citizenship
and the politics of identity, control, resistance." Citizenship Studies 20.8 (2016): 933-942.
Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. "Utopias Eroded and Recalled: Intellectual Legacies
of East Pakistan." South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies (2018): 1-19.
Majumdar, Aniket. "The Shelf Life." No Return Address: Partition and Stories of
Displacement. Ed. Manjira Majumdar. New Delhi: Vitasta, 2023. 134-144.
Mannur, Anita. "Culinary Nostalgia: Authenticity, Nationalism, and
Diaspora." MELUS 32.4, Food in Multi-Ethnic Literature (2007): 11-31.
<http://www.jstor.org/stable/30029829>.
Matos, Sérgio Campos. "History, Memory and Fiction: What Boundaries?"
Historia da Historiografia 8.17 (2015): 427-439.
Morrison, Toni. "Memory, Creation, And Writing." Thought 59.235 (1984): 385-390.
Mukhopadhyay, Shirshendu. The Aunt Who Wouldn't Die. Trans. Arunava
Sinha. Kolkata: BEE Books, 2017.
Neumann, Birgit. "The Literary Representation of Memory." Cultural Memory
Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar
Nünning. New York: De Gruyter, 2010. De Gruyter,.
Raychaudhury, Anasua Basu. "Nostalgia of 'Desh', Memories of Partition."
Economic and Political Weekly (2004):5653-5660. <https://www.jstor.org/ stable/
4415984 >.
Sen, Uditi. "Introduction." Citizen Refugee: Forging the Indian Nation after
Partition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 1-20.
Sen, Uditi. "Preface." Citizen Refugee: Forging the Indian Nation after Partition.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. ix-xi.
—. "The Myths Refugees Live By Memory and History in the Making of
Bengali refugee identity." Modern Asian Studies 48.1 (2014): 37-76.
<https://www.jstor.org/stable/24494182>.
Shamshad, Rizwana. "Bengaliness, Hindu nationalism and Bangladeshi migrants
in West Bengal, India." Asian Ethnicity (2016): 1-19.
Srinivas, Tulasi. "'As Mother Made It': The Cosmopolitan Indian Family,
'Authentic' Food And the Construction of Cultural Utopia." International Journal of
Sociology of the Family 32.2, Globalization and the Family (2006): 191-221.
<http://www.jstor.org/stable/23030195>

71
 Embodiment of Mnemonic Sites:
Representation of Theyyam in Kantara Movie

Anuranj C. K.
Introduction
The investigation of the connections between culture and memory
has taken on a variety of forms. "Remembering" is a term that is
figuratively transported to the cultural level. Other ways of referring
to the past include myth, religious memory, political history,
trauma, familial recall, or generational memory. This paper tries to
critically evaluate the presence of the folk art, Theyyam (Bhoota Kola
in Kannda) in popular culture with a special reference to the
Kannada movie, Kantara. Theyyam, a ritualistic dance is performed
in Tulunadu (currently part of southern Karnataka and Northern
Kerala). It can be analyzed that Theyyam is the unconscious memory
of the social system which is materialized through folk art. Kantara
movie used this artistic form as a main symbolic tool to examine
the existing dialectics of the social system, mainly rooted in feudal
economic structure.
Historical memory is not what it used to be now, which is how
contemporary memory differs from memory in earlier societies. It
used to signify how a community or a country related to its past,
but the line separating the present from the past used to be firmer
and more stable than it appears to be now. Through contemporary
means of replication like photography, cinema, recorded music, and
the Internet, as well as the proliferation of historical scholarship
and an ever-hungrier museum culture, untold recent and not-so-
recent pasts have an impact on the present. In ways that were
unfathomable in previous ages, the past has truly become a part of
the present.
The performance of Theyyam (see Figure I.) is the remembrance
of what happened in the past, a society of diverse ethnic and
cultural differences. There are more than four hundred Theyyam’s
performed in the region and all of it has their own myth associated

72
with them. These stories invoke the disastrous society of the past.
Theyyam, here is functioning as an embodied memory, in which the
past is situated in the art and artistic performances. Various studies
on Theyyam have concluded that it is a repository of many critical
engagements. Theyyam and its cultural aura are intertwined with
deep ecology, the stories behind them have profoundly against the
structure of the patriarchal system and its vigor and anger against
caste atrocities of the past and so on. The paper uses
psychoanalytic approaches and cultural memory studies to
understand the symbolic relation of Theyyam to the cultural memory
of the collective group. The movie, Kantara’s portrayal of Theyyam
popularises this folk art and valorizes this cultural memory in varied
ways.

Figure I. Theyyam is being performed before the devotees

Methodology
Erika Apfelbaum’s study on memory studies titled “Halbwachs and
the Social Properties of Memory”, depicts the establishment of
memory studies as a disciplinary field by Halbwach
Halbwachs, in delineating the social and collective dimensions
of individual memory, tracing their dialectical links in the process of
elaboration and transformation, in addition to analyzing the
mechanisms and modes of dissemination of collective memory, laid
73
the theoretical foundations for a comprehensive approach to the
study of the social sciences, providing an integrated perspective
from which to conceptualize the historical, social, and individual
components of human behavior (77).
Cultural memory shouldn’t be confined only to the past, yet it
has to be understood in a more corporeal and dynamic spectrum
with its grandeur of contemporaneity as well as its progression
towards the future. Cultural memory studies is a nascent academic
phenomenon and transdisciplinary in its method of inquiry. It
collaborates and coordinates varied disciplinary fields such as
theology, philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, literature, history,
sociology, anthropology, media studies, and so on, in order to
delineate and synthesize varied cultural traditions. Being an
interdisciplinary project, cultural memory studies bring forth
multifarious terminologies together and always foster dialogue
between culture and memory. As Astrid Erll (2008) contends that
cultural memory is the combination of three different subservient
concepts such as ‘social memory’, ‘material memory’ and ‘mental
memory.’ Most of the time, when studies were conducted, it was
found that all three dimensions of cultural memory intersect and
overlap with each other and that shows the quality of interplay and
territorial transcendence of this novel academic field.
Cultural memory studies have identified two major types of
memory; on the one hand, it works at the individual level and the
other at the collective level. On a broader sense, individual memory
functions cognitively, however, not on a full-scale subjective position
since it is perpetually shaped by external factors whereas cultural
memory or collective memory have the intersectional nature that Erll
argues,
Societies do not remember literally but much of what is done
to reconstruct a shared past bears some resemblance to the
processes of individual memory, such as the selectivity and
perspectivity inherent in the creation of versions of the past
according to present knowledge and needs. (Erll 5)
At this juncture, this study focuses upon the collective nature of
memory on Theyyam which is performed by the particular
community to reignite the past memory. Identity development and
74
memory are not mutually incompatible processes in which one
memory exclusively shapes one identity and another memory
shapes another identity. Instead, because memories are
heterogeneous, they interact and work in a variety of ways over
time, affecting how we perceive ourselves, our experiences in the
world, and how we comprehend global issues. Hence, contrary to
what proponents of competitive memory would have you believe,
memory should not ideally be a zero-sum game with conflicts
arising over limited resources. Both individual and collective
memory and connections to the past are possible, yet neither is
more significant than the other.
Since Holocaust memory work had become a global concern,
memory studies started to gain traction as a field of study in the
1980s. Social scientists have grown increasingly interested in the
study of shared memories and social mnemonic activities from
history to psychology, via sociology, anthropology, or cultural
studies. As post-Communist Europe, post-totalitarian South
America, and post-genocide Africa started to come to terms with
their terrible pasts, new memory sites were gradually opened to a
public inquiry and remembering. The discussion of memories is
more prevalent than ever today. Its cultural roles, such as self-image
formation and maintenance, historical consciousness, group
membership, or maintaining a balance between the past, present,
and future, are therefore inextricably tied to personal and social
identity, historical traumas, or redistributive justice.
Theyyam: Profusion of History, Myth, and Memory
In this sense, Theyyam as a site of cultural memory overlaps
variations on which members of the community remember the
shared past collectively. Theyyam is a traditional ritual and it
functions as a creation and training of memory. (See Figure II) The
expression of a "collective shared knowledge of the past, on which
a group's sense of unity and individuality is built," is what is done in
public at "sites of memory," which are locations where groups of
people congregate. In addition to introducing new connotations,
the group that visits these locations inherits earlier meanings
associated with the event. For the display and preservation of
75
memorial sites, such action is essential. Sites of memory lose their
original impact as such groupings disperse or vanish and may even
completely vanish.

Figure II. Theyyam and its grandeur of colors

Theyyams are sites of memory with a life history. All the

Theyyams have a particular commemorative purpose which in the
initial stage is constructed, then institutionalized, and finally
routinized through moments of remembrance at particular kaavu or
kottam. Most of the time folks of memory fade away when the
social groups who started the remembrance might no longer have a
connection with the process. Contrary to that, Theyyams in these
areas, generationally, with more vigor and grandeur, continue to be
a strong presence. With the advent of popular culture like films,
Theyyams have got a profound influence across territories. Unlike
other Kerala classical art forms such as Kathakali and
Mohiniyattam, theyyam cannot be removed from its very roots. It
shows the specificity of Theyyam as a site of memory. As Jay
Winter (2010) asserts that the quality of sites of memory on the
function of materializing a particular message, “commemoration at
76
sites of memory is an act arising out of a conviction, shared by a
broad community, that the moment recalled is both significant and
informed by a moral message. Sites of memory materialize that
message.” (Winter, 313)
In the discursive field of memory studies, ritual is a complicated
term as ritual cannot be categorized under history or personal
memory, or even collective memory, yet it overlaps against all of
these categorizations. Theyyam is a religious ritual performance that
is only performed in Northern Kerala by Scheduled Castes and
Scheduled Tribes. It is one of Kerala's most ancient kinds of
folk art. It is mostly performed by male artists and is made up of
rituals and traditions that date back thousands of years. The social
order is subverted through the cultural and ritual performance
known as Theyyam in Northern Kerala, which is seen as a
reflection of the war cry against the caste system and oppression.
The performer's finalized deity represents the fleeting outrage of
the oppressed and exploited people as a whole. The creative and
cultural acts that serve as a potent form of protest and resistance
against an unfair social structure provide aesthetic pleasure and act
as memories or impressions of the ongoing struggle against social
disparity. Religious rituals and festivals have long promoted the
spiritual beliefs and cultural affiliation of communities through
their vividly colored and energetically exuberant acts.
Raghavan Payyanad argues that "Theyyam should have been a
primitive form of ritual dance. The transformations in the social
structure, cultural transformations, were well reflected in it. At one
point in time, everyone should have participated in the ritual dance.
Today a section of people performs it with the support of all others
for the wellbeing of one and all."
Memory Against Oppression
Memory Against Caste: Theyyam is the repository of all sorts of
memory. Mostly, in the orbit of memory studies, it has to be read
as the embodiment of memory against oppression. Though the
feudal structures have been dismantled in Kerala, Theyyam has the
potentiality to reinvoke all the symbolization of feudal hierarchy.
Theyyam performance is the combination of folk music, songs
77
from myths (thottam pattu), dialogues, oracles, different attires, and
so on to reinvent itself in the form of Theyyam. Modernization has
drastically reshaped the landscapes of Kerala, yet, these
performance places survived as testimonials of the feudal economic
system, now not in the form of oppression but in the form of
‘remembrance.’ It has to be explained how the site of Theyyam
become a memorial space of oppression. It can be understood
from the historical/mythological story attached to all Theyyam that
these are the reincarnations of Dalit bodies who were confronted
with severe atrocities from the so-called higher caste people. In this
sense, Theyyams are the subaltern embodiment with unparallel
mnemonic symbolization. Lorena Anton’s (2016) emphasis on
places of the protest cultures, “cultural memory could be a
powerful operational category of analysis, as it is always the
complex phenomenon of remembering, which determines a
group’s identity, thus making future collective claims possible.”
(131) Anton’s arguments were based on the premises of Western
post-war commemorations and that memorial sites are reiterated
dynamically by the occasions of every year's Memorial Day
functions. On the contrary, here in the context of Theyyam
performance, the very quality of Memorial Day translocates
intrinsically in the consciousness of the particular community
who are part of Theyyam. Prevailing inequalities in
contemporary Kerala on the basis of caste, though there was a
revolutionary enlightenment movement that happened in Kerala,
manifests the value of commemorations each year. Unlike other
parts of Kerala state, the Theyyam performing areas in Kerala
are least concerned about caste issues, very openly at least. The
reason behind this dilution of caste hierarchy is the cultural
performances of Theyyam, I would say.
Memory Against Patriarchy
When acknowledging the gender dimensions attached to Theyyam,
many socio-historical studies have traced the intrinsic nature of its
protest culture against the atrocious patriarchal system. Most of the
Bhagavathi Theyyams like Muchilot Bhagavathi, Neeliyar
Bhagavathi, and Puthiya Bhagavathi are the reincarnations of
78
women who were victimized for their rebelliousness against the
higher caste oppression. As the anthropologist Anil Gopi (2021)
points out that Bhagavathi Theyyams are the reincarnation of
goddesses Parvati as Kali, “the ferocious demonic spirit, who is
born to kill the malevolent spirits in the celestial world as well as
the earth. The deity, basically Kali, came to earth for the destruction
of all evil spirits, epidemics and so on, and save people from all
sufferings” (5). Gopi’s (2020) article on feminine divinity of
Theyyam critically engages this gender phenomenon in detail as
“these commemorative performances are occasions for recalling
the miserable lives of women in past. The tolerance of these
women and their survival under difficult conditions is the basis of
these divinities” (166).
A memory of Ecology: Ecology is an integral part of Theyyam
performances; the place where it is being performed is called ‘kaavu’
which primarily consists of various trees and indigenous plants
which people rarely tread. These are highly eco-sensitive area where
many endangered species of flora and fauna lives in plenty and
traditionally, in tandem, kaavu’s are spiritually connected to their
belief system and people considered it a sin to step into these
kaavu’s; only on rare occasions like the day of Theyyam
performances, believers’ step in and make customary gestures in
these spaces. Theyyam is a particularly pantheistic art form, and
performances of it have persevered in the face of threats from climatic
change and cultural emigration. Andrew Hoskins's (2016) study on
memory ecologies is unparallel in the field of memory studies as he
traces the ‘connective’ nature of memory to other disciplines such as
environmental humanities.
One way to connect the individual and the collective is by
affording greater attention to the environment in which
remembering and forgetting take place…Fivush and Merill (2016)
adopt this approach with autobiographical memories, showing how
the individual (at the center) moves through different micro- and
macro-systems or ‘ecologies’ over time which provide multiple
narratives around which identity and memory establish, develop and
cohere (353).

79
 Here, in the context of Theyyam, apart from the ecological
richness in kaavus, Theyyam wears native flowers also as its
ornaments and this ornamenting of flowers is closely connected to
casteism and tribalism. Theyyams’ are not allowed to use the
flowers like lotus or jasmine, that are used by Brahmins in temples,
instead, they are compelled to use thechi or chemapkam (see figure
III) during the feudal period in Kerala and it continues to be the
same in this time also. Another eco-memory associated with
Theyyam is traceable in the colors it uses in the face of Theyyam
which is called mukhathezhuth (painting on the face). The colors it
uses are mostly red, then black, green, and yellow which are
collected from nature. If there is no sustainability of nature, its
greenery, and the native ecology, there is no performance of
Theyyam. Every performance reminds the significance of
commemorations and every commemoration brings back the past,
a past is intertwined with a sensitive and fragile environment.

Figure III. Theyyam uses native flowers as its ornaments.

80
Theyyam in Kantara Movie
There are already various filmic representations of Theyyam in
Malayalam and Kannada film industries that have portrayed the
ineluctable quality of Theyyam in people's lives and culture who are
associated with the tradition. Malayalam movies like Kaliyattam,
Pulijanmam, Chayilyam showcased in detail how Theyyam can be a
connecting tool to popular culture through cinematic
representations. Yet, unlike Kantara, none of these films had gone
global and none of these films had received the massive critical
claim. Here Kantara differs and achieves a ubiquitous position in
popular culture and helped audiences across the globe to relook
into folk art once again. What binds together the community is the
land, culture, and human relations with its itinerary
commemorations each year, thus invoking the memory. Bhoota Kola
is a symbolic representation in the movie of Kantara, set against the
feudal-patriarchal economic system in which the question of who
owns the land, whether a landlord or the state or the people
altogether, marks the entry point for the Kola. The very existence of
Kola culture is only applicable when the land goes to people to
whom the divine Kola is connected. The movie demonstrates the
mnemonic representations of Kola in order to delineate how
memory is integral to the community for its own fight against all
odds and for its own survival. The memory is intact, through the
customs, the cultures, and through the folktales of punchuruli (the
Kola performed in the movie). Punchuruli energizes the community
against disharmony of the community due to the intrusion of
embodied feudalism or state machinery, it warns against forgetting.
The movie has a special space in the consciousness of people that it
popularises not only the culture of Theyyam, but it popularises the
idea that how significant is that the act of remembering the people
and for the community to preserve its own culture and the role it
takes be together against the adulteration of its own identity.

81
Works Cited
Apfelbaum, Erika. “Halbwachs and the Social Properties of
Memory.” Memory: Histories, Theories, and Debates, edited by Susannah
Radstone and Bill Schwarz, Fordham UP, 2010, pp. 77-92.
Anton, Lorena. ‘Cultural Memory’. Protest Cultures, Berghahn Books, 2016,
pp. 130–136, https: // doi.org10.2307/ j.ctvgs0b1r.16.
Erll, Astrid. Introduction. Cultural Memory Studies: An International and
Interdisciplinary Handbook, edited by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nunning, Walter de
Gruyter, 2008, pp. 1-18.
Feuchtwang, Stephen. “Ritual and Memory.” Memory: Histories, Theories, and Debates,
edited by Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz, Fordham UP, 2010, pp. 281-298.
Gopi, A. Gods and the Oppressed: A Study on Theyyam Performers of North
Malabar.
Contemporary Voice of Dalit, 13(2), 2021. 199-207.
https:// doi.org/10.1177/2455328X211008363
Gopi, A. “Representing Feminine Divinity: A Visual Ethnography of
Kaliyattam in North Malabar.” Society and Culture in South Asia, 6(1),
2020.165–173. https://doi.org/10.1177/2393861719892445
Hoskins, Andrew. “Memory Ecologies.” Memory Studies, vol. 9(3), 2016, pp.
348–357. DOI: 10.1177/1750698016645274
Mathew, Raisun, and Dr. Digvijay Pandya. “Carnivalesque, Liminality and
Social Drama: Characterising the Anti-Structural Potential of Theyyam.” Rupkatha
Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities Vol. 13, No. 3, 2021. 1-11 DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v13n3.28
Payyanad, Raghavan. Folklorinu Oru Padanapadhathi, Thrissur: Kerala Sahitya
Academy, 1998.
Shetty, Rishab, director. Kantara. 2022.
Winter, Jay. “Sites of Memory.” Memory: Histories, Theories, and Debates, edited
by Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz, Fordham UP, 2010, pp. 312-324.

82
SECTION TWO: LITERATURE
AND MEMORY

83
 Recollecting the Nation’s Trauma with
Retrospective Eye: Politics of Memory in
Select Poems of Seamus Heaney
SANDEEP.T.G
In an ‘age of forgetfulness’ that is avouched and augmented by the
advantages of science and technology, memory or the act of
memorising turns out to be (fundamentally) a political act that
recalls and retrieves the ‘bygone’ of people, community or nation.
With its definite (and selective) retrospection of past episodes, it
initiates connectivity with old generations, events, and sentiments
and acts as a defining agent in the present. Memory is a process, a
continuum, by which people interact and interpret social situations
and identify their specific roles/ positions within each cultural
context. Maurice Hawbwachs in On Collective Memory has rightly
pointed out “It is in Society that people normally acquire their
memories. It is also in societies that they recall, recognize and
localize their memories.” (p.38).
Memory, as Michael Rothberg claims, requires the active agency of
individuals and the public and further argues- “Such agency entails
recognizing and revealing the production of memory as an ongoing
process involving inscription and re-inscription, coding and
recoding.”(pp.8-9). While considering the agency of memory,
primarily, there is an individual’s involuntary act of remembering past
episodes, either of wholesome intimate incidents or of utmost
national, social, or historic importance. They come uninvited and
remain mostly unobtrusive. Filling the pensive hours with vividness,
such acts of remembrance are personal re-creations of indwelling
moments unless and until they take shape out of voluntary
subjectification. Yadin Dudai, an Israeli neuroscientist, who
extensively studied the importance of memory traces in science and
culture, maintains that memory is a creative effort that carries out the
very act of ‘embodiment of retrieval’ (Dudai, 190). Secondly, cultural
practices (art, literature, media, and movies) in every social platform
carry out the act of memorizing the past. Those intentional acts of

84
memorizing- how culture retains information from the past- can be
seen as a product of political impulsion.
Looking at the history of world nations, it could unequivocally
be argued that every nation will have experienced one or the other
kind of traumatic episode (war, rebellion, epidemic, natural disaster,
etc.) which afterward becomes a part of the aggregate national
consciousness and acts upon the memory of the nation.
Remembering those events configures the logic of the nation’s
discourse and determines the cultural dimensions that assist their
meaningful retention. Such historic nostalgia gives birth to hyper-
nationalist fascination and exuberant ‘engagements’ with nationalist
symbols, ideals, and paradigms that emerge out of collective
remembrance. Ireland, as an example, has experienced the
historical agony of anarchy, revolution, and violence in the name of
political independence from Great Britain till the Anglo-Irish treaty
in 1921 that culminated in a partition between Irish Free State and
Northern Ireland that remained with the United Kingdom.
Northern Ireland which has a predominantly Protestant population
that widely discriminated against the minority Catholics
experienced ethno-nationalist conflicts in the latter half of the 20th
century, known as ‘The Troubles. Such political upheavals and
religious persecutions determine/ influence the collective memory
of the region along with the richly vivid Celtic tradition that it
cherishes in terms of art, myth, rituals, and beliefs.
Seamus Heaney represents the collective sensibility of Northern
Ireland through his meticulous literary mapping of its rich legacy.
The menacing socio-political situations and violence in the name of
religious segregation formulate his poetic conscience. The spirit of
his poetry emanates from the political act of ‘remembering’ the
nation’s history- from the sensuous, personal, nostalgic echoes of
Irish landscapes to the crisis-ridden antagonisms that his land/
people experienced. His poems turn out to be cultural broodings
over the Irish imbroglio and a deep critique of its destabilized
socio-political frontiers. That sort of retrospective ‘re-capturing’
opens up (the) nation’s implicit anecdotes hidden/forgotten within
the explicit sources of history and culture. Thus, his literary output
becomes so axiomatic in understanding the social memory that a
85
close reading of them turns out to be travel by a (nation’s)
mnemonic bridge under which rushes the river of history/time.
Art as well as literature, while engaging in the mnemonic
activity (that facilitates the association with the past) reflects upon
personal or national memories, and recapturing those memories
becomes pivotal in identifying the political spectrum. Seamus
Heaney provides his valuable share to the ‘shared narrative’ of
Ireland and attempts to resist as Andreas Huyssen emphasizes,
“For the more, we are asked to remember in the wake of the
information explosion and the marketing of memory, the more we
seem to be in danger of forgetting and the stronger the need to
forget.” (p. 28)
Even in his intimate recollections of such private events, he
weaves in a political tale of antagonism that is encrypted into the
collective national consciousness. For instance, in ‘Casualty’ he speaks
about an old man known to him and narrates various instances of
meeting him and suddenly speaks about the gruesome killings.
He was blown to bits
Out drinking in a curfew
Others obeyed, three nights
After they shot dead
The thirteen men in Derry.
PARAS THIRTEEN, the walls said,
BOGSIDE NIL. (38-44)

Following the Yeatsian attempt to encapsulate the air of

violence, it is an unerasable record of a nation’s memory which
Heaney facilitates through the medium of poetry. Though his
poems are predominantly vibrant with agrarian imagery set in the
backdrop of countryside serenity, they also fuses urban anguishes
and hostilities.
For Adrian Velicu:
When consistent memory practices focus on texts, images, and
rituals they result in the establishment and consolidation of a canon
that becomes relevant for the identity of the community. The contrast
between canon and archive has recently contributed to a conceptual

86
clarification that finds their equivalent in the distinction between
“cultural working memory” and “cultural reference memory”.
The Troubles being inseparable from the cultural identity of the
Irish people, Heaney is undoubtedly vociferous regarding such
traumatic episodes of violence. In ‘Requiem for the Croppies’ he
pays tribute to those Irish rebels who fought in the Battle for
Vinegar Hill on 21 June 1798, for independence from Britain.
‘Croppies’ or men with cropped hair opposed British rule in
Ireland. His requiem- an act of remembrance- is a compelling
political statement, putting up a diachronic perspective. They move
“quick and suddenly” in their “own country” and despite varied
strategies and ploys succumb to defeat and are laid to rest. The rebels,
mostly farmers had nothing except barley in their pockets, and “in
August the barley grew up out of the grave”. Thus, the barley that
regenerates stands as a symbol of the indomitable spirit of resistance
and rebellion. Heaney is aesthetically perpetuating a disturbing national
memory through the narrative dynamics of recollection that indulges
not passively but with a sharp, intense political fortitude.
In the post-war cultural space- that many critics aptly bewailed
over as the ‘death of history’ or ‘death of memory’- the term
‘cultural memory’ received academic acceleration in varied streams
of inquiry. Propelled by the mass media culture and vast
technologisation, the ‘memory’ of nation-states got inscribed into
the common narrative- something that Bernard Stiegler refers to as
‘epiphylogenetic memory’ that exists in an outside sphere and is
different from acquired or biological memory. These attempts to
‘recall time’ in turn become an attempt to recall the (collective)
trauma experienced by the community. Heaney too invokes the
memories of the political turmoil that has shaped the cultural tale
of Ireland. In ‘Act of the Union’ he brings in the analogy of male-
female union where Ireland is represented as a female and Britain
as male. Historically, it is an act passed by the British Parliament in
1800 as an immediate response to the rebellion in 1789. The
relation between Britain and Ireland and the act of accession is
presented through the allegory of sexual union and towards the end
of the first stanza he states- “conquest is a lie.” (11) Later,
England/the male, with all masculine, imposing vigor declares- “I
87
am still imperially/ male, leaving you with the pain..(15-16). In
another poem, ‘Bone Dreams’, yet again he allegorically represents
these two countries and here also the political positions that
determine the national/ collective memory are brought into play.
For Heaney, language also is a powerful tool to resist any
attempt of cultural obliteration. Arthur E. Mcguinnes thus states:
The vocalic beauty of the Irish language and its ability to give
the listener/chanter access to deep cultural truths make England's
imperialist efforts at suppressing the language seem especially
tragic. Signs of the old language survive, but few Irish can read
them coherently. One needs to recall that Ulster poets like Seamus
Heaney have a continuing sense of the British presence in their
country. Attempts have been made to revive the Irish language in
the Irish Republic, but not until very recently in Ulster. As soon as
one crosses the border into Ulster, one notices that English place
names predominate. Here Kingstown has not become Dun
Laoghaire. Heaney recognizes that in his homeland the native
language remains suppressed. Every Englishman and every
Protestant in Ulster calls the second largest city in Ulster
Londonderry. Every Catholic in Ulster calls it Deny. The two
names indicate that colonialism still remains in Ulster. (77)
Thus, in ‘North’ Heaney brings in a new aesthetic of poetic diction
that encapsulates the essence of Irish culture, especially, language:
It said, 'Lie down
in the word-hoard, burrow
the coil and gleam
of your furrowed brain.
Compose in darkness.
Expect aurora borealis
in the long foray
but no cascade of light.
Keep your eye clear
as the bleb of the icicle,
trust the feel of what nubbed treasure
your hands have known.' (29- 40)

88
Oona Frawley, in ‘Memory Ireland’ brings the concept of “trauma-
ready culture” into play in order to point out the traumatic episodes
experienced by the Irish population either in terms of famine or the
Troubles. With that long history of devastation, Heaney considers
Ireland’s violence as indispensable to its cultural premises. In the
view of Helen Vendler:
Heaney has made imaginative cast after another in an attempt
to represent the almost unrepresentable collective suffering of the
North, yet it has tried equally consistently, to bring intellectual
reflection to the emotional attitudes that too often yield, the binary
position taking of propaganda. (p.2)
Along with the political turmoil, Heaney paints the cultural
landscape on Ireland through his meticulous depiction of its
antique traditions. He revisits the mythic, ritualistic Gaelic past and
connects the history of antique violence with the contemporary
political saga of brutality. His effective rendering of ‘Bog’ imagery
in numerous poems establishes an unequivocal juxtaposition
between two time periods and at the same time ensures a
remarkably clear narration of a nation’s memory of martyrdom.
The employment of archetypal image is a favorite trope that
Heaney is always fascinated with and he reinvents ‘primitive’ accounts
of sacrifices, burials, rites, rituals, and goddesses. For instance, in
‘Strange Fruit’ he speaks about the ‘beatification’ that he feels about
the bodiless head of a girl that was recovered from a bog.
Here is the girl's head like an exhumed gourd.
Oval-faced, prune-skinned, prune-stones for teeth.
They unswaddled the wet fern of her hair
And made an exhibition of its coil,
Let the air at her leathery beauty.
Pash of tallow, perishable treasure:
Her broken nose is dark as a turf clod,
Her eyeholes blank as pools in the old workings. (1-8)
When Heaney points at the brutality behind the ritualistic sacrifice
to appease the Fertility Goddess, it simultaneously turns out to be a
pointer to the continued history of brutality. That excavation and
resultant exhibition of the relics is an act of remembrance- of Irish
cultural tradition. In ‘Bogland’ he speaks about the ‘great Irish elk’, ‘salty
89
and white’ butter, and great (pulpy) firs that are brought out of one of
such bogs. Thus Heaney seems to be fascinated with the idea of
historical continuity. He proudly says:
Our pioneers keep striking
Inwards and downwards,
Every layer they strip
Seems camped on before. (23-26)
Poems like ‘Bog Queen’, ‘The Grauballe Man’, ‘Punishment’,
and ‘Tollund Man’ display the antique vestiges of Ireland through
the promises of memory- retrieving the archetypal/ mythical/
historical/ national remnants for the present to experience. His
poems that remember, represent, and resist, turn out to be an
account of the country’s collective past.
Astrid Erll states that:
According to anthropological and semiotic theories, cultures
can be seen as a three-dimensional framework, comprising social
(people, social relations, institutions), material (artifacts and media),
and mental aspects (culturally defined ways of thinking,
mentalities). Understood in this way, "cultural memory" can serve
as an umbrella term that comprises "social memory" (the starting
point for memory research in the social sciences), "material or
medial memory" (the focus of interest in literary and media
studies), and "mental or cognitive memory" (the field of expertise
in psychology and the neurosciences). (P.4)
In an era of socio-cultural ‘amnesia’ and persistent flux of
transition from one form to another, the idea of cultural
mnemonics and retention turn out to be axiomatic in determining
the ‘present’ of any given community. The collectivity of such
‘relics’, whether in the form of trauma, guilt, fear, exuberance, or
violence, form a national/ transgenerational pattern of memory and
once they are decoded we suddenly enter into the cultural history
of people. Memory speaks to the present through the language of
the traumatic past and reflects upon the national imagination of
collective identity. It is an act of resistance- resistance against ‘cultural
slippage’, as Stanley Cohen puts it. Seamus Heaney is endeavoring to
retrieve the ‘national narrative’ of Ireland through his poems so that
the nation hardly forgets its past.
90
Heaney is a poet who has gained wide acceptance and his works
reflect the Irish identity. Ernest Renan has aptly said: “The essential
element of a nation is that all its individuals must have many things
in common but it must also have forgotten many things.” (p.12).
For Heaney, the act of memorizing Ireland is direct as well as
deliberate. His poems function like a historic- cultural archive
where transgenerational experiences are encrypted so as to ensure
that they are not erased/ forgotten. He manifestly decodes the
history of the nation through the subtle arrangement of past events,
objects, people, and places as experienced collectively by a culture.
His poems then become true determinants to locating the Irish
cultural landscape through which the present could identify the
past. Heaney’s retrospective eye transcends time and recollects the
nation’s trauma so that nothing gets obliterated in the pace at which
political transitions and cultural transformations happen in society.
Works Cited
Dudai, Y. Memory from A to Z. Keywords, Concepts, and Beyond. Oxford
University Press, 2002.
Erll, A., & Nünning, A. Cultural Memory Studies: An International and
Interdisciplinary Handbook. Walter de Gruyter, 2010.
Frawley,Oona.“Ireland and Memory Studies.”Oxford Bibliographies Online
Datasets, 2018, doi:10.1093/obo/ 9780199846719-0137.
Garden, Alison. “Oona Frawley (Editor), Memory Ireland, Volume 3: The
Famine and the Troubles.” Irish University Review, vol. 47, no. 1, May 2017, pp.
204–206, 10.3366/iur.2017.0267. Accessed 15 Nov. 2019.
Hawbwachs, M. ‘The Social Frameworks of Memory’ in On Collective Memory
(Trans.L.A.Coser). University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Huyssen, A. “Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia.” Public Culture, vol.
12, no. 1, 1 Jan. 2000, pp. 21–38, 10.1215/08992363-12-1-21. Accessed 13 Oct. 2019.
McGuinness Arthur E. Politics and Irish Poetry: Seamus Heaney's
Declaration of Independence. In: Études irlandaises, 1990. pp. 75-82
Renan, Ernest, and M. F. N. Giglioli. What Is a Nation?: and Other Political
Writings. Columbia University Press, 2018.
Rothberg, M. ‘Between Memory and Memory’. In liex de memoire to noeuds de
memoire’. Yale French Studies, 2010.
Velicu, A. (2011). Cultural memory between the national and the transnational.
Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 3(1), 7246. https://doi.org/10.3402/
jac.v3i0.7246
Vendler, Helen. Seamus Heaney. Harvard University Press, 1998.

91
Decoding the Violence of Archival Memory in
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale
Dr. Jasmine Sharma

Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but rather a

medium. It is the medium of that which is experienced, just as the
earth is the medium in which ancient cities lie buried.
(Walter Benjamin, “Excavation and Memory,” 576)
Narratives of memory offer illuminating insights into the
discourses of storytelling. Each tale is a catacomb of timeless
experiences which cater towards preserving one’s identity. Volumes
of literary works engage with this potent question of memory from
multiple perspectives, such as historical, social, political, medical,
psychological, technological, etc., with an objective to present
cognitive churnings within the self. Their episodic gesticulations
carry prototypical emotions of nostalgia, trauma, anger, or solitude,
depending upon the plural reminiscences they go through.
Atwood’s writings epitomize a threshold of foregrounding
memories which map the uniquely overwhelming journeys of her
central protagonists. At the same time, it is imperative for the
documenter of this memory to unbiasedly interpret the epiphanies
behind its construction. This means that the documenter must have
an empathetic orientation toward the memories of the survivor and
must aim to present them without blemishes and distortion.
However, on the contrary, the sensitization of these memories
could be a critical challenge for those who have not lived the
experiences of the storyteller. In such a scenario, one could observe
a sense of misappropriation or, to be more precise, epistemological
violence against the retrospective contemplations of the sufferer.
This farcical attempt to create a pastiche of a personal memory
poses a threat to the overall obliteration of the true essence
pertaining to a specific experience of the past. And this threat
becomes all the more hellacious when a phallic dimension of
epistemic understatement is added to its inception. This polemic of
control over selective flashbacks works towards the erasure of the
92
preserved memory and, in turn, disenfranchises its creator,
especially if she is a woman. Discerning this misogynist
suppression, this chapter traces the emphatic function of memory
in Margaret Atwood’s dystopia, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), and the
epistemic violence meted out against its optimal materialization.
While developing this argument, the chapter employs a technological
impetus so as to demarcate the relevance of audio-tape recordings
discovered after the dethroning of Gilead’s theocracy.
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale chronicles a fictive,
speculative, and dystopian future engendering a theocratic code of
conduct. It depicts the establishment of an anti-republican
government, referred to as Gilead, in the wake of a military
dictatorship. The novel exhibits a socio-political unrest
characterizing thousands of massacres, detainment of racial and
sexual misfits, burning of parliamentary, judicial, and educational
institutions, severe economic recession, and a rampant
concentration of environmental and nuclear disasters. This
theocracy of Gilead repudiates female agency. It categorizes women
as per their socioeconomic and fertility status. It seeks to discipline
their actions within an austere environment of domination and
control. Amidst this anarchy unfurls the story of the handmaid,
Offred, living at the threshold of the past and the present, the personal
and the political, the sacred and the mundane. Compelled to conceive
the unwanted semen, the handmaids are mechanized “two-legged
wombs” (Atwood 146) facilitating enforced surrogate services to the
commanders of the lord. The novel ends with a separate section
entitled “Historical Notes” in which a professor of archives tries to
decipher and deconstruct Offred’s tale, which features as a post-
historic entry point into the horrendous past of Gilead.
Evaluating Atwood’s dystopia from the theoretical perspective
of memory studies has been successfully attempted in the last three
decades. Ranging from Offred’s time-elapsing memories of her
emancipated past to her entrenched days spent at the handmaid’s
training center, each memorial account has been an unparalleled by-
product of her inscribed self which invites a critical standpoint.
However, this chapter, by no means, ponders upon this strand of
thought but rather maintains a distinctive focus on the section of
93
“Historical Notes” that supplements Atwood’s novel before the
author provides it a formal closure. Thus, this chapter features an
exclusive study of the “Historical Notes” section from the stance of
violence against archival memory.
As stated in the “Historical Notes,” Offred, the protagonist of
Atwood’s contemporary dystopia, records her story on a tape
recorder which Professor James Darcy Pieixoto aims to decipher
through his research lecture read at the Twelfth Symposium of
Gilead Studies that took place at the University of Denay, Nunavit,
on June 25, 2195. The tape recordings act as a technological archive
that is discovered, perhaps a hundred years past the end of the
fundamentalist regime. Derived from the Greek word arche meaning
“commencement” or “commandment,” The National Archival
manual of the U.K government defines archives as “collections of
documents or records which have been selected for permanent
preservation because of their value as evidence or as a source of
historical or other research” (3). “Archives have value to nations
and regions, organizations, communities, and individual people.
They provide evidence of activities that occurred in the past, tell
stories, document people and identities, and are valuable sources of
information for research. They have recorded memory and form an
important part of our community, cultural, official and unofficial
history” (4), the Manual continues. Michel Foucault in his Archeology
of Knowledge opines that “the archive is the first system which
governs the appearance of statements as unique events” (Foucault
129). This renders a privileged position for archival storage. As
stated earlier, this chapter offers a critical interpretation of how a
male professor of history discriminatingly deciphers Offred’s
archival memory and renders it trivial for the contemporary
audience of the symposium.
Nonetheless, Offred’s tape recordings serve as a transcripted
token of techno-archival memory. Pramod K. Nayar in his book
An Introduction to Cultural Studies defines memory as a “cultural
practice,” (171) “a construction [which] involves the use of
representation to capture and communicate a past experience”
(178). This memory “is mediated by modes of archiving,
technologies of representation, and modes of recall” (178). “Public
94
memorials and cenotaphs, audio-tapes and CDs, oral materials
(interviews), folk and popular culture practices like songs, official
history texts, and devices construct memory,” (178) Nayar notes.
Reading the “Historical Notes” through Nayar’s cultural lens
connects memory with the audio tapes carrying Offred’s non-
physical presence. Marita Sturken in her article, “Memory,
consumerism, and media: Reflections on the emergence of the
field” interlinks the personal and the political dimension of
memory. She notes:
The concept of memory practices allows for an emphasis on
the politics of memory, precisely because of the ways in which the
production and construction of memory through cultural practices
have as its foundation the notion that memories are part of a larger
process of cultural negotiation. This defines memories as narratives,
as fluid and mediated cultural and personal traces of the past (74).
Thus, memory emerges as a powerful blend of cultural
dimensions that act as a tool for its reiterative propagation. In the
present context, the use of audio tapes adds to the cultural negotiation
of memory across the timeline, with Offred (the producer of the
memory) at one end and professor Pieixoto (the
constructor/consumer of the memory) at the other. In fact, during the
process of this cultural negotiation and the subsequent
misappropriation of memory, Offred’s voice undergoes a
technological mediation in Professor Pieixoto’s techno-archival study.
Technology features as a dynamic syndicate of the scientific and
the philosophical. Extending its reach beyond technical artifacts,
devices carrying electronic and cybernetic components, and the
various instrumental applications in mechanical, communication,
and forensic industries, technology signifies a way of thought, a
style of practice, and the structuring of human realities. This
chapter argues how a male professor of history is able to cleverly
misappropriate a memory of personal survival by questioning the
authenticity of the digital (the technologically archived tape
recordings). “Technologies, especially audio technologies [are] an
intrinsic part of our acts of remembrance, of the individual and
collective process of remembering” (Bijsterveld and Dijck 15). As a
source of archival memory, audio tapes and the content recorded in
95
them plays a vital role in recovering the lost experience. However,
the authenticity of this lost experience could be challenged at any
point. It means that the reliability of the archival source could get
entangled within an interrogatory network due to a perspectival
shift between the producer (that is Offred, the handmaid) and the
consumer (that is Professor Pieixoto) of the technologically
archived memoir. Walter Benjamin in his essay, “Theses on the
Philosophy of History” asserts that “to articulate what is past does
not mean to recognize how it really was. It means to take control of
a memory as it flashes in a moment of danger” (254). Similarly,
Jacques Derrida in his essay, “Archive Fever: A Freudian
Impression,” notes that “a science of the archive must include the
theory of institutionalization, that is to say, at once of the law which
begins by inscribing itself…and of the right which authorizes it. This
right imposes or supposes a bundle of limits which have a history, a
deconstructible history” (10). Through the lecture, Professor Pieixoto
grounds himself as the characteristic forerunner of this “destructible
history” while catering an inquisitive interest in the identity of the
Commander as opposed to Offred’s tale of subjugation.
The chapter discerns this perilous ground in the “Historical
Notes.” Professor Pieixoto, throughout his talk, tries to regulate the
premises of Offred’s tape recording. However, while maintaining
his prejudiced misconception, he ends up getting trapped in his
own web. No matter how much Professor Pieixoto strives to
disregard Offred’s technologically produced personal narrative on
the ground that it does not cover the political atmosphere of
Gileadean fanaticism, a close reading of “Historical Notes” shows
the duplicitous arguments of the Professor’s talk. In other words,
“Pieixoto’s interest …lies not so much in uncovering whether
[Offred] made it to safety but how she managed to record the
cassettes and how they arrived safely in Bangor” (Cooke 125). In
fact, even before the beginning of his lecture the chair of his
sessions, Professor Maryann Crescent Moon makes a few trivial
announcements like:
The fishing expedition will go forward tomorrow as planned,
and for those of you who have not brought suitable rain gear and
insect repellant, these are available for a nominal charge at the
96
Registration Desk. The Nature Walk and Outdoor Period- Costume
Sing-Song have been rescheduled for the day after tomorrow, as we
are assured by our own infallible Professor Johnny Running Dog of a
break in the weather of that time. (Atwood 311)
Recounting a list of these inessential details indirectly reveals
the upcoming shallowness of Professor Pieixoto’s talk. Rather than
coming to the main argument, the Symposium is more concerned
with the side-by activities organized for the entertainment of the
keynote speakers and listeners. The title of his lecture, “Problems
of Authentication in Reference to The Handmaid’s Tale,”
eventually turns out to be a paradox as it demonstrates a misleading
and one-dimensional account of Gileadean politics. Further, as the
Professor takes up the center stage, to begin his feverishly awaited
speech, he sarcastically compares the dinner of the previous night
to the current session of the Symposium. This pin pointedly
suggests the unrealized non-seriousness towards which the
Professor, his speech, and the entire audience will be inclined in
due course. All these minor instances prior to the Professor’s
speech assert a clear subjection of the technological document
recorded in a female voice.
Professor Pieixoto is skeptical while using the term
“document” for Offred’s lately discovered techno-archive. “This
item- I hesitate to use the word document- was unearthed on the site
of what was once the city of Bangor, in what, at the time prior to
the inception of the Gileadean regime, would have been the state of
Maine,” (Atwood 313) articulates the Professor. Through his act of
calling the document, an item, Pieixoto subverts the essence of
archival history. His fetishized understanding of the audio
recordings detaches the notion of “permanent preservation and
value as evidence” from the definition of archives (as cited a few
paragraphs above). Next, he is more interested in detailing the
quality rather than the content of the audio cassettes. He discloses
the “army surplus” (Atwood 313) footlockers including thirty tapes,
now outdated and replaced by the new compact disk. And as
Offred’s tale is an obsolete techno-archive, he depicts excessive
arrogance while stating the reconstruction of a machine effective in
the transcription of the “item.”
97
Supplementing the aforementioned discussion, the Professor now
turns on to the haphazardly arranged audio tapes, devoid of serial
numbers, and digressing in between with old folk songs. And,
eventually, he declares all his transcribing labor to be a waste due to
the lack of any authentic information. He declares all the names like
Luke, Moira, and Jannie as unidentified and useless and shows
annoyance over the scarcity of official sources like the unavailability
of reliable proofs for the Mayday Revolution, the Sons of Jacob
meetings, etc.
By now, it could be established that the function of audio
cassettes stands vital to the decoding of epistemic violence against
Offred’s memory. In fact, Offred’s story gets entangled in phallic
judgment against the memory construction of a handmaid and the
technological artifact plays a crucial role in this bias. It means that
the digital tape recordings have a significant impact in allowing
Professor Pieixoto to decipher the source of Offred’s memory in a
certain way, which is ultimately a redundant one. At this point, one
can draw a discernable link between the act of archival decoding
and Marshal McLuhan’s seminal statement that goes as “it is the
medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human
association and action” (2).
McLuhan in his famous work, Understanding Media: The
Extensions of Man (1964) posits a fundamental connection between
the technological medium of communication and the content
intended to be communicated through it. In his book, McLuhan
cites various examples, ranging from the electric bulb to films,
demonstrating that the source of production is both relevant and
complementary to what is produced and eventually consumed.
“The instance of an electric light may prove illuminating…as the
electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message
. . . [and] the message of any medium or technology is the change
of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs,”
notes McLuhan (1).
Linking Pieixoto’s discussion of Offred’s technologically
archived memory with McLuhan’s theory of medium as the
message, the chapter argues that the use of audio-tapes for
recording Offred’s politico-personal tale serves as a medium
98
(production), and therefore of substantial importance, while its
chauvinistic interpretation by Pieixoto’s is the message
(consumption). In this way, the production and consumption of
memory account for engendering a dichotomy of perspectives
between what is delivered (produced) to what is comprehended
(consumed and reciprocated). Thus, Pieixoto’s act of concentrating
on the totalitarian history of Gilead while dismissing Offred’s story
of suffering demarcates the sociological mechanics of production
and consumption, and audio tapes feature as a catalyst in building
this misogynist bias.
In reality, Offred’s audio recordings feature as authentic and a
piece of impartial evidence for the debasement of women's rights
and the subjugation of specific classes of women who do not meet
the diabolic requirements of the new Puritan regime. It provides a
dystopian framework for the sufferings of women whose fertility
became the subject of classification in order to restore the lost
population of the theocratic order. In fact, Pieixoto’s talk comprises
sexist jokes with “euphemisms on birth services for childbearing
and serial polygamy for the late 20th-century marriage reflect[ing]
his androcentric bias and misogyny” (Browndey 11). Further to
this, Pieixoto’s transvaluation of Offred’s memory is severe to the
extent that he demeans her identity by commenting scathing
remarks on her presence in Gilead. He attempts so by raising
critical judgments against her character by articulating:
Our author, then, was one of many and must be seen within the
broad outlines of the moment in the history of which she was a part.
But what else do we know about her, apart from her age, some physical
characteristics that could be anyone’s, and her place of residence? Not
very much. She appears to have been an educated woman, insofar as a
graduate of any North American college of the time may be said to have
been educated. (Laughter, some groans) But the woods, as you say, were full
of these, so that is of no help (Atwood 218).
The above statements resonate with a misogynist acumen
towards Offred’s memorial account. It undermines female
individuality and tries to uphold the masculinized historical
prejudice of the professor. In fact, he orchestrates his entire lecture
by highlighting Offred’s lack of mindfulness in her audio
99
recordings. He reprimands Offred’s tendency to focus on her
personal story which mainly revolved around the loss of financial
and corporeal freedom, suffering, and hopes to escape the
theocratic regime. At the same time, he is also critical of Offred for
not describing the political uprisings in Gilead and the function of
the commanders within the newly established puritanical order.
This chauvinism is further enhanced when Pieixoto shows a
substantial interest in the identity of the commander and his official
documents pertaining to the fundamentalist history of Gilead.
Therefore, the clash between the produced and the consumed
technology, between what is meant to be constructed (production)
and what eventually gets destroyed (consumption), emphasizes the
discernable conflict between history and her story. Here, history
(the consumed) refers to the grand narrative of the past which
allows space for the pedantic retrieval of historical elements while
her story (the produced) explicates the churning undercurrents
connected with those events. Or else put it, Offred’s voice
recorded in the audio tapes emblematizes a ‘her story’ about female
subservience and while Professor Pieixoto’s article documents a
retrospective obsession with the history that is predominately
phallic. Therefore, the notion of chauvinistically consuming the
archival memory is, itself a violation of female autonomy that took
the risk of escaping a rigid theocracy. Thus, Pieixoto’s lecture bears
an unquestionable relevance to history (what is consumed) as
opposed to her story (what is produced). And audio-tapes play a
vital part in this transition from her story to history, from the
technics of production to the preoccupancy with consumption. The
study reads this transition between production and consumption,
between her story to history as a transition between medium and the
message. And this shift caters to a destructible connotation as put
forth by Benjamin and Derrida.
The talk ends with the final statement, “are there any
questions?” (Atwood 324) For Cooke, “this statement raises more
questions than it answers” (125). In fact, it implies a sardonic
gesture towards the inauthentic tale of the handmaid, an itemized
collection of audio tapes through which nothing historical could be
decrypted. Pieixoto considers the tapes as an anachronistic epitome
100
of personal angst and flashbacks which are futile to a scholar of
history and archives. Moreover, he exhibits his apprehensiveness
against the paucity of evidence confirming Offred’s escape as well
as raises multiple revulsions that compel the audience to consider
her memory as a farcical personal confession. Before opening the
forum to responses and feedback from the audience, Pieixoto’s
vitriolic questions and pompous comments are stated as follows:
Did our narrator reach the outside world safely and build a new
life for herself? Or was she discovered in the attic hiding place,
arrested, sent to the colonies or to Jezebel’s, or even executed? Our
document, through in its own way eloquent, is on these subjects
mute….As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and
filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it, but what they say
to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they
come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them
precisely in the clearer light of our own day (Atwood 342).
These statements present Professor Pieixoto as a stereotypical
male historian who has stigmatized the value of Offred’s memory.
It constructs a superiority dynamic that questions the temporal gap
between the past and the present due to which the audience is
tailored towards siding with the phallic misappropriation of the
memory. Yet, the readers are still able to disambiguate the duplicity
behind the lecture. As Theo Finign remarks, “The historiographer
attempts the material erasure of any traces of a past that does not
coincide with the officially sanctioned version [that is] with the
control of the past comes the domination of the future” (435).
Undoubtedly, Professor Pieixoto is this historiographer. Through
this lecture, he makes every effort to engender archival violence of
the politico-personal memory. However, we are able to discern the
deceptive schema behind this craftiness and thus, summarily
repudiate the malignant inference of his lecture.
In a nutshell, this chapter illuminates the problematics of
archival memory and the violence it faces when misappropriated by
a male historiographer. It discusses the relevance of an archive and
how Professor Pieixoto questions its authenticity through
demeaning Offred’s account of survival. In sync with this, the
chapter establishes the function of the technological facet such as
101
audio tapes, and the ways in which it re-inscribe one’s
understanding of the retrospective confessions. It draws the
polemical contrast between history and her story where history,
through the medium of intellectual rhetoric tries to dominate her story
which is archived in the form of outdated audio cassettes. Overall, the
chapter is an attempt towards deciphering the misunderstood swirls
within memory studies. It insightfully couples the critical theory of
memory with the technologized archive and unravels the seismic
undertones within Atwood’s contemporary dystopia.
Works Cited
Archive Principles and Practice: An Introduction to Archives for Non-
archivists. The National Archives, 2016, pp.1-24.
https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/archives/archive-
principles-and-practice-an-introducon-to-archives-for-non-archivists.pdf
Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. Vintage, 1985.
Benjamin, Walter. “Excavation and Memory.” In Selected Writings, Vol.2, part
2, edited by Marcuse Paul Bullock, Michael William Jennings, Howard Eiland
and Gary Smith, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005, pp. 576.
https://folk.uib.no/hlils/TBLR-B/Benjamin-ExcavMem.pdf

“Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections,

Schocken Books, 1968, pp. 253-264.
Bijsterveld and Dijck. Audio Technologies: Memory and Cultural Practices.
Amsterdam University Press, 2019.
Browndey, Martin Watson. “Atwood on Women, War, and History: The
Loneliness of the Military Historian.” Margaret Atwood, edited by Harold
Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, 2009, pp. 3-20.
Cooke, Nathalie. Margaret Atwood: A Critical Companion. Greenwood Press, 2004.
Derrida, Jacques and Eric Prenowitz. “Archive Fever: A Freudian
Impression.” Diacritics, No. 25, 1995, pp. 9- 63.
http://artsites.ucsc.edu/sdaniel/230/derrida_archivefever.pdf
Finign, Theo. “Into the Memory Hole: Totalitarianism and Mal d’Archive in
1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale.” Science Fiction Studies, No. 3, 2011, pp. 435-459.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259748755_Into_the_Memory_Hole
_Totalitarianism_and_Mal_d'Archive_in_Nineteen_Eighty-
Four_and_The_Handmaid's_Tale
Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by A.M Sheridan
Smith. Pantheon Books, 1972.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Taylor and
Francis, 2005
Nayar, Promod K. An Introduction to Cultural Studies.2nd ed., Viva Books, 2017.
102
 Sturken, Marita. “Memory, consumerism and media: Reflections of the
emergence of the field.” Memory Studies, Vol. 1, 2008, pp. 73-78.
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=721d1
c192f0fafc023271ccdbade4cfa6d89c14b

103
 Interplay of Memory and Time in Harold
Pinter’s Old Times
Abhinaba Chatterjee

Theatrical truth has been classified as ‘explicate reality’ and

‘implicate reality’. ‘Explicate reality’, according to Demastes, is “the
reductionist scientist’s foregrounded subject of interest.” (87) It
implies a linear vision of order, which David Bohm defines as
“the world is regarded as constituted of entities which are
‘outside of each other’, in the sense that they exist independently in
different regions of space (and time) and interact through forces
that do not bring about changes in their essential nature.” (173)
Proposing “a new mode of language” to capture the essence of
the ‘implicate reality’ that challenges the static object-based
language systems, Bohm called for a dynamic reality that is “to be
seen from moment to moment, in an act of perception of a very
high order.” (42) This, according to Bohm, is a more accurate
depiction of reality.
A similar point is made by Harold Pinter, who, in his Nobel
Lecture, while referring to his essay, ‘Writing for the Theatre’ said,
“There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is
unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not
necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.” (2006,
811) This refutation of dialogic by Pinter leads to a dialectical
situation based on the fluidity of relations and by extension, to a
dynamics that include all forms of logic and possibility. The
theatrical ‘truth’ of Pinter’s dramatic oeuvre relies on this dynamics
of fluidity. The dramatization of this fluidity and the subsequent
revelation of his dramatic ‘truth’ in such plays as Old Times (1971),
Landscape (1967), Silence (1968), Monologue (1973), No Man’s Land
(1975), and also the dramatic sketch Night (1967), often classified as
the ‘Memory Plays’, manifests itself in his exploration of the
various nuances of memory in relation to the present and past and
the subsequent power struggle. As summarized by Varun Begley in
Modern Drama:
104
These works rest on the premise that memory, when expressed in
language, is a way of transforming the self, negotiating one’s
relations to others, and defining a place within the objective world.
Collectively, the 'memory' plays are often seen as a kind of
extended mediation on damaged consciousness, with the new stress
on inwardness considered as a complement or response to the
harrowing objectivity of his earlier works. (639)
The discourse of memory, thus, impacts the present, past, and
future identity of the characters in the plays, as it is used in these
plays to undermine the rivals. The mediation of the dialectics of
memory is done by Pinter’s use of silence and pause. Indeed, as
Peter Hall points out:
There are three very different kinds of pauses in Pinter: Three
Dots is a sign of a pressure point, a search for a word, a momentary
incoherence. A Pause is a long interruption to the action, where the
lack of speech becomes a form of speech itself. The Pause is a
threat, a moment of non-verbal tension. A Silence – the third
category – is longer still. It is an extreme crisis point... By their use,
the unsaid becomes sometimes more terrifying and more eloquent
than the said. Pinter actually writes silence, and he appropriates it as
a part of his dialogue. (163)
Pinter’s play Old Times presents the conflict of memories and
the subsequent tension as they surface in the present. The play
presents three characters, Anna, Deeley, and Kate, with the first
two arguing to assert their supremacy over Kate. As the two
characters, Deeley and Anna abuse each other, Kate evolves as the
centrifugal character in the play, as she fits into the narratives and
counter-narratives that the memories of Anna and Deeley give rise
to. As Dr. Prashant Mandre points out:
Old Times deals with the constituent of time, space, and the
associated concept of the memory of the dim far-away past. The
play attempts to imprison the past, to co-relate everlasting time
with spatial time, and to reconstruct the effect of the past on the
present through the reminiscence lane. (142-143)
Scholarship on memory with reference to Old Times deciphers
two trends. The first trend was to interpret the plays as a ‘memory
contest’ (Kreps, 1979, 54) for 'superior knowledge' (Billington,
105
2009, 367) between Anna and Deeley ‘... to re-create the past’
(Quigley, 1987, 17), directed at ‘ultimate possession of Kate’
(Billington, 2009, 367). This contest, according to Dukore, makes
memory a weapon (93) that gives an advantage in the battle for
domination over Kate. The second trend relates to the unreliability
of memory as the ‘past is presented as possessing fluid, amorphous
qualities that ultimately belie any attempt to construct present
certainty from them' (Batty, 2005, 53).
While the fluidity of memories makes it dynamic, time appears
static along with the characters at the beginning of the Old Times.
The play opens with the following stage directions:
Light dim. Three figures were discerned.
DEELEY slumped in an armchair, still.
KATE curled on a sofa, still.
ANNA standing at the window, looking out.
The dim light has been used by Pinter to depict the vagueness
of the past. The initial stage directions seem to suggest silence.
However, as the lights move up to Deeley and Kate, and the
conversation between the two characters is heard by the audience,
it seems not a beginning but rather a middle which sets up the tone
of temporal vagueness as the past and the present seem to merge at
that particular moment. The fusion of the past and the present
manifests itself from the very outset, conforming to the fluidity of
the temporal dimension of the play. Thus, the play begins with
Kate reminiscing of her memories of Anna, who is visible to the
audience as standing by the window, while Deeley instigates her to
extract information about her.
KATE: (Reflectively.) Dark.
Pause
DEELEY: Fat or thin?
KATE: Fuller than me. I think.
Pause
DEELEY: She was then?
KATE: I think so.
DEELEY: She may not be now.
This conversation, apparently referring to a description of Anna
as Kate remembered her, makes her presence ‘standing at the
106
window’ metaphorical. The simultaneous presence and absence of
Anna give a metaphorical dimension to her character, that of
memory in the process of formation. As Steven H Gale observed,
One of the most obvious examples of the writer’s ease in
moving between the media is found in the opening scene of Old
Times, when Anna is observed on stage but is not involved in the
action as Kate and Deeley talk about her. Suddenly, she turns and
joins in the conversation in midstream. Most critics were
confounded by this maneuver. Did it mean that Anna was an
imaginary character, they wondered, or was she part of Kate’s dual
feminine nature? ... By having Anna’s figure on stage, he indicated
that she was on the minds of the two other characters, but he also
avoided a lot of unnecessary stage business – there was no need for
the husband and wife to stop their dialogue and then go to the
door where introductions would be made and then the trio would
sit down to dinner, and so on. (90)
While it seems natural for Kate to remember her friend, whom
she will be meeting after 20 years, the interest of Deeley to extract
information about Anna seems curious. According to Foucault,
knowledge entails power. Thus, from one perspective, Deeley’s
desire to extract information about Anna can be seen to be his
sense of insecurity – an invasion of what he had believed to be his
personal possession. The intimacy between Kate and Anna is
further confirmed when Kate said that Anna used to steal her
underwear.
KATE: Pause She was a thief. She used to
steal things.
DEELEY: Who from?
KATE: Me.
DEELEY: What things?
KATE: Bits and pieces. Underwear.
DEELEY chuckles.
Their chuckling of Deeley can easily be perceived to be
uncomfortable as he suspects a lesbian relationship between the
two ladies.
From another perspective, the curiosity of Deeley regarding
Anna can be seen from a Foucauldian quest for asserting power
107
over both the ladies. Looked upon from this point of view,
Deeley’s chuckling can be seen as his confidence in being superior
to the two ladies as he is able to extract information/ knowledge about
Anna. However, what Deeley grossly fails to understand is the
unreliability of the memories of Anna that Kate shares with him.
KATE: I hardly remember her. I’ve almost
totally forgotten her.
Pause
DEELEY: Any idea what she drinks?
KATE: None.
DEELEY: She may be a vegetarian.
KATE: Ask her.
DEELEY: It’s too late. You’ve cooked your casserole.
Pause
Why isn’t she married? I mean, why isn’t she bringing her
husband?
KATE: Ask her.
In his concern with the identity of Anna and her relationship
with Kate, Deeley overlooked the negative responses that Kate
gives to him about her memories of Anna. From another
perspective, it can be argued that Deeley is not convinced that Kate
has forgotten about Anna and therefore, he continues to pressurize
Kate to extract more information about Anna, whom he sees as a
rival. Deeley is convinced that Kate is playing a power games in her
silence, indifference, and memory games.
The tension that is thus built in the initial scenes of the play
enhances as Anna joins the conversation and the two reminisce
about their past, comparing memories of a time when they may or
may not have known each other. Interestingly their memories both
converge and diverge. In perhaps the most famous lines of the play
that deconstructs the reliability of memories, Anna said:
There are some things one remembers even though they may
never have happened. There are things I remember which may
never have happened but as I recall them so they take place.
This interplay of temporality and memory manifests itself at
several points in the play as the past and the present fuse into each
other:
108
 ANNA (Quietly.): Don’t let’s go out tonight, don’t let’s go
anywhere tonight, let’s stay in. I’ll cook something, you can wash
your hair, you can relax, we’ll put on some records.
KATE: Oh, I don’t know. We could go
out.
ANNA: Why do you want to go out?
KATE: We could walk across the park.
ANNA: The park is dirty at night, all sorts of horrible people,
men hiding behind trees and women with terrible voices, they
scream at you as you go past, and people come out suddenly from
behind trees and bushes and there are shadows everywhere and
there are policemen...
Pause
You’ll only want to come home if you go out...
Two facts arise here. Firstly that Anna, who is a visitor, is very
much aware of the locations as well as the inhabitants of the place,
perhaps more so than Kate, who is a resident there. Secondly, in
her insistence on Kate staying back at home rather than going out
at an odd hour, Anna contradicts Kate’s memory of her as an
extrovert who had hundreds of friends. The confusion can only be
explained by relying on Pinter’s dramatic technique that fuses the
past and the present. From this perspective, it can be deciphered
that the conversation refers to London where the two friends had
lived together 20 years ago. The play of time and memory creates
confusion not only amongst the audience but also for Deeley who
fails to visualize the fusion of the past and the present.
This failure to visualize the fusion of the past and the present
on behalf of Deeley gives a sense of power to Anna and Kate.
Power, according to Foucault, is:
“(1) the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere
in which they operate and which constitute their own organization;
as (2) the process which, through ceaseless struggles and
confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses them; as (3) the
support which these force relations find in one another, thus
forming a chain or a system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions
and contradictions which isolate them from one another; and lastly,
as (4) the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design
109
or institutional crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in
the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies.” (As
quoted in Lynch, 19).
This definition of power situates it as a strategy that is fluid and is
amply manifested throughout Old Times. The discourse that
emanates from this struggle for power, according to Foucault, gives
the subjects ‘a plurality of possible positions and functions.’ Thus,
the struggle for power and supremacy over Kate as the object of
desire manifests itself in the manipulation of memories of the past
by both Deeley and Anna. As Billington said, “In a world where
memory is hazy or subjective the past can be used to gain leverage
over the other people: one of the key points of the play.” (214)
It is this memory of the contested past in the play that evolves
as the point from which the discourse of power evolves. The play
presents numerous instances of such a contested past where the
memories of Anna and Deeley are at variance. Indeed, one of the
primary concerns of Pinter has been on memories, not as the past
but rather, as its reconstruction, to understand the motif that
governs the manipulation of the past. As Martineau points out:
Pinter recognizes that the past is essentially dramatic when
explored through conflicting memories both because the range of
possible action is further extended and because the uncertainty of
outcome holds the audience in continuous suspense (11).
Thus, while in the initial scenes of the play, Kate denies of
having any memory of Anna, later while Anna describes her
memory of their lives in London 20 years ago, she confirms the
same, thus contradicting her initial statement that she ‘hardly
remembered her’.
ANNA: Queuing all night, the rain, do you
remember? my goodness, the Albert Hall, Covent Garden, what did
we eat? to look back, half the night, to do things we loved, we were
young then of course, but what stamina, and to work in the
morning, and to a concert, or the opera, or the ballet, that night,
you haven’t forgotten? and then riding on top of the bus down
Kensington High Street, and the bus conductors, and then dashing
for the matches for the gas fire and then I suppose scrambled eggs,
or did we? who cooked? both giggling and chattering, both
110
huddling to the heat, then bed and sleeping, and all the hustle and
bustle in the morning, rushing for the bus again for work,
lunchtimes in Green Park, exchanging all our news, with our very
own sandwiches, innocent girls, innocent secretaries, and then the
night to come, and goodness knows what excitement in store, I
mean the sheer expectation of it all, the looking-forwardness of it
all, and so poor, but to be poor and young, and a girl, in London
then … and the cafés we found, almost private ones, weren’t they?
where artists and writers and sometimes actors collected, and
others with dancers, we sat hardly breathing with our coffee, heads
bent, so as not to be seen, so as not to disturb, so as not to distract,
and listened and listened to all those words, all those cafés and all
those people, creative undoubtedly, and does it still exist I wonder?
do you know? can you tell me?
Slight pause
DEELEY: We rarely get to London.
KATE stands, goes to a small table, and pours coffee from a pot.
KATE: Yes, I remember.
While the above conversation of Anna about her life in London
points out her nostalgia, she contradicts herself when she praises
the silent life and place which Kate and Deeley spend together in
their present location:
ANNA: Listen. What silence. Is it always
silent?
DEELEY: It’s quite silent here, yes. Normally.
Pause
You can hear the sea sometimes if you listen very carefully.
ANNA: How wise you were to choose this
part of the world, and how sensible and courageous of you both to
stay permanently in such silence.
DEELEY: My work takes me away quite
often, of course. But Kate stays here.
ANNA: No one who lived here would want
to go far. I would not want to go far, I would be afraid of going far,
lest when I returned the house would be gone.

111
However, the most significant contradiction is revealed in their
memories of Kate.
DEELEY: ... I marched in on this excruciatingly hot summer
afternoon in the middle of nowhere and watched Odd Man Out
and thought Robert Newton was fantastic. And I still think he was
fantastic. And I would commit murder for him, even now. And
there was only one other person in the cinema, one other person in
the whole of the whole cinema, and there she is. And there she was,
very dim, very still, placed more or less I would say at the dead
center of the auditorium. ... and I stood for a moment in the sun,
thinking I suppose about something and then this girl came out and
I think looked about her and I said wasn’t Robert Newton fantastic,
and she said something or other, Christ knows what, but looked at
me, and I thought Jesus this is it, I’ve made a catch, this is a true
blue pickup, and when we had sat down in the café with the tea she
looked into her cup and then up at me and told me she thought
Robert Newton was remarkable. So it was Robert Newton who
brought us together and it is only Robert Newton who can tear us
apart.
Pause
ANNA: F. J. McCormick was good too.
DEELEY: I know F. J. McCormick was good
too. But he didn’t bring us together.
Pause
DEELEY: You’ve seen the film then?
ANNA: Yes.
DEELEY: When?
ANNA: Oh … long ago.
Pause
DEELEY: (To KATE.) Remember that film?
KATE: Oh yes. Very well.
Pause
DEELEY: I think I am right in saying the next
time we met we held hands. I held her cool hand, as she walked by
me, and I said something which made her smile, and she looked at

112
me, didn’t you, flicking her hair back, and I thought she was even
more fantastic than Robert Newton.
Pause
And then at a slightly later stage our naked bodies met, hers
cool, warm, highly agreeable, and I wondered what Robert Newton
would think of this. What would he think of this I wondered as I
touched her profoundly all over. (To ANNA.) What do you think
he’d think?
ANNA: I never met Robert Newton but I
do know I know what you mean. There are some things one
remembers even though they may never have happened. There are
things I remember which may never have happened but as I recall
them so they take place.
DEELEY: What?
ANNA: This man crying in our room. One
night late I returned and found him sobbing, his hand over his face,
sitting in the armchair, all crumpled in the armchair and Katey
sitting on the bed with a mug of coffee and no one spoke to me, no
one spoke, no one looked up. There was nothing I could do. I
undressed and switched out the light and got into my bed, the
curtains were thin, the light from the street came in, Katey still, on
her bed, the man sobbed, the light came in, it flicked the wall, there
was a slight breeze, the curtains occasionally shook, there was
nothing but sobbing, suddenly it stopped. The man came over to
me, quickly, and looked down at me, but I would have absolutely
nothing to do with him, nothing.
Pause
No, no, I’m quite wrong … he didn’t move quickly … that’s
quite wrong … he moved … very slowly, and the light was bad,
and stopped. He stood in the center of the room. He looked at us
both, at our beds. Then he turned towards me. He approached my
bed. He bent down over me. But I would have nothing to do with
him, absolutely nothing.
This conversation between Anna and Deeley brings out the
underlying tension for power and control over Kate as the object
of their desire. The conversation that was initiated by Deeley to

113
reveal his control and possession of Kate is deconstructed by Anna,
when she says that Kate has been with another man (apparently
referring to Deeley), who was begging for the attention of Kate
who remains aloof to his desires. The overall impact of the
conversation is the ultimate rejection of Deeley by both ladies. That
Deeley is living with Kate at present can thus be looked upon as an
act of mercy. The two contradictory memory of the relationship
between Kate and Deeley, as revealed by Deeley and Anna, create
an effect of uncertainty in the audience.
Old Times, according to William Baker, marks a “return to the
‘old times’ of localized urban poetry combined with the new poetry
of maximum compression and austerity found in Landscape and
Silence” (79). The impact of memory is manifested not only in the
power struggle between Deeley and Anna on stage but also in the
audience who is taken back to the good old times of the early plays
of Pinter, especially The Homecoming. Thus, in Deeley’s attempts to
prove himself a macho man by objectifying the women, the
audience is reminded of Max’s relationship with his wife and
daughter-in-law. Again, despite the heroic attempts of the male
characters in both plays, it is the women, who evolve triumphantly.
Thus, while The Homecoming concludes with Ruth occupying the
throne and the other male members lying at her feet, Old Times ends
with Deeley losing the affection of both the ladies as they come
together in their rejection of the male dominance of Deeley.
Old Times invites its audience to identify the best amongst the
many possible worlds that the often conflicting memories of its
characters present. This, according to Pinter, is the most difficult
task. As he has pointed out:
Apart from any other consideration, we are faced with the
immense difficulty, if not the impossibility, of verifying the past. I
don’t mean merely years ago, but yesterday, this morning. What
took place, what was the nature of what took place, and what
happened? If one can speak of the difficulty of knowing what in
fact took place yesterday, one can I think treat the present in the
same way. (8)
In the face of such a difficult situation, the task of classifying a
statement as true or false is required to be extended as it is required
114
to be understood that both the statements of Deeley and Anna can
be true. Indeed, the conflicting worlds projected by the memories
of the characters may be viewed as presenting an alternative
possible world that seems real to the concerned character at the
moment of speaking, thereby re-situating the audience to one of
the many possible worlds. The interpretations of the memories are
thus essentially subjective, thereby revealing a truth that is always
subjective. As such, the play seems to dwell in the past as the
memories take an ontological significance.
Old Times best illustrates Pinter’s ever-changing longings for
different identities in the present and alternative versions of the
past. The common setting of the conventional ‘kitchen-sink’ drama,
with which the early plays of Pinter usually began, appears
menacing as they create the impression of being a segment of the
multi-layered world as the play unpacks itself. What Kreps believed
to be an inseparable phenomenon of art and reality in the plays of
Pinter, is an invitation to the audience to realize the multiple facets
of reality that deconstruct the unified, linear vision of the world and
the nature of reality. As Hevesi points out,
The various interpretations and different perspectives of/one's
world could not be considered all veritable alternative versions of
reality, however, with an objective parallel existence ... as they
occupy a kind of a neutral place, a no man's land, being products of
the human mind. Consequently, their existence can only be relevant
subjectively and their ontological relation to time becomes rather
problematic as well. (62)
This ambiguity or uncertainty regarding the nature of plays which
critics have termed ‘Pinteresque’, is considered to be a hallmark of the
‘Theatre of the Absurd’ of whose tenets Pinter subscribes. The
uncertainty is created due to the multivalence of interpretations of the
activities that take place on stage by the audience.

115
Works Cited
Baker, William. Harold Pinter, Continuum International Publishing Group,
London and New York, 2008
Batty, M. About Pinter: The playwright and the work. Faber, 2005.
Begley, V. The aesthetics of refusal: Pinter among the radicals. Modern
Drama, 45, 2002,
628–645. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.3138/md.45.4.628
Billington, Michael. The Life and Works of Harold Pinter London, Faber,
and Faber, 1996.
Bohm, David. Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Routledge, New York, 1980
Burkman, Katherine H. Reviewed Work(s): Old Times by Harold Pinter,
Theatre Journal, Vol. 46, No. 3, Colonial/Postcolonial Theatre (Oct. 1994), pp.
419-421, The Johns Hopkins University Press, https://www.jstor.org/stable/
3208625, accessed on 10 Mar 2023
Demastes, William W. Staging Consciousness: Theatre and the
Materialization of Mind, The University of Michigan Press, 2002
Dukore, B. F. Harold Pinter (2nd ed.). Macmillan, 1988
Gale, Steven H. Harold Pinter, screenwriter: an overview in The Cambridge
Companion to Harold Pinter (2nd Edition), ed. Peter Raby, Cambridge
University Press, 2009, pp. 88-104
Hall, Peter. “Directing the Plays of Harold Pinter” in The Cambridge
Companion to Harold Pinter. (2nd Edition), ed. P. Raby. UK: Cambridge
University Press. 2009, pp. 160-169.
Hevesi, Márk Adrian. Remembering the Present: Ersatz Possible Worlds as
Alternative Realities in Harold Pinter's "Theatre of Absence", Hungarian Journal
of English and American Studies (HJEAS), Spring, 2011, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Spring,
2011), pp. 59-70, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43921801
Kauffmann, Stanley.Pinter and Sexuality Notes, Mostly on "Old Times", The
American Poetry Review, July/August 1974, Vol. 3, No. 4 (July/August 1974),
pp. 39-41, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27774710
Knowles, R. Understanding Harold Pinter. University of South Carolina Press, 1995
Kreps, B. Time and Harold Pinter's possible realities: Art as life, and vice
versa. Modern Drama, 22, 1979,47–60. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.3138/
md.22.1.47Lynch, Richard A. Foucault’s theory of power, in Dianna Taylor (ed)
Michel Foucault, Key Concepts, Rawat Publications, Jaipur, 2012
Mandre, Dr. Prashant.Harold Pinter and the Absurd Theatre, Authors Press,
New Delhi, 2020
Martineau, Stephen. “Pinter’s Old Times: The Memory Game.” Contemporary
British Drama, 1970-90. Eds. Hersh Zeifman and Cynthia Zimmerman. London:
Macmillan, 1993.
Pinter, Harold. Art, Truth & Politics. PMLA, May, 2006, Vol. 121, No. 3
(May, 2006), pp.811-818, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25486356, accessed
on 11 Mar 2023.
116
 ---.Harold Pinter: Plays 3, Grove Press, 1975
Prentice, Penelope.The Pinter Ethic: The Erotic Aesthetic, Garland
Publishing Inc., Taylor
& Francis Gp, London and New York, 2000.
Quigley, A. E. The temporality of structure in Pinter’s plays. Pinter Review,
1(1), 1987, 7–21
Regal, Martin S. Harold Pinter: A Question of Timing, Macmillan Press Ltd.,
London, 1995 Taylor, Dianna (ed). Michel Foucault Key Concepts, Rawat
Publications, Jaipur, 2012

117
 Mnemonic Interplay in Rohinton Mistry’s
Family Matters

Suyasha Dwivedi

And turning toward the window should say:

“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant at all.”
(The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot)
Eliot, imitating the dissonant spirit of the modern age, opens
ambiguous possibilities of recuperating from the impossibility of
transmission through dialogic discourses of tradition and plurality
revering simultaneous multiplicity. Contemporaneous approaches
in memory studies have tried to portray the dynamicity of our
memories but normatively establishing memory models fail to
accommodate the simultaneous existence of contradicting or
complementing epistemes at various levels. Protruding into the
present with the power to adjust our perception and provide it with
an epistemological base memory of the past is a reassurance of
continuity through tradition. On one side of tradition stands the
concern of ossification and on the other a dialectical debate over
the eschatological concerns of an epoch. Until these calamities
occur simultaneously they can not occur at all. That is to say, only
the dead can be ossified. Both individual and collective memories
contribute to the formulation of cultural, national, and global
memory. Pluralism revered by cultural relativism can be
analogously identified with the contested nature of memories in
this equation of collective memory. Continuance in culture
proceeds through inferential reasoning in the derivation of new
approaches modifying the existing one while the source also
continues to have a conceptual existence. Roaring discourses,
particularly in diasporic literature, regarding the essentialist
treatment of national identities, call forth for a new integrated and
inclusive theoretical base of national memory. Since these

118
discourses are diasporic in nature they also propose a transnational
reconsideration of Global memory. The act of writing is an entry
into the database of memory which presupposes the existence of an
immanent or metaphysical episteme, a priori, based on which a
creative discourse, a posteriori, is propagated or proposed. An
adjunct to this presupposition is the denial of an absolute episteme
which figures as a distant perpetually restructuring focal in the
spatiotemporal fabric holding the addressed subjects intact.
Memory is considered one of the sources of epistemology. Its role
is not just contributive and acquisitional but also recreational.
Canonical consensus contributes to the addition of creative entries
of memory through the works of fiction into the register of cultural
memory. Memories are informed by epistemology which in turn is
recreated by memories.
Reminiscing the past with a diasporic lens Mistry while writing
a fictional account undertakes real exchanges of transnational,
transcultural, and transtemporal nature. Interspersed with the lucid
memories of Nariman’s lost love Lucy, the narrative of Mistry’s
Family Matters connects the delirium of familial loss with the
displacement of a city’s culture lamented through various
mnemonic devices. They introduce a constant flux of the dynamic
interactions of individual and collective memory (or
Communicative) and their relationship with sociology, politics,
religion, and culture. The limited cognizance of individual memory
is aided by the multifoliate stimulus concordant with the material
and non-material collective memory that permeate the microscopic
sites of memory. Microscopic epistemes originating at these
microscopic sites undergoing microscopic transactions with their
antithetical contortions distort the seemingly and oppressingly
synchronous caricature of cultural memory and by conceding to the
subjective imaginations of the individual open up the domains for
the globalized models of memory.
Halbwachs is often considered the vantage point in memory
studies whose theories first initiated the discourse of individual
memories within the structure of collective canonical memories.
This model propagated many more complex subsidiaries, like Jan
and Aleida Assmann’s theories of cultural memory, deriving inputs
119
from different epistemological fields. His theories are still relevant
in their sociological propositions and in understanding the
situatedness of the individual within the wider pattern. Halbwachs’
The Social Frameworks of Memory is the starting point of my discussion
on the depiction of dysfunctional families in Mistry’s novel.
Halbwachs theories depict the inclusivity of individual memories
within the framework of social memories. An individual is a part of
the whole but at the same time through its idiosyncrasies different
from it. Collective memories exist separately from individual
memories while every individual’s memory participates in the
collective memory in the same form. Collective memory does not
then only exist transcendently but subsists within the individual
memory as well. This assures a sense of identity amongst the
varying individual memories by the virtue of participating in the
collective memory in the same forms that collectively recur in
individual cases. The differences between the individuals are
maintained by the degree of delineation from the recurring
epistemes of collective memory. The attributes of collective
memory can be perceived by the study of recurring patterns and
behaviors of individuals in social situations. Individual memories in
that sense are not private and are shaped by the experiences in the
social sphere. Halbwachs further adds that “one may also affirm
that the memory of the group realizes and manifests itself in
individual memories.” (Halbwachs 40) He seems to be creating a
well thought structured tapestry with the interactions of cognitive
outputs of individual memory with the established roadmap of that
cognitive path in the immediate social settings.
Rohinton Mistry’s novel Family Matters is a fictional testament
to these negotiations. Centered around the scattering family
dynamics of Nariman’s family, the novel provides a reanalysis of
memories that the characters hold within themselves. Mistry’s use
of memory is both a character-driven narrative device and a means
of exploring the thematic nuances of transformation and
globalization. It assesses the roles of collective memory in
structuring an individual’s identity and sense of self. The disparate
italicized sections dedicated to the reminiscing consciousness of
Nariman reconstruct a personal story concurrently with the non-
120
italicized narrative which is under construction along the temporal
stream. Maurice Halbwachs’s theories on collective memory
propagate that the memory of an individual is not hermetically
sealed away from the social epistemes but rather relies upon the
larger and smaller social units in the act of remembering. Viewed
through this lens Family Matters opens up a variegated discourse of
personal, familial, national, and cultural negotiations within the
framework of memory. Memories of Lucy reverberate the Parsi
community’s sometimes bigots reluctance (as portrayed in the
novel) of conjugal relations outside their community which invoke
“debate and polemics and bickering that infected the Reformists
and the Orthodox” (Mistry 131). This statement reflects the
paradoxical influences of the collective memory in two different
strains of thought yet maintaining a common source. Both of these
situations, reformation, and orthodoxy, demand an extreme
paradigmatic shift and acquiescence. It can be said that opposing
forces within a social framework drive the moderation required
with their equal pulls.
Halbwachs maintained that individual memories are organized
within the social frameworks in a way that the representative
attributes shared by the members of that social institution become
the representation of the past and tradition shared by all the
members. Participation in social activities and the general act of
socialization shape the outlook of individuals and the content and
context of individual memories by affecting their perception.
Although Halbwachs does not directly link memories with
epistemology it can be inferred that the framing of perception
influences the epistemological choices of the individual (This
chapter will keep drawing back to this inference). The degree of
privation which differentiates the individual continuously
constructs and deconstructs the representative attributes that are
inherited as a part of the social setting. The individual participates
in the genus of the framework but as is known, despite the
similarities there can be species and sub-species and further
distinctions even on the same taxonomic levels. The social
framework is a mediator amongst people fostering a sense of
collective identity which serves the purpose of uniting the members
121
of the group and stratifying them against other groups. It serves a
dual purpose of maintaining cohesion within the group while also
differentiating different groups.
The central tragedy of the novel is the conflict between
individual delineations from the collective memory in Nariman’s
forced marriage to Yasmin Contractor and the failure of his love
affair with Lucy. It is through these relationships that religious
identities enter the individual sphere and intervene with them. The
interplay is painful to read as it separates the two lovers. Nariman’s
family members are staunch believers of Zoroastrian values. For
the sake of consolidation of religious identity, the family sabotages
the individual’s feelings, in this case, Nariman. Halbwachs
maintains that in early societies “religious beliefs were perhaps
formed within the organization of society and fashioned in its
image.” (Halbwachs 64) This intruding inclusivity of religion in the
familial sphere is evident in Nariman’s family and is conspicuous in
its contrast with the modern idea of the family depicted in Roxana’s
home. Roxana, who has inherited these values from her mother
Yasmin is a religious person while at the beginning of the novel we
witness Yezad as a skeptic. It is interesting when this notion of
family entertaining the secular idea of pluralistic beliefs without
discord collapses towards the end with Yezad’s religious conversion
and aversion to the ways of his elder son Murad. It depicts the
familial structure as a closed one. House Clock of Plesant Villa is a
metonymic extrapolation of Zoroastrian values. But as Peter Morey
points out, “the myth of Parsi honesty and integrity is an
ambiguous one, both inspiration and burden” (Morey 69).
Jehangir’s challenge to this by receiving bribes is a microcosm of
corruption snuggling up an acquaintance and befriending them
which is true also of the cultural memory inherited by Yezad whose
pseudo-conversion is seen at the end. Since he belonged to the
same religious community his conversion is from a skeptic to a
believer.
Collective memories are essentially molded by language,
traditions, and social institutions. Family is one such social
institution that is a point of focus for Halbwachs. While discussing
the relationship between the individual with their immediate
122
socializing unit, family, Halbwachs argues that an individual is
related to the category of family, subconsciously revering the ethics
of that category. This becomes a determinant of its relationship
with the actual family as a composition of kins and consanguine
relations. It is those “conceptions which we understand and by
which we are impressed because of the simple fact that we enter
into a domestic group and take part in it” (Halbwachs 56) that
frame the individual’s understanding and gives them those
formative experiences from the beginning. The interaction here is
with the collective episteme of values attached to the category of
the family which vary according to the familial structure within a
cultural context. In a patriarchal society, for example, the privileges
of the eldest male in the family are subscribed to through the
dictates of that society since “our position is determined not by
personal feelings but by rules and customs independent of us that
existed before us.” (Halbwachs 54) This ensures continuity with the
past and belonging to the community while maintaining an
aggregating cohesion amongst the members of a family. But
sometimes it also decrees the need to disarray from conditioned
behavioral and cognitive patterns and rearrange the clusters of
memory for better comprehension
An instance of this is visible in the differing attitudes of all the
characters towards the tragic past. What Catherine Nesci discusses
about Baudelaire’s narrator in the poem ‘To a Woman Passing By’
is also true for Nariman. While the “peripatetic poet” searches for
love and identity Nariman seeks his identity in love. At the
accidental deaths of Yasmin and Lucy he feels “intense shock and
quasi-death inflicted by love. . . and his own rebirth after the
majestic grieving woman has moved on.” (Nesci 69-70) Nariman’s
shock at the dual deaths is constitutive of his memories. He spends
his entire life suffering under the burden of those memories.
Coomy on the other hand reminisces about her hatred for her
stepfather which is rooted in the same memory. It shows that other
person’s feelings and attitudes towards a person can also serve a
mnemonic function. She breaks the roof of Chateau Felicity just to
avoid the presence of Nariman. Jal and Roxana’s outlooks are
sympathetic. Jal recedes within and Roxana even if manages to
123
articulate a desire for reconciliation utters distaste for Coomy’s
hatred. Restructuring of these memories does not happen until the
end. It is the ceiling that she was striving to break but just enough
to suit her purpose that falls and kills Coomy. Nariman’s
recollections are not recorded in the novel after this incident. He
perhaps realizes the contestations of personal memories and their
fatal impact on other participating individuals. It is at this stage that
he is prepared for rebirth by letting go of the past. The lamentation
ends dramatically with Nariman’s death while Daisy’s violin tunes
to Serenade by Schubert depict the reverberating melancholia of
yearning for rebirth. She plays the Brahms lullaby and finally One
day when we were young. The final song is that which Lucy and
Nariman would hum. It is a fictive case study of individual
contribution to the collective memory of the family and the
community. Perhaps the tale of Nariman and Lucy will not be
immortalized like that of Shirin and Farhad, but it resembles the
collective archetype inherited through memory.
Nariman’s failed love story owes a lot to the collective belief of
a community as well. Escaping the religious persecution by the
Muslims in Iran Parsis emigrated to India. The community faced
the threat of dismantling ethics and values inherent in their cultural
beliefs of the overarching influence of diverse cultures in India.
Jesse S. Palsetia studied that “The Parsis in India reaffirmed
endogamy as a means of safeguarding identity.” (Palsetia 18) Being
a minority they needed cohesive forces within the community to
avoid acculturative schemata. Cultural coherence was sought
through sociological solidarity (as in every cultural/religious
community).
They in turn relied on the tradition of endogamy. This tradition
seeps into the novel as a collective memory of the social framework
of the Parsi Community which further permeates the domestic
walls and occupies the family’s obsession with maintaining a pure
race of Parsis. When Nariman is discovered having an affair with a
Christian girl it is met with revolt not just by his own family
members but the consanguine kin as well. It is an obstruction of
the intergenerational transmission of knowledge. It menaces the
collective identity and self-definitive values of the group which
124
denies the privation sought by Nariman. In the epilogue of the
novel, we see Yezad internalizing such beliefs when he sees his son
kissing a girl from another community. Halbwachs while
considering this situation of the introduction of new friends
provides two ways that the families follow. Either they accumulate
the newly introduced member within their folds or they discard this
new relation as “capricious, unregulated, and imaginative
affectivity” (Halbwachs 57) directly in discord with the perfect and
ideal sanguinity of family. The formative elements of the social
structure here are prohibited by tradition and the collective
epistemology is limited to its dictating normative function.
There are multiple functions that Halbwachs ascribes to the
social framework of family memory. One of the functions of this
mnemonic community is to provide a sense of integrated affiliation
within the constant transcience of diminishing metanarratives in
modern societies (modern in contrast with the primeval). Astri Erll
summarizes this functional relationship of a family as a framework
for memory and writes:
“(T)he family is a mnemonic community with specific
mnemonic practices, (face-to-face interactions, conversations at
family get-togethers), contents of memory (kinship patterns, family-
related past events), characteristics (emotional, allegiance based,
individualizing memory and functions (normative and formative).”
(Erll 308)
It can be conjectured that collective memories persist even after
the individuals who participated in this are gone and we can
conceive them as abstract ideas that can be conceptualized without
corresponding reference to extra-mental sort. Keeping the overtly
deterministic aspect of the framework of family memory
Halbwachs problematized the idea of fluidity of memories based on
the fact that cultures are always susceptible to change through
reconstruction and reinterpretation. With the changes in culture
and the intermingling of various cultures, the purview of the
subject also changes and reflects memory traces. The formation of
collective cultural memory begins with the accumulation and
preservation of behavioral patterns, habits, customs, and thinking
patterns which are inherited by the progeny through transmission
125
after undergoing certain alterations. The progeny reevaluates the
inherited memories and shifts the dynamics of comparative
contributions of tradition and modernity. Autonomy is not yielded
to either the individual or the collective rather they are synergically
dependent on each other for their sustenance. Jan Assmann, as
discussed later, will go on to say that, “Every individual belongs to
numerous such groups and therefore entertains numerous
collective self-images and memories.” (Assmann, “Cultural
Identity” 127) An individual acquires, that means, various socio-
political frameworks that shape their cognitive schemata and
epistemic paradigms. Their identity is not yielded to singular
authority.
With the hostility witnessed in him, Nariman’s idea of family
becomes distorted and he keeps returning to Lucy who waits for
him on the pavement outside his window or on the roof of the
building. This distorted vision breaks the individual identification
with the group and alienates him. It is an internal ostracism of sorts
that makes Nariman dwell in the memories of the past where he
felt belonging to Lucy. With Yasmin’s expectations of a similar
kind, Nariman is alienated from the new family as well. In the six
italicized sections we witness Nariman’s tragedy. We hear the voice
of Coomy resisting her father’s repeated return to Lucy. The fumes
from the silver thurible flash in front of our eyes when Yasmin
burns Lucy’s pictures in it but “Lucy’s image was beyond burning”
(Mistry 88) for it was engraved in Nariman’s memory.
At the beginning of the novel within the italicized section, we
read an utterance to which Mistry does not allocate a voice. It
represents the collective voice of the community when it says,
“Your past is your handicap.” (Mistry 16) It is curious because
Nariman is dependent on the representatives of the community,
Coomy, and Jal. It is in memory that he is reminded of the fatal
consequences of reminiscing the past. In another instance
following this, Nariman while quoting Longfellow exclaims, “Let
the dead Past bury its dead.”(Mistry 56) This happens in the non-
italicized section representing the present in the novel. Ironically,
Nariman is aware of the protruding influence of the past and
forlornly wishes to be freed of its shackles. The individual memory
126
which is supposed to be private is infested with the buzz of societal
and cultural dogmas. It is in these ways the concretized ideas of
family are abandoned. Nariman is representative of a Globalized
world, secular, interconnected and pluralistic. But Nariman stands
on the edge of the old world held by the memories of the past.
This is the right junction to enter the theories of cultural
memory and their religious influence by Jan Assmann. Jan
Assmann builds his theory of Cultural memory from Halbwachs
proposition of collective memory. He renames Halbwachs
collective memory as communicative memory. He attributes an oral
tradition to Halbwachs sociological inquiry into the process of
accumulation and transmission of collective memories. “Cultural
Memory, on the other hand, is a memory that is tied to material
objectivations.” (Erll 311) Cultural memory relies also on
mnemonic reminders such as physical artifacts, Iconography,
symbols, relics, monuments, and memorials. These tangible
mnemonic artifacts are the visual passage into past memories.
Heritage sites are a good example of the objectivation of cultural
memory. The pyramids of Giza and the cave paintings of Ajanta
belong to the cultural memory of a past essentially dead but
important as a beginning point of civilization. Markers of cultural
memory “transcend the borders of object-memory because they
make the implicit index of time and identity explicit”. (Assmann,
“Early Civilization” 7) That is to say, the topographical, spatial, and
temporal epistemes that feed the particular culture under
consideration are exposed when we deal with absolving ambiguities
of mnemonic artifacts. It expresses the cultural memory’s
relationship with the past. Yasmin’s burning of Lucy’s pictures is
analogous to the destruction of different versions of national
history institutionalized by political polemics. The demolition of
Babri Masjid employed a similar rewriting of national and cultural
history. The destruction of mnemonic markers of culture,
infrastructure habituating remembrance and acts of trauma live in
the personal reservoirs of memory. In the novel characters
repeatedly refer to the violent political control of Shiv Sena. Most
emotive of all the mentions is the description of Hamid’s desolate
countenance hurled by the memories of the loss of his family.
127
While explaining Pierre Nora’s theory on national remembrance
Astri Erll writes, “Sites of memory thus seem to function as
artificial substitutes for the no longer existent, "natural" collective
memory"(Erll 310). The demolished infrastructure leaves a wound
in the topographic sense which is registered in the
Nation’s memory and continues to batter individual memory.
Assmann seeks to differentiate between communicative and
cultural memory based on the modes of transmission. The everyday
process of remembering and sharing experiences within a social
group is referred to as communicative memory, whereas cultural
memory is the extended, institutionalized process through which
societies transmit their values, conventions, and history across
generations. 13 This distinction is critical for understanding how
various types of memory create communal identity and contribute
to the formation of shared narratives. Communicative memory is
not a concretized form of memory while cultural memories that are
transmitted through various mnemonic markers are solidified.
Assmann writes:
“If we think of the typical three-generational cycle of
communicative memory as a synchronic memory-space, then
cultural memory with its traditions reaching far back into the past
forms the diachronic axis.” (Assmann 8)
The nature of mnemonic regimes is a transient one in
communicative memory while it is rather constant in the case of
cultural memory. In the communicative aspects there is a scope of
a higher degree of privation but in a cultural setting memories are
collaborative in an essentialist sense. Jan Assmann attributes several
functions to the accumulative whole of ‘Cultural Memory’. Cultural
memory like collective memory is intertwined with the individual’s
memory and promotes a cohesive identity. Culture for Assmann is
a mnemonic marker with its capacity to accommodate distinctions
between communities. Memory owing to its fluidity also helps in
the reconstruction of culture. There are epistemological texts of
canonical significance in every culture, they are fixed in time. They
are the regulatory basis on which the ethical, moral, and behavioral

13

128
conducts of the participants of that culture are based. However,
they do not prohibit modifications and reinterpretations which
gives this framework a heuristic dimension. Cultural memory’s function
is also formative reassessment and the organization of epistemes.
In the Epilogue of the novel Jehangir describes Yezad as
“though he is carrying a secret burden, whose weight is cursing
him.” (Mistry, 465) It is perhaps the burden of continuing the
lineage of the pure Zoroastrian race with homogenous cultural
ideas. Yezad bears the heaviness of inheritance and the inability of
passing on that religio-cultural memory to his sons. One might
question if the religious transmogrification of Yezad is an extension
of the violent interference he witnesses in the death of Mr. Kapur
or a true conversion of faith. In that communal conflict between
Shiv Sena representatives and Mr. Kapur, a cosmopolitan
representative of Bombay we see the strife between two versions of
cultural memory. Shiv Sena’s is a religious extremist reformist
vision while Mr. Kapur’s is that of a romanticized nostalgia of the
past preserved in the name of his shop, “Bombay Sporting Goods
Emporium.” Religious connotations and examples were given by
Shive Sena in renaming ‘Bombay’ as ‘Mumbai’. In the initial pages
of the novel, we witness the confusion created by the changed
signifiers signifying the city. The shift from Bombay to Mumbai
spliced with the religious chauvinism of Shiv Sena and their
insistence on reversing, forgetting, and rewriting national memory
is substituted by “Bombay’s baby pictures” (Mistry 153). The
cosmopolitan garb of Mumbai is analogous to Murad and
Jehangir’s secular outlook breaking away from the communal
trammel and accepting multicultural developments. Jens Ruchatz
discusses the role of photographs in cultural memory and writes
that “the photograph refers to a particular and singular moment in
time”. The photographs of Hughes road and Dhobi Talao junction
make Yezad reassess his relationship with the city and the past and
give him a vantage he never had. He adopts and attaches Mr.
Kapur’s nostalgic romanticization to his perception of Bombay and
his own cultural inheritance. The nature of this nostalgia is semi-
artificial since it is not the organic longing of the past for Yezad as
much as it is an escape from the tribulations of the present. Murad
129
worryingly declares about his father’s religious beliefs that “Hitler
had the same ideas about purity.” (Mistry 482) This analogy
between an individual afraid for the community’s survival with the
perpetrator of the tragic event of the Holocaust seems absurd at
first. But it is undeniable that an individual belief could convince
people to kill the “unworthy” race. The persuasive power of
individual memory can be used both constructively and
destructively. This instance of reverberations of memory that
Murad could not have had a first-hand experience of shows that
this generation is equipped to handle the collective responsibility
and culpability of the horrors of the past.
The visible struggle of rewriting national memory invokes
Yezad, who is failing to sustain his family, and an urgent need of
preserving his cultural memory. Jan Assmann is aware of this
antagonizing tendency of cultural memory. He writes, “In line with
the slogan, “You shall not have died in vain”, obligations towards
the dead are used to justify a duty of revenge and intransigence.”
(Assmann, “Religion and Cultural Memory” 21) His proposed
resolution of this issue is that a restructured past should be
presented that depicts both sides sympathetically. This will free the
progeny of oppressors from their guilt and negotiate the sufferings
of the oppressed through the expression of responsibility by the
oppressors’ progeny for the actions committed in past. Assmann
proposes another aspect of globalization and universalism, albeit
the ambiguity inherent in the idealistic choice. He opines that
universalism or globalized communities are essentially formed
based on a canonized epistemological base already present. The
intermingling of different cultures and communities causes a
mnemonic erosion of cultural memory. But a new global
community is also being formulated. He writes, “World religions
combine the two opposite tendencies: the centripetal tendency of
memory and the centrifugal tendency of universalism.” (Assmann,
“Globalization” 134). The emerging globalization is attributed to
the undertones of theocracy driven by a homogenizing as well as
accommodating world religion which. It at once seems to
paradoxically preserve various cultures and proselytize. If

130
Globalization and universalism underwrite proselytizing it is secular
toleration and a moderate regulation of discursive arguments.
Mistry too relies on this globalized vision to resolve the impasse
of communal strife. For him the nostalgia of Bombay is organic
and we can almost substitute Mr. Kapur’s identity with Mistry.
Kapur's family’s interaction with people from varying sects and
religions is parallel to Mistry’s interaction with Canadian society as
an emigrant. Kapur’s longing for the crowd to pull him up in the
train can be analyzed as Mistry’s struggle in gaining acceptance in a
new society. But also as a yearning for acceptance of his national
belonging to India and validation of inherited collective memory.
He attempts to soothe his alienation. Barring the essentialist
stagnation through his anti-essentialism while dealing with
cultural/national memory, Mistry expands the identifiers of
homeland and challenges the cultural constructed-ness of the
nation as a category. Through this transnational debate, he reclaims
his global identity which is inclusive of but not limited to
sociological, cultural, and national memories.
“To make the Muses the daughter of Memory is to express a
fundamental perception of the way in which creativity operates.”
(Park 56) A memory of an event, experience, person, thought or
pre-existing episteme is fluid, conditioned by the resisting flux of
political, social, religious, intellectual, and other remote changes.
Memory passed on in the form of literary texts is subjected to the
same paraphernalia. Skopljanac maintains that “ the personal
involvement of a reader with the text. . . may in turn influence what is to
be retained from the text and subsequently recalled from memory.”
(Skopljanac 206) This can certainly originate a hegemonic battle
between different interpretations. These discourses delimit the
boundaries of memory and further its dynamicity.
If we seek to reimagine the embodiment of Mnemosyne, the
Greek Goddess of Memory, in the context of these developments
she appears to be a multifaceted cognizance who ceases to be a
noun and is in the process of concurrently becoming and
unbecoming, structuring and restructuring, and creating and
annihilating herself like the actual protagonist of the novel, the city
Bombay. This establishes that even if the original images perceived
131
collectively are not altered entirely, their reception is certainly
dependent on creatively grafted ideas of tradition and modernity,
bigotry and multiculturalism, and extremism and moderation.
Memory resists an absolute singularity both at the individual and
macroscopic dimensions and Mistry reifies this dynamic complex
nebula in the family drama of his novel. Memory is anonymity
because of the plurality of subjectivism. We dialectically infer the
collective elements which still reserve the authority to say, “That is
not what I meant at all.”
Works Cited
Assmann, Jan, and John Czaplicka. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” New
German Critique, no. 65, 1995, pp. 125–33. JSTOR,
https://doi.org/10.2307/488538.
Assmann, Jan. Cultural Memory, and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance
and Political Imagination. Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Assmann, Jan. “Globalization, Universalism, and the Erosion of Cultural
Memory.” Memory in a Global Age Discourses, Practices and Trajectories. Edited by
Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad, Palgrave Macmillian, 2010, pp. 121-137
Assmann, Jan. Religion and cultural memory: Ten Studies. Translated by Rodney
Livingston, Stanford University Press, 2006.
Erll, Astri. “Locating Family in Cultural Memory Studies.” Journal of
Comparative Family Studies, vol. 42, no. 3, 2011, pp. 303–18. JSTOR,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/41604447.
Halbwachs, Maurice. On collective Memory. The Heritage of Sociology, edited
by Lewis A Coser. The University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Mistry, Rohinton. Family Matters. Faber and Faber Limited, 2003. Print
Morey, Peter. “Running repairs: corruption, community and duty in Family
Matters” Rohinton Mistry. Manchester University Press, 2004, pp. 125-51.
Nesci, Catherine. “Memory, Desire, Lyric: The Flâneur.” The Cambridge
Companion to The City in Literature. Edited by Kevin R. McNamara, Cambridge
University Press, 2014, pp. 69-84.
Palsetia, Jesse S. The Parsis of India: Preservation of Identity in
Bombay City. Brill
Indological Library; vol. 17, 2001.
Park, Clara Claiborne. “The Mother of the Muses: In Praise of Memory.” The
American Scholar, vol. 50, no. 1, 1981, pp. 55–71. JSTOR,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/41210692.
Ruchatz, Jens. "The Photograph as Externalization and Trace". Cultural Memory
Studies: An
International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, edited by Astrid Erll and
Ansgar Nünning, Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 2010, pp. 367-378.
132
 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110207262.6.367
Lovro Skopljanac. “Literature Through Recall: Ways of Connecting Literary
Studies andMemory Studies.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, vol. 14, no. 2, 2012,
pp. 197–212.
JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.5325/intelitestud.14.2.0197.

133
 The Metaphysical Aspect of Nostalgia:
Romanticization of Memory

Ayushi Rakesh
Memory serves to fill the gaps of displacement and nostalgia, and it
is often said that a certain degree of "romanticization of the past"
takes place. This study examines the role of memory and nostalgia
in contemporary literature and the effects on readers' perception of
displacement and diaspora by reviewing two pioneer novels of the
present age, To the Lighthouse and The Kite Runner. It explores the
traces of displaced memory, wherein a desire to return to the past is
often accompanied by a romanticization of time. The authors' use
of nostalgia to bring back diasporic memory further complicates
the issue.
Upon close reading and textual analysis, the use of language in
both To the Lighthouse and The Kite Runner raises questions about
memory and its narrative. In their stream-of-consciousness style,
the Ramseys and Lily Briscoe culminated in a vague ignorance of
settings, reverberating in the form of memory, nostalgia, and the
retrieval of "those days." On the contrary, The Kite Runner highlights
the complexity and intricacy of emotions often shrouded in silence,
especially the betrayal by Amir, who becomes a mere witness to his
friend's rape, driven by his jealousy due to a lack of attention from
his father. Amir's father, who kept his paternity hidden from
Hassan for years, is depicted in a romanticized light, despite the
heinousness of his actions. The pauses, silences, and sentimental
phrases that usually build the narrative of sentimentality only serve
to displace the readers' minds from the more significant questions
of reality and memory narrative.
In his book, Grafton Tanner poses the question of nostalgia
and its target audience. He begins by saying nostalgia and memory
are political; “everything is political.” He further goes on with the
description of nostalgia as “that wistful feeling you get reminiscing
about the good old days.” (Tanner) The romanticization of
nostalgia in literature, when read by a widespread population,
134
politicizes power dynamics. In the book, Tanner mentions, “It’s
futile to extinguish nostalgia completely because the problem isn’t
nostalgia per se, but how it’s used. What stories are told with
nostalgia, and who tells them? What do they have to gain? And
above all, who do these stories erase? In short: who gets left out of
the remake?” (Tanner 17)
The novels, The Kite Runner and To the Lighthouse have multi-
layered characters who speak volumes of society's socio-political
and economic conditions. Both novels have synonymous plot
settings: the rich living in the void and lashing out their infernal
temper on their loved ones, and the ‘atonement’ attained at the end
somewhat brings this modern Greek tragedy to an end. They learn
lessons throughout the way, and by the end, there is much use of
dramatization to pay back for the pains inflicted on loved ones; the
novels come to an end and leave a plethora of questions in the
minds of readers. The novels are slightly different in the way of
remembrance this memory. In The Kite Runner, various trauma and
cultural memories are involved. In To the Lighthouse, the past and
present are used to reminisce certain degrees of nostalgia, and a
perennial sense of despondency lingers throughout the narrative.
The Kite Runner can be studied through the lens of postcolonialism
and cultural study. The question of identity and a reflection on
identity are pertinent in both novels. As Hosseini suggests:
…he pointed to an old man dressed in ragged clothes trudging
down a dirt path, a large burlap pack filled with scrub grass tied to
his back. ‘That’s the real Afghanistan, Agha sahib. That’s the
Afghanistan I know. You? You’ve always been a tourist here, you
just didn’t know. (215)
This one sentence spoken by Farid, a pivotal side character in
the novel, demonstrates the glorification of the homeland from the
point of view of Amir, who had the luxury to leave the nation and
reboot his life.
The essay compares and contrasts the two novels, The Kite
Runner and To the Lighthouse, where family and relationships are
written and talked of extensively. However, they both come to a
resolution by the end, giving the novels a happy and peaceful
ending; the characters and complexities are far from comfortable
135
and calm, and they question nostalgia. This paper shall explore an
answer to the otherness and metaphysical aspect of Hosseini’s
nostalgia through the eyes of Amir, who tends to romanticize his
nativeness at the expense of socio-economic hierarchy.

II

Cultural and Memory Studies

“Cultural memory has a deep time perspective, transcending both
individual life spans and the life span of any specific generation. It
connects the present with the past, creating a sense of historical
continuity and a shared identity with previous generations."
(Assmann) One of the most prominent writers of memory and
cultural studies, Aleida Assmann, defines the characteristic trait of
generational memory. A single incident does not cause memory.
Instead, generations take to build memory and culture. The Kite
Runner encapsulates this aspect of culture perfectly. Amir is
parented by his father, who is mellowed in his opinion for religion
and merriments. This cultural upbringing made him accepting
enough to ‘allow’ his wife to drink. On the other hand, Soraya
belonged to an affluent family but could never drink or talk openly
about her marriage in front of her father. In a way, Soraya
represents Lily Briscoe, who could attain her liberation after
marriage and on her own. The memory and nostalgia for these two
belonged to the same strata is very polarised. Amir romanticized
Afghanistan and his guilt into longing for Hassan and his warmth.
For him, the summer, Kite Festival, and Afghanistan were the bags
of guilt, betrayal, and pain he had caused to Hasaan and shame and
jealousy, whose honor he could not defend. He could neither
defend Hassan’s honor in front of his friends nor protect his
country from the vast Western countries like USSR and USA. “The
entire idea of memory and process of consumption of history has a
very textual process. Texts are always dealing with the politics of
representation, which strategically include and exclude certain

136
things, and thus, it can be said forgetting is not an innocent activity
at all.” (Saha)
The socio-political condition of 2001 Afghanistan was that the
USA had settled its military bases in Afghanistan to ‘protect’ it
from any danger. This book is often accused of fabricating stories
for an agreeable audience and a well-rounded protagonist. The
book does not mention any cons of the US regime in Afghanistan,
and it glorifies the country as its own. The community of Afghanis
meeting every Friday paint a picture of the fraternity on long lost
island. The US community of Afghanis is unaffected by the daily
war-like situation Afghanis face, which somehow problematizes
memory and narratology. The spending of $35,000 on a wedding by
emigrants in the USA when the entire community is suffering
seems far-fetched from reality.
“According to theorists, every act of remembering is not an act
of recollection but reconstruction through a process of
deconstruction. Certain imaginations fill the gaps in the narratives,
the missing links which are forgotten. Recollection is an act of wish
fulfillment that entangles information with imagination. As the
human brain is a politically biased machine, certain biases
embedded in our neural system color our acts of recollection. As a
result, when our neural system encodes some information, it
excludes other things. That’s why our hegemonic version of
memory suppresses several marginalized voices and thus celebrates
the hegemonic grand narratives over the lesser known mini-
narratives which are mainly staying in personal or marginalized
collective memories.” (Saha)
Postcoloniality and hierarchical subservience embedded in
Afghan society show the way of Hazara, an ethnic tribe, were
treated like others in the society. The loyal Hazaras went over and
beyond to prove their loyalty to the Pashtuns, but they were never
accepted in society due to their ‘Shia’ status. The Western troops
could have exploited the society due to a lack of kinship among
their own. As soon as Aseef confronts Amir on his friendship with
Hassan, the first thought in his mind is, ‘But he is not my friend, I
almost blurted; he is my servant.’ On the other hand, Hassan was
sodomized by Aseef and still proved his loyalty to Amir by working
137
for him day and night and trying to establish the same old friends.
The book has been written from the guilty person’s perspective,
and still, he talks about guilt and trauma, which problematizes the
narrative structure. Hassan’s pain was masked by his work ethic and
suppression, which the rich boy churned to drown his guilt and
cowardice to stand up against the bully. The entire narrative
structure is excessively woven around to dramatize and somehow
compensate for the years of injustice. Hassan and Ali, the prime
example of ‘generational doom’, were played over by their beloved.
Hassan’s mother, Sanaubar, returned to repay her guilt through
physical help and spending time with her grandson. The beauty she
was renowned for ultimately wore off, and what remained for her
redemption was, seeking forgiveness from her son and husband.
She played her part and died peacefully when she could shed some
guilt. The otherness Amir experiences in America is cultural
dissociation in a diasporic land where he will not be slaughtered for
being marginalized.
On the other hand, Hassan had to pay the price of being born
in a country that could never accept him as his own. Hassan’s
biological father, Baba, could not accept him, and the father-son
relationship stretches to his acceptance in the country. Baba longed
for his athletic abilities in Amir and wanted Mair to be an ‘a man’,
but his bastard child bore all the abilities he wished his ‘socially
acceptable’ son had. He was born out of love of a Pashtun and
beautiful Hazara woman, yet he was born with a cleft lip, which
made him prone to several verbal attacks. The price paid by
Hazaras in their land was double the marginalization experienced in
one’s own country. Nostalgia for Hazaras is the romanticization of
the memory they had suppressed over the years. Hassan had to face
his worst enemy and still address him as ‘Agha’, a term of
endearment and respect, which he had to say even when Aseef had
insulted him, his father, and his tribe. Amir observes, “…and I
wondered briefly what it must be like to live with such an ingrained
sense of one’s place in a hierarchy.” (Hosseini, 39) Gender and
Identity in the novels The antagonist, Assef, who has a mixed
heritage, belonging to a German mother and an Afghani father, is a
teenager who presents the aspect of hyper-nationalism, which has
138
been associated with extremist Islamic agencies. As mentioned in
the novel, the funding subtleties of these extremist organizations
are a brilliant way of exposing the viciousness capitalist societies
bring forth. The Taliban as an agency was hailed in Afghanistan
when they first made their way in the 20th century; soon, economic
development took a back seat, leaving Afghanistan with starvation.
Organizations fund top leaders, but they underfeed the staff and
foot soldiers to maintain chaos. The hands and belly feed would
ensure no flogging and power exhibition. Therefore, young boys
are infiltrated with religious bigotry to spread the message. Usually,
the leader is just an identity crisis well, the articulated person who
hides beneath the façade of extremism under the name of
development. Aseef believed in purging the community like Hitler,
whom he idolized, as his identity was questioned. Thus he resorted
to the easiest way to manipulate, i.e. religion and ethnic cleansing.

III

The Altering of Diasporic Memory and ‘Real’

Incident: Blocks and Loopholes of Memory
The ‘Four Turning Theory’ by William Strauss and Niall Howe,
which describes the cyclic pattern of history, each lasting between
20-25 years, can be applied to the book. The book’s timeline is
1933, the 1960s, 1975, and 2001; roughly 20-25-30 years of gaps.
According to the theory, the cycle of events are as follows: The
High, The Awakening, The Unravelling, and The Crisis. The four
courses of timeline and characteristics can be easily put into the
study of the novel. The earliest stage, i.e. ‘The High’, marks from
1933 when Baba’s father, Siyah Posh, The Judge, sentences wealthy
boys of a reputable family in Kabul to serve the punishment of
running over a Hazara family, leaving a kid orphan. The adopted
kid is Ali, and thereon begins the cycle of his everlasting pain.
The Awakening (the 1960s) was the period of immediate
danger at hand; the birth of the boys and Russian troops forming
an ally with Afghanistan’s monarch was the period of awakening.
139
The fatal mistake in the birth cycle has been made, and the micro-
macro ripple effect of this blunder will be served as the ultimate
betrayal of kinship. The nursing of the boys, Hassan and Amir,
who would grow up in different worlds despite sharing parentage,
has been destined. One will be the split copy of the father’s ideal,
and the other is the darker side of his personality. Awakening
usually signifies the rise of a new tide that would challenge the
previous ones. Baba and Rahim Khan were business moguls who
knew the religious preaching would take them nowhere. Thus,
these mavericks took the situation to a different level and changed
the settings of modern-day Afghanistan.
The Unravelling is the period when the ideology usually fails
due to disparity amongst various classes. In the book, Hassan and
Ali, lead a very rustic life, whereas Amir and his father have
Anglicised their ecosystem. They indeed become tourists in their
own country. Amir talks about unheard-of international movies and
plays, and his father drove a sensational car that drew envious
looks. The unraveling thus brings the protest of the masses. In
1975, Russia took over Afghanistan to introduce socialist methods
to improve and benefit the economy.
The Crisis is the period of change and conflict in the book's
timeline, which would be 2001. The Russian troops could not
change anything in the country, and there came another religious
extremist group from the country called the Taliban, which was
applauded by the locals. In due course, the Taliban made it clear that it
would impose hypernationalism and an excessively grounded way of
living. It was the period in which Amir came back to rescue his nephew,
Sohrab, and encountered the ruins of a once beautiful nation.
Interestingly, the book extensively mentions relatives, but two
names are never disclosed. They are Baba, Amir’s father, and The
judge, Amir’s grandfather. Amir’s mother, Sofia Akrami, who had
royal family connections, is presented by the Author and
protagonist, but the father’s name never comes up in the novel.
Surprisingly, the relationship between the father-son is very tensive,
and they never get along as Ali and Hassan do. The later revelation
that Ali was not the father of Hassan and still he was the center of
Ali’s world raises the question of the competence and general
140
favoring of Hassan over Amir and the classic example of memory
displacement and overarching jealousy. It is also essential to build up the
trauma memory and discourse. The atrocities of physical trauma were
majorly inflicted on Hassan, and the boy could only live his life in peace
after they moved away from his problematic family.
Usage of Literary Devices as Metaphors
The book uses literary devices to advance the writer’s literary
prowess, which can be read as symbolism. The first literary device
introduced to the readers was irony, followed by plothole, followed
by the use of clichés, foreshadowing, and dramatization. These
literary devices are essential for deconstructing and reconstructing
the narrative and nostalgic memory.
The irony, as defined by MH Abrams in A Glossary of Literary
Terms, is defined as “In most modern critical uses of the term
“irony”, there remains the root sense of dissembling or of hiding
what the case-not is, however, in order to deceive, but to achieve
special rhetorical or artistic effects.”
The use of irony starts from the very first example of Hassan
and Amir being called brothers because the same woman breastfed
them; this irony and foreshadowing became a very significant twist
by the end of the novel. It made the suffering of Hassan, Ali, and
Sohrab sound cruel and unjust. The phrase “But I had not turned
out like him. Not at all.” Made in his teens was another irony in his
life. His father had a magnanimous personality and the will to
sacrifice for others at the cost of his life. Amir did not immediately
follow him, but his other son Hassan was the action hero of Amir’s
life. Later in his life, Amir realized that he and his father harbored
very dark secrets from each other, and his viewpoint changed for
his father changed. He could now see him as the philanthrope who
paid the price of his heinous crime under the pretense of goodwill
and charity. He did excellent work unloading the burden of
betraying his sons, society, and a loyal man.
Using plot holes as a literary device is a skilled attempt at
portraying Afghanistan, Ali, and Hassan as the signified. According
to Oxford Dictionary, a ‘Plot hole’ is defined as an inconsistency in
the story which could have been due to a mistake on the
141
editor/author’s end. Taking Afghanistan’s perspective as a plot
hole, it has seen turbulence and bloodshed for as long as it existed.
The rulers tried to bring central governance, but many sects and
communities lived in various parts of Afghanistan and could not
stand to lose ownership. The country came together only when
they drove any Western power out as they overstayed the welcome
and hospitality. It was an ostensible inconsistency in the face of the
earth, which has been the target of massive economic maneuvers
from the Western power. It was caught in the middle of the cold
war when the Occident were parading their supremacy by tying
knots with the country. The USSR and USA have taken advantage
of the crisis in Afghanistan and left it to rebuild itself, even in 2022.
As a plot hole, Ali is one of the classic examples of subtle hints
towards ongoing violence against race and class. The Hazaras are
traveling nomadic groups who belong to Shia Muslims who do not
share outstanding bonds with the Sunnis. These groups of people
are hardworking but disadvantaged and primarily work as
entertainers. Ali’s deformity in his legs, along with his impotence,
made him a silent sufferer all his life. Baba was the birthfather of
Hassan, and Ali bore the shame of this betrayal every day in silence.
He was a mature man who never took his frustration of his son’s
birth on his son, Hassan.
On the other hand, Baba could not believe Amir was his son
had he not seen the birth himself. On the other hand, Hassan
shared a loving and ever-lasting relationship with his father. Ali was
aware of Amir’s mischief and hooliganism, yet, his internalized
subservience could never let him raise his voice for all the
sufferings Baba and Amir had put Ali and Hassan to. Ali was
considerate enough to look after his son, observe his everyday
activity, comfort him, and finally, take him out of the toxic situation
Amir had built. This made Amir long for his father’s affection, yet
he could never get that from his father. As long as Ali was alive, he
cared for his son and family like a true man of honor. He had
internalized his pains and sufferings, and his son, Hassan, shared
the same feeling. They were not related by blood, but their bond
was incredible.

142
Interestingly, Amir and Soraya could not have children, which Amir
had subtly blamed on Soraya, again showing his toxic masculinity
when the test results could not decipher their inability to conceive.
The interesting turn of events where the impotence gets transferred
from Ali to Amir is the ultimate poetic justice the author does to
repent and “to be good again”. Their longing for Amir for his
homeland mellows the pain his father inflicted on Ali and Hassan.
Both of them subconsciously relied on Hassan and Ali, called them
friends, and confided for their benefit, but they were even more
lethal than Aseef.
Hassan was the plot hole of the story, the protagonist whose
point of view mattered, and the unsung hero of this teenage
friendship and nostalgic memory. When Amir wrote his first story,
he woke Hassan to hear that. Though it seems like a sweet gesture
between friends, Hassan’s innocent observation of using onion as a
prop to cry and make pearls does not sit well with Amir. His
burning jealous thoughts about the advice showcase the
institutionalization of class distinction and everlasting disharmony
between races. He thought, ‘What does he know, that illiterate
Hazara? He will never be anything but a cook. How dare he
criticize you?’ (Hosseini, 32)
Plot hole as a literary device exemplifies the emblematic
hierarchical subversion in Hassan, Ali, and Afghanistan. They were
all crushed and used as a scapegoat for others to rise, and they paid
the hefty price of being born in specific ways.
Baba worked excessively hard in the United States, ensuring
Amir got the proper education. Nature suited him as he could
connect more with Hassan’s manual labor-oriented activities.
However, the irony of migrating to the United States was that the
USA itself occupied large parts of Afghanistan and ‘ruled’ over it
for the most prolonged period. Baba’s assertion of not getting
treatment from a Russian doctor as the Russi had plundered his
home country is ironic that the country they sought refuge in
overthrew the ruling leaders and installed a puppet government of
its own. As recently as 2021-22, the current President of The
United States asked the US military to evacuate Afghanistan due to
cost and budgeting. Afghanistan was no longer the play toy for any
143
western democracy, another irony, and all of them had shifted their
attention to the ongoing war crisis between Russia and Ukraine.
Cowardice and forgiveness as irony is another use of Hosseini’s
literary expertise. Baba, who had entangled the lives of these
characters, unimaginably suffered all his life and died of cancer.
Cancer, as a metaphor, is an indestructible guilt that finally catches
up with life and slowly metastases into consuming the person. In
his essay, Imagining Homeland, Salman Rushdie talks about
fragmented memory and guilt:
“his mistakes are the mistakes of a fallible memory
compounded by quirks of character and of circumstance, and his
vision is fragmentary.” (Rushdie)
Baba, who should have sought forgiveness, accepted his son
Hassan, freed Ali from this crushing secret, and never once talked
about it. He instead chose to remain silent and be the judge of
others’ character. He did all he could for Amir, his socially
acceptable son, but his longing for Hassan showed that he was
Amir's first inciter of this ugly jealousy. He made his son self-
conscious of himself and even debunked his duties as a parent.
Amir has written about various incidents of negligence and
aloofness from his father. However, Amir is the coward, and
Hassan is the braver of the two; in the end, Sohrab and Amir
illustrate bravery as Sohrab uses his slingshot to hurt Aseef and run
away from the Taliban.
The notable pause, silence, and sentimentality present
throughout both novels is the only similarity in writing style. The
Kite Runner is dialogue and takes note of the conscious thought that
appears, whereas, To the Lighthouse is like the flow of water; the
memory and nostalgic understanding comes at the expense of Mrs.
Ramsay’s death. The kids' excitement to reach the lighthouse as a
kid was extinguished with time, and the hollowness of her absence
made everyone question how she stuck them all together. The polar
opposite viewpoints described the masculine and feminine identity,
and the ‘roles’ they should have confided in get shattered. The
absence of Mrs. Ramsay becomes a haunting trip to the lighthouse,
which everyone notices. The only person close to Mrs. Ramsay, i.e.
Lily Briscoe, undergoes artistic liberation and finally understands
144
the significance of Mrs. Ramsay’s action. The silence and pauses
Mrs. Ramsey took to work as a matchmaker or a guide in
everyone’s life was a mature standing. She was the pillar of the
house and was sacrificed to get the family to understand her value,
Lily getting her vision. The death was timely and peaceful, but it
opened the window to Lily’s soul and locked the judgment of her
personality. The lesson which most of them learned was that the
idealization of an entity or trip was not the parameter of success.
They had all achieved what they could, yet none were happy. The
pillar of the structure was based on the frailty of a woman who wanted
happiness for everyone else.
Similarly, the romanticization of memory with various plot
holes and loopholes in the novel does not make them a happy
memory study. The atrocities inflicted on Ali, Hassan, and Amir
were unjustified, and they all led a life of melancholy. They were
the scapegoat of destiny when people like Baba, Rahim Khan, and
General Taheri could find a nostalgic attachment to their
homeland. On the other hand, Sohrab, Ali, Amir, Hassan, and
Soraya were the second generation of spectators who had been
used and manipulated into the likes of ‘home’, and yet, there was
no safe space for them all their lives. The overarching memory of
the place was simply an extension of their parents’ longingness for
the homeland.
IV

Convergence of Memory and Reality: Romanticisation of

Nostalgia
“Our identity is at once plural and partial. Sometimes we feel that
we straddle two cultures; at other times, we fall between two stools.
But however ambiguous and shifting this ground may be, it is not
an infertile territory for a writer to occupy. If literature is, in part,
the business of finding new angles at which to enter reality, then
once again, our distance, our long geographical perspective, may
provide us with such angles.” (Rushdie)
The writer Hosseini, finds a new angle in this diasporic setting,
and he longs for his nation, his homeland, but then he has settled in

145
another nation, and so has his protagonists. They rarely condone
the diasporic setting. Instead, the characters have growth and
diversity with the global network. Hosseini’s book The Kite Runner
was adapted from a movie banned in Afghanistan due to the rape
scene. The idea of seeing the world with a conceited mind repulses
the author’s feelings. They acknowledge and write stories to awaken
the masses of the heinousness occurring in the war-inflicted zones.
Thus, they feel settled and at home in the new country. Amir, too,
immediately sets his wheel in motion to find Sohrab because he
knows he will change his mind as soon as possible. Afghanistan as
his home was only up until Hassan and the beautiful summer
dream existed. They felt far more at home in the USA than in
Afghanistan.
The final words of Salman Rushdie on owning up to a diasporic
setting and a new vision or version of his native land, which might
not be an accurate description, but the writers’ are not supposed to be
appropriate with the image of the country; instead memory should
focus on the subjectivity of their emotions and understanding.
“John Fowles begins Daniel Martin with the words: 'Whole
sight: or all the rest is desolation.' But human beings do not
perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, with
cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions. Partial
beings, in all the senses of that phrase. Meaning is a shaky edifice
we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper
articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated,
and people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the
case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend
it so fiercely, even to the death. The Fowles position seems to me a
way of succumbing to the guru illusion. Writers are no longer sages,
dispensing the wisdom of the centuries. And those of us who have
been forced by cultural displacement to accept the provisional
nature of all truths, all certainties, have perhaps had modernism
forced upon us.” (Rushdie)
The writers are not the ambassadors of nations that they need
to create a perfect hideaway image for the nations. The hardships
and emotions matter over the metaphysical ‘made up’ memory;
distortion of memory in trauma is factored but using memory to
146
build up narratives that never existed is misleading. Memory Studies
involve disciplines from literature, Neuroscience, and Psychology,
which affect the readers and writers equally; hence, ethical
discretion must be followed while narrating memory, trauma, and
cultural studies. As he mentions, the invisible should be written
about, and he perfectly summarises the complexities of a memory-
based diasporic writer. “It may be that writers in my position, exiles
or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss,
some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being
mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must also do
so in the knowledge which gives rise to profound uncertainties that
our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we
will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost;
that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but
invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind.” (Rushdie)
Works Cited
Abrams, M H and Harpham Geoffrey Galt. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Cengage
Learning, 2015.
Assmann, Aleida. "Communicative and Cultural Memory." Cultural Memory
Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, edited by Astrid Erll
and Ansgar Nünning, Walter de Gruyter, 2011, pp. 109–118.
Grafton Tanner, The Hours Have Lost Their Clock: The Politics of Nostalgia
(2021), 10-17 and 229-251
Rushdie, Salman, “Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981-1991.” Choice
Reviews Online, vol. 29, no. 03, Nov. 1991, pp. 29–134029–1340,
doi:https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.29-1340
Saha, Poulami. “Mapping the Entangled and Intricate Memories of Diasporic Lives;
Revisiting the Mnemonic Spaces in Khaled Hosseini′S The Kite Runner.” Litinfinite, vol. 4,
no. 1, 2022, pp. 101–8, www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=689072705013.
Accessed 26 Mar. 2023.

147
 The Mnemonic Reading of “The Waste
Land”: A Cultural Text of Memory, Myth &
Mnemotechnics

Bhawna Vij Arora

As a significant cultural text, “The Waste land” has, for

generations, elicited and challenged several cognitive and
interpretative readings by literary critics and scholars. As a
cautiously crafted, and loaded text, it is pregnant with dynamic
meaning and mutates as per the lens of the reader. A twentieth-
century reader interprets the text and its underbelly differently as
compared to the war-ridden, unsettled psyche of a reviewer. “The
Waste Land” is not “long or loud” but rather perpetually
purposeful for variegated epochs and soils. Critics of “The Eliot
Studies” have long argued and established about the poem, that:
If the poem is, as it has been purported to be, a major cultural
statement or the first stage in a long spiritual pilgrimage or even
just personal grumbling, it is also a poem that is basically concerned
with the literary structure that underpins that culture, that spirit,
that person (149)
In addition to the copious body of research that stations the
text within cultural anthropology and negotiates with its zeitgeist,
"The Waste Land" can be seen as an important insignia of cultural
memory. The interpretative canon offered by ‘Memory Studies’ as a
discipline not only helps to discover the underlying semantics of
the text other than the neurophilosophical or neuroanatomical
aspects of cognitive sciences but also demonstrates the role of
memory in constructing literary masterpieces by way of its reliance
on the foundational domain of memory. As Renate Lachmann
reiterates“the image-producing activity of the memory incorporates
poetic imagination” (304). As Irimia describes:
literature has emphasized the central place occupied by memory in
classical culture, from Homer’s to Da Vinci’s and Cervantes’s or
Shakespeare’s times. Early modernity regarded this divine and
148
human faculty as an “essential intellectual skill” by which one could
be grasped the “intricate designs of the cosmos. Memory was
eventually institutionalized as an art known as mnemonics and
implied its own hermeneutic capacities, strategies, and mechanisms.
It discharged the crucial function of contributing to the ‘making of
the paradigms of cultural understanding’. Along the centuries, to its
rhetoric sagacity was added the moral substance of medieval
teaching further amplified by internal(ized) processes in the space
of the mind or/and the soul. Its ability to create images in the
receding places of its storage came to be equated with a technique
of disclosing obscure origins of onetime poetic force. (3)
The text has numerous interpretations and has engaged
thousands of scholars in serious academic interventions to provide
a well-rounded understanding of this complex web of meaning.
Amid other interpretations and critical nuance-ing, the paper would
explore to seek out the meaning of Eliot’s memories which have
driven and beget weaving and narrativizing of “The Waste Land”.
Using Renate Lachmann’s framework of memory and literature,
this paper would trace and sketch “The Waste Land” as a
‘mnemonic piece of art par excellence’(Lachmann, 301), a poem
that occupies a macro space of mnemonic mesh through inter-
textual material, varied cultural references, fables, and allusions,
reconstituting them to establish innovative remembering and
recollection. The purpose is to establish an age-old classical work as
a representative of “cultural truthfulness”, and authenticity through
the rhetoric of personal memory and its varied mode. The poem
secures and elaborately takes a literary and memory space by way of
many mnemonic devices: from its nihilistic undertones to the use
of Shakespearean rag, the rattle of the bones, the sound of motors,
horns, and falling towers or the meats and potatoes of simple
tautological repetitions. The broader framework of the poem
encompasses five segments namely:
I.’The Burial of the Dead; II. ‘A Game of Chess’ III. ‘The Fire
Sermon’ IV. ‘Death by Water’ and V. ‘What the Thunder Said’.
Mary Chamberlain and Paul Thomson emphasize that “Memories
contain and are contained by a narrative which orders, links and
makes sense of the past, the present and the future. At the same
149
time, they contain para-narratives, which weave in and out offering
a counterpoint here, a substance there. Placing memory, in all its
multifaceted and multilayered dimensions, within the Longue durée
of a narrative suggests more an act of creativity than a finite text,
where the process of recall is as vital as the substance
remembered”(xiii). In this regard, the rhetoric of collective and
personal memory constitutes four modes of memory vis-a-vis:
A) The Experiential
B) The Mythical
C) The Antagonistic
D) Reflexive mode.
The central character of the poem, Tiresias, for whom Eliot
suggested, “What Tiresias sees in fact is the substance of the poem”
seeks allegorical approximations, mythical resurrection, and
antagonistic juxtaposition-ings, often mediated reflexively. These
modes are achieved through the ‘Experiential mode’ in which
literary forms ratify the past as a “recent, lived-through
experience.” Techniques such as long stream-of-consciousness, the
life of the mind, utterances, and communicative memory of
narrativized by first/third indicate the modes of remembering
mainstreamed through literary forms of various genres. In the
poem, these modes are utilized and deployed through a number of
sensorium and sensory apparatuses important to the materialization
of the mnemonic devices. The five senses of touch, see, smell,
hearing, and taste emerge by way of sensations on the aura,
atmosphere, intuition, presentiment, and prognostication that
Tiresias experiences.
That ‘The Burial of the Dead’ creates the aura by the smell of
‘Lilacs breeding out of dead lands’, ‘tasting/drinking coffee’,
‘having a bad cold’, ‘exhaling sighs’, ‘talking for an hour’, the touch
and feel of ‘April being the cruelest’, ‘dead trees’, ‘dry stones’, the
images of death and decay, ‘corpse sprouting’ like vegetative seeds.
The other segments of the poem, similarly, have a repertory of such
images as, ‘barges drift’, ‘falling towers’, ‘exhausted walls’, ‘empty
chapel’, ‘dry bones’, ‘flash of lightening’; Sounds as ‘frosty silence’,
150
‘drip drop drip drop’, ‘Co co rico co co’, ‘O O O O that
Shakespearian Rag’, ‘Jug jug jug jug’, ‘Twit twit twit’; caress and
collisions of the typist, the sexual assaults of the young man carbuncular,
groping and kissing; respire and inhale as ‘the river sweats’, ‘sweaty
faces’; fancy, desire, and penchant of ‘the deep sea which swells of profit
and loss or the ‘mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit’.
Thus, the material conditions of these mnemonic images and
symbols indicate the poem as a humongous depository text,
recollecting the past through repressed memory, the present
through the configuration of the fervent memory, and the future as
a prefiguration of autonoetic memory. To establish the
propositions mentioned above, it is necessary to bring Eliot’s
doctoral research of 1911-1914 on F. H. Bradley, who was
“generally considered to be the greatest living
philosopher”(Brooker, 146), competing “Experience and the
objects of Knowledge in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley”.
Interestingly, many critics such as J.H. Miller, and Hugh Kenner
have found his preceding works based on and aided by Bradleian
idealism, and have located precisely the Bradleian elements in his
poetry (Brooker, 147).
In 1910, while Eliot stayed in Paris, he also attended and
subscribed initially to Henri Bergson’s lectures on memory and his
1896 publication Mateiere et Memoire which was a significant
contribution to the study of implicit memory. It was Bradley,
however, whose theory of memory, ‘that it is not a retrieval,
recollection, or remembrance of past mental states or events but
rather ‘the ideal construction’ (Rylance,101) formed from such
recollections gave impetus to Eliot’s belief of the theory of
memory. For Bradley, “We remember forwards, not backward”
(Bradley, 382). In retrieving and rummaging through the past, this
experience owes their meaning to the continuity of the self towards
the future” (Rylance, 101). Experience thus is not an independent
set of events or emotions in the past rather, it has a perpetual and
ideal connection with the present”(Rylance,102). “Memory of
events, therefore, is an ideal consistent formation”. Thus, in the
case of “The Waste Land”, apart from the polemical
interpretations of the text being a commentary and critique of
151
World War-I and the political turbulence across the continents, it
can be validated from the above arguments that this particular work
gravitated more towards the regenerative profundity, spiritual [re]-
formation. Particularly in “What The Thunder Said”, a total [re]-
integration of the dilapidated society has been crafted as ‘Memory’
has a dialectical relationship and a syllogistic structure between the
event of the past and how it is recalled. The poem, in this light, is
an ideal and consistent formation of the resurrection of the
promised land, a transmogrification of the ugly to the delightful. It
is, therefore, by way of recollection and imagination, Eliot draws
his metaphors, incidents, histories, events, and even a commentary
on poetry. Lachmann’s observation about imagination and memory
is crucial and groundbreaking:
The bond between mnemotechnics and literature is grounded
in the double meaning of imago as an image of memory and as the
product of imagination, the creative stimulus of literature. The
image-producing activity of memory incorporates poetic
imagination . . . These both seem to mirror each other and comment
upon one another. It is also plausible to assume that literary imagery
necessarily appeals to mnemonic imagery, that the image of the bank
of literature is the same as the image bank of the memory. (303)
The second aspect of the paper would dwell on the hyper-use
of the inter-text, that which the original text of the poem absorbs
assimilates, quotes and at times even subverts and reorganizes. The
myths and allusions hang between the image and written word of
the previous and thereafter, between the dead and the re-
memorialized, tracing its space in the mnemotechnics.
As a master of allusions, Eliot functions to expand the allusive
circuit of the fable to stretch it for remembrance and preservation
and exhibit the regenerative power of this subversion. The Russian
poet Osip Mandelstam points out, “Poetry inhales remembering
and invention with its nose and mouth.” Similarly, Eliot applies this
re-membering by way of all sense experiences--touch, hearing,
seeing, smell, and taste.
The inter-textual references from around thirty-five sources
including Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, German, French, and Italian,
(Coppedge) become the mnemonic tools of remembrance of a
152
disintegrating civil society. As Eckstein says in “Towards a Poetics
of Mnemonic Strategy in Narrative Texts” “more than just a
passive medium that saves data, literature is the realm of active
designs of memory which engage critically with earlier literary
recollections”. Thus, the memory of a text manifests itself as a
“result of complex transformations, rearrangements [Verstellung]
and disfigurements [Entstellung] of other texts” (12). The act of
reading thus becomes a “constantly repeatable attempt to describe
in the manifest text the traces, ramifications, stratifications,
hollowings-out, and notchings that the work of transformation left
behind” (Eckstein,12). The memory of literature, from this
‘descriptive’ point of view, is thus to be found in strategies of
covering and re-covering other representations, systems/techniques
that can be identified and described by the reader. (7)
Lachmann says further that, “in quotations, anagrams, and
syllepses, the border between previous texts and the next text is
shifted; the texts in a sense, enter into one another.” Critics of
Eliot's studies have long argued and established that,
if the poem is, as it has been purported to be, a major cultural
statement or the first stage in a long spiritual pilgrimage or
even just personal grumbling, it is also a poem that is basically
concerned with the literary structure that underpins that
culture, that spirit, that person (149)
“Eliot's propriety in severing Om from "shantih" rests on the
fact that in a poem that offers little more than non-essences in
"broken images," Om, the quintessential source of all order and
harmony in life according to the Upanishads, does not and cannot
find a place” (Narayan, 682). Rather it is the disintegration,
disorder, and anarchic state of his land that flashes on his mind as
metonymic intertextuality for an incautious roseate of his land:
I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie (423-429)
153
 It is therefore not the “vanity” of uttering (Narayan, 683)
shantih instead a hopeful regeneration of his fragmented memories
of ruination by remembering Dante’s Divine Comedy and Gérard
de Nerval in his poem “El Desdichado”. The manifested structure
of this newly constructed text now stands to admix the sub-text:
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih (430-433)
The above semiotic and semantic analysis clearly establish how
Eliot’s iconic work marked itself, unconsciously, as a crucial
symbol in the sentience of the cultural memory. The text can
further be resurrected through a number of theoretical
apparatuses that post-modern critical theories on intertextuality
and memory studies have offered.
Work Cited
Bradley, F. H. “Some Remarks on Memory and Inference.” Mind, vol. 8, no.
30, 1899, pp. 145–66. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2247655. Accessed
14 June. 2022.
Brooker, Jewel Spears. “F. H. Bradley’s Doctrine of Experience in T. S.
Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ and ‘Four Quartets.’” Modern Philology, vol. 77, no. 2,
1979, pp. 146–57. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/437501. Accessed 13
June. 2022.
COPPEDGE, WALTER. “REVISITING ‘THE WASTE LAND’: WHAT
THE THUNDER IS SAYING.” Natural Resources Journal, vol. 30, no. 3, 1990,
pp. 471–76. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24883586. Accessed 14 June.
2022.
Eckstein, Lars. Re-Membering the Black Atlantic: On the Poetics and Politics
of Literary Memory, BRILL, 2006. ProQuest Ebook Central,
https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/britishcouncilonline-
ebooks/detail.action?docID=556712.
Irimia, Mihaela. “Literature And/As (Cultural) Memory.” Literature and
Cultural Memory, BRILL, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central,
https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/britishcouncilonline-
ebooks/detail.action?docID=4848110.
Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies, Berghahn
Books, Incorporated, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,
https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/britishcouncilonline-
ebooks/detail.action?docID=4498479.
Mnemonic and Intertextual Aspects of Literature R ENATE LACHMANN
154
 Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook,
edited by Astrid Erll, and Ansgar Nünning, De Gruyter, Inc., 2008. ProQuest
Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/britishcouncilonline-
ebooks/detail.action?docID=364668.
Narrative and Genre, edited by Mary Chamberlain, and Paul Thompson,
Taylor & Francis Group, 1998. ProQuest Ebook Central,
https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/britishcouncilonline-
ebooks/detail.action?docID=178623.
Whiteside, George. “T. S. Eliot’s Dissertation.” ELH, vol. 34, no. 3, 1967,
pp. 400–24. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2872121.
Uroff, Margaret Dickie. “‘THE WASTE LAND’: METATEXT.” The
Centennial Review, vol. 24, no. 2, 1980, pp. 148–66.

155
SECTION THREE: CULTURAL
MEMORY AND MEDIA

156
 Affective Synthesis: Sensation, Emotion and
Prosthetic Cognition in Contemporary
Motivational Cinema

Manodip Chakraborty

Introduction: The Passivity of Awareness

The inception of MS Dhoni: The Untold Story (2016) opens with a
chanting evocation of nationalistic semantics, presenting a decisive
anathema of India-Sri Lanka cricket match. The awareness of the
audience is then diverted by the camera focusing on the landscape
of congested city space, announcing the temporality of after-sunset,
and then focusing from behind the protagonist (Sushant Singh
Rajput). At this crux moment, the audience is introduced to a
tumultuous event: the final of the Cricket World Cup 2011. Even
though the event has become a thing of the past, ‘an apparition’ –
the illuminations of the screen mechanics made it present, a living
event right before the viewers. The voices of the crowd fade and
the protagonist speaks: “If a wicket goes down, I think I’ll go”
(M.S. Dhoni 2:50-53) – immediately conveying the impression of
superiority that the character holds over other major characters,
solidifying his ‘deterministic enigma’. Though the director Neeraj
Pandey had a multitude of stimuli to choose from, he had opted for
this particular ‘event’ (as the opening scene of his narrative). As this
particular event is imbued with deep cultural enumerations, it at
once slips into the cognition of the receptors and generated in them
a deep-rooted episodic memory – turning their consciousness into
passivity, making them receptive to the narrative proceedings that
follow. The camera than in an elliptical mode sways into ‘the past’
of the protagonist, displaying the birth of an ordinary boy in an
ordinary hospital.

157
The symptomatic portraiture of a ‘success’ on the screen (by
making it a lived experience) is not a sole function of a single
motivational biopic of MS Dhoni’s; rather the 21st-century
cinematic adaptations of the genre of biopic motivation have made
this their genealogy of portrayal. The portrayal of a ‘living past’, a
disjunctive corpus that is otherwise non-attainable serves to
exemplify the immersive power of contemporary cinematic
production. It now has the unique functionality of making the ‘past’
present, connecting it to the future. In what follows, as a result of
this specific spasmodic mode of addressing: motivational cinema
now can elicit an optimum awareness of the viewing situation.
Within the viewing experience, as the screen oscillates between the
temporality of the past and the present (even though it is also past)
‘success’, the viewer becomes adaptive to the screen anathema. As
Metz writes:
Spectator-fish, taking in everything with their eyes, nothing
with their bodies: the institution of the cinema requires a silent,
motionless spectator, a vacant spectator, constantly in a sub-motor
and hyper-perceptive state, a spectator at once alienated and happy,
acrobatically hooked up to himself by an invisible thread of sight, a
spectator who only catches up with himself at the last minute, by a
paradoxical identification with his own self, a self-filtered out into
pure vision (p 49).
The enigmatic affective experience of motivational movies
thwarts the viewers’ perceptions into delirium. On the one hand,
the viewers are aware of their own physical corporeality, but, on the
other, they cannot deny the ideological association with the virtual.
Ronald Barthes perceiving the same terrain of affective-hypnosis of
cinematic perversion has provided an observation of how these
cinematic adaptations impose on the viewer:
But there is another way of going to the movies; by letting
oneself be fascinated twice over, by the image and by its
surroundings – as if I had two bodies at the same time: a
narcissistic body which gazes, lost, into the engulfing mirror, and a
perverse body, ready to fetishize not the image but precisely what
exceeds it: ...the obscure mass of the other bodies (348).

158
However, film critics have argued that the order or symmetry of
immersion of the viewers is not uniform, nor it is cohesive.
Different cinematic “styles will solicit different degrees of
concentration and types of psychic and/or corporeal engagement
in the context of the film theatre and that of other viewing spaces”
(Luca 5). Behind this proposition stands a whole corporeal
assumption about the nature of functionalities of cinematic
experience. While film critics are primarily interested in the film as
a code of valuable information(s), the everyday viewers are content
with the ‘content’ of the film(s). In this respect, the cohesion or
uniformity of these films lies in the packaging of the film and the
topic of interest extracted from it (by the viewers).
Motivation on the Screen: How One Wo/Man Found
Success
For the motivational cinema, the functionality of an operational
value on the screen is thereby largely dependent on the degree of
immersion that the viewer experiences. The basic criterion for this
ideological immersion is the adequacy of ‘cinematic message
transmission’. The system of motivation transmission works well if
the “message received by the addressee is wholly identical to the
one dispatched by the addresser, and it works ‘badly’ if there are
differences between” (Lotman 12). If one accepts the ‘adequacy’ of
the transmitted message as the sole locus, then it would lead to
even more ‘absent’ (cinematically hidden) complexities. The first of
which is cinematic motivational language. No matter the era or the
spatiality, the motivational heroes serve to represent the ‘icon’ of
commonality. The cinematic paraphernalia in order to invoke the
sense of ‘empathy’ morph(ed) the entire cinematic populace with
the syntactical aura of emotional language; and human “memory
for emotional words is better than that for neutral words”
(Greenberg et al. 71). Such studies indicate the potency of
cinematic-motivational language paradigms, which can implicate
the autonoetic memory performance of the viewer without his/her
conscious activation, constructing a spectacle. In this technicity of
syntax, “the language of the spectacle consists of signs of the
dominant system of production – signs which are at the same time
the ultimate end products of that system” (Debord 8). Additionally,
159
the encoding of a culturally specific word (as is uttered on the
screen) presumably stores in it the potency of later ‘recall’ valency.
The advantage of such a composition is that, at an initial level,
words and their intended connotative cinematic meanings can
foster a similar attitude value from the audience. For instance, the
moment the viewers felt compelled by the suffering(s) on the
screen, they comprehend the associated words with positive
intentions. Simply put, if a viewer is feeling sympathetic toward the
visible or audible language – he or she is more likely to become a
subject of a cultural recall. The underlying mechanism then affects
the subject in perceptual and conceptual axes, influencing the
viewer’s memory via specific word(s) stimuli leading to the culture
of fandom consumption.
Another widespread complexity of motivational movies is its
impact on the viewer’s past experience. The commonplace
assumption is that “the process of remembering the personal past
is a reconstructive one, mediated by a host of significant factors,
ranging from prevailing conventions of remembering all the way to
the inevitable impact of present experience on the rendering of the
past” (Freeman 263). In this context, when the viewer upon
perceiving the events on the screen, gets into a stature of personal
remembering, his cognition is being re-encoded in parallelism with the
external stimuli. Often time as a result, when the viewer after the
cinematic experience tries to locate material from his memory,
he/she is quite spontaneously being directed into an association
with the cinematic narrative persona. The enduring patterns of the
relationship between memory and cinematic formulations “derives
in part from broader para-optical models of thought,
consciousness, and the mind and in part from the often-noted
visuality of memory” (Redstone 327).
The protagonists of reality, about whose sufferings and
eventual ‘success’ the cinematic adaptation would be – are also not
random enunciations. The epistemology of the 21st century is
largely driven by globalization and its counterpart digital hegemony.
The traditional ‘high’ values of the past are changing with the
dynamic expectations of the masses. Thus, the cinematic industry
responds with only those ‘persona’ who have the aura of mass
160
influence capacities. From this standpoint, one perspective
becomes clear: the viewer’s sympathy with the cinematic persona as
an ideal figure is only a superficial sham. On the ideological level,
the real-world persona (as Mahendra Singh Dhoni) and their
cinematic counterparts (Sushant Singh Rajput as Mahendra Singh
Dhoni) are the careful productions of popular cultural media. The
media serves as an assemblage corpus, whose prime function is
as creator and controller of the institution's commodity product
markets within the community. In each of its operation, the media
will always instill ideology in every product creation, so that the
target object provoked by propaganda (remain) ‘hidden’ behind it.
As a result, all kinds of products and in situations of circumstances
produced and disseminated by the media on a continuous basis will
be absorbed by the public as a product of culture, and this has
implications for the process of the interaction between media and
the community. (Fasta et al. 61)
This masking of the protagonists always attracts the audience
and thereby produces a semiological zone of cinematic consumption.
False Mirror Cognition: The motivational cinema’s
comprehension is to a large extent is parallel with a visual
achievement. The reason of why this proposition is true is because
these movies foreshadow an object on the screen with which the
spectator can always generate spectatorship. In this respect,
watching ‘motivation’ on the screen has the same foundation as
observing real-life factuality. With regard to the connection
between motivational cinematic aspects and their connection with
human cognition, Deleuze in an interview had famously said:
The brain is unity. The brain is the screen. I don’t believe that
linguistics and psychoanalysis offer a great deal to the cinema. On
the contrary, the biology of the brain – molecular biology – does.
Thought is molecular. Molecular speeds make up the slow beings
that we are… The circuits and linkages of the brain don’t pre-exist
the stimuli, corpuscles, and particles that trace them…Cinema,
precisely because it puts the image in motion, or rather endows the
image with self-motion, never stops tracing the circuits of the brain
(Lambert 283).

161
 At the same time, the affective effects of motivational images
on the screen work out with narrative cogent(s). The contemporary
discovery of mirror neurons sheds light into the deeper
development of a narrative ‘image’ of motivation and its effect on
the perceiver’s brain: “One important feature of skill development
is that children and adults construct their own skills, but they do so
in part by learning from other people… It has been hypothesized
that this “mirror” property may form the most basic biological
mechanism by which we internalize and learn from another
person’s thoughts and actions” (Yang 69). And, the definition of
mirror neurons runs: mirror neurons are a particular class of
neurons that become active when someone makes a particular
action (like grasping or holding) and when the subject observes
another individual making a similar action (Rizzolatti et al). For
some parts of the human brain then seeing is doing. Thereby, the
brain cells of these regions cannot demarcate between an actual
doing and a perceptual doing – and ends up providing (or firing)
the same nerve mechanisms.
This entails that a perceiver’s perception literally touches ‘areas’
of the cerebellum and produces feelings of reality. This means that
motivational movies’ arousal of audience’s feelings “is the mapping
of a particular body state” and “a feeling, in essence, is an idea – an
ideal of the body, and even more particularly, an idea of a certain
aspect of the body…A feeling of emotion (in the audience) is an
ideal of the body when it is perturbed by the emoting process (the
motivation)” (Damasio 88). Therefore, ‘images’ are propagated by
the cinematic industry cannot be considered as a mere
representation of objective (external) epistemology; rather they are
internal stimuli, a methodological manifestation of cinematic
apparatus, which can alter the audience’s cognition – leading to the
formulation of new brain circuits from the perceived event.
However, the individual differences in the corpus of brain-cell
constructions lead people to have slightly different perceptions of
reality (from the same ‘image’) from each other. Even though this
statement often encourages dialetheism, the cinematic motivation
(industry) comprehended the cerebral connection between images
and neurons as their point of departure. They also have understood
162
that, as the brain circuits create and re-create themselves based on
the visual imagery, any change in the ‘image’ will ultimately change
the synoptical interconnectedness, and overall will orient the
subject into a cultural dilemma. The motivational aspect even goes
further. All the corners that it projects are already culturally
selected, impregnated with cultural symptoms, blended with
popular nostalgia, and metaphorically associated with a mental
corpus, where time and space are no longer the axes of reality. As
Edgar Morin has observed:
All the disasters of the mind are already in action in the world
on the screen. They are projected into the universe and bring back
identifiable substances from it. The cinema reflects the mental commerce
of man with the world. This commerce is a psychological-practice
assimilation of knowledge or of consciousness, The genetic study
of the cinema, in revealing to us that magic, and, more broadly,
magical participation inaugurate this active commerce with the world,
at the same time teaches us that the penetration of the human mind
in the world is inseparable from an imaginary efflorescence. (206)
The enactment of the cultural dilemma of ‘motivation’
consumption (from the screen) is not a monolithic property; the
symptomatic change in the contemporary mode of ‘media’
consumption is also responsible for producing the norms of
cinematic illusions. Web 2.0, Laptops, Mobile Phones, Webcams,
IPods, and Satellite Televisions are now proposing a new
alternative (signified as ‘mobile’ consumption) from the traditional
mode of cinema consumption (Television, News Paper, Magazine,
and Radio). The autonomy of operation while interacting with new
media technologies produces in the user a sense of ‘freedom’, a sense
of ‘domination’ (social media posting and commentaries), the
fluidity to create and enhance a social ‘identity’ (through social
media groups), which was largely absent in the traditional
consumption. Even though the pertinent field of mobile
consumption announces itself to be a synchronic development, but,
the ‘idea’ certainly did not appear from anywhere. Mobile media led
discursive lives before the material ones; they may even have
existed as the shadows cast by other applications (traditional media)
– “traveling with the users in guises, fulfilling functions, but rarely
163
perceive. As it often happens, we needed the explosion of mobile
media in the marketplace and the public consciousness before we
began to see”(Huhtamo 24) that mobile media is the futuristic
constant of traditional media. The wired gadgets may be neglected
for a more immersive non-wired cinematic approach, but at the
core, both represent the popular ideology.
The outset cultural protest against traditional media (for their
bureaucratic enigma) has now supplanted itself with the democratic
ideology, by combining with the craze of being online – where
YouTube, Netflix, and Hotstar are now dominating the cinematic
mode of perception. Furthermore, one major aspect of cinematic
blending is their assemblage of shareability. This does not only
mean that “the technical requirements given by social media enable
information to spread in the first place. Moreover, it means that the
user is an active carrier of information, engaged in sharing and
recommending content to friends in their network” (Roese 315).
The cinematic experience of ‘motivation’ consumption has
robbed from the perceiver the individual’s most distinct prerogative
– his capacity to choose. They are no longer choosing the objects
of their own desire; rather it is the motivational heroes, who must
do it for the receivers. This factor of individual identity formation
has led to the generation of episodic memories in the perceiver(s),
and episodic memories “never exist in complete isolation but are
connected to a wider network of other memories (in this case the
motivated memories of cinema) and, what is more important, the
memories of others” (Assman 213). In such networks of
association and communication, memories are continuously socially
re-adjusted as per the changing norms of motivation portrayal: be it
that they are being substantiated and corroborated through the
same genre of motivation (as in the proliferation of game genre
motivational cinemas – proposing games and associated path are
the ‘ideal’ success), or is challenged by other genres (politically,
scientifically, military success), and corrected.
The mass distribution and exhibition of cultural motivation
have made these films readily more accessible than written text(s).
Their propagation is: the world is what they see fit, where
individual ‘success’ designates to the ‘accepted’ mode of pursuits.
164
Through the intermingling of web 2.0, and cut-shot peculiarities,
they are embodying reality with phantasy (signified as a cultural
appeal) where any form of cognition is a hyperreal entity, simulacra
where “the real is produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and
memory banks, models of control – and it can be reproduced an
indefinite number of times from these. It no longer needs to be
rational…it is a hyperreal, produced from a radiating synthesis of
combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere”
(Baudrillard 3). In this hyperreal space, the perceiver’s identification
with the protagonist (the ideal of ‘success) on the screen, also gives
rise to a sense of immediacy to the events on the screen. The
factuality, that the film is portraying a narrative of the past (real or
non-real cannot be established); and the film also is a past
embodiment can be temporarily erased from the perceiver’s
cognition. Of course, the characters’ being there ‘on the cinematic
screen’, and the actions carried out synchronically with the
progression of the narrative are the result of cinematic apparatus.
But, the cinematic apparatus foreground a unique artificiality and
invite the perceivers to generate illusionary connoisseurship. In any
case, the perceptual event on the screen results in the creation of a
‘memory’, a fictive one, not based on the perceiver’s own
experience.
Alison Landsberg while connecting the cinematic experience
and the perceiver’s perception identified ‘it’ as ‘prosthetic memory’.
According to Landsberg:
Prosthetic memories are those not strictly derived from a
person’s lived experience. Prosthetic memories circulate publicly,
and although they are not organically based, they are nevertheless
experienced with a person’s body as a result of an engagement with
a wide range of cultural technologies. Prosthetic memories thus
become part of one’s personal archive of experience, informing
one’s subjectivity as well as one’s relationship to the present and
future tenses…these memories are not “natural” or “authentic”
and yet they organize and energize the bodies and subjectivities that
take them on. (pp. 25-26)
The encouragement provided by the motivational perception
presents its audiences with dialectical engagements. These films
165
explore the idea of ‘living temporality’ of cinematic characters
through ellipsis “in order to allow the spectator to slow down and
experience duration along with the characters” (Hedges 5). Other
than the obvious entertainment, motivational cinemas inculcate in
the perceiver a sense of ‘discovery’, which enables them to
penetrate the viewer’s conscious cognition and code them in the
preferred cultural way. As early as 1916’s Hugo Munsterberg
warned the populace against the adverse effect of cinematic
exposure:
The intensity with which the plays take hold of the audience
cannot remain without strong social effects. It has even been
reported that sensory hallucinations and illusions have crept in;
neurasthenic persons are especially inclined to experience touch or
temperature or smell or sound impressions from what they see on
the screen. The associations become as vivid as realities, because
the mind is so completely given up to the moving pictures. (154)
Conclusion: To consider motivational cinema and its
relationship with the brain and mind, one has to co-join film
criticism with neurological studies. In fact, due to the ever-present
aura of the cultural industry, inquiry into the employability of
motivation in films (which is a contemporary phenomenon) would
conjure no probable solutions. The cinema which first appeared to
be a reflection of ‘reality’, a mode of approach to the masses for
conveying the general way of epistemological sufferings has
ostracized itself to be the screen of ‘reality’. The 24 FPS is now
more concerned with the penetration of human cognition. Their
construction of ‘consumer’ based productions is now evoking
mentalese communication in the viewers. A look at Projections: The
Journal of Movies and Mind would solidify the above sentences and
can provide convincing quantitative and qualitative data for the
deeply embedded motivation on the screen and it's negative (in the
guise of ‘positive’) enunciation on the perceiver’s brain. Modern
cognitive sciences and neurobiological scanning now are able to
provide the exact replica of the audience’s brain functions during
the perceptual act of motivation. If Aristotle has argued for the
cathartic effect as the prime component of a dramatic narrative
(which was ‘then’ visual), the cinematic developments delay the
166
catharsis to the maximum height of awareness – creating in the
perceiver the inability of demarcation. This proposition came to the
foreground only because motivation cinema functions for the
evocation of a parallel emotion in the viewer. They isolate the
subject, either through closed dark rooms, or by appearing through
prosthetic mobile devices. The perceptional experience of
motivation also encompasses the psychological paraphernalia of
day-to-day epistemology – thereby a viewer becomes ‘subjectified’
to it very readily and succumbs to the proposed cultural adaptations
(which are largely profit-centric). It seems that the principles of
democracy responsible for providing the sense of ‘equality’ for each
and every individual has indeed robbed the individuals of their
‘individuality’. As a result, the younger populace, in particular, is
being confiscated with the ideological principles on the screen – all
for the hope of finding a probable solution to the contemporary
dilemma of being ‘successful’.

Works Cited
Assman, Aleida. “Memory, Individual and Collective”. The Oxford Handbook of
Contextual Political Analysis, Edited by Robert E. Goodin and Charles Tilly,
Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. 210-226.
Barthes, Ronald. The Rustle of Language. Translated by Richard Howard, Basil
Blackwell, 1986.
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser,
Michigan University Press, 1995.
Damasio, Antonio. Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. The
Random House Group Limited, 2003.
Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Ken Knabb, Aldgate Press,
2014.
Fasta, Feni, et al.. “ Western Heroism as Culture Ideology in the Avengers”.
The Indonesian Journal of Communication Studies, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2015, pp. 60-73.
Freeman, Mark. “Telling Stories: Memory and Narrative”. Memory: Histories,
Theories, Debates, edited by Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz, Fordham
University Press, 2010, pp. 263-280.
Greenberg, Seth N., et al. “Affective Orientation Influences Memory for
Emotional and Neutral Words”. American Journal of Psychology, Vol. 125, No. 1,
2012, pp. 71-80.
Hedges, Inez. World Cinema and Cultural Memory. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

167
 Huhtamo, Erkki. “Pockets of Plenty: An Archaeology of Mobile Media”. The
Mobile Audience: Media Art and Mobile Technologies, Edited by Martin Rieser,
Rodopi, 2004, pp. 23-38.
Lambert, Gregg. “Cinema and the Outside”. The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and
the Philosophy of Cinema, Edited by Gregory Flaxman, University of Minnesota
Press, 2000, pp. 253-292.
Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American
Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. Columbia University Press, 2004.
Lotman, Yuri M.. Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. Translated
by Ann Shukman, I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., 1990.
Luca, Tiago de. “Slow Time, Visible Cinema: Duration, Experience and
Spectatorship”. Cinema Journal, Vol. 56, No. 1, 2016, pp 1-26.
Metz, Christian. Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier.
Translated by Celia Britton et al., Macmillan Press, 1982.
Morin, Edgar. The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man. Translated by Lorraine
Mortimer, University of Minnesota Press, 2005.
M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story. Directed by Neeraj Pandey, Fox Star Studios,
2016.
Munsterberg Hugo. The Photoplay: A Psychological Study and Other Writings.
Edited by Allan Langdale, Routledge, 2002.
Radstone, Susannah. “ Cinema and Memory”. Memory: Histories, Theories,
Debates, edited by Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz, Fordham University
Press, 2010, pp. 325-335
Rizzolatti, Giacomo et al.. “The Mirror System in Humans”. Mirror Neurons
and the Evolution of Brain and Language, Edited by Maxim Stamenov and Vittorio
Gallese, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2002, pp.13-36.
Roese, Vivian. “You won’t believe how co-dependent they are Or: Media
Hype and the Interaction of News Media, Social Media, and the User”. From
Media Hype to Twitter Storm: News Explosions and Their Impact on Issues, Crises, and
Public Opinion, Amsterdam University Press, 2018, pp. 313-332.
Yang, Mary Helen. “The Smoke Around Mirror Neurons: Goals as
Sociocultural and Emotional Organizers of Perception and Action in Learning”.
Mind Brain and Education, Vol. 2, No. 2, 2008, pp. 67-73.

168
 Understanding the Obsessive Nature of
Fandoms through the Eyes of a Sasaeng

Sheeba Chithra S. Rajan and Dr.T. Sridev

The term Obsession was first used in the 1510s the term derived
from French and Latin has been around and has developed varied
meanings as time has gone by. However, the nature of humans to
obsess and to pine over any object they deem worthy of their
affection has been around for ages. History has always had
impressive individuals; People who have inspired awe amongst the
mass. It is quite natural for some to be extremely successful in their
pursuit of greatness but is greatness, always achieved through
perseverance not necessarily. People achieve greatness sometimes
through their own merit and sometimes they are thrust into the
world of appreciation. The world of appreciation or elevated
existence has evolved along with humans, we have progressed
steadily from being in awe of another individual, being happy for
their victories and talents to slowly wanting to be in a penultimate
position with those victories. The question of what it means to be
famous has evolved as well, the word famous has become an
arbitrary term. The criterion for success or to be considered famous
began with popularity and has trickled down into followers
(Instagram and Tik Tok) It truly can be considered a stretch to call
the Influencers who flood our screens on a daily basis as true stars.
But there are certain aspects of fame that have stayed consistent
throughout history and that is a fan following and certain stardom.
The true meaning of stardom is perhaps waning in a manner that
could be considered a loss to humanity. As the true meaning of
stardom continues to wane so do the ways through which the fans
showed 2 their love continue to steadily diminish. Rallying or
trailing behind a popular figure or crowding the road outside one’s
house were common occurrences even a few decades ago, but
these days the numbers on one’s screen are what determines a
169
person’s popularity. But hiding behind the scenes brings out the
worst in people as there are far fewer repercussions for
misbehaving online.
The earliest case of cyberstalking goes back to the 1990s when
the state of California became the first to being forth a law banning
cyberstalking. While most countries have followed suit and have
banned or penalized any form of Cybercrimes. Online crimes have
continued to evolve and have become commonplace. In fact, most
countries have cybercrime units to tackle these issues, and yet
Obsessive crimes or crimes passion has continued to only grow in
number. Unlike the word obsesses, the Korean word Sasaeng had a
much more recent connotation, coined in the 90’s the word means
to intrude into a person's personal life. But why has the word
gained popularity throughout the world? It is common knowledge
that Korean dramas have broken into the global stage in recent
times. The Global pandemic was a turning point for all things
media, earlier a fun day out might have included a nice meal and a
good movie at the local cinemas but with COVID-19 rising and
establishments shutting down like dominos, people had to
improvise and be innovative as to how to spend the surplus of time
they suddenly had in their hand while OTT platforms had always
been around and more and more individuals were preferring the
comfort and confines of their homes to unwind with a good movie
or series the COVID-19 lockdown accelerated this process.
Individuals were stuck at home with plenty of time and a year of
uncertainty to look forward to which immediately led to binge-
watch sessions and live streaming. Influencer content might also
have played a huge role in the romanticization of Korean culture
and drama.
Big social media platforms such as Tik Tok and Instagram 3 are
flooded with images and descriptions of Korean dramas. But
Korean drama and showbiz have been around for a really long time
in fact my experience with Korean drama and the unique form of
visuals that Korean media has always propagated might go back a
decade or more, right to a time which I consider to be the
beginning of the Global domination brought on by the Korean
Media. Big fans of Kdramas, the abbreviated form of Korean
170
Drama, will all agree that Boys Over Flowers was probably the first
Korean show that they might have watched which would have
acted as the starting point of this fascination and appreciation. So,
for this paper, I would like to go ahead and consider the 2009 hit
TV series Boys over Flowers as the inception of this worldwide
fame that Korean drama enjoys now and could also be known as
one of the dramas that began the “Hallyu Wave”. “The Hallyu
Wave is also known as The Korean Wave which is a cultural
phenomenon through which the global popularity of South Korean
popular culture has dramatically risen since the early 1990s”(
Korean Wave) The world of showbiz is different now with
production values exceeding movies, but it was a different time
back in 2009 where TV shows had to rely entirely on real-life
events, raw emotions, and dialogues. Emotions have always been
high when it comes to Korean dramas with all of the movies and
shows have a dramatic or extremely romanticized element in them
which has become a trademark of sorts for Korean shows and
movies. Boys Over Flowers was no different the show which shot
to instant popularity within Korea and also throughout the world
had an extremely good-looking cast, a cliche yet gripping storyline
and it also had a lot of tear-jerking movements which the audiences
lapped up. The show which is a far cry from what the current tv
shows look like still remains a fan favorite and has achieved a sort
of cult status within avid Korean drama viewers. Hence it is not
surprising that a tv show which has enjoyed global popularity
during a time when Netflix subscriptions or HBO or any other
OTT platforms were not 4 commonplace also had its fair share of
obsessed fans who were completely immersed in the lives of the
actors who played the titular role in the show. The leads of the
shows were bombarded with fans from all over the world who
flooded shooting locations of the stars in hopes to catch a glimpse
of them, this might have truly been the somewhat humble
beginnings of what is now a wider more aggressive form of
fandoms that have become normal. “Fans from China visited Lee
Min Ho at his home in Nonhyun-dong, Seoul as well as following
him on his filming schedule to Gyunggi-do Yang Pyung and
Gyunggi-do Ilsan. These fans shadowed the actor day and night
171
traveling in pairs or in small groups by hiring “sasaeng taxis”
(Lellie). Of Course, Boys Over Flowers is not the only show to
have leads who have been relentlessly followed, stalked, and
obsessed over if Korean showbiz has shown us anything; is that all
actors, idols, and anyone who wants to have their share of the
limelight must adhere to a strict routine and regime and also look a
certain way to appeal to their audiences. The standards for both
male and female stars in Korea are pretty strict and it has become
common knowledge that surgery is imposed, suggested, and
considered pretty normal in the business. Korean beauty has also
gained a widespread appreciation and following, in fact, Korean
skin aka the glass skin has been considered a benchmark in the
beauty world with Korean products being all the rave around the
world. Hence the Industry never runs out of these perfect
individuals who are always available to woo the audience with their
talent and features and as a result, the presence of these fans, super
fans, and Sasaengs has only multiplied as the years have gone by.
In this paper, we are looking to deep dive into the phenomenon
that is the Hallyu wave and focus on celebrities especially the Idols
who have experienced the harsh realities of Fandoms (5). The
phenomenon of becoming famous is a cleverly structured one and
the Korean media takes huge pride in producing several stars, idols,
and personalities who are recruited and trained from a very young
age to become the perfect representative of their culture. The
Korean pop agency training programs are rigorous as they are
strenuous. The Trainees are recruited at a very young age as young
as ten years through online and offline auditions after which they
are made to practice their vocals or any other aspect from 5 am to
11 pm. These hard few years are considered absolutely necessary
for the Trainees to cultivate and culminate their skills even then a
debut which is the most coveted event in a Trainees life is not
guaranteed. Factors such as weight, physical features, and finding a
spot within a band all play a role in the debut factor and even then,
some trainees have quit and have pursued other career paths due to
being unable to deal with the restrictions and the pressure of being
in the limelight. "If you’re just starting out, you’re just going to do
the basic vocal and dancing lessons. If they want you to take acting
172
classes or language skills [English or Korean], they’ll give you a
fuller schedule” (Steffi Cao). The Trainees are handpicked by the
agency and sorted out into groups. The group's creation also has a
specific formula associated with it. “K-pop groups are usually
formed by South Korean entertainment agencies that host
auditions both domestically and abroad, searching for talent after
the announcement of a new group. They look for rappers, dancers,
and vocalists as well as "visuals" — people who are conventionally
attractive — to represent the group in modeling opportunities”
(Steffi Cao). How the K-pop group creation works is a cleverly
constructed tried and tested method of selecting the members of
the band.
The Korean showbiz Industry has created the magic formula
for ensuring the success of the debuting group. The band would
comprise 6 several members ranging anywhere from five members
on average and might go up to 23, currently, only one band has
these many Idols in the same group and that is Neo Culture
Technology (NCT) which has Idols on fixed and rotational
subunits. The reason for selecting a vast number of trainees and
debuting them together is to ensure the success of that particular
group. “South Korea’s entertainment companies realized long ago
that there’s a “magic formula” for idol groups, ensuring a good mix
of individuals with different characteristics, strengths, and fan
appeal. Although members of some groups might wear several hats,
most bands are composed of the same roles. Here’s a look at the
most common” (Hina). The magic formula for the formation of
any group regardless of gender is as follows, the team has a Leader,
usually the oldest of all the group members who have been training
for a very long time they act as a glue holding the band together,
they motivate and guide the younger band members a fine example
of a leader is RM from BTS who is known to be exceptional at
guiding his teammates. Next, we have the Visual the best-looking
individual in the group acts as the visual they are the ones who get
featured in the middle of group images, endorse different brands,
and are privy to a lot of modeling and acting gigs Jungkook from
BTS is considered to be visual of his group. Then we have the
Vocalist, generally, the group member who has the best voice
173
divided into Main and Lead vocalists these members have the best
vocals and they get to highlight their talents by having a lot of lines
and high notes allocated to them within those songs. The Main
vocalist usually sings the notes which are hard to hit and has most
lines allocated to them, while the Lead vocalist as the name says
takes the lead and sings first sort of introducing the main vocalist
within BTS we have Jin, Jimin, and V aka Kim Taehyung with
Jimin being the lead vocalist. Next comes the Rapper, basically
members of the group who take up the rap portions of any songs.
Just like 7 the vocalists are divided into Main and Lead vocalists,
and the rappers of the groups are also divided into these categories.
But unlike the vocals the rap category also has something called as
the Rap duo which is found in groups which has more than 10
group members an apt example would be Kim Namjoon RM, Suga,
J-Hope, and Jungkook from BTS While RM is the main rapper
Suga and J-Hope lead rappers with Jungkook being a Sub-rapper.
Then comes the dancer, the person with the most skill and
charisma is often the dancer of the group, some might also train
and choreograph the members of the group for their performances,
concerts, and also for their music videos. BTS J-Hope is the dancer
of the group. Finally, the last component of the magic formula is
the Maknae. Maknae is the Korean word for the youngest sibling
and so Maknae just means the youngest member of the group and
they are usually perceived as mischievous, reserved, and cute BTS
Jungkook is the Maknae of his group. This formula works
wonderfully to capture the interests and admiration of the masses,
which is pertinent to the success of these groups.
A YouTuber, Stephanie Lange did a breakdown of different
boy bands who have followed these particular formulae of group
creation and have had immense success resulting in worldwide
fame, modeling opportunity, acting gigs, merchandise, and so on.
While the payout of their years of hard work is certainly great, the
trainee needs to put in a lot of effort before they reap any benefits.
The Trainees work really hard on developing their skills as well as
their screen presence and have their much-awaited debut during
their teens. The debut is the most crucial time for young artists
because this is where their transformation from a trainee to Idol
174
happens and as popularity is a big factor in the success of any form
at present the first two years after the debut is considered crucial in
an Idols life. Even after their debut, the stars are made to follow
strict rules to make sure that they have a squeaky-clean image, any
rumor is instantly squashed by the representatives of these 8
budding idols with no information being shared about their
personal life for a long time but former K-pop Idols who stepped
away from the limelight usually sit down with a publication to share
some unspoken rules that are enforced on them, especially during
their Initial days as an Idol “Past and present K-pop stars told
Insider about the industry's exceptionally high beauty standards,
gym routines, and their inability to date in order to remain
accessible to fans”(Komeil Soheili).The No Dating ban is probably
the most famous one and not without reason, The no dating rule is
one such ban put in place to help present an image of availability to
the masses, to help create a relationship and a fan following for a
freshly debuted group. “An unwritten rule in K-pop is that idols
must also give up on having a love life if they want to be successful.
Being single makes them appear more accessible to their fans. This,
the theory goes, means more devoted fans, which means more
income for the group and record label. This is also why K-pop
groups are either all-male or all-female, too — so fans don't suspect
band members are dating each other”( Komeil Soheili) Other than
just being accessible to fans, the agency also gives additional
reasons as to why they prefer if the young trainees don’t date, one
being that South Korea does not take lightly to scandals if an Idol is
part of a scandal, it can completely ruin their reputation/career as
well as the career of the agency that debuted them which would
end up causing the agency to inadvertently lose a lot of money. But
the No Dating rule is not isolated to Korea in fact the Tokyo court
found that the dating ban was necessary for Idols to have a
guaranteed male fan following. However, at the end of the day, the
dating ban is put in place to make sure that the Idols gain a massive
fan following. The sense of availability from Idol’s end is
considered crucial to the group’s success, hence any dating rumors
are immediately neutralized by the agency that represents them. 9
Since the stakes are high when a group debuts and the success is
175
placed entirely on how people perceive them; an obsessed or
overtly interested fan is considered to be a benefit for the group.
The Makings of these super fans hence begin with the agencies
while of course, the agencies do not want any harm to befall the
Idols or compromise their safety by any means they also do not
deter in their goal of creating these super fans as a massive fan
following guarantees the success and popularity for the groups.
Fandoms are an Incredible part of any group's journey and all of
the K-pop groups love their fans but here is the thing Sasaengs are
not fans or part of the fandom they are stalkers condemned by the
fandoms of different K-pop groups. Hence the inception of a
Sasaeng can be called as the extreme result of a tailored effect, the
agencies want the fans to be invested in the life of the Idol, but
Sasaengs take it too far and commit criminal acts in the name of
being super fan. The origin of the Sasaeng is fairly new the earliest
Sasaeng can be traced back to the 1990s for the very first-
generation K-pop group H.O.T and g.o.d. but these Sasaengs were
much tamer in comparison with their obsession only leading to
them having dedicated fan pages but the dawn of the digital age has
made it really easy for fans to exceedingly cross the line. “Although
the term sasaeng was coined much later, the obsessive, disruptive
fan behavior it designates emerged with the rise of K-pop idol
groups and "fandoms" in the 1990s, as noted by local English-
language newspaper Korea JoongAng Daily in 2001.[4]
There are accounts of such fan behavior prior to the digital era
from industry veterans and members of first-generation K-pop
groups such as H.O.T. and g.o.d.[5][6][7][8] With the rapid
development of the Korean popular culture industry, and the
spread of the Hallyu wave internationally in the 2000s and in recent
decades, 10 extreme and disruptive fan behavior towards Korean
idols and celebrities has also been seen abroad.[3]”( Sasaeng fan).
But the level of Obsession and entitlement that Sasaengs express
now has been unseen before, while earlier versions of Sasaengs
might have been relentless in their worshiping of the Idol the most
common occurrence is standing in front of the Idols house, having
online forums about the said Idol, religiously watching their shows;
the current trend of being a Sasaeng has taken a turn for the worse
176
while earlier what the Sasaeng supposedly wanted was to show their
support and love for the Idol, now Sasaengs want to be recognized,
they want to a part of the Idols life, to be pointed out in a sea of
people by the Idol of whom they religiously follow and scarily
enough they have found several ways in order to do that. “I feel
like I get to know more about and get closer to the idol I love. If I
go to a concert, there are thousands of people attending, so the idol
would not know who I am. But if I become sasaeng, they will
recognize me. If I keep telling them, 'I am so and so. I saw you at
that place before. I am so-and-so', they will start to take note of me
and ask 'Did you come again today?' To sasaeng fans, being
recognized by idols is a good thing.[3]”( Sasaeng fan). Thanks to
the Internet the world is our oyster, do we always make productive
use of it? no. Most individuals don’t spend hours a day stalking a
celebrity who does not know they exist. Of course, one eats up the
juicy titbits of celebrity gossip and feuds to soothe their dramatic
souls. But most individuals also have a sense of awareness around
them, they understand that their impression of an Idol, and their
relationship with them is entirely Para social aka one-sided. While a
lot of them are happy making their edits and posting comments on
the internet. The frighteningly obsessed ones descend into
committing truly deplorable actions such as hiring individuals to
spy on the Idols, vandalizing the Idols' houses, hurting them or 11
trying to cause physical harm to the Idols in hopes that they
remember them, taking up jobs in the Idols workplace in hopes of
meeting them, installing spy cameras to take pictures, breaking into
Idol’s house and even having their phone lines recorded. “JYJ and
TVXQ, in particular, have been the target of obsession. Here's a list
of what they have had to go through in the past year: -- TVXQ's
phone lines are tapped and personal conversations recorded --
Several sasaeng saved their menstrual blood and had it delivered to
the JYJ members. -- TVXQ's apartment was broken into and
sasaeng attempted to kiss them while they were sleeping -- JYJ's
Yoochun had sasaeng fans who installed spy cameras in his parking
lot and took pictures of him. -- TVXQ's Yunho was poisoned by
an anti-fan who gave him a drink with an adhesive mixed in. He
had to have his stomach pumped”( Elizabeth Soh). This creepy
177
nature of fandoms has been accelerated by the availability of the
Internet and the widespread popularity of Internet cafes. In fact,
reports have stated that a lot of these Sasaengs are young women
who are around thirteen to twenty-two and these young women
often spend all of their time in Internet cafes stalking and obsessing
over the Idols every moment and even sleeping there. School-going
Sasaengs skip schools to get a glimpse of their Idols and some even
discontinue their education which leads to them going down the
deep end to fuel their desire in being Sasaeng. Young Sasaengs who
have no means of paying money to either follow their favorite Idol
in Sasaeng Taxis offer resort to prostitution in order to either
afford or hire a Sasaeng Taxi, which is basically taxi drivers on call
to tail Idols.
The Sasaeng Taxi drivers do not care about other drivers,
pedestrians, traffic rules, or 12 even the Idol they are tailing for that
matter in fact, one result of relentlessly following an Idol resulted in
a car crash in Singapore. “Sasaeng fans, who always follow K-pop
idols around even run the risk of car accidents. In 2011, Super
Junior Lee Teuk and Kim Heechul had a car accident in Singapore.
It was a seven-car collision that occurred by their Sasaeng fans.
Sasaeng fans were riding in a cab, and they chased the members
from the airport. The two members were not seriously injured, but
it really was a dangerous moment”( Kpop Stars' Sasaeng Fans: They
even enter into prostitution). Due to the increasingly unhinged
behavior exhibited, the agencies of these Idol groups have started
cracking down upon these behaviors. South Korean government
has upped the penalty for stalking as the previous punishments
were considered quite tame for the crimes committed. K-pop stars
have also started retaliating against the Sasaengs by having their
agency issue statements condemning their behavior as have fans
from different fandoms. Recently, stars have also started taking
legal action against those who cross the line. A lawsuit was filed by
a 2 PM member accusing a woman of stalking him and incessantly
contacting him on his phone. While Sasaengs might not have had
many repercussions in the past that is slowly but surely changing.
But being a Sasaeng is not being a fan, but what does it truly mean
to be a fan, the true essence of a fandom remains in celebrating the
178
Idols, about positivity and having a sense of solidarity with the
other fans. Belonging to a fandom means having a large group of
friends to gush over the same thing, it can be a great bonding
experience, and it is perfectly normal to want to know a little bit
more about your favorite Idol, it is totally normal to want to know
one’s favorite color or type of food and the Idols themselves are
okay with that with most of the groups having YouTube shows
which allow the fans to get a sneak peek into their lives. 13 The
relationship between the Idols and their fans seems to be a truly
special one we usually have the Idols say that they love their fans,
they appreciate the gifts they give them, their dedication to the
group. The Idols are truly thankful to their fans for being a part of
the journey and even with the presence of hundreds of Sasaengs
there seems to be no love lost between the actual fans and the
Idols. The real problem resides with the Sasaengs and only with
themselves, in the pursuit of wanting to be special to their Idol they
act in ways that are harmful and keep persistently trying to cross a
normal and reasonable boundary, which in turn earns them the
Idols scorn; And so, the vicious cycle of wanting something and
never being able to get it will continue. The Sasaengs are never
going to be important to the Idols, especially with the course of
action they are following and the Sasaengs are not going to
recognize the errors of their ways.
Being a Sasaeng is a choice that some make, but this path of
obsession rarely ends well, If the Ultimate goal is to earn someone’s
love causing them harm is the furthest thing from showing one’s
admiration, the Inability of the Sasaengs to recognize and accept it
points to a deeper problem than just being infatuated with the Idol.
This Obsession is also fuelled by the online community of Sasaengs
who find it completely normal to commit criminal acts in the name
of love. Understanding the obsessive nature of fandoms is truly
impossible as we can only assume what goes on in their minds to
rationalize their behavior, but it does not take a lot of imagination
to understand that most Sasaengs are beyond reasoning. They have
admitted to and have succumbed to the perversive nature of Idol
worshipping armed and fuelled by the Internet, connecting with
Sasaengs all over the world. The Internet seems to amplify all
179
things that are invasive, earlier wanting to know each part of the
Idols life might have been a fleeting thought as there were no
resources to indulge in that particular thought. But now with the K-
pop industry’s worldwide popularity and rightfully so causing the
Idols to work really hard and the presence of smartphones and 14
Internet, even in the most remote part of the world; these fleeting
thoughts unless curbed by the individual, turn gruesome. Thus, a
sliver of self-control, as well as foresight, is necessary when using
this ultimate device, we have in our hands. Ultimately the culture of
Sasaengs is a complex one which would continue unless truly
eradicated by the government, fans, and agencies.

Works Cited
“Creatrip: The Process of Becoming a K-Pop Idol.” Creatrip,
www.creatrip.com/en/blog/11280.“TheBasics.”Www.bu.edu,www.bu.edu
/lernet/artemis/years/2017/projects/StudentWebsites/Michelle/pages/Kp.
html#:~:text=Once%20a%20person%20has%20gotten. Accessed 25 Mar. 2023.

Arnaud, Jourdan. “A Brief History of K-Pop.” The Los Angeles Film School,
7 Apr. 2021, www.lafilm.edu/blog/a-brief-history-of-kpop/.
Cao, Steffi. “How Korean Pop Groups Are Formed — an Introduction to
the K-Pop Trainee Process.” BuzzFeed, www.buzzfeed.com/stefficao/how-are-
kpop-groups-formed.
Stanley, Adrienne. “The ‘Boys over Flowers’ Phenomenon: How One Drama
Continues to Influence Korean Entertainment.” KDramaStars, 25 Feb. 2015,
www.kdramastars.com/articles/75895/20150225/the-boys-over-flowers-
phenomenonhow-one-drama-continues-to-influence-Korean-entertainment.htm.
Accessed 25 Mar. 2023.
Sunio, Patti. “What Does It Take to Become a K-Pop Idol in South Korea?”
South China Morning Post, 30 Jan. 2020,
www.scmp.com/magazines/style/newstrends/article/3048154/bts-
blackpink-what-it-takes-become-k-pop-idol-south. Wikipedia Contributors.
“Korean Idol.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia
Foundation, 4 Nov. 2019, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_idol. “‘Sasaeng
Stalkers’ (Part 1): K-Pop Fans Turn to Blood, Poison for
Attention.”Sg.entertainment.yahoo.com, sg.style.yahoo.com/blogs/singapore-
showbiz/sasae

180
SECTION FOUR: RETHINKING
LIEUX DE MEMOIRE

181
 Of Memory and Forgetting: The Role of Oral
History and Popular Culture in Conserving
the Legacy of Bengali Revolutionaries

Shriya Dasgupta and Oyeshi Ganguly

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory

against forgetting”.
(Kundera, 1978)

In talking of the importance of documenting the alternate history

of the independence movement, Bhupendra Kumar Dutta, a
revolutionary imprisoned for his part in the Alipore Conspiracy
Case in the 1910s and released in 1920-21 by royal amnesty (Ghosh
1) wrote in no uncertain terms: “I have said that it is necessary to
write contemporary history, as its absence will render difficult the
preparation of history in the future. From practical political
experience, I know that whatever gains currency among the people
or is printed in books, does not constitute history. Actual facts
remain for the most part unknown to the people, and historians fail
frequently to discover the truth about them…The revolutionary
movement is extinct today in India and the people have accepted
non-violence as their creed; and it is time, therefore, to examine the
records of our own activities…” (Dutta)
When Dutta mentioned his concern, his primary intention was
to challenge the colonial narrative that had termed the
revolutionary movement as a ‘terrorist conspiracy’. After India won
independence and the Congress led by Jawaharlal Nehru came to
power, one of their main tasks became the construction of a
national history of the country where ahimsa (non-violence) was
floated as the primary reason for India’s independence. However,
the critical historical role played by armed revolutionaries got
whitewashed since it didn’t fit the official narrative. Not only were
182
hundreds of revolutionaries denied the freedom fighters’ pension
for decades but soon history textbooks were also marked by the
conspicuous absence of their contribution. However, for a long
time, their stories lived on as legends by being passed down orally
from one generation to the other.
This research explores the impact of the obliteration of the
contribution of revolutionaries in the freedom struggle from
conventional school history textbooks in post-independence India
and tries to assess the extent to which their stories have been
passed down at the local level through memory, popular culture,
and oral history. The first section follows a qualitative analysis of
the ICSE and CBSE (the two central boards in India) and the West
Bengal State Board class X history syllabi since that is the grade till
which the subject is offered on a compulsory basis. The case
selection is justified as the Rowlatt Report of the 1920s devoted a
hundred pages out of the total two hundred to the agitations in the
Bengal Presidency. Besides Calcutta, the capital of Bengal (and
British India till 1911) was the nerve center of commercial,
administrative, and political mechanisms of the British in South
Asia during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The impact of
the revolutionary movement can be depicted through two
incidents: The announcement of shifting the British capital in India
from Kolkata to Delhi made in 1911, right after the participants in
the Muzaffarpur Conspiracy (1908) were convicted and the new
capital was officially inaugurated in 1931 following the Chittagong
Armoury Raid (April 1930) in undivided Bengal and the Writer’s
Building Attack in Kolkata (December 1930).
A critical analysis of the history syllabi of the three boards
revealed that there has been a gross underrepresentation of the
organized Indian anti-imperial armed struggle in academia, both in
terms of volume as well as dynamics, thus denying students basic
knowledge of the same. The syllabus for the Central Board of
Secondary Education (CBSE), the central government board,
dedicates one chapter to the national movement titled ‘Nationalism
in India’ which covers the period between 1919 to 1942. The major
events covered are the Khilafat and Non-Cooperation Movement
(1919), Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of ahimsa (non-violence) and
183
satyagraha (truth), the Civil Disobedience Movement (1930) and the
Quit India Movement (1942). No mention is given to major events
such as Rashbehari Bose’s Ghadar Movement, the Indo-German
conspiracy- both of which were transnational revolutionary
movements- or even the formation of the Indian National Army by
Rashbehari Bose or the contribution of Netaji Subhas Chandra
Bose in the freedom struggle.
The ICSE syllabus (national private board) covers the period
between 1857 to 1947. A total of eight chapters are dedicated to the
national movement, focusing on the Revolt of 1847, objectives and
methods of struggles of Moderates and the formation of the Indian
National Congress, the Partition of Bengal, and the split between
moderates and extremists as a result. A cursory mention is given to
extremist leaders such as Aurobindo Ghosh and Bal Gangadhar
Tilak. The syllabus also includes extensive coverage of Mahatma
Gandhi’s “Non-Cooperation Movement: causes (Khilafat
Movement, Rowlatt Act, Jallianwala Bagh tragedy), program and
suspension - Chauri Chaura incident, and impact of the Movement;
the Civil Disobedience Movement causes (Reaction to the Simon
Commission, Declaration of Poorna Swaraj at the Lahore Session
of 1929), Dandi March, program and impact of the Movement,
Gandhi-Irwin Pact and the Second Round Table Conference; the
Quit India Movement: causes (failure of Cripps Mission, Japanese
threat), Quit India Resolution and the significance of the
Movement''. Half a page is dedicated to the formation and
significance of the Indian National Army. No further mention of
organized armed revolution has been observed including the
Muzaffarpur Conspiracy of 1908 involving the imprisonment of
nationalist leaders such as Aurobindo Ghosh or the Delhi-Lahore
Conspiracy (1911) where an attack was attempted on Lord
Hardinge, the then Viceroy of India, on his way to the Delhi
Durbar as a warning that the shifting of capital from Kolkata would
not deter the revolutionaries.
The West Bengal Board syllabus to covers the period between
1857 to 1947 in the nationalist struggle. At the same time, subaltern
local struggles such as the Munda Rebellion, the Santhal Rebellion,
and the uprising by Titumir have also been covered. Sections have
184
been dedicated to the contribution of revolutionary secret societies
and the major activities like the Battle of Buribalam (1915), the
Chittagong Uprising (1930), and the Writer’s Building Attack (1930)
at various points in the textbook. The role of Subhas Chandra Bose
and the trends of leftist revolutionary politics in the Indian freedom
struggle have also been covered. However, it still looks at the
revolutionary uprisings as independent, disjointed uprisings. What
the textbooks fail to note is that the armed struggle was part of an
organized, well-planned network. At the same time, it is observed
that more coverage has been given to the revolutionary movements
by the West Bengal State Board since Bengal happened to be the
hotbed of most of these activities. Thus, it can be deduced that
geography does play a role in developing one’s sense of history.
This brings forth the debate of what should constitute ‘national
history’.
The argument provided by the national boards in defense of
ignoring these uprisings is that they were mainly ‘regional history’.
With a greater number of students preferring a national board and
the disappearance of the contribution of armed resistance from
textbooks, there is an increasing importance of the tradition of oral
history in not letting the forthcoming generations forget these tales
of valor and sacrifice.
Danielle Renee Wager, in her thesis on A Textbook Analysis: A
Case Study of Changes in History Textbooks Based on the Revolutionary War
looks at prejudice in US school history textbooks with the
American Revolution as a case study and argues that while
textbooks can be used as primary sources to teach history, it should
also be supplemented with secondary sources since they are not
free from bias and can be motivated by several factors such as
preconceived notions of the author, source of funding, appeasing
the government, etc. Horn sums up the significance of balance
between oral and textbook history succinctly: “Memorising facts
with no understanding of historical context will no doubt lead to
learners seeing the past as ‘pre-existing present local, personalized
and fragmentary’ (Husbands) Furthermore, learners will overlook
the historical significance and the influence historical events have
on the present day. On the other hand, the overemphasis on the
185
‘hard’ understanding of history also holds a threat to the subject
itself as learners don’t understand how a list of names and dates can
add value to their future career or their personal growth.” (Horn).
Rather than focusing on the sequence of events, oral history
questions what the event means for a set of people. Glen Whitman
mentions four problems of including oral history in pedagogy: it is
expensive, is limited to geographic location, requires special
equipment, and is time-consuming. Fortunately, with the help of
technology, the limitation of cost, geographic location, and even the
need for special equipment can be dealt with to some extent.
A random sample survey was conducted by the authors of this
paper on behalf of their organization Agnijug Archive- an academic
archive attempting at documenting, preserving, and sharing oral
histories of Indian revolutionaries and the anti-colonial resistance
that they espoused through oral history by interviewing the
descendants of the revolutionaries, scholars, academicians, and
authors as well as accessing primary research material, unpublished
letters, and photographs of personal artifacts of these unsung
heroes- at various locations in Kolkata including the historic
Alipore Jail Museum which was once a site of torture and
incarceration of young revolutionaries by British officials where
simple questions about Bengali revolutionaries were asked to the
public to understand their level of awareness. Out of the 100
people that were interviewed, only 1 person managed to correctly
associate Benoy-Badal-Dinesh with the Writer’s Building Attack. In
an attempt at decolonization, Dalhousie Square, one of the busiest
locations in the city and the site of the attack, had been renamed
Benoy-Badal-Dinesh Bagh by the West Bengal Government in
1969 in the memory of the three teenage heroes who sacrificed
their lives for the freedom of India. Similarly, 2 out of 55 people
interviewed could identify Masterda Surya Sen, the leader of the
Chittagong Rebellion, India’s Easter Uprising, correctly. It is to be
noted here that there are several streets and locations named after
Surya Sen across West Bengal. Significantly, one respondent
answered that he was only aware of a “Masterda Surya Sen Metro
Station''. While conducting the sample survey, one recurrent answer
from respondents to justify their lack of awareness was that they
186
were ‘out of touch’ with history. At the same time, renaming roads
or institutions have been seen to have little significance if the
curiosity to learn is not sparked among citizens. It has been
observed that the level of retention, especially when considering
rote learning for theoretical subjects, is significantly low among
students. Agnijug Archive also conducted oral history workshops
with 50 school children from grade 9 and the feedback received
from teachers was that the active participation in the subject has
helped them take a greater interest in and retain the information.
Sierra High School introduced an elective course based on
critical oral history in their school and the results have been
impressive. Oral history is primarily based on storytelling and
begins right at home when grandparents pass on tales from one
generation to the other. The practice of oral history in high school
where the students recorded interviews themselves, and heard first-
hand accounts of events that they had only read in books till then
allowed them to not just get more involved in the subject but also
become ‘active agents’ (Maulucci). It also helped enhance not just
their historical sense but also skills such as journalism, language
expertise, etc. However, the question here is, can oral history be
introduced in the curriculum only after students gain a certain
amount of maturity? In a country like India where most ‘bright
students’ would opt for the sciences in high school considering job
opportunities, textbook learning needs to be supplemented with
oral history at least from middle school so that the active learning
remains with them irrespective of whether they pursue the subject
in the future. Many of the Indian revolutionaries lived post-
independence and had thriving careers in politics and other
professions. In the context of this research, for e.g, tasks can be
assigned to kids to ask their grandparents about the Chittagong
Uprising (1930) which is not very distant history or their experience
of meeting any revolutionary post-independence and hearing first-
hand accounts of the movement. As Brockman mentions in her
paper (Brockman, 2016), this exercise would also trigger
conversations and the practice of storytelling among family
members, something which is on the decline today. Another aspect
that must be kept in mind while teaching oral history is to
187
incorporate as many versions as possible. For e.g., a person settled
in Bengal for generations and a refugee forced to flee his land due
to partition would look at independence very differently.
The use of films as a means for remembrance, commemorating,
and reviving popular memory regarding the freedom fighters has
been a long trend since the independence of the nation in 1947. In
accordance with the theme of the paper, the focal area remains
some of the current films based on Bengal revolutionaries made in
Tollywood (the West Bengal film industry with its headquarters in
Kolkata) and Bollywood (the Hindi language film industry with its
headquarters in Mumbai). Chronologically, one of the first films in
Bollywood that depicted Bengali revolutionaries was Khelein Hum Jee
Jaan Sey (We Play With Our Lives) released in 2010. This film
directed by Ashutosh Gowarikar detailed the tale of the Chittagong
Armory Raid of 1930 when a bunch of sixty teenagers led by a
schoolteacher Surjya Sen attacked the Police Lines, Auxiliary Force
Armoury, the European Club among other sites of strategic
importance. The film flopped at the box office and was marked by
numerous historical inaccuracies that can be significantly attributed
to the spreading of misinformation about historical events and
characters. One of the primary ones is an alleged romantic
relationship between the uprising leader Masterda Surjya Sen and a
fellow revolutionary Kalpana Dutt with clear formal expressions of
love between Sen and Dutt. Historical records indicate that not
only was this fictitious and baseless but Dutt herself confessed to
being in a romantic relationship with Tarkeshwar Dastidar, another
fellow revolutionary. The authors of this paper, as the co-founders
of Agnijug Archive in conversation with Professor Gargi
Chakravarthy, the biographer of PC Joshi (Kalpana Dutt’s
husband) and a lifelong confidant of Kalpana Dutt stated that
Dastidar had even during their trial in 1933 asked Kalpana whether
she would wait for him in case he returned alive from the prison.
Dastidar was hanged along with Surjya Sen on 12th January 1934.
The other fallacies include the narrative of the young foot soldiers
joining Surjya Sen’s Indian Republican Army as they were denied
the right to play football in a local ground by British soldiers who
wanted to build an army residential camp there instead, the young
188
men being recruited into the operation through a process of formal
interview by queuing up outside a building and through a question-
answer round with the top leaders Ganesh Ghosh, Lokenath Bal,
Ananta Singh, Ambika Chakraborty, and Nirmal Sen while in reality
there was a complex process of kinship networks and individual
clandestine networking that was involved in recruitment. Similarly,
a number of major events that form a part of the movement
including the surrender of Ananta Lal Singh had no factual
evidence to corroborate it as the film depicted Singh as a delusional
man who mistakes the Lal Bazar Calcutta Police Headquarters as a
Gurudwara and being a devout Sikh enters it and surrenders, while
in reality Singh was neither a Sikh nor did he surrender under
similar circumstances, but wrote a well-documented letter to the
F.J. Lowman , the Inspector General of Bengal Police, surrendered
in September 1931. While all of these facts may have been justified
in the name of dramatization, the fact distortion ran the risk of
misinformation of a little-known historical event, including the
creation of distorted narratives about the historical event about
which there is little information in English available in the public
domain.
The other film based on the Chittagong Uprising that was
released a year later and won three national awards is called
‘Chittagong’ directed by Dr. Bedabarata Pain. While this film is
through the perspective of Subodh Roy aka Jhunku, one of the
sixty children who participated in the Chittagong Uprising, it too
was marked with a few factual discrepancies such as CID inspector
Khan Bahadur Ahsanullah being shot by the revolutionary Benode
Bihari Chowdhury while it was Haripada Bhattacharya who killed
Ahsanullah and Jhunku’s friendship with Aparna a fictional
character introduced into the film. Factual discrepancies aside, the
director in conversation with Agnijug Archive revealed an
interesting perspective about the revolutionaries. He hinted that a
homosexual relationship might have existed between the
revolutionaries Ganesh Ghosh and Ananta Singh, something he
refrained from explicitly showing on-screen. The retention capacity
and critic’s review of the film was more positive than that of
Gowariker’s film and reflected in viewership and box office
189
collections. However, the impact of both the Hindi language films
released at the national level, on the same subject seems to have
little impact on the average citizen of Kolkata as reflected in a
public survey conducted by Agnijug Archive where responses to
the question ‘Who was Surjya Sen?’ was met with answers ranging
from ‘All I know is that there is a metro station named after him’
referring to the South Kolkata underground rail station named after
Surjya Sen by the West Bengal state government as means of
commemoration. Other responses to the sample survey included
saying Bhagat Singh led the Chittagong Uprising, and ‘Surjya Sen is
a name I have never heard of’. Thus, the influence of both films
seems incongruent to that of public memory and retention of the
average citizen on Calcutta streets that has a statute of Surjya Sen
right outside the Calcutta High Court and an important street
named after him in the town Centre College Street that is also the
place that houses the Calcutta University, the Presidency College,
the Hindu School and other prominent academic institutions in
Calcutta’s College Street.
In terms of regional films, Arun Roy’s ‘8/12-Benoy, Badal,
Dinesh’ released on 26th January 2022 based on the Corridor Battle
that took place on 8th December, 1930 at writer’s building between
three revolutionaries Benoy Basu aged 22, Badal Gupta aged 18 and
Dinesh Gupta aged 20 and the British police forces following the
assassination of Col. N.S Simpson, the Inspector-General of
Prisons. While this film garnered significant public attention due to
it being the first-ever media depiction of the subject, the factual
inaccuracies included serious loopholes. The two characters of
Badal and Dinesh are introduced to each other for the first time in
Kolkata before their operation while in the book authored by
Madhumanti Sengupta ‘Bengal Volunteers’ published in 2020 by
Ananda Publishers, daughter of Kshitimohan Sengupta one of the
close associates of Dinesh Gupta mentions that the freedom
fighters knew each other for almost a year before the event and
worked together to uproot telegraph poles. Agnijug Archive in
conversation with Arna Mukhopadhyay, the actor who played
Badal Gupta, claimed that the director had explicitly discouraged
him from engaging with primary sources including meeting the
190
family members of the revolutionary. Agnijug Archive in
conversation with the nephew of Badal Gupta, Bishwanath
Dasgupta too stated that the film director had neither contacted
him nor asked for references or personal or family anecdotes about
the revolutionary. In a blatant violation of what was revolutionary
work ethics as well as historical evidence, the revolutionaries after
shooting Simpson bend down to and whispered ‘How does it feel?’
as a mark of revenge. The over-dramatization of historical events
backfiring and failing to produce the intended result or even leading
to younger generations distancing themselves from such unrealistic
narratives can be attributed as a cause for the collective amnesia of
the younger generation about freedom fighters. Such narratives
make historical events unreal and far removed from reality which in
turn repels a younger audience to developing an interest in the
history of anti-colonial rebellions. Moreover, the impact of 8/12 on
a generalist audience, seemed to have been of little influence. The
public survey conducted by Agnijug Archive further empirically
proved that as a reply to the question ‘Who were Benoy-Badal-
Dinesh and which institution did they attack?’ responses ranged
from the British parliament and the hurling of bombs on the
British magistrate. All such responses come on the heel of the most
important Business and administrative district of Kolkata being
named ‘Benoy-Badal-Dinesh Bagh’ and statues of the three martyrs
being raised in a prominent spot in the area. A similar loss of
memory and awareness was also visible at the Alipore Central now
converted into the Jail Museum where Dinesh Gupta was hanged
as none of the respondents present there could answer who Gupta
was and what were his contribution to the revolutionary movement
in spite of his activities being widely mentioned in the gallery of the
museum complex.
The same director Arun Roy is currently directing the biopic of
another prominent revolutionary Bagha Jain eponymously titled
Bagha Jatin to be released in Autumn 2023. Roy in conversation
with Agnijug Archive said on record that he has neither met any of
the descendants of Jatindranth Mukherjee on whose life the film is
based nor read any of the books by Prithwindranath Mukherjee, the
most prominent scholar on the life and times of Bagha Jatin. Bagha
191
Jatin was the principal coordinator of the Indo-German Conspiracy
in 1915 to procure arms from the German empire to lead a
country-wide uprising in coordination with revolutionaries from
Punjab. Thus, the lack of acquaintance with primary source text
material by the directors of films in the making of those films has
been glaring at the regional level. This is corroborated by Agnijug
Archive public survey on the question ‘Who was Bagha Jatin?’ to
which responses received included ‘Bagha is a separate individual and
Jatin is a different individual altogether’ and none of the respondents
interviewed could answer who Bagha Jatin was and what his
contribution the freedom movement had been in the city of Kolkata
has a major settlement in the south of the city named after ‘Bagha
Jatin’.
The 2019 national award-winning film ‘Gumnami’ directed by
Srijit Mukherjee dealt with the mystery surrounding Netaji Subhash
Chandra Bose’s disappearance in 1945 and several controversies
and theories surrounding it. While not a biopic on Bose, it
generated substantial attention to the nature of the topic and
became one of the highest-grossing films of 2019 in Bengali. The
2015 play ‘Boma’ by Bratya Basu depicted the 1905 Alipore Bomb
case that was led by Aurobindo Ghosh (later the saint of
Pondicherry Rishi Aurobindo) and his brother Barindra Kumar
Ghosh. Unfortunately, public awareness about the case seems to be
quite low as seen in the public survey where Calcuttans were even
unable to recognize who Aurobindo Ghosh was, or who defended
him during the trials, the answer being the advocate and founder of
the Swaraj party Chittaranjan Das, or the role of Khudiram Bose
and Prafulla Chaki who hurled a bomb at ‘Magistrate Kingsford but
accidentally killed the wife and daughter of Pringels Kennedy in
April 1908. It was the action of Bose and Chaki that ultimately led
to the search in the 32 B Muraripukur Roadhouse of the Ghosh
brothers and subsequent arrests and the trials.
Thus it may be inferred that the failure of films to reduce collective
amnesia may be attributed to multiple reasons, the first being
factual inaccuracies that generate two outcomes- first,
disseminating distorted information that people who didn’t have
access to the real factual history may consider as true and accept it
192
and further spread it among their friends and colleagues and family
giving rise to a cycle of misinformation, and secondly, generational
misinformation being endemic due to the higher retention capacity
of audio-visual medium. While it may be argued that the initiative
of making such films generates some awareness of at least bringing
up the name of a forgotten historical character, one is left with a
choice of whether to -accept a distorted narrative of history or
simply support efforts that dust out names lost in the annals of
history for the sake of representation. Either choice does not seem
to influence the masses as despite commercial successes such as
8/12, the names of those associated with the revolutionaries
continue to be shrouded in oblivion. Thus, the question of the extent
to which films a mass medium is influencing the audience to recall, or
in certain cases introduce historical characters is the question that
needs to be investigated prior to determining the resurrection of the
names of historical characters based on the number of films produced
on them quantitatively.
This essay concludes that mainstream Indian academia has
ignored the role of the anti-imperial Indian armed struggle, and
media houses that have engaged with this history have distorted
narratives and disseminated misinformation to the audience. One
reason for this was that the political regime that came to power
post-independence was led by the Indian National Congress which
mainly propagated freedom struggle through non-violent means as
forms of resistance. While the role of revolutionaries has survived
to an extent as regional and oral history, it is important to bring
them into the mainstream discourse to develop a holistic
understanding of the Indian freedom struggle.

Works Cited
Brockman, Barbara. "Collecting oral histories in the junior/elementary
classroom." Oral History Education. 2016. 150.
Dutta, Bhupendra Kumar. "Printing Articles Relating to Reminiscences of
Revolutionaries Which Have Appeared in the Press." Bangabani Aghrayan 1331
BS.

193
 Ghosh, Durba. Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in
India, 1919-1947. Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Horn, Karen. Oral History in the Classroom: Clarifying the Context through Historical
Understanding. January 2014.
Husbands, C. What is History Teaching? n.d. ICSE History & Civics Class 10
Syllabus. n.d.
<https://www.icsesyllabus.in/class-10/icse-history-civics-class-10-syllabus>.
Keiser, Jessica. Oral History: A Tool for the Elementary and Middle Classroom.
2022.
Kristina Llewelyn, Nicholas Ng-a-Fook, Hoa Truong-White. "Introduction:
Telling Tales in School." Oral History Education. 2016.
Kundera, Milan. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. 1978.
Maulucci, Melinda. "Elevating Experiences through an Oral History Course:
Voices of Sierra High School." Ohio Social Studies Review n.d.
Mukherjee, Piyul. Interview. Shriya Dasgupta. July 2022.
Mukhopadhyay, Jibon. Swadesh, Sabhyata o Bishwa. n.d.
Shapiro, I D. ETC A Review of General Semantics (2007).
Wager, Danielle Renee. "A Textbook Analysis: A Case Study of Changes in
History Textbooks Based on the Revolutionary War." 2014.
Whitman, Glen. Dialogue with the Past: Engaging Students & Meeting Standards
Through Oral History. 2004.

194
 Memory, Witnessing, Violence: A Study of
Select Poetry of Nelly Sachs

Jaspreet Kaur

Literature reflects society, its virtues, and vices. Poetry, a primeval

medium of expression in literature, is considered one of the earliest
and most original forms of expression. Throughout history, from
ancient works to modern works, literature has given insights and
meaning to society. Out of all the themes, violence and its
aftermath are one of the most common and notable themes in
literature.
The infamous twentieth century witnessed many horrific
violent incidents and one of the most gruesome was the Holocaust.
Brutal acts of violence can numb witnesses and victims. On the one
hand, sufferers and victims are silenced by their inability to cope
with such disturbing realities. This is what Nelly Sachs' personal
experience proves. As she writes in a poem, “When the great terror
came/I fell dumb” (Celan). On the other hand, pent-up emotions
give way to words and narratives where affected people consciously
choose to become witnesses and unburden themselves of
troublesome emotions. Many people traumatized and anguished by
violence take refuge in writing to relieve themselves of their grief
and pain. Nelly Sachs was one of them.
Sachs, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1966), was a
Swedish poet and a playwright of Jewish-German origin. Sachs, a
prominent poet and witness of the Jewish Holocaust highlighted
the futility of wars by giving voice to the suffering caused by war.
Her anthology, Glowing Enigmas (1967) endeavors to give words to
the “unspeakable” emotions, as words often fall short when
describing such gruesome times. Her deep concerns are preserving
and giving voice to Jewish memories. In the anthology, Sachs does
not try to look for beautiful or pure words but for words that
languages could not injure or damage, words capable of “speaking

195
the unspeakable” (Sachs 132). Her words “draw a line / write down
the alphabet/paint on the wall the suicidal words / that make the
newborn burgeon at once” (Sachs 289). Thus, the paper explores
how Sachs takes the responsibility of being a witness to violence
and gives voice to the individual and collective memories of the
people affected by violence in her poetry.
Ursula Rudnick in “Reconstructing God-Language: The Poetry
of Nelly Sachs” (1997) states that speechlessness is a central motif
in post-Shoah literature or Holocaust literature. These experiences
pose a challenge to language as it tries to find appropriate words to
describe them. In order to provide words for such catastrophic
experiences, Sachs draws vocabulary from the Bible and references
to Jacob, Job, Saul, and Daniel, etc. are used which adds another
layer of meaning to it. Nelly Sachs' poetry preserves Jewish
memories. The Holocaust resulted in the extermination of many
Jews, and an equally large number were forced into concentration
camps where they suffered atrocities and torture. Being a Jew,
Sachs knew she would also be asked to report to a concentration
camp. Consequently, she could not bear to live in extreme torment.
Under such troubling circumstances, “Dark hissing of the wind/ in
the corn / The victim ready to suffer/ The roots are still/ but the
ears of corn/ known many native languages” (Sachs 305). With no
chance of reprieve, she fled to Sweden and became a stranger to
her homeland. Describing those oblivious circumstances when all
the Jews felt like outsiders but carried love for their country in their
hearts, she writes: “A stranger always has / his homeland in his
arms / like an orphan / for which he may be seeking / nothing but
a grave” (Sachs 167). Due to the trauma, she lost her speech. But
silently, she witnessed the catastrophe that befell her and her fellow
Jews. Grief did not stop her from writing. Instead, she found
writing therapeutic, which brought her out of silence.
Her trauma manifested in her poetry, and she spoke through it.
Even her silence became extremely powerful as she wrote, “Here
we wind a wreath / Some have violets of thunder / I have only a
blade of grass / full of the silent language / that makes this air
afresh” (Sachs 249). In her work, she depicts images of hope and
courage that helped her and the victims cope with their dreadful
196
pasts. This helped gradually relieved them of the burden of carrying
the Holocaust horrors. Instead of drowning in her sorrows, she,
through her poetry, provides solace to people in despair. She asks
his fellow victims to be patient and writes: “Wait a moment
longer— / and you walk upon the sea . . . / and found again soon
in the sand / and on the stars an awaited guest arriving by air / and
consumed in the fire of reunion / be still — be still” (Sachs 251).
Since there is no escape, Sachs urges all sufferers to wait for
imminent death. Sachs sees hope in death which would certainly
abate pain. For Sachs, the theme of metamorphosis and
transformation is central to her poetry. This is manifested in the
metaphors like ‘butterfly’, and ‘rising from the dust’. It serves as an
icon for innocent souls. An individual’s metamorphosis through
death is placed in the context of the earth's life cycles. The butterfly
symbolically embraces a transformation phase. Each end leads to
another beginning. The pain of leaving, of death, is not erased but
mitigated by the promise of renewal. She comes to terms with the
senseless murders of her people during the Holocaust. Afterward,
she writes: “What lovely aftermath / is painted in your dust. /
What royal sign / in the secret of the air” (Sachs 91).
Not all victims have the courage to speak out against what
Miguel Abensour called “modern terror” (231). The term “modern
terror” refers to twentieth-century political violence. Consequently,
a few came forward and volunteered to write about their horrid
experiences. For that reason, a writer’s role becomes more
imperative as when a writer chooses to write, they bear a moral
responsibility of conveying the ‘truth’ or their own perspectives
regarding disturbing events. Here, ‘truth’ becomes relative as a
witness does not always convey ‘the truth’ but ‘the truth’ or
knowledge that he/she believes to be true. The “need of truth”
compels writers to put into words the emotions that emerged from
their stupefaction at such atypical political violence. Writers like
Nelly Sachs (a Holocaust survivor turned poet), Mahmoud Darwish
(Palestinian exile poet), Brian Turner (an American war veteran),
Agha Shahid Ali (a Kashmiri-American poet), Primo Levi (a
Holocaust survivor turned writer), and many more have suffered
from trauma caused by different manifested violence. They have
197
also witnessed the atrocities they themselves, their loved ones, and
the people belonging to their respective countries underwent.
Thus, a question arises, whether all the people who happen to
be at the place where any horrendous event takes place and have
either seen or undergone the atrocities can be called witnesses. As
Giorgio Agamben argues, no survivor considers themselves
absolute witnesses because no single testimony can represent the
Holocaust as all the testimonies contain “a lacuna” (1999 33-34).
This demonstrates Theodore Adorno’s provocatively proposed
dictum, “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (Prisms 34).
However, for Agamben, a true witness could only be a Muselmann,
the drowned and the dead. In other words, it denotes victims who
succumbed to death and were the most fortunate. Sachs focuses on
the dilemma of the survivors as to whether they should consider
themselves fortunate to survive or quite unlucky to continue to live
in an eternal abyss. Describing their confusion, she writes: “Those
who live on have clutched at a time / until gold dust was left on
their hands / they sing sun — sun — / midnight the dark eye / has
been covered with the shroud” (Sachs 251). The ‘gold dust’
symbolizes that freedom that all the survivors secured and all
doomed died dreaming of. however, the achieved freedom lost its
significance, the moment they found themselves “wandering” like
“ears of corn/ on a black field” (Sachs 271), “doing nothing” and
perceptibly “wilting” (Sachs 247) in the disrupted and disoriented
world. Due to “the dark eye”, even the effulgence of the ‘sun
remains ineffective.
Now, some challenging questions emerge about who a witness
is; what are the characteristics of a witness, and what the act of
witnessing is, and the most pertinent one is can a poet be called a
witness? The answer to these questions can be derived from
understanding the term's etymology. According to Chambers’
Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (1874), the word
'witness' means "factual knowledge; testimony of a fact; that which
furnishes proof. . .” (563). A ‘witness’ is also a person, “who sees or
has personal knowledge of a thing; one who attests” (563) the
occurrence of an event. Sarah E Anderson in the article, “The
Value of ‘Bearing Witness’ to Desistance” (2016) defines ‘bearing
198
witness’ as to “see, attend to and testify to lived experience, and is
linked to ideas of narrative, voice and truth” (409). Similarly, W.K.
Cody in an essay, “The Ethics of Bearing Witness in Healthcare: A
Beginning Exploration” (2001) describes it as “attesting to the
veracity or authenticity of something through one’s personal
presence” (289). The meaning suggests that a witness must be
present at the place where any event is occurring and witness the
events taking place. However, words such as "attest" and "testimony"
add an additional dimension to "witnessing", making it more
authentic. Nevertheless, the aspect of 'testifying' represents a subject
and more individual truth.
The meaning implies that a witness is not merely a person who
casually sees any event taking place. He/she is likewise the one who
attests to the veracity of the event. The words of a ‘witness’ are
often taken as proof of an event. The term ‘witness’ is usually
associated with a person who has some personal experiences that
may help establish some truth. He/she appears in court and
testifies against someone in front of a judge. However, a witness
always testifies to what he/she believes is true. Hence, Jacques
Derrida doubts the position of a witness and discusses the “politics
and poetics of witnessing” (Sandomirskaja n.p.) in “Chapter Ten.
‘A Self-Unsealing Poetic Text’: Poetics and Politics of Witnessing”
(2000). Derrida questions the authenticity of a witness's words as a
source of truth. He argues that when a witness records or writes
about any event, s/he bears “a political and aesthetic agenda”
(Sandomirskaja 247). Hannah Arendt believes that when a witness
witnesses an event, he/she seldom thinks of surviving the atrocities
and becoming a voice after the event passes. However, Arendt
acknowledges and agrees that a witness, if she/he agrees to speak,
always has a political agenda behind the narrative or his / her
‘truth’. But she also affirms that disqualifying a witness, perhaps,
because of his/her agenda, is unjustified. It is not to be understood
that Arendt fully believes in the words of a witness. Instead, she
also approves of the Derridean dubiety but has one in mind when it
comes to becoming a witness. For Arendt, a true witness should be
a “righteous” man who understands the poetics and politics of

199
witnessing. But, the presence or absence of righteousness does not
account for the witness's credibility, argues Agamben.
Along with being righteous, a witness bears moral responsibility
and ultimately is accountable for each word he/she utters. A
witness does not give voice to his/her experiences or pain. Instead,
he/she becomes a spokesperson for all victims who refuse to talk
about the pain and trauma. Agamben defines responsibility as “to
become the guarantor of something for someone (or for oneself)
with respect to someone” (21). But the act of responsibility
“expresses nothing noble or luminous, but rather simply an
obligation” (22). Being a responsible witness, Sachs attempts to
document sufferings that otherwise would have been lost. She writes:
“I write to you/ You have come into the world again/ with the
haunting strength of letters/ that gripped for your essence” (Sachs
303). By becoming a ‘guarantor’ or ‘righteous’ one presents “the
plainest to truth” (Sachs 289).
Most importantly, witnessing is a conscious choice. Not all
'witnesses' speak of the horrendous event. There are many who
survived the event but do not have the courage to speak of it,
remaining silent Yet there are people who choose to speak of it
incessantly. Speaking of the trauma caused by the gruesome event
is no easy task. It takes courage and the will to fight one’s fears.
However, survivors share their stories or truth to avoid guilt. Primo
Levi, a Holocaust survivor, was one of them. Levi found himself
“at peace with [himself] because [he] bore witness” (Agamben 219).
By becoming a witness who could attest to the cruelty and brutality
they (Jews) had to endure, Levi could take ‘revenge’ upon the
perpetrators. Like Levi, Nelly Sachs was also a victim of the Jewish
Holocaust and the survivor chose to speak of the trauma. However,
she remained silent for several years before gradually gaining the
courage to raise her voice. She consciously chose to speak of her
horrifying experiences. Later, she became a global phenomenon
when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1966.
It must be noted that bearing witness is different from ‘merely
looking’ which is a common and continuous process. For instance,
in the event of an accident, many people just pass by, some stop
there to offer help, some are there just to see what has happened,
200
and a few ‘bear witness’ to it. This could mean that bearing witness
differs from just knowing or seeing the event. It seems a conscious
act and requires complete awareness of the intensity of the event
and its impact on the people who experienced that event. The
effect of the event disturbs a 'witness''s consciousness and compels
him/her to tell about it or write about it.
Besides bearing witness to carnage, the poet deals with silence,
traumas, psychological scars, withdrawal, or finding creative ways
of expressing or representing convoluted emotions in her poetry.
Moreover, the representation of trauma and subjective truths relies
heavily on memory efficiency. Thinkers like Walter Benjamin and
Sigmund Freud opine that confrontation with violence blurs the
memory of the affected person. As Benjamin in his work Reflections:
Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (1986), argues that
memory “is not an instrument for exploring the past but its
theater” (25). He defines memory as a dramatic representation of
the past and not just a repository of the events which happened in
the past. Subsequently, the argument emphasizes the backward
functioning of memory in which memory recollects events from
the past and establishes a link with the present. This interrelation
gives a coherent meaning to the events happening in the present.
Literature and memory have a strong connection which is often
manifested in many literary works. Describing the twofold
relationship between literature and memory which led to the
emergence of a new area of research that is literary memory studies,
Neumann writes, “In their world-creation, literary works resort to
culturally predominant ideas of memory, and, through their literary
techniques, represent these ideas in an aesthetically condensed
form” (Neumann 335). He also highlights literature's capability to
exhibit human minds' inner processes by staging fictional minds in
literary works. It may mean that literary texts can make visible what
otherwise would remain invisible to the naked eye. This may
include complex cultural and individual memories processed in the
mind unconsciously. On the one hand, literature, according to
Jeffrey Olick, can depict collected observable memories which are
basically “socially shaped individual memories”; on the other hand,
these memories themselves become a medium of collective
201
memory which is “public discourse of the past” and “shapes the
knowledge content if larger social contexts” (Olick 337-343)
Memory is not just a personal phenomenon, as is commonly
believed. It is more social and collective than personal. Memory is
not static or permanent. Individual memories are collected over
generations, multiplied, and passed on from generation to
generation. Thus, individual memories become collective memories
as all memories carry the traces of the previous generation. It is so
fluid that it multiplies and aids in identity construction. The fluidity
of memory renders it highly unreliable and unstable. For this
reason, the concept has become so fluid that Susannah Radstone
talks of "memories" rather than 'memory'. When a person has
complete awareness of his present and past, and on the basis of
that, he/she makes assumptions about the future. Such
assumptions depend a lot on memory efficacy.
It would be an understatement to say that the present makes
sense only when one knows about his/her past. While pointing at
the transitory nature of time, Sachs writes: “Always empty time / is
hungry / for the inscription of transitoriness” (Sachs 267). This
reminds me of T. S. Eliot's idea of the simultaneity of time. This
idea is evoked through the lines of Eliot's poem, “Burnt Norton”:
“Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time
future, / And time future contained in time past. / If all time is
eternally present / All time is unredeemable” (Scofield 202). The
poem discusses the nature of time. Eliot stresses the need to
concentrate on the present moment and to know that there is a
universal order. It also depicts the emergence of two periodical
periods, in which each reduces its identity and becomes one. The
difference between them grows fainter. Moreover, memory, we can
say, is a continuous presence of the past in the present. “Through
remembrance comes redemption; by going back one also moves
toward the future. . . .” (Handelman 349). The very aspects of
memory that are remembering and recording “are the key to
existence, becoming and belonging” (Garde-Hansen). Needless to
say, if a person forgets his bitter memory, he is relieved of the
burden and regains his health. For Friedrich Nietzsche as well as
Milan Kundera, recalling a bitter past is an overwhelming burden.
202
For Nietzsche, forgetting the past is important to attain happiness
in life. However, Kundera believes that a purposeful forgetting of
the past would be more "unbearable" (Whitehead 88) than
consciously remembering it and acknowledging it as a responsibility
for that event in mind. Further, “Remembering is an active
reconciliation of past and present. The meaning of the past in
relation to the present is what is at stake here; memories are
important as they bring our changing sense of who we are and who
we were, coherently into view of one another” (Keightely 58).
Thus, remembering is not merely recalling an event or an
articulation of the mind's processes, but a performance deeply
rooted in lived experiences. The process of remembering involves
selections, absences, and forgetting. Hence, remembrance becomes
a crucial aspect of witnessing.
Memory studies have shifted from understanding individual
memory to comprehending an entire gamut of more shareable
social and public remembering. In addition, forgetting is as critical
as remembering. Collective memory is “shareable among members
of a social group or community, be it a nation, an institution, a
religious group, or a family” (Wang 2008 305). Hugo Van
Hofannsthal coined the term 'collective memory' in 1902. However,
the full potential of the term was exploited by a French philosopher
and sociologist, Maurice Halbwachs. He developed the concept and
stated that social context is essential to human memory
functioning. Halbwachs’ ideas propagate scientific objectivism
which stands in stark contrast to Bergsonian individualism
(Bergson’s Matter and Memory). Halwachs refutes individual memory.
Nevertheless, he considers individual and collective memories as
tools to understand social and cultural scenarios. The constantly
shifting and transforming concept helps in understanding “how
these forms of remembering operate as collective representations
of the past, how they constitute a range of cultural resources for
social and historical identities, and how they privilege particular
readings of the past and subordinate others” (Keightley and
Pickering, 2013).
Memories are socially and politically colored fragmented narratives
that are undoubtedly different from history as history is a linear
203
account of facts and events to which a person does not really feel
connected. The reason could be that “Human memory is malleable
and fallible” (Jon 78) as external conditions and situations cause
stress to affect memory. The quality of the reconstructed memories
depends upon how the mind cognitively constructs traumatic
memories. Traumatic trauma survivors also suffer from deleterious
effects on their mental and physical health as a result of their
victimization, as do many trauma victims. Literary trauma studies
are an area of scholarship that seeks to understand the role and
representation of trauma in literary works.
The field is not clinical in nature, but trauma studies "operate
on the evil of theory, and of exegesis in the service of insights
about human functioning” (Hartman 554). There has always been a
strong preoccupation with trauma studies in memory studies.
Literary devices used in works often describe the relationship
between readers and texts. Shoshana Felmon and Dori Laub, a
practicing psychologist, in their famous book, Testimony: Crisis of
Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (1992), highlight the
crucial role witnesses' testimonies play in understanding trauma,
particularly in literary works. Felman and Laub also argue that the
interplay between the act of testifying and the act of presenting
events causes the occurrence of witnessing. Further, to have
successful witnessing, there has to be a listener and a speaker. Both
are connected by a shared responsibility for making sense of the
events. In the absence of a listener, the testifier becomes an
“internal witness” (87) that leads to the construction of the other-
self which in the form of a poem converses with the testifier, here,
the poet. The poem and poet both share responsibility for the
poet’s testimony. A poet has the gift of clairvoyance. He/she can
take essential leaps of imagination and receive intuition about
events of the past and future. This will enable him/her to unravel
the mysteries of the past. Perhaps in the poem, “You Speak with
Me”, Nelly Sachs speaks of this relationship, “. . . I shall not know/
what my invisible/ will do without me now —/ . . . You speak with
me in the night/ but fought off like all the dead” (Sachs 255). Here,
the expression “fought like all the dead” shows that a dead person is

204
still and devoid of pain. It could also mean that trauma has numbed
victims and torture does not affect them anymore.
Poetry has a special status in representation which Adrienne
Rich refers to as “a long dialogue between art and justice” (8).
Poetry provides repressed emotions with space to say the unsaid
from distinct perspectives. Freud in his work Psychopathic Characters
on the Stage (1942) highlights how poetry, especially lyric poetry,
“serves the purpose, more than anything, of giving vent to intense
feelings of many sorts” (1608). Poetry by such writers creates
cultural and social ‘memoryscapes’ wherein a community or cohort
group makes sense of the event. However, John Berger argues that
poetry cannot repair any loss. Rich quotes Berger and writes that
poetry “defies the space which separates . . . By its continual labor
of resembling what has been scattered” (31).
Writing becomes an act of reflection and recovering from
traumatic memories of the past. The act of remembrance is thus
carried out “in pursuit of the integrity and continuity of the self in a
morally disrupted world” (Bower 2). By giving words to baffling
and perplexing responses, their poetry helps sufferers come to
terms with or deal with their harrowing experiences. It provides
reassurance to people who have not suffered alone. By doing so,
they connect all victims together by collectively witnessing
horrendous events.
Language plays a vital role in communicating such agonizing
experiences. Speaking also has therapeutic effects which sometimes
completely and partially heal psychological wounds. Poetry
provides repressed emotions with space to say the unsaid from
their distinctive perspectives. Freud in his work Psychopathic
Characters on the Stage (1942) highlights how poetry, especially lyric
poetry, “serves the purpose, more than anything, of giving vent to
intense feelings of many sorts” (1608). In poetry, the boundaries
between fiction and non-fiction blur. The images convey an
essential message about the world through highly compressed
imagery. Images produced do not always correspond directly with
reality; rather, they are symbolic representations of the author's
response to experiences. it must be noted that representations are
always colored with subjective perspectives.
205
 In the end, trauma caused by political and social realities affects
memory a lot. Poetry is a highly creative literary form that provides
fluidity and expressibility. It must be clearly understood that a
poem informs the truth not based on factuality. Instead, it speaks
of reality even a victim cannot comprehend. A poet with her gift of
giving words to even the most incomprehensible emotions, and by
doing so, becomes a witness in the true sense. In this way,
literature, especially poetry, serves a purpose more than any other
discipline does.

Works Cited
Adorno, Theodore. Prisms. Trans. Samuel and Sherry Weber, 1984, p. 34.
Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive.
Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen, Zone Books, 1999.
Anderson, S. E. “The Value of ‘Bearing Witness’ to Desistance.” Probation
Journal, 2016, https://doi.org/10.1177/0264550516664146.
Benjamin, Walter. Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings.
Edited by Peter Demetz., Schocken, 1986.
Berger, John. Selected Essays: John Berger. Edited by Geoff Dyer, Vintage
Books, 2001.
Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Pantianos Classics, 1896.
Bower, Kathrin M. Ethics and Remembrance in the Poetry of Nelly Sachs and Rose
Auslander. Camden House, 2000.
Celan, Paul, et al. Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs: Correspondence. Sheep Meadow Press,
1995.
Cody, W. K. “The Ethics of Bearing Witness in Healthcare: A Beginning
Exploration.” Nursing Science Quarterly, vol. 14, no. 4, pp. 288-296.
Felmon, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing in Literature,
Psychoanalysis, and History. Routledge Publications. 1992.
Garde-Hansen, J. Media and Memory. Edinburgh UP, 2011.
Handelman, Susan. “Walter Benjamin and the Angel of History.” 1991,p.349.
http://www.academia.edu/5799043/Walter_Benjamin_and_the_Angel_of_Hist
ory.
Hartman, Geoffrey H. “On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies.”
New Literary History, vol. 26, no. 3, The Johns Hopkins UP, Summer, 1995, pp.
537- 563.
Jon, R. “Conte Memory, Research and the Law: Future Directions” in
Trauma and Memory. Edited by Linda M. Williams and Victoria L. Banyard, Sage
Publications, 1999.

206
 Keightley, E. “Remembering Research: Memory and Methodology in the
Social Sciences.” International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 2010, pp. 55-70.
Keightley, E., and Pickering, M. Eds. “Research Methods for Memory
Studies.” Edinburgh UP. 2013.
Neumann, Birgit, “The Literary Representation of Memory.” A Companion to
Cultural
Memory Studies, Berlin/Boston, 2010, pp. 333–343.
Olick, J. K., and Robbins, J. “Social Memory Studies: From Collective
Memory to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices.” Annual Review of
Sociology, 1998, pp. 105-140.
Radstone, Susannah, and Bill Schwarz, editors. Memory: Histories, Theories,
Debates. Fordham UP, 2010.
Rudnick, Ursula. “Reconstructing God-Language: The Poetry of Nelly
Sachs.” European Judaism: A Journal for the New Europe, vol. 30, no. 2, Autumn
1997, pp. 131-150, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41443423.
Sachs, Nelly. “Glowing Enigmas.” O the Chimneys: Selected Poems, Including Eli,
a verse play, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967.
Sandomirskaja, Irina. “Derrida on the Poetics and Politics of Witnessing.”
2011.
Scofield, Martin. T.S. Eliot: Four Quartets, Harcourt, Brace and Company,
Cambridge UP, 1988, p. 202.
Sigmund, Freud. Psychopathic Characters on the Stage. Standard Edition, 1942.
Wang. Q. “On the Cultural Constitution of Collective Memory.” Memory, vol.
16, no. 3, 2008, pp. 305- 317.
“Witness.” Chamber’s Etymological Dictionary of English Language. Edited by
James Donald. Edinburgh, 1874.
Whitehead, Anne. Memory. Routledge, 2009.

207
 Durga Visarjan (self-immolation): Revisiting
the Memory of Violence Exposing
Vulnerability of Women during Partition

Abhishek Sarkar
Women in every society, in every age, and in every situation have
been the easy and common targets of any kind of upheaval
operative in society. It matters barely whether a woman has
anything to do with the rupture that impacts the socio-political
stability of any social order. Whatever may be an issue of the rift-
social, cultural, religious, political, or anything else, the brunt is to
be invariably shouldered by women- irrespective of class or
community. In times of chaos and confrontation, a woman’s
identity doesn’t depend on her class or community or even her
relation to others; rather she merely becomes a fleshly object to the
panoptic gaze of the perpetrator and essentially an instrument to
satisfy the ego of dominance. Her body and beauty turn out to be a
site where male chauvinism ever intends to record its tangible
superiority by registering his vigorous access to her privacy1. In
fact, occasions of chaos and crisis have always provided such
maniacs with tailor-made situations to register and re-register their
corporeal presence in the body and psyche of vulnerable women.
The Partition of Undivided India in 1947 offers such a backdrop to
all the maniacs- irrespective of class and community to exult over
their bestial instinct.
The Partition of India in August 1947 has been a matter of far-
reaching consequences and an instrumental historical juncture that
still impacts the geopolitics of South Asia. It is, in fact, such a
decisive moment that has irreversibly changed the course of life of
millions of people in the Indian subcontinent where all such people
once lived as neighbors and brethren maintaining their respective
cultures and religion. The political game of hankering after power
during the Partition was an exclusively masculine cup of tea,
although quite astonishingly it essentially poisoned the world of the
women, most of those who had limited periphery of life within the
208
four walls and had nothing to do with such a tug of war practiced
in power politics. They were invariably preoccupied with domestic
chores and rooted in the socio-cultural life of their surroundings.
So when partition was shaping itself, the first thing that struck
women was the issue of displacement.
In the initial phase when just the discussion of the probability
of Partition was going on, most people considered it an
impracticable and temporary crisis and for the common people of
both religions living in the countryside for generations- the such
ambiance of animosity was hardly in existence beforehand.
Definitely, their religion, rites, and customs were different;
however, that was not adverse enough to foster fatal enmity against
each other. On the contrary, there was mutual interaction at socio-
cultural levels. Things started to change when in a few places
communal riots started and the news of such riots reached the
adjacent and far-away localities. The immediate effect of such
calamity was that the level of mutual trust of the common people
of both religions was arrested. Once their mutual faith started to
dwindle, what initially seemed to be an impracticable and
temporary crisis turned out to be a gross reality at hand. Further,
the rising number of incidents of barbaric murders, arson, and loot,
and most importantly the incidents of abduction, rape, and
conversion of women fuelled the animosity unprecedentedly. Quite
shockingly, the next-door neighbor who had been erstwhile a
companion suddenly became alien and directly or indirectly
participated in all such inhuman practices unscrupulously. It was
truly a time of unexpected revelation, sheer helplessness, and a
situation of being caught amongst strangers. In no time truth and
reality changed and known became unknown. The tension and
unrest only grew with time and consequently, the only rational
choice left was migration - a forceful uprooting.
It was not an easy decision for those common countrymen,
especially the women to leave their ancestral soil, (‘site) or their
village (‘desh’) with which their bonding was like that of a child to
the mother. More than ‘territorial’ or ‘spatial’, the bonding was
emotional and psychological. Their site’ and ‘desh’ had been an
integral part of their reality and inseparably conjoined to their
209
identity. Hence there was a sense of intense grief and pain at that
critical juncture. However, a sense of all-pervading danger and
threat made the situation so adverse that East Bengal no longer
remained a safe haven for the Hindus to live in and after the
outbreak of communal riot in Noahkhali, the epicenter (in
November 1946) of partition riots there were frequent inevitable
aftershocks of different magnitude all around East Bengal and
beyond. Indeed it was a time of unimaginable horror and violence
stemming from communal unrest2. It marked a definitive rupture in
the syncretic culture of Bengal (Mukherjee 168).
The riots of the period with their inhuman manifestations
brought back the days of medieval barbarity and to be precise, the
impact was not limited to the people affected by riots; rather people
beyond the fold of such violence grew pale and petrified under the
suspected attack at any moment. In fact, in communal riots that
preceded and followed the Partition, it was essentially a sense of
intimidation of being persecuted, the fear of being dispossessed and
humiliated, and moreover, the fear of not belonging that prompted
many to take the unwilling decision of fleeing rather than actual
incidents of violence. What made the situation more vicious was
that in many cases the ‘phobia’ was planned and fully generated by
means of leaflets or newspaper reports and often by concocting
rumors3. In the western side, there was the same pattern in
operation4. In those stormy days, it was quite easy to fall prey to the
rumors that a mob was advancing their way or the next village had
been set ablaze. Living life in the midst of such continuous panic
and anxiety became nightmarish and an ordeal for their patience.
Evidently, there was fear of losing life and/or the land and valuable
belongings at the hands of the violent Muslims; though more than
such losses it was the issue of humiliation, abduction, rape and
conversion of the girls and women that stormed the life of the
Hindus in East Bengal. The frequent news of abduction, rape, and
conversion of girls and women was most common. However, what
affected the most on such occasions was the sudden departure of
the neighbors, often silently and secretly in the darkness of the
night. Hence a perception of fear and violence than actual acts of
violence devised the backdrop of fleeting of large number of
210
Hindus. Obviously the ambience was not conducive to the Hindus
to live there with safety and security and quite practically one
couldn’t wait for the moment to encounter such fire of communal
frenzy in reality and then to decide.
The inevitable result was the mass migration of the Hindus
from East Bengal, the soil of their ancestors as well as their own
upbringing. Even the departure for many was an instantaneous
decision- being encircled in the situation of threat and danger.
Somehow they had to flee only with their lives and often with
scanty resources. Millions of Hindus left East Bengal and went
chiefly to West Bengal to find shelter and save their lives and
honor. The experience of reaching West Bengal (Calcutta and
adjacent districts mainly) and the challenges and hardships
thereafter have opened a huge compass of Partition study with the
plethora of multidimensional analysis. However, in between the
crisis and challenges both in East and West Bengal, there was
another transitional phase when these migrating people
encountered challenges and intimidation- that is during the course
of their exodus from East Bengal to West Bengal. In this chapter,
my focus is to investigate and understand the mindset and response
of the migrating women trapped in the midst of a crisis close to the
border where officials posed further complexity to these wretched
and helpless creatures5. Let’s try to appreciate and investigate the
situation in the historical light of the then post-Partition context
and women’s response to it with reference to Jotirmoyee Devi’s
short story “Epar Ganga Opar Ganga”, translated as “The
Crossing” by Sarmistha Dutta Gupta in “Bengal Partition Stories -
An Unclosed Chapter” edited by Bashabi Frazer.
Partition history irrespective of Punjab and Bengal is replete
with a staggering number of occasions when women either
committed suicide by drowning themselves or by any other means
or were killed by the male folks of the family in the name of ‘honor
killing’ to save their purity from the hands of the frenzied Muslims
who revel over the bodies of these helpless women and celebrated
such sexual violence as an emblem of triumph over the rival
community. The concept of ‘purity’ (sexual) is central to the
identity of women and in Indian moral standards, this stricture is
211
avowedly practiced. Hindu women have the precedence of
committing suicide during the Mughal Empire when ‘Jauhar’ was
practiced by Hindu women to avoid capture, enslavement, and rape
by an invading army. 6 Society (patriarchy in fact) has always
extolled women’s (sexual) ‘purity’ and identified it with the ‘honour’
of the community7. Women have been told to protect their ‘purity’
in all situations and if necessary they must sacrifice their life for the
same. So when men of other communities tried to molest or ravish
them they considered it better to sacrifice their life rather than be
caught and ravished by the Muslims and get converted to Islam.
They instilled within themselves such societal perception-
fanned and fueled by the then historical stalwarts like M.K.Gandhi,
who on such occasions of sectarian brutalities in Noakhali in the
autumn of 1946 not only vindicated such steps of women in the
midst of a crisis but also eulogized women for their boldness to
commit suicide in order to preserve their chastity and purity.
“Gandhiji advised the women in West Bengal to commit suicide by
poison or some other means to avoid dishonor … suffocate
themselves or … bite their tongues to end their lives.”8 Gandhi
insisted that “women must learn how to die before a hair of their
head could be injured.”9 Speaking a year later, just over a month
after Independence and Partition, he valorized pre-emptive suicide,
even murder, as a sign of strength, lauding the deaths of Hindu and
Sikh women:
I have heard that many women who did not want to lose their
honor chose to die. Many men killed their own wives. I think that is
really great because I know that such things make India brave.
After all, life and death is a transitory game. Whoever might have
died is dead and gone, but at least they have gone with courage.
They have not sold away their honor. Not that their life was not
dear to them, but they felt it was better to die than to 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 India10. However, he was not alone
in his insistence on the preservation of chastity, Gandhi was an

212
important voice, and his speeches had actual consequences for
women’s lives.
Quite obviously, such a statement no longer remains the
personal opinion of an individual as it stems from Gandhiji.
Invariably it becomes national sentiment and understanding.
Thereby, incidents of sacrifice were not extraordinary – both on the
eastern as well as the western border. Jotirmoyee Devi’s short story
Epar Ganga Opar Ganga (The Crossing) is an insightfully drawn
narrative that simulates such an occasion. Durga, a pretty woman in
her early twenties finds herself helpless in the midst of an ambiance
of phobia of being raped and converted to Islam. The thought of
such supposed violence was so fatal and pervasive that she
succumbs to committing suicide by drowning herself. Her
unfortunate death testifies to the menacing condition that women
in those days encountered as their everyday experience. Hers is a
classic case to understand the impact of the environment of horror
and violence permeating ubiquitously and the vulnerable condition
that led innumerable women to embrace the end of life. Jotirmoyee
Devi’s short story captures precisely this vulnerability of a woman
who becomes a victim of the game of power played on the table of
politics.
Truly it was an indescribable phase of the partition history.
With heart-rending pain, people left their ‘desh’ in small, large, and
split-up groups-all moving together towards some unknown
destination. In this crowd of homeless people Sudam and Durga in
the dark of the night through the jungle path walked on for almost
an uncertain destination. The reward would be that if somehow
they could reach there the honor of their women, the lives of their
men and their faith would not be lost. They went on with the belief
of reaching their goal and the storyteller presents a picturesque
description of such a journey: “The men are carrying sticks and
battle axes. Bundles of clothes or some eatables tied to their back.
Bare torsos, just a dhoti between their legs. Men of all ages-the old,
the young, and the middle-aged.” (247)
The description of women and the pattern they maintained while
undertaking such a journey sums up well the probable attacks on
women. However, they had their strategy to protect the younger
213
ones- most vulnerable at the hands of the perpetrators: “All kinds
of women, the younger ones right in the middle encircled by elders.
They walk in silence. Terrified.” (P 247) This silence resulting from
a sense of creepy terror characterized the threat that kept them on
tenterhook all the way.
The group in which Sudam and Durga are present comprises
60 homeless people and many others are on their way such groups
only add to the staggering number of dispossessed people
migrating from East Bengal. The couple on reaching the border
thought like others that the time of their prolonged trials and
tribulations might have come to an end and soon they would depart
from their ancestral land (‘janmabhumi’/ birthplace) for good.
However, these rustic and naïve people were unaware of the way of
the world. Their hope dashed into the ground as soon as they
realized they need to show papers or passports for getting the
desired permission to cross the border11. They were the common
and uneducated people of rural Bengal- ignorant about the rules
and regulations structured by the Governments of both countries.
They only knew earlier that others had crossed the border without
papers and hence pleaded earnestly to the officials of both sides to
allow them, but all went in vain. However, there was an exception
to this apparent stricture as “Those who can afford, cross the
border.” (248) The writer here quite overtly pinpoints the practice
of corruption and manipulation indulged by the officials of the
border12.
The term ‘afford’ nakedly exposes the malpractice that led to
the disaster in the lives of a few like Durga and Sudam- comprising
the cluster of people who could not ‘afford’ to fulfill the demands
of the officials who remained in a corner at the station. Already
once these hapless people have been corned in East Bengal and
compelled to escape and now they are to stay once more ‘in a
corner at the station’ and thus they become most ill-fated amongst
the unfortunate ones and doubly cornered. Sudam Rishi, however,
left no stone unturned to arrange for the provision for crossing the
border. He had only five rupees, although he needed twenty-five to
be affordable for the purpose. Quite obviously, for anyone like
Sudam, this was a hard nut to crack. He realized somehow he must
214
arrange for the required money and this he could do only from the
relatives living on the other side of the border. However, when the
officials approached them- especially looked at Durga with the
lascivious male gaze and advised Sudam to let Durga stay at the
station master's house for a couple of days, Sudam got scared by
the thought of separation and in no time replied, “No Babu, we'll
go back.” (249) This instantaneous revision of decision is the
instinctive and experiential response of Sudam that features the
state of affairs of the time. He apprehends a mischievous tone in
their proposal.
Durga on the other hand also got scared and clung to her
husband. In the night she lay all wrapped up tying the end of her
sari to her husband’s dhoti. This is an obvious response of a
frightened woman who feels her surroundings unsafe and hence
desperately holds on to the ultimate shelter of her life- her
husband. Her wrapping up tying the end of her sari to her
husband’s dhoti is owing to her obvious psychological need to
catch hold of someone she trusts most. It is this sense of being
attached to her husband that strengthens her minds. Hence she
never allows herself to dissociate from Sudam. Whenever she dozes
off for a while, she then wakes up with a start after some time and
this ‘start’ of Durga makes us realize the pervasive danger and
threat that encircle them all the while.
The situation becomes scarier as gradually others in their group
somehow ‘manage’ to cross the border and the two were left
behind as they failed to ‘manage’. Durga’s naïve beauty has already
flared up the lusty passion of the guards of the border of this site
and as the night fell and darkness prevailed, those agents returned
with a darker suggestion, “Why don't you go, Sudam? Get the
money; we'll look after your wife.” (249)
The insidious hint is unmistakably realized by Durga and she
‘freezes in apprehension.’ This reaction of Durga testifies to the
unfathomable panic that grips the sensibility of any woman caught
in such an inescapable situation. There must have been the glint of
searching eyes and penetrating voice that immediately alarms
Durga’s womanly instinct as harassment in transit was an
inexorable reality in those days13. She has realized well that these
215
‘instruments of evil’ will not allow them to cross the border without
the money demanded. At the same time, they cannot return to their
homeland (‘desh’) in such a terrible situation. Finding no other
choice, Durga suggests her husband take her to Master Saheb's
house and if he allows her to stay in their house, that can be a
potential solution for some time to avert the vultures flying around
her. He has a Bibi and this consoles her thought that in the midst
of an omnipresent crisis, they may be her shelter.
Acting upon her suggestion Sudam pleads at the feet of the
station master and considers him as his father requests him to allow
her to stay for some time and in the meanwhile, he would return
with the money from her brother in Calcutta. Sudam desperately
intends to leave Durga in a safe place and at present, there is no
better alternative than the station master’s family. Though the
station master has been used to witnessing no end to these people's
sufferings, for some unknown reason he is suddenly struck by the
helplessness of this couple and gives consent to Durga’s stay with
his wife. Perhaps he might have also realized the vulnerable
condition of Durga and took the difficult responsibility of
sheltering a Hindu woman in his house in times of communal
carnage and mistrust. Though he himself was not sure how long he
would be able to protect her from those ruffians. The station
master, at least for the time being, provides Sudam with the
opportunity to have the breathing space to arrange for the money
from the other side of the border. Sudam assures to return soon
and leaves Durga under the custody of Ma-Jan. Master Saheb’s wife
offers her a sense womanly comfort zone that turns this family into
her oasis.
Durga’s counting of the days starts and from the third day
onwards she expects the arrival of Sudam with the money. She
speculates about so many relatives who can help him out in this
crisis and grows optimistic. However, all her expectations gradually
turn out to be a reverie to her as days pass. She is gripped by fear
and anxiety and caught in the whirlpool of so many questions,
“What has happened to Sudam? Won't he return? Has something
happened to him? Have the people over there done something to
him?” (250)
216
 All such speculations make her restless and what worsens the
situation is that the young loafers of the station gather around the
station master's house and advise her, “Bibisaheb, why have you
kept her with you? Drive her out. Let her go where she pleases.”
(250) This is the precisely the very ominous thought that has always
been lurking at the back of her mind and the absence of Sudam
now becomes critical. A few porters hanging around the station
area also laugh at her and opine their doubt about Sudam’s return
and add further that Sudam somehow manages to get rid of her.
However, the worst of suggestions comes after this when the
porter slyly remarks:
Now the girl is going to earn so much more. Sure, we'll find
clients for her.' (250)
Truly it is more than alarming and humiliating for a young wife
of rural Bengal to eavesdrop on such insinuation, which in those
stormy days was a stark possibility. Psychologically too, the
statement is enough to crush her spirit and cause the disintegration
of her psyche. The context sums up it well how much vulnerable
the condition of women in times of Partition that finding a woman
alone and helpless is considered to be a property or an object to be
used by her clients. In the imagination of these voluptuous men,
she has already become a fleshly object – exposed to the panoptic
gaze of these vultures. Durga can easily surmise the implication of
the chat and no wonder: “Her heart pounds. Tears well up. Lips
feel parched”. Here the storyteller has splendidly used short
sentences - each with loaded profundity, immersed in wide-ranging
emotional responses and adding to induce an ambiance of tension
and urgency.
The fear of such possibility grips her sensibility appallingly and
being frightened, Durga immediately after the departure of these
vicious men pleads at the feet of Bibisaheb not to hand her over at
their hands. Though Bibisaheb assures her that there is nothing to
worry about, Durga is shaken within and the suggestion of Sudam’s
leaving Durga in this despicable situation haunts their thought
process of Bibisaheb: 'Why hasn't that man come back? Has he
ditched her and run away?' (250)

217
 It is not that Durga disbelieves Sudam or believes in what those
men suggested, yet it is also true that the circumstance has been so
complex and menacing that such thought pops up at night. In reply
Miyan says “God knows.” Though he is assured of Sudam’s return,
nevertheless there reflects a sense of doubt in his reply too.
The conversation between the two continues and Miyan
apprehends the trials and challenges that Sudam might have faced
in Kolkata also. It is not that easy to arrange for money and return
in those days as he knows very well that even if Sudam succeeds in
arranging for the money he has to persuade the guards of the other
side also to believe him and in that case also he might have required
to ‘manage’ them too. Familiar with the way of the world, Miyan
broodingly comments: …how it is on both sides of the Ganga.
They'll have to pay up here as well as there. Not much difference
between the guardian angels on the two sides of the river.'
If Miyan is worried about Sudam, Bibisaheb is equally worried
about Durga and the long absence of Sudam frightens her more.
She knows it well Durga is under their custody and their
responsibility till Sudam returns. At the same time, she realizes how
much difficult it is to shelter and protect a young and beautiful
Hindu girl: 'Poor girl. And she's so young. How long do you think
you'll be able to shelter her in these times of trouble?' (250)
Durga eavesdrops on everything and obviously spends a
sleepless night in the next room. Now starts the convolution of a
sequence of questions that are enough to trigger the gradual
disintegration of her consciousness. She is utterly clueless as to
what should she do and grows fidgety by the thought that they
might throw her out amongst the ‘pack of wolves’. Her experience
in the recent past has been truly frightening as she has seen the fate
of some women in their neighboring villages. In addition to all such
traumatic memory, Durga on the way to the border, has witnessed
groups of migrating people being attacked a number of times. The
thought of such moments numbs her sense and Durga freezes and
gets petrified. In a state of tremendous pressure, Durga’s mind
swings like a pendulum. She asks herself, “Should she escape?
Where to? They are there everywhere. Hang herself? Drown? Is

218
there a river close by? A pond? Maybe there's one. The next minute
she's hopeful. He'll come.” (251)
Gradually Durga gets lost in her anxiety and doesn’t cook
anymore and hardly eats anything. She only munches ‘hire or muri’
if Bibi keeps nagging her. Definitely, this is the sign of the state of
mind of someone who has started to dwell on the thought of
submission and when Sudam fails to return in the next few days
Durga, left with no other choice, takes the ultimate decision- a
decision that is most unfortunate though not uncommon in those
days. Suicide. Durga commits suicide by drowning herself.14 Like
numerous helpless women caught in such an inescapable trap
during and after partition, Durga to prefers to end up her life by
drowning herself in place of being a vulnerable victim before the
ferocious animals who are ready to pounce upon her to inscribe the
sign of dominance over her body- a site for territorial possession.
pressure, she resigns to her doom. Had she been able to hold
on to her nerves a bit more, things would have been different.
Sudam returns after twenty-one days. However, her circumstance
and memory have been so adverse that there takes place
psychological breakdown in Durga – she is disintegrated utterly,
and the haunting memory of the visuals of the foreseen violence
and trauma simply overpower her capacity for endurance. It is the
impact of phobia and traumatic memory that left Durga with no
other choice. Who knows how many Durgas ended up in their lives
in such an unfortunate way at that ominous phase of history?
Though there prevail wide differences in situation and degree,
Jotirmoye Devi’s Durga unmistakably refreshes our memory of
Bhism Sahani’s “Tamas”, where also helpless women jumped into
the well to save their dignity and purity. In times of inescapable
crisis, they considered it better to sacrifice their lives by jumping
into the well rather than being ravished and converted to Islam15.
One can only wonder to surmise the mindset of those women who
sacrificed their lives to uphold and glorify the purity and virtue of
their being and that of their community.
However, Jotirmoye Devi’s story adds another crucial
dimension with respect to the choice of the name of the
protagonist- Durga, and her ultimate end that invariably links her
219
with the Hindu goddess Durga and the rituals associated with her.
It goes without saying that quite consciously and deliberately,
Jotirmoye Devi has chosen the name of the protagonist. Durga’s
drowning herself in the river/ pond immediately sets the
parallelism with the immolation of goddess Durga at the end of the
worship (Puja). However, the stark difference is that in the case of
the immolation of goddess Durga, people arrange for the ritual of
drowning the idol; however, in this story, Durga herself indulges in
self-immolation. Goddess Durga is worshipped and after the
completion of all rituals with devotion, the idol is drowned;
conversely, Durga of flesh and blood is only objectified – exposed
before the voluptuous eyes of a ‘pack of wolves’. The irony is
extended further when we find that the mythological goddess
defeated the ‘asuras’, namely Mahisasura in the battle between ‘suras’
(divine power) and ‘asuras’(demonic power); although in the
aftermath of partition the ‘asuras’ (men of other religion) turned the
table. In the midst of all-pervasive evil Durga of rural Bengal only
seems powerless and vulnerable and gets defeated. The situation
becomes so horrific that Durga at her prime youth is forced to put
an end to her life.
No wonder, Durga’s case is not an exception during that
period; rather one of the glaring examples in the list of such
innumerable sacrifices. On both sides of the border – Punjab and
Bengal countless women (and even children) had to embrace
untimely death in the name of preserving their dignity and honor. A
political decision [of some power mongers] that had nothing to do
with the women within four walls, affected their lives the most.
Jotirmoye Devi’s short story “The River Churning” with artistic
precision enlivens a recurrent chapter in the history of Indian
partition through the unfortunate demise of a young woman (of
rural Bengal), who epitomizes the state of utter vulnerability of
women at the time of unprecedented chaos.

Notes
1 Moral regulation or, rather, a hypocritical obsession with women’s sexual
purity, marks the patriarchal foundation of the hegemonic class in India. A
woman’s body is a pawn even in the game of nation-building. See Jasodhara

220
Bagchi and Dasgupta Subhoranjan, “Freedom in an Idiom of Loss” in “The
Trauma and the Triumph- gender and Partition in Eastern India”, Published by Mandira
Sen for STREE, 2007 p 20
2 Vermilon marks‘(Sindur) were forcibly erased from the foreheads of women

and conch shell bangles broken. The leading newspaper The Hindustan Standard
on November 5, 1946, published a report stating that 300 women were raped in
Noakhali and further intimated to its readers about 400 rape cases of defenseless
women in another area.
3 Interviewing migrants across the borders, one is astounded by the large

number of people who said they had not witnessed an act of violence but had
fled because of rumors that a mob was coming their way, or that the next village
had been set ablaze, or even by idle chatter which made them believe that this
country no longer belonged to them. See Jasodhara Bagchi and Dasgupta
Subhoranjan, “The Trauma and the Triumph- gender and Partition in Eastern India”,
Published by Mandira Sen for STREE, 2007 p 100
4 Partition was accompanied by an acidic paper trail of pamphlets, letters,

and newsprint that created a sphere of paranoid and partial knowledge.

Abundant rumors and their magnifying, generalizing tendencies made it
impossible to distinguish truth from fiction, reality from apprehension. See
“Blood on the Tracks” in “The Great Partition The Making Of India And Pakistan”,
New Edition, Yale University Press, New Heaven and London, 2017, Yasmin
Khan p 140
5 The refugee women were humiliated and inhumanly tortured on their way

to West Bengal under the facade of search by the Pakistani customs officers and
staff. See The Partition of India: Through the Experience of Bengali Refugee Women‖, by
Kirankumar Nittali, The Criterion, June 2013.Vol.4 Issue-111
6 Jauhar, sometimes spelled Jowhar or Juhar, was a Hindu practice of

mass self-immolation by women, in the Indian subcontinent, to avoid capture,

enslavement, and rape by an invading army, when facing certain defeat during a
war.
7 The nationalist obsession with preserving the honor of the community by

valorizing sati and jauhar was directed, by a strange twist of logic, less against the
white ruler than against the Yavana compatriots. Tod’s Annals of Rajasthan
provided a model of chaste women who were seen as custodians of India’s
national glory. See Jasodhara Bagchi and Dasgupta Subhoranjan, “Freedom in an
Idiom of Loss” in “The Trauma and the Triumph- gender and Partition in Eastern
India”, Published by Mandira Sen for STREE, 2007 p 19
8 Mohandas K. Gandhi, Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (hereafter

CWMG) (Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and

Broadcasting, Govt. of India, 1958–1994), v. 92, 355. SPEECH AT PRAYER
MEETING, NEW DELHI October 18, 1946.
9 Ibid. v. 92, 344. SPEECH AT PRAYER MEETING, NEW DELHI

October 17, 1946.

221
 10 Ibid, v. 96, 388–89. SPEECH AT PRAYER MEETING, NEW DELHI
September 18, 1947.
11 Permit systems started between West Pakistan and India in 1948. In July

1948, India unilaterally imposed a permit system on West Pakistan- India border,
Pakistan too came up with permit system than on the same year, in October. See
for the politics of permit system Vazira Fazila Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long
Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia, Penguin-Viking, India, 2008,
Chapter 3
12 Border Militia, Customs Officials and volunteer troops like the Ansars

were in charge of checking and interrogating the individuals crossing the border.
They often crossed the limits of legality and harassed migrants and extorted
bribes from them. See Anwesha Sengupta, “Some Stories from the Bengal
Borderland: Making and Unmaking of an International Boundary” P 10
13 Provisions of the Nehru-Liaquat Pact addressed these complains and

promised the migrants “freedom of movement and protection in transit;”,

“freedom to remove as much of his movable personal effects and household
goods as a migrant may wish to take with him” See IB Records, WBSA, File
Number Kw 1238 A-47, 1947
14 Menon and Bhasin (1998) also noted that women jumped into wells or set

themselves on fire either singly or in groups. The Fact Finding Team set up by
the Indian Government recorded that, in Bewal village (in the Rawalpindi
District), many women committed suicide by self-immolation on March 10,
1947. They put their bedding and cots in a pile, set fire to it, and jumped onto it.
(Menon and Bhasin, 1998, p. 42) See Suicide and the Partition of India: A Need for
Further Investigation an essay by David Lester The Richard Stockton College of
New Jersey, USA 22nd February 2010 in Sociology Online 2010; 1:2-4, p 03
15 Butalia talked to and recorded the experiences of those in one region

during this crisis, Punjab. She heard from her informants tales of hundreds of
women jumping into wells (and sometimes being forced to jump) to avoid
capture, rape, abduction, and forced conversions. One informant reported
watching more than ninety Sikh women jump into a well in her village in
Rawalpindi on March 15th, 1947, when it was under attack from Muslims.
The informant jumped in too with her children but survived because the
water was no longer deep enough for her to drown. When the well filled up,
villages dragged the women who were still alive out of the well (p. 35). The
incident was reported in the April 15th, 1947, edition of The Statesman, an
English daily newspaper. ibid, p 02

222
Works Cited
Gupta, Sarmistha Dutta. “The Crossing” Edited by Basabi Fraser “Bengal
Partition Stories - An Unclosed Chapter”, Anthem Press, 2008, (247-53)
Mukherjee, Bhaswati. “Bengal and its Partition- An Untold Story” Rupa
Publications, 2021
Chatterji, Joya, “The Spoils of Partition, Bengal and India” 1947—1967,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
MINISTRY OF INFORMATION AND BROADCASTING, Govt. of
India, 1958–1994, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi
(hereafter CWMG) (Delhi: Publications Division,), Ministry of Information and
Broadcasting, Govt. of India, (1958–1994) v
Nittali, Kirankumar, “The Partition of India: Through the Experience of
Bengali Refugee Women”, The Criterion, June 2013.Vol.4 Issue-111
Sahani, Bhism, “Tamas”, Translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell, Penguin
Random House India, 2016
Butalia, Urvashi, “The Other Side of Silence –Voices from the Partition of
India”, Penguin Books India, 2014
Bagchi, Jasodhara and Dasgupta Subhoranjan, “The Trauma and the
Triumph- gender and Partition in Eastern India”, Published by Mandira Sen for
STREE, 2007
Sengupta, Anwesha, and Himadri Chatterjee, “Some Stories from the Bengal
Borderland: Making and Unmaking of an International Boundary” in “Bengal
Borders and Travelling Lives”, 2012
Khan, Yasmin “The Great Partition The Making of India and Pakistan” New
Edition, Yale University Press, New Heaven and London, 2017,
Lester, David, “Suicide and the Partition of India: A Need for Further
Investigation”, 22nd February 2010, Sociology Online 2010; 1:2-4,
Menon, Ritu and Bhasin, Kamala (1998), “Borders and Boundaries”. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press

223
SECTION FIVE: MEMORY IN
THE CONTEMPORARY
LANDSCAPE

224
 Influence of Sikh’s Collective Memory in
Indian Farmers’ Revolution 2020-21

Rajashri Ghosh

Introduction- Collective Memory And Sikh Cultural Identity :

Memory, being a fundamental part of human existence, often
builds up our personality or the conviction that we practice in
everyday life. It empowers people to grasp hints from their past
experiences so as to implement that understanding in present
circumstances (National Geographic Society, Cultural Memory,
2022). Sikhism or the identity of the Sikhs is founded on their
cultural memory of traumatic events that surround the sacrifices of
Gurus 14 and their family members, motivating them to fearlessly
take action against injustice and oppression. (Who Are Sikhs? What
Is Sikhism?). Guru Nanak, the first Sikh Guru, was imprisoned for
standing up against the tyrant Babur when he caused havoc and
slaughtered innocent lives during his invasions of South Asia (Guru
Nanak and Babars Invasion Sri Guru Nanak Sahib Ji Discover
Sikhism). Following his footsteps, subsequent Sikh Gurus have
always courageously fought against all forms of injustice, evil, and
oppression. When Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb started persecuting
Hindu Brahmins for religious conversion, Kashmiri Brahmins
sought help from Guru Tegh Bahadur 15 who confronted
Aurangzeb and attained martyrdom on November 11, 1675, along

14 Guru, in Sikhism, any of the first 10 leaders of the Sikh religion of northern
India. The Punjabi word Sikh (learner) is related to the Sanskrit shishya
(disciple), and all Sikhs are disciples of the Guru (spiritual guide, or teacher).
The first Sikh Guru, Nanak, established the practice of naming his successor
before his death (1539), and from the time of Ram Das, the fourth to reign, the
Gurus all came from one family.
15 Guru Tegh Bahādur, (born 1621?, Amritsar, Punjab, India—died November

11, 1675, Delhi), ninth Sikh Guru (1664–75) and second Sikh martyr. He was
also the father of the 10th Guru, Gobind Singh.
225
with three of his devotees (Chaman Lal Gadoo’s Writings). After
Guru Tegh Bahadur, his son Gobind Singh became the tenth Sikh
Guru who founded the Khalsa, a Sikh warrior community to
protect the innocent people and the Sikh-Hindu community from
the oppression of the Mughals. Though the Khalsa never fought
unfairly or invaded territories, the Mughals started to deem the
Sikhs as a threat to their reign and tried to demolish them, which
initiated the Battle of Chamkaur (21 to 23 December 1704), a
historic battle of epic proportion, in which Guru Gobind Singh Ji
with his two sons and 40 Sikh warriors fought against combined
Mughal armies of 1,000,000, proving that in battles number are not
everything, all it needs is courage and motivation to fight for
righteousness (The Most Heroic Last Stand in History: How 40
Sikhs Fought against a Million Mughals in the Battle of
Chamkaur(1704) - Dharmayudh).
Just like Jan Assmann has said, cultural memory refers to
objectified and institutionalized memories, that can be stored,
transferred, and reincorporated throughout generations (Cultural
Memory: The Link between Past, Present, and Future — En)
which is prominent in Sikh memory transition and Sikh identity
formation as well. Guru Granth Sahib, the scripture containing
hymns of Guru Nanak and his successors; Sikh Rahit Maryada
which defines a code of individual and communal Sikh conduct; the
Sikh religious calendar full of martyrdom days of Gurus and other
great Sikh warriors (Singh et al.), are some of the objectified
memories which have kept them conscious of their rich past and
have taught them to stay true to their identity while taking actions
against oppression, no matter the place, time and circumstances
(Role of Sikh Memory in Farmers’ Protest in India 2020-21: A
Study – Sikh Formations). The reflection of their strong aversion to
mistreatment can be seen in the Ghadar movement16, which proved

16 In California, the Ghadar Movement began in 1913 as a coalition of

expatriate Punjabis dedicated to raising money and support for the overthrow
of British rule in India. It was organized and headed by a Punjabi Hindu, Har
Dayal, who was at Stanford University. Its early leaders also included two
Sikhs and a Muslim, and the masthead of its publication bore the names ‘Ram,
Allah, and Nanak.’ While the movement’s leadership was, at first, somewhat
226
that when it came to rebelling against British oppression, identity as
‘Indian rather than Sikh, Hindu, or Muslim’ became more
important for them (Affairs).
Even if the Sikhs have exhibited numerous moments of
bravery, they have also gone through traumatic experiences.
Cultural trauma occurs when members of a collectivity feel they
have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible
marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories
forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and
irrevocable ways (Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity). Sikh
Ardas (Sikh Prayer) martyrize those who have suffered for
righteousness as well as advise the Sikh descendants on how to use
traumatic memory to stay unified as the Sikh identity (Segall). Sikhs
have witnessed Chhota Ghallughara (small Holocaust) in May 1746 in
which about 10,000 Sikh men and women were killed, the wadda
Ghallughara (big Holocaust) in February 1762 when almost half of
the total Sikh population was slaughtered (Wounds That Never
Heal: Remembering Operation Bluestar), the genocide of India-
Pakistan partition where one million Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs
were massacred (Brocklehurst) and the1984 Sikh Genocide 17 in
which almost 3000 Sikhs were murdered (Gill). The agonizing
memories of the attacks of 1984, for the Sikhs, meant an assault on
the Sikh collective body. 1984’s trauma was different from the
brutality of Partition as it was only aimed at the Sikh community,
their land, and their people were the primary victims of those Anti-
Sikh riots (Segall). The 1984 genocide made the Sikhs question the
vulnerable position of their collective identity in India as well as
sculpted them to be on constant alert to defend their rights (Segall).

elitist, eventually the vast majority of the members were California’s rural
Sikh farmers.
17 ‘Operation Blue Star’, when Indira Gandhi, the then Prime Minister of

India, ordered an attack on the Sikh Golden Temple in June 1984. The aim
was to silence demands for Sikh religious and political autonomy, and resulted
in the deaths of 492 civilians. In retaliation, Indira Gandhi was assassinated by
her two Sikh bodyguards. The events that followed, the 1984 Sikh Genocide
represent one of the darkest periods of modern Indian history.
227
 So, when in September 2020, the Indian Government
announced three agricultural laws, the Indian farmers feared that
these laws would only benefit large corporates and immensely
detriment them (Explained: The Three Controversial Farm Laws
and Why They Are Being Withdrawn). So, thousands of farmers,
mostly from Punjab, Haryana, and western Uttar Pradesh initiated a
large protest against these laws and it was chiefly led by the Sikh
farmers from the Indian state of Punjab, the country’s breadbasket
(Affairs).
Theory And Methodology
Carl Jung presented the theory of collective unconscious which
stated that universal human tendencies like fear of fire or desire for
social status, actually originate from a collective unconscious that
each of us carries within us. Emile Durkheim shed light on how
each new generation is connected to the past, gets taught about
their history, and shoulders the responsibility to carry those
memories forward (Take online courses. earn college credit.
Research Schools, Degrees & Careers). It was Maurice Halbwachs,
who first introduced the world to the concept of ‘collective
memory’ through his book ‘The Collective Memory’ (García-
Gavilanes et al.). According to him, individual memories are
constrained by social interactions and hence, the identity of an
individual gets controlled by this collective memory. Nevertheless,
it is Jan and Aleida Assmann who have associated culture with
collective memory. Collective memories perform numerous roles
related to social identity (Páez, et al. Collective memory and social
representations of history expanded English version,2016) and
the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition has
defined Culture as shared patterns of behaviors and interactions,
cognitive constructs and understanding that are learned by
socialization which shape culture to be seen as the growth of a
group identity fostered by social patterns distinctive to the group
(Pappas and McKelvie). The Assmanns couple has defined cultural
memory as a tool that preserves the symbolic institutionalized
heritage to which individuals resort to build their own identities and
to affirm themselves as part of a group, for, the act of remembering
228
involves normative aspects that state ‘if you want to belong to a
community, you must follow the rules of how and what to
remember’ (Cultural Memory: The Link between Past, Present, and
Future — En). This can be regarded as a device for societies to
ensure the ‘survival of the type’ and ‘consistency in human nature
through generations’ (Assmann and Czaplicka).
A nation cannot come into existence without its people having
a sense of cultural belonging as a shared experience as culture
enables the conversion of different existing identities into a national
identity (Culture & Making of a Nation). National identity defines
the way persons see themselves as members of a nation of people
(7.2: What Is National Identity?) and by providing the narratives of
a national past, collective memories preserve a sense of continuity
as well as define what it means to be a member of the nation
(Pennebaker). Collective memories of a national past can influence
the ways people would interpret their present-day experiences, their
present mindset as well as their motivation to take part in collective
action (Mukherjee et al.). Even more, if they contain information
about historical injustice, then the collective memories can further
control the perception of a certain group about the present-day
injustice and their collective actions of either supporting or
opposing the policies to address historical grievances (Sibley et al.).
Since Collective memories have a three-generation cycle, to retain
the controlling effect of the memories over people, Cultural
memory functions as the tool for unifying and stabilizing a
common identity that spans many generations (Studies in Cultural
Memory). Cultural Memory has its fixed points, and its horizon
does not change with the passing of time. These fixed points are
fateful events of the past, whose memory is maintained through
cultural formation (texts, rites, and monuments) and institutional
communication (recitation, practice, and observance). Most of
these ‘fixed points’ are often some traumatic struggles in the distant
past or a historical injustice that a collective has lived or fought for
their survival (Assmann and Czaplicka).
The aim of this paper is to detect and explore the impact of the
Sikh Memory on this Indian Farmers’ protest. The core question
that this paper is going to analyze is to what extent the Sikh
229
Cultural Memory has inspired them to play a pivotal role in this
protest. This paper will follow a qualitative analysis through online
journals in the field of Sikh and Punjab studies as secondary
sources corresponding with the instances collected from the
detailed descriptions of the protest projected in primary sources,
i.e., digital versions of National newspaper reports in India. The
first chapter has given a brief introduction to the theory of
Collective Memory as well as Cultural Memory and how the Sikh
Collective Memory has framed their group identity. The second
chapter will provide a literature review containing a detailed analysis
of the mentioned sources to argue whether the Sikh collective
cultural memory has influenced Sikh participation in the protest
and if it has, then to what extent. The concluding chapter will sum
up all the findings from the analysis to demonstrate that the
influence of the Sikh Collective Cultural Memory has played a
major key role throughout the protest.

Sikh Collective Memory And Sikh Participation In

The Farmers’ Protest 2020-2021
Agriculture plays a pivotal role in the Indian economy, the
livelihood of approximately 60% of the whole Indian population
depends on farming itself. Yet, the farming sector accounts for only
about 15 percent of India’s GDP (2019-2020), which is why the
Indian government wished to pave way for the farmers by
attracting more private businesses to them so that the farmers can
sell their produce whomever they want to (Arvin). Thus, in
September 2020, then-President Ram Nath Kovind gave his assent
to the three ‘Agriculture Bills’ that were earlier passed by the Indian
Parliament, which then became acts. These Farm Acts are aimed at
transforming agriculture in the country and raising farmers’ income
(Explained: The Three Controversial Farm Laws and Why They
Are Being Withdrawn):
1. The Farmers' Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion
and Facilitation) Bill, 2020

230
 2. The Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement
of Price Assurance and Farm Services Bill, 2020
3. The Essential Commodities (Amendment) Bill, 2020.
4. Once the Farm Bills were made public, reading the fine
print of them made the farmers in Punjab concerned
because they feared that the bills would privatize the
agriculture sector and benefit big corporates (Indian Anti-
Farm Laws Protest 2020-21 – Participedia). Elaborating on
the Farm Bills and the farmers’ reasons for opposing them,
we can find:
The Farmers' Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and
Facilitation) Bill, 2020 seeks to provide for the creation of an
ecosystem where farmers and traders enjoy the freedom of choice
relating to the sale and purchase of farmers' produce which
facilitates remunerative prices through competitive alternative
trading channels to promote efficient, transparent and barrier-free
inter-State and intra-State trade and commerce of farmers' produce
outside physical premises of markets or deemed markets notified
under various State agricultural produce market legislations; to
provide a facilitative framework for electronic trading and for
matters connected therewith or incidental thereto (Explained: The
Three Controversial Farm Laws and Why They Are Being
Withdrawn).
This Bill, Farmers opposed as they dreaded that selling the farm
produce to the outside registered Agricultural Produce Market
Committee (APMC) markets would make the states lose their
revenues coming from the ‘mandi 18 fees’ as well as if the whole
farm trade gets transformed out of mandis, then it might eventually
put a stop on the minimum support price (MSP)-based
procurement system, leading towards the exploitation by private
companies. (Farm Laws Explained: What Are the Three Agri
Legislations and Why Farmers Opposed Them)
The Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement of
Price Assurance and Farm Services Bill, 2020 seeks to provide a

18Mandi, in Hindi, refers to a trading hub or a market, generally for

agricultural produce.
231
national framework for farming agreements that protects and
empowers farmers to engage with agri-business firms, processors,
wholesalers, exporters or large retailers for farm services and sale of
future farming produce at a mutually agreed remunerative price
framework in a fair and transparent manner and for matters
connected therewith or incidental thereto (Explained: The Three
Controversial Farm Laws and Why They Are Being Withdrawn).
Contesting this Bill, the Farmers’ Associations stated that this
law has been only framed to make it easy for the big corporates to
dominate the Indian food and agriculture business while weakening
the negotiating power of farmers, giving the upper hand to the big
private companies, exporters, wholesalers, and processors (Farm
Laws Explained: What Are the Three Agri Legislations and Why
Farmers Opposed Them).
The Essential Commodities (Amendment) Bill, 2020 seeks
to remove commodities like cereals, pulses, oilseeds, edible oils,
onions, and potatoes from the list of essential commodities. This
will remove fears of private investors of excessive regulatory
interference in their business operations. The freedom to produce,
hold, move, distribute, and supply will lead to the harnessing of
economies of scale and attract private sector/foreign direct
investment into the agriculture sector (Explained: The Three
Controversial Farm Laws and Why They Are Being Withdrawn).
This third Bill made the Farmers alarmed that the big
companies will have the freedom to stock commodities which
would help them to dictate terms to farmers (Farm Laws
Explained: What Are the Three Agri Legislations and Why Farmers
Opposed Them).
The protests were first initiated by the local farmer unions in
the villages of Punjab because of its extensive dependence on the
agrarian sector as a means of livelihood (Indian Anti-Farm Laws
Protest 2020-21– Participedia). Soon, farm and labor unions of
neighboring states of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh joined the
movement as well, and together they formed the ‘Sangharsh
Committee’ comprising representatives of 32 unions (Six Major
Phases That Defined the Farmers’ Movement in India). After a
series of local protests, they decided to move their protests to
232
Delhi, the capital city, and announced a ‘Delhi Chalo’ (let’s go to
Delhi) march call, in which thousands of farmers joined (A
Timeline of the Months-Long Farmer Protests in India) and
eventually the protest took the form of a national social movement
when people, who are not even related to the agricultural sector,
joined the protest in Delhi (Farmers Are Leading India’s Biggest
Social Movement in a Generation).
Majority of the protesters happened to be Sikhs, though their
grievances are rooted in economic issues, not religious ones
(Explainer: Why India’s Farmers Are Revolting against PM Modi).
While the protests are a broad movement seeking equal rights for
people of all backgrounds, and while it is not a religious element,
per se, there is a notable religious dimension to them (Affairs).
Guru Nanak has taught the Sikhs that agrarian production is the
lifeblood of human survival, hence whenever the agricultural sector
of the country has faced jeopardy from the central
government, Sikh-Punjabi farmers have fought for their rights
(Shepherd). So, given the Sikh history of standing up against
injustice, the Sikhs being the chief constituents of the Farmers’
protest should not come as a surprise. Guru Nanak, the founder of
the Sikh faith, courageously stood up against the tyrant Babur when
he massacred innocent people during his invasions of South Asia
and got incarcerated (Guru Nanak and Babars Invasion | Sri Guru
Nanak Sahib Ji | Discover Sikhism), 9th Sikh Guru Tegh Bahadur,
along with his three devotees were executed by Mughal Emperor
Aurangzeb for protesting on the Kashmiri Hindus’ behalf (Chaman
Lal Gadoo’s Writings). All Sikh Gurus, through their actions, have
set a precedent for the Sikhs to raise their voices against injustice,
no matter the consequences (Balakrishnan). In adherence to this,
recollections of Sikh memory were vividly present throughout the
entire year-long protest.

233
Delhi Symbolizes Oppression And Injustice
The ‘Delhi March Call’ was made because, not only it is the capital
of India, but also there is a long line of injustices emanating from
‘Delhi’, symbolizing it as a historical seat of central power in the
subcontinent for 800 years to the Sikhs (Daniyal). Starting from
Guru Nanak getting imprisoned by the Mughal Emperor Babur
when he invaded Delhi in 1526 (Guru Nanak and Babars Invasion
| Sri Guru Nanak Sahib Ji | Discover Sikhism); the martyrdom of
the 9th Sikh Guru Tegh Bahadur at Chandni Chowk, Delhi
(Chaman Lal Gadoo’s Writings); Sikhs of Punjab versus Central
Government (Delhi) over Anandpur resolutions in 1973 in which
Sikhs insisted to have autonomy of Punjab (Anandpur Sahib
Resolution 1973 - JournalsOfIndia); the traumatic 1984 Sikh
Massacres and Anti-Sikh riots in Delhi (Gill); as well as the Farmers
were protesting against the Indian government whose Seat resides
in Delhi; for each of these instances, Delhi represents brutality,
struggle, trauma, and unfairness to the Sikhs.
Hoisting Of Nishan Sahib On The Red Fort
On 26th January 2021, the Republic Day of India, a Sikh named
Jugraj Singh hoisted the Nishan Sahib, the religious flag of Sikhism
at the Red Fort, which was portrayed as a terrorist act of Khalistan
movement 19 (Man Who ‘Planted Sikh Flag on Red Fort’ Gets
Interim Protection from Delhi Court). Nevertheless, the flag was
not the legitimate flag of Khalistan movement, it was Nishan Sahib.
Harjeshwar Pal Singh, a professor of history, stated that historical
consciousness could have shaped events on Republic Day because
some protestors might have imagined themselves as historical
heroes and raised the flag (Daniyal). The historical reference here is
linked to the heroic instance of Sikh commander Baba Baghel
Singh, along with Jassa Singh Ahluwalia and Jassa Singh Ramgarhia,

19The Khalistan movement is a Sikh separatist movement seeking to create a

homeland for Sikhs by establishing a sovereign state, called Khalistan (Land
of the Khalsa). The proposed state would consist of land that currently forms
Punjab region in India and Pakistan.

234
who seized control of the Red Fort from Mughal emperor Shah
Alam-II and hoisted the Nishan Sahib in 1783. The event has been
commemorated as Delhi Fateh Diwas (Delhi-Cate Moment).
Cold Winter Nights And Thanda Burj
The farmers, including many older people, endured the bitter
winter of northern India while temperatures dropped to 2-3 degree
Celsius (35.6-37.4 Fahrenheit), but did not back down. Balbir
Singh, an octogenarian from the Patiala district of Punjab said, ‘It’s
very difficult to camp out in this weather, but we aren’t scared, we
won’t go back until our demands are met. Even if we have to die
here, we will.’ Farmer Surinder Singh said, ‘I’m neither scared of
the cold nor of Modi. Our struggle will continue until the laws are
withdrawn’ (Indian Farmers Vow to Carry on Protests despite
Cold, Deaths). This undaunting attitude of the Punjabi farmers is a
reflection of the Sikh cultural memory of the Cold Tower or
‘Thanda Burg’. The Sikhs consider December as a month of
mourning for the Shaheedi (martyrdom) of the 10th Sikh Guru,
Guru Gobnd Singh Ji Maharaaj’s four sons and mother (“Why Is
the Month of December Important to Sikhs? Balraj Sahota,
GNSA”). In December 1704, Mata Gujri and the two younger
Saahibzaadas20, mother and sons of Guru Gobind Singh ji, were
captured and confined at Wazir Khan’s Thanda Burj (Cold Tower),
which was designed to capture the cool night breezes of air drawn
over water channels in the hot summer months, hence it was really
torturous for the prisoners inside. Despite the shivering cold and
getting tortured at the hands of the Mughal police, the
young Saahibzaadas as well as their grandmother kept on holding
onto their faith and embraced martyrdom (Puri). The memory of
their sacrifice ignited the fire in the hearts of the Sikh farmers to
endure the cold nights on Delhi streets and not bow down in front
of the Indian government.
Sikh Diaspora Supporting The Farmers’ Protest

20‘Sahibzaade’ is a term endearingly used for the four sons of Guru Gobind
Singh Ji, the 10th guru of the Sikhs.
235
The involvement of the Sikh diaspora with the Farmers’ Protest is
another vibrant example of staying close to their roots and
practicing their religious faith (Sidhu). It was not only about their
identities as farmers’ lineal and collateral kin, but it was also about
standing up against oppression and injustice. Across the world,
from California and London to Vancouver and Melbourne Sikh
Punjabi communities gathered in Covid-19 safe car rallies to protest
in solidarity with Punjabi farmers, sponsored financial support to
arrange basic amenities for the protesters as well as raising
awareness through social media (Thandi). This is not the first time
that the transnational Sikhs have compressed the distance and
supported their community. During India’s Independence
revolution, their involvement in the Ghadar movement (The
Ghadar Party: Freedom for India) exhibited their solidarity, both as
a religious group and as Indians. Nevertheless, an oppressive and
haunted past of violence, contention, and struggle has constructed
the present strong transnational kinship supporting the Farmers in
their protest. For Sikhs in the diaspora, the past is reflected in this
present struggle, and an understanding of the present is deflected
through past trauma (Affairs) specifically the trauma of the Anti-
Sikh riots in 1984 (Gill). The Sikh diasporic members have
expressed that there is an underlying need for justice concerning
the 1984 anti-Sikh violence when thousands of Sikhs were killed by
mobs in many parts of India and had left unforgettable wounds
(How Punjab’s Diaspora Supports Farmer Protests). The 1984
trauma induced a deeply-rooted grievance in the hearts of the Sikh
diaspora against the Indian government as many of the first
generations of the diaspora were direct survivors of it and shared
their experiences with the next generations (Devgan), hence, the
diasporic Sikhs, the introduction of new Farm laws in September
2020 was seemed to be another injustice being done to the Sikhs in
Punjab (Thandi).

236
Redefined Relationship With The Younger
Generation Of Sikh Diaspora
The second generation of the Sikh diaspora, who have only heard
about the struggles their ancestors have faced or the traumatic
experiences they have gone through only in bits and fragments
from here and there, witnessing the Farmers’ protest and learning
the reasons behind it, they have also started to relate to the
historical injustices that were being done to the Sikhs as well as
made connections between the past genocidal violence and present
threats of genocide (Thandi). Second-generation diasporic Sikhs
have grasped this Indian Framers’ Protest as an anchor to
understand their ancestor’s long history of persecution and
estrangement from both national and diasporic point of view. A
Twitter post by a young Sikh woman living in the Bay Area said,
‘Our grandparents saw 1947. Our parents saw 1984. We are seeing
2021’ (Affairs). Bikramdeep Singh Pannu was seven years old when
he relocated to Norway with his parents in 1988. Pannu has
expressed that the Farmers’ protest has created an opportunity to
bring the new generation closer to their roots. He has grown up
hearing family stories about the 1947 partition and the 1984 riots.
His great-grandfather was a freedom fighter and a poet who used
to say, ‘You have to be blessed to take part in a revolution. That
chance is not given to everyone.’ For Pannu and the youth
diaspora, this Framers’ protest seems like their chance. Armed with
a dual identity and a commitment to protecting human rights in the
country of their origin, young Sikhs, often second or third-
generation immigrants but first-generation digital natives, are
leading the way (How Punjab’s Diaspora Supports Farmer
Protests). They spread awareness about Sikhism, their histories, and
the Farmers’ Protest on social media, in their respective host
countries while keeping tabs on every minute detail of the protest,
mostly they started feeling connected to their roots (Thandi).

237
Sikh Faith Influence Can Be Seen In The Portrayed
Fraternity Across Religion, Caste, And Class During
The Protest
Sikh faith is about respecting other faith and treating everyone with
equality (Culture and Religion Sikhism) as well as raising their
voices against any injustice being done to anyone, irrespective of
the religion or class, like, Guru Tegh Bahadur set an example by
embracing martyrdoms for Kashmiri Hindu Pundits (Chaman Lal
Gadoo’s Writings). It is true that Sikh Gurus were martyred at the
hands of the Mughals, but that has not prevented the inclusive
nature of Sikhism to form a bonding among Hindus, Sikhs, and
Muslims (A Personal Account of Sikhism’s Inclusive Embrace).
The initiation of the Ghadar movement by the Sikh Punjabi, as well
as non-Sikh Punjabi migrants, was a vivid portrayal of being united
for the greater good (The Ghadar Party: Freedom for India). Sikhs,
Muslims, Hindus, Dalits, farmers, and common people from every
religion and class protested together in Delhi can be regarded as
another example of uniting together for better purposes (Mander).
Nevertheless, apart from having a common objective, the Sikh
spirit of Langar inspired them to come together as well.
The Sikh tradition of Langar denotes the communal meal
shared by all who come to the gurdwara21, and it has been a part of
the Sikh community since the time of Guru Nanak. Attendees all sit
at an equal level on the floor and eat the same food, prepared in the
same pots. In this way, Langar serves as a ritualistic expression of
the equality of all humans (Langar: The Communal Meal). For the
farmers protesting at Delhi’s Singhu border, Langar became an
inherent part of their movement, manifesting equality while
thousands of protesters, sitting together on the floor/roads, in
lines, were fed hearty meals for free, day after day. Even the Police
officers, who were stationed there to put up barricades, obstructed
21 The Gurdwara is the Sikh place of learning and worship where the
community gathers. Visitors of any background can seek shelter, comfort, and
food through the institution of langar, a free community kitchen open to all.
Because the Sikh faith does not have an ordained clergy, any woman or man
from the congregation may lead religious services.
238
the protesters with tear gas and water cannons and did not get
excluded from receiving the care of the langar as well (Langar – the
Heart of the “No Farmer, No Food” ProtestsVolume 1 | Issue 10
[February 2022] - on Eating). This, too, has its roots in Sikh cultural
memory. During the Battle of Anandpur Sahib in 1704, Sikh troops
witnessed one of their own giving water to the wounded Mughal
soldiers. When Guru Gobind Singh summoned the man, Bhai
Ghanaiya, and enquired about the credibility of the incident, Bhai
Ghanaiya admitted to it, stating that he served everyone without
any discrimination, as he had always been taught to see the divine
light in all human beings (Seva, the Sikh Langar, from Bhai
Kanhaiya to Delhi Violence, 2020). It is this Sikh psyche of Sewa or
service ingrained with the spirit of langar that kept the protests
ongoing from November 2020 to December 2021 on Delhi’s
borders, and 14 months in Panjab (Langar – the Heart of the “No
Farmer, No Food” ProtestsVolume 1 | Issue 10 [February 2022] -
on Eating).
As Jan Assmann has stated that each society has its own
specific way to cultivate the fixed points of cultural memory, such
as reusable texts, images, and rituals, to stabilize and convey the
self-image of that particular society. One society constructs its self-
image on a canon of sacred scripture, the next on a basic set of
ritual activities, and so on (Assmann and Czaplicka). Sikhs have
built their identity in accordance with the teachings of their Gurus,
in the form of their religious scriptures and hymns, as well as the
past memories of their brave confrontations against oppression and
injustice (Nesbitt).
Many scholars and researchers in the field of memory studies
have expressed that the collective cultural memory can often be
viewed as an instrument to influence or to motivate a certain social
group to lead or be a part of an active movement (Zamponi). An
in-depth analysis of the Sikh history as well as their past traumatic
experiences, depicted in the historical narratives has unveiled that
throughout the Indian Farmers’ Protest 2020-2021, Sikh memory
has played multiple roles, 1 inspiring the Sikhs to speak up against
the Indian government, 2) building intra-national solidarity, 3)
reconnecting the Sikh national and international youth to their
239
roots, 4) constant presence of various Sikh symbols have kept
fueling the undaunting attitude of the protesters, and most
importantly, 5) casting the protest as a Sikh versus Central
oppression movement.

Conclusion: Repealing of the Farm Laws And ‘Sikh’

Victory
On November 19, 2021, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s
announcement of the repealing of the farm laws got the whole of
India as well as the NRIs in a festive mood (From Students and
Dalits to the Punjabi Diaspora, Volunteers Made the Farmers’
Protest a Success) and Former President Ram Nath Kovind signed
off on the Farm Laws Repeal Bill on December 3, 2021(President
Signs off on Farm Laws Repeal Bill). November 19, 2021, was also
marked as the birth anniversary of the first Sikh Guru Nanak, so
the unanticipated announcement of PM Modi got
synchronized with the Sikh festival of Guru Parb, which implied a
gesture made by the government to conciliate the Sikh farmers who
were the leading part of the movement (The Problem with Modi’s
Repeal of India’s Farm Laws) as well as sacrificed the lives of more
than 700 of theirs during the protest. The Sikh cultural involvement
in the protest was so prominent that some people stated the
repealing of Farm Bills as the Sikh victory over Delhi (the central
government) (Menon).
Indian Framers’ Movement against the Farm Bills posed as a
unified movement where the leftist or centrist farm unions, Jat
farmers of Haryana and Western Uttar Pradesh or other leaders led
the entire movement against the government with great zeal,
putting aside their individual faith and differences altogether,
making sure that the protest would not fall apart. Nevertheless, it
was the Sikh farmers who started the movement from Punjab in
August 2020 and the Sikh values of fighting against injustice,
narratives of courage, and martyrdom kept thousands of protesting
farmers inspired to stay resolute till the end (Menon). The constant
presence of the various symbols imbibed in the cultural ethos of
240
Sikh tradition and shared history throughout the movement
retained instilling hope in them. The presence of a
mobile Gurdwara (Sikh socio-spiritual home) and Kirtan (reciting
the Bani and singing hymns from Guru Granth Sahib) offered
spiritual strength to protestors; the presence of the Nishan Sahib
(the symbol of Sikh identity) and Nihangs (Sikh warriors) made the
protest site felt protected; manifesting images of brave Sikh Gurus
and warriors as symbols of martyrdom and sacrifice; most of the
speeches at the protest sites were delivered by Sikh protestors,
beginning and ending with ‘Waheguruji Da Khalsa, Waheguru Ji Ki
Fateh’ a salutation that assures victory for all; and not to forget the
langars that provided food to all the people at the protest site,
regardless of friend or foe; can all be interpreted as the fragments
of Sikh cultural memory influence on the movement (In Photos:
Remembering the Farmers’ Protest, a Triumph of Satyagraha
Politics).
The Farmers’ resistance to the Farming Bills reconstructed the
ties between the younger generation and their Sikh roots as well.
They gained a clear consciousness of the cultural struggles and
traumatic episodes their previous generations have gone through.
They are the kids of generations Y, Z, and Alpha, so imprinted with
reconquered Sikh cultural spirit, both the national and international
younger generations played key roles in supporting the movement
by overseeing the social media and digital communication channels.
They wrote blog posts containing information about the protest;
arranged social media campaigns, using social media handles, such
as Facebook and Instagram; streamed live from the protest sites
whenever any sort of activity was happening there; spread
awareness through Twitter accounts and kept track of minute
details, both of theirs and the opposition, giving no chance to false
information getting spread (In Photos: Remembering the Farmers’
Protest, a Triumph of Satyagraha Politics). Their active
participation took the protest to a whole new level, gaining support
and advocacy from far and wide, making the protest indomitable
(Months and Week).
To conclude, it is distinctly evident that the Sikh collective
memory is intensely embedded into their religious as well as
241
cultural identity. Their cultural association with their past memory
has influenced not only the Sikhs from all around the world to
support the Farmers’ protest but also has performed a crucial role
in uniting people from diverse cultural and religious backgrounds
together while motivating the protesters to remain persistent. Their
indomitable spirit made November 19, 2021, happens when PM
Modi announced the repealing of the three Farm Laws, and the win
was celebrated by people from different worlds, in India, the US,
the UK, and Canada, located thousands of miles apart, the same
jubilant mood was evident everywhere (From Students and Dalits
to the Punjabi Diaspora, Volunteers Made the Farmers’ Protest a
Success). So, in adherence to this, further research can be done to
cultivate the areas of Collective Cultural Memory to provide the
world with better strategies to overcome religious and cultural
enmity by discovering as well as connecting common threads
related to each particular group’s individual traumatic experiences
and forming a cross-cultural alliance on sympathetic grounds based
on these concatenated threads.
Works Cited
Assmann, Jan, and John Czaplicka. “Collective Memory and
Cultural Identity.” New German
Critique, vol. 65, no. 65, 1995, pp. 125–33.
Gill, Monique. “The 1984 Sikh Genocide - 36 Years On.” Human Rights
Pulse, 20 Jun 2020,
www.humanrightspulse.com/mastercontentblog/the-1984-sikh-genocide-36-
years-on.
Pennebaker, James W. “Writing about Emotional Experiences as a Therapeutic
Process.” Psychological Science, vol. 8, no. 3, May 1997, pp. 162–66,
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1997.tb00403.x.
Role of Sikh Memory in Farmers’ Protest in India 2020-21: A Study – Sikh
Formations.
sites.lsa.umich.edu/sikh-formations-podcast/2022/04/18/role-of-sikh-
memory-in-farmers-protest-in-india-2020-21-a-study/.
Singh, Jodh, et al. Sikh Gurus, Concepts and Culture.
gurmatveechar.com/books/English_Books/Sikh.Gurus.Concepts.and.Culture.
(GurmatVeechar.com).pdf. Accessed 24 Mar. 2023.
7.2: What Is National Identity?” Social Sci LibreTexts, 22 Feb. 2022,

242
 socialsci.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Political_Science_and_Civics/Introductio
n_to_Comparative_Government_and_Politics_(Bozonelos_et_al.)/07%3A_Politic
al_Identity-_Nationalism_Religion_Class/7.02%3A_What_is_National_Identity.
A Personal Account of Sikhism’s Inclusive Embrace. The Wire,
thewire.in/religion/sikhism-ruchi-ram-sahni-golden-temple. Accessed 22 Mar.
2023.
A Timeline of the Months-Long Farmer Protests in India. Quartz, 29 Jan.
2021, qz.com/india/1920840/a-timeline-of-the-months-long-farmer-protests-in-
India. Accessed 24 Mar. 2023.
Affairs, Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World. “Faith, Trauma, and
Transnational
Connections in India’s Farmer Protests.” Berkleycenter.georgetown.edu,
berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/responses/faith-trauma-and-transnational-
connections-in-india-s-farmer-protests. Accessed 24 Mar. 2023.
Anandpur Sahib Resolution 1973 - JournalsOfIndia. 16 Feb. 2021,
journalsofindia.com/anandpur-sahib-resolution-1973/.
Arvin, Jariel. “Why Tens of Thousands of Farmers Are Blocking Roads into
India’s Capital
City.” Vox, 2 Dec. 2020,
www.vox.com/2020/12/2/21726648/india-farmer-protests-strike-action-new-
Delhii.
Balakrishnan, S. Sikhism Teaching on War and Peace. 2014,
www.shanlaxjournals.in/pdf/ASH/V2N2/Ash_V2_N2_007.pdf. Accessed 24
Mar. 2023.
Brocklehurst, Steven. “Partition of India: ‘They Would Have Slaughtered Us.’”
BBC News,
11 Aug. 2017, www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-40874496.
Bureau, ABP News. “Winter Session: What Are the 3 Farm Laws That Modi
Govt Passed
Last Year and Will Now Repeal.” News.abplive.com, 29 Nov. 2021,
news.abplive.com/news/india/winter-session-what-are-the-three-farm-laws-
that-modi-govt-passed-last-year-and-is-now-set-to-repeal-1495609.
Chaman Lal Gadoo’s Writings. Ikashmir.net, ikashmir.net/clgadoo/6.html.
Accessed 24 Mar. 2023. Cultural Memory. Education, National Geographic
Society, 20 May 2022,
https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/cultural-memory/
Cultural Memory: The Link between Past, Present, and Future — En.
Iea.usp.br,2013, www.iea.usp.br/en/news/cultural-memory-the-link-between-past-
present-and-future.
Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity.
kulturiskvlevebi.weebly.com/uploads/1/8/3/7/18376403/cultural_trauma_an
d_collect .identity.pdf. Culture & Making of a Nation. Frontline.thehindu.com, 14
July2011,frontline.thehindu.com/the
nation/article30176172.ece#:~:text=Nation%20is%20a%2
243
 0political%20and. Accessed 24 Mar. 2023.
Culture and Religion Sikhism.
tfhc.nt.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0017/252224/nt-sikhism-fact-sheet.pdf.
Daniyal, Shoaib. Red Fort: How Punjabi Protestors Are Tapping into History
to Mobilise
against Farm Laws. Scroll. in, scroll.
in/article/985313/red-fort-how-Punjabi-protestors-are-tapping-into-history-
to-mobilesed-against-farm-laws.
Delhi-Cate Moment. The Week,
www.theweek.in/theweek/cover/2021/01/28/delhi-cate-
moment.html#:~:text=In%201
783%2C%20Sikh%20commander%20Baba. Accessed 24 Mar. 2023.
Explained: The Three Controversial Farm Laws and Why They Are Being
Withdrawn. Cnbctv18.com, 19 Nov. 2021,
www.cnbctv18.com/india/explained-the-three-controversial-farm-laws-and-
why-they-are-being-withdrawn-11520312.html. Accessed 24 Mar. 2023.
Explainer : "Why India’sFarmers Are Revolting against PM Modi.
”APNEWS,27Jan.202,apnews.com/article/india-farmers-protest-explained
1ccbf48d76a55a1061f40d9a1e951314. Accessed 24 Mar. 2023.

Farm Laws 2020: Everything You Need to Know about the New Agriculture
Reforms in India. Jagranjosh.com, 11 Dec. 2020,
www.jagranjosh.com/general-knowledge/farm-bills-indian-farm-reforms-
2020-1606901455-1. Accessed 24 Mar. 2023.
Farm Laws Explained: What Are the Three Agri Legislations and Why Farmers
Opposed Them. News18, 19 Nov. 2021,
www.news18.com/news/india/farm-laws-explained-what-are-the-three-agri-
legislations-and-why-farmers-opposed-them-4461893.html. Accessed 24 Mar. 2023
Farmers Are Leading India’s Biggest Social Movement in a Generation.
Jacobin.com,jacobin.com/2021/04/indian-farmers-strike-modi-bjp-social-
movements-historical-struggles. Accessed 24 Mar. 2023.
From Students and Dalits to the Punjabi Diaspora, Volunteers Made the
Farmers’ Protest a Success. The Wire,
thewire.in/agriculture/from-students-and-dalits-to-the-punjabi-diaspora-
volunteers-made-the-farmers-protest-a-success. Accessed 24 Mar. 2023.
García-Gavilanes, Ruth, et al. “The Memory Remains: Understanding
Collective Memory in the Digital Age.” Science Advances, vol. 3, no. 4, Apr. 2017,
p. e1602368, https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1602368.
Guru Nanak and Babars Invasion | Sri Guru Nanak Sahib Ji | Discover
Sikhism.Www.discoversikhism.com,,www.discoversikhism.com/sikh_gurus/guru_
nanak_babars_invasion.html. Accessed 24 Mar. 2023.
How Punjab’s Diaspora Supports FarmerProtests. Www. thehindubusinessline.
com,22 Dec.2020,www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/know/so-far-yet-so-near/
article33393508.ece.Accessed 24 Mar. 2023.
244
 In Photos: Remembering the Farmers’ Protest, a Triumph of Satyagraha
Politics. The Wire, thewire.in/agriculture/in-photos-remembering-the-farmers-
protest-a-triumph-of-satyagraha-politics. Accessed 24 Mar. 2023.
Indian Anti-Farm Laws Protest 2020-21 – Participedia. Participedia.net,
participedia.net/case/8539. Accessed 24 Mar. 2023.
Indian Farmers Vow to Carry on Protests despite Cold, Deaths.
Reuters,21Dec.2020,www.reuters.com/article/us-india-farms protests-coldwave
idUSKBN28V19U.
Langar – the Heart of the “No Farmer, No Food” ProtestsVolume 1 | Issue
10 [February 2022] - on Eating. 24 Mar. 2022,
www.oneating.in/langar-the-heart-of-the-no-farmer-no-food-protests/.
Accessed 24 Mar. 2023.
Langar: The Communal Meal. Pluralism.org, pluralism.org/langar-the-
communal-meal.
Man Who ‘Planted Sikh Flag on Red Fort’ Gets Interim Protection from Delhi
Court. The Indian Express, 1 July 2021,
indianexpress.com/article/cities/delhi/man-who-planted-sikh-flag-on-red-fort-
gets-interim-protection-from-delhi-court-7384449/. Accessed 24 Mar. 2023.
Mander, Harsh. “Harsh Mander: Six Months On, India’s Protesting Farmers
Are Creating History.” Scroll.in,
scroll.in/article/995971/harsh-mander-six-months-on-indias-protesting-
farmers-are-creating-history.
Menon, Aditya. “Farm Laws: Sikhs Have Made Delhi Bend Again, Govt Can’t
Spin It Any Other Way.” TheQuint, 21 Nov. 2021,
www.thequint.com/news/politics/farm-laws-repealed-sikhs-punjab-modi-
government-elections#read-more. Accessed 24 Mar. 2023.
Months, Proma Khosla 5, and 1 Week. “How Social Media Is Driving the
Indian Farmers Protests — and Why We Can’t Stop Now!” Mashable India, 1 Mar.
2021, in.mashable.com/social-good/20590/how-social-media-is-driving-the-
indian-farmers-protests-and-why-we-cant-stop-now.
Mukherjee, Sahana, et al. “A Cultural Psychological Analysis of Collective
Memory as Mediated Action: Constructions of Indian History.” Journal of Social
and Political Psychology, vol. 5, no. 2, Jan. 2018, pp. 558–87,
https://doi.org/10.5964/jspp.v5i2.705. Accessed 11 Oct. 2019.
Nesbitt, Eleanor. “Origins and Development of Sikh Faith: The Gurus.” The
British Library, 23 Sept. 2019,
www.bl.uk/sacred-texts/articles/origins-and-development-of-sikh-faith-the-
gurus.
Páez, et al. “Collective Memory and Social Representations of History
Expanded English Version.” ResearchGate, 2016, https:// www.researchgate.net/
publication/284729435_Collective_memory_and_Social_Representations_of_Hist
ory_Expanded_english_version.
Pappas, Stephanie, and Callum McKelvie. “What Is Culture? | Definition of
Culture.” Live Science, Live Science, 17 Oct. 2022,
245
 www.livescience.com/21478-what-is-culture-definition-of-culture.html.
President Signs off on Farm Laws Repeal Bill. India Today,
www.indiatoday.in/india/story/president-signs-off-on-farm-laws-repeal-bill-
1883015-2021-12-01. Accessed 24 Mar. 2023.
Puri, Ragini. “Fatehgarh Sahib - the Story of Thanda Burj (Part 3).” From My
Window Seat, 13 June 2015,
www.frommywindowseat.com/fatehgarh-sahib-the-story-of-thanda-burj-part-
3/. Accessed 24 Mar. 2023.
Segall, Hayley. Oberlin Oberlin Digital Commons at Oberlin Digital Commons
atOberlin.digitalcommons.oberlin.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1707 & context
= honors. Accessed 24 Mar. 2023.
Seva, the Sikh Langar, from Bhai Kanhaiya to Delhi Violence, 2020.”
SabrangIndia, 29 Feb. 2020, sabrangindia.in/article/seva-sikh-langar-bhaikanhaiya-
delhi-violence-2020. Accessed 24 Mar. 2023.
Shepherd, Kancha Ilaiah. “Guru Nanak vs RSS Guru Hedgewar—Farmer
Protests Showed How Sikhs Have a Lesson for India.” ThePrint, 23 Nov. 2021,
theprint.in/opinion/guru-nanak-vs-rss-guru-hedgewar-farmer-protests-
showed-how-sikhs-have-a-lesson-for-india/770085/. Accessed 24 Mar. 2023.
Sibley, Chris G., et al. “Social Representations of History and the Legitimation of
Social Inequality: The Form and Function of Historical Negation.” European
Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 38, no. 3, 2008, pp. 542–65,
https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.449. Accessed 24 Mar. 2023.
Sidhu, Mandeep. “Why Sikhs All over the World Are Protesting with Indian
Farmers - Gal-Dem.” Gal-Dem, 11 Dec. 2020,
gal-dem.com/why-sikhs-across-the-world-are-protesting-with-farmers-in-
india/. Accessed 24 Mar. 2023.
Six Major Phases That Defined the Farmers’ Movement in India. The Wire,
thewire.in/rights/six-major-phases-that-defined-the-farmers-movement-in-india.
Accessed 24 Mar. 2023.
Studies in Cultural Memory. Calenda.org, calenda.org/300702. Accessed 24
Mar. 2023.
Study.com. “Take Online Courses. Earn College Credit. Research Schools,
Degrees & Careers.” Study.com | Take Online Courses. Earn College Credit.
Research Schools, Degrees & Careers, 21 Nov. 2016,
https://study.com/academy/lesson/collective-memory-definition-history-
theory.html. Accessed 24 Mar. 2023.
Thandi, Shinder. Understanding Sikh Diaspora Support for the Punjab Kisan
Morcha. giss.org/jsps_vol_29/11-shinder_thandi.pdf. Accessed 24 Mar. 2023.
The Ghadar Party: Freedom for India. Pluralism.org,
pluralism.org/the-ghadar-party-freedom-for-india. Accessed 24 Mar. 2023.
The Most Heroic Last Stand in History: How 40 Sikhs Fought against a Million
Mughals in the Battle of Chamkaur(1704) - Dharmayudh.
dharmayudh.com/40-sikhs-ten-lakh-million-mughal-battle-of-chamkaur/.
Accessed 24 Mar. 2023.
246
 The Problem with Modi’s Repeal of India’s Farm Laws. Thediplomat.com,
thediplomat.com/2022/01/the-problem-with-modis-repeal-of-indias-farm-laws/.
Accessed 24 Mar. 2023.
Timeline of Farmers’ Protest against Three Farm Laws. The Economic Times,
19 Nov. 2021, economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/india/timeline-of-farmers-
protest-against-three-
farmlaws/articleshow/87797650.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_mediu
m=text&utm_campaign=cppst. Accessed 24 Mar. 2023.
Who Are Sikhs? What Is Sikhism? SikhNet, 5 Aug. 2012, www.sikhnet.com/pages/
who-are-sikhs-what-is-
sikhism?gclid=CjwKCAjw5dqgBhBNEiwA7PryaK3ePuf1lRjnKmCeldg40wSpZKJZ
OGF8FNlcJFxYm8vXPhBiPmrXExoCENEQAvD_BwE. Accessed 24 Mar. 2023.
Why Is the Month of December Important to Sikhs? Balraj Sahota, GNSA.
This Is Local London, www.thisislocallondon.co.uk/news/19833477.month-
december-important-sikhs/. Accessed 24 Mar. 2023.
Wounds That Never Heal: Remembering Operation Bluestar. The
Wire, thewire.in/history/wounds-that-never-heal-remembering-
operation-bluestar. Accessed 24 Mar. 2023
Zamponi, Lorenzo. Memory in Action: Mediatised Public Memory and the
Symbolic Construction of Conflict inStudent Movements.cadmus.eui.eu
/bitstream/handle/1814/36977/2015_ Zamponi.pdf ?sequence =. Accessed 24
Mar. 2023.

247
 Tremors of Trauma amid the Debris:
Unearthing Memories from Syria-Turkey

Sruthi Mohan

Trauma and memory are intricately aligned concepts. In the Syria-

Turkey earthquake scenario, trauma theory can help in
comprehending the psychological impact of the disaster on the
affected populations, including the survivors, first responders, and
rescue workers. It can also help in developing effective
interventions to address the psychological needs of those affected
by the disaster. Trauma theory suggests that traumatic events can
cause psychological distress, including feelings of shock, fear,
helplessness, and loss. Sudden natural calamities can impact a
community as a whole which might lead to cultural trauma.
“Cultural trauma occurs when members of a collectivity feel
they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves
indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their
memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental
and irrevocable ways” (06, Alexander). People who belong to
varying age groups, experiences, genders, and aspirations confront
this catastrophic event and this will retain the scars of pain and
pangs in their collective unconsciousness.
Children will be the most affected category among all the
victims and survivors. UNICEF underscores that the “collective
death toll is now more than 50,000, while more than 850,000
children remain displaced after being forced from their damaged or
destroyed homes. Many families are now living in temporary
shelters. The earthquakes have also caused widespread damage to
schools and other essential infrastructure, further jeopardizing the
well-being of children and families. Access to safe water and
sanitation is also a major concern, as are the health needs of the
affected population” (UNICEF).

248
 There are certain ways in which trauma theory can be applied in
the Syria-Turkey earthquake scenario. One of the significant aspects
is to decipher the impact of trauma on the affected populations.
Trauma theory suggests that traumatic events can have long-lasting
psychological effects on individuals and communities. By
understanding the psychological impact of the disaster, we can
develop interventions to address the needs of the affected
populations.
Apart from that, providing psychological support to survivors
and rescue workers is another area that requires paramount
attention. Trauma theory suggests that psychological support is
essential for individuals affected by trauma. In the context of the
Syria-Turkey earthquake, psychological support can include
counseling, various therapies, and other remedies to help
individuals to transgress to the psychological effects of the disaster.
Moreover, addressing the social and cultural factors that
contribute to trauma needs to be understood. Trauma theory
proposes that social and cultural factors can contribute to trauma.
At this juncture, addressing these factors can include providing
support to communities that have been marginalized or displaced
by the disaster. “The experience of trauma, at its worst, can mean
not only a loss of confidence in the self, but a loss of confidence in
the surrounding tissue of family and community, in the structures
of human government, in the larger logics by which humankind
lives, in the ways of nature itself, and often (if this is really the final
step in such a succession) in God” (Erikson,198).
Developing effective disaster response strategies is another
remarkable aspect. Trauma theory can inform the expansion of
effective disaster response strategies that address the psychological
needs of the affected populations. These strategies can include
providing psychological support, addressing social and cultural
factors, and promoting resilience and recovery.
In the milieu of the Syria-Turkey earthquake, memory and
trauma are closely related. Traumatic events can have a significant
impact on memory, both in terms of how the event is remembered
and how it is processed in the brain. Traumatic events can result in
fragmented, disorganized, and vivid memories that are difficult to
249
process and integrate. The brain’s response to trauma can cause
changes in memory processing, leading to intrusive memories,
flashbacks, and avoidance behaviors. Apparently, survivors may
experience traumatic memories of the disaster, including memories
of the event itself, as well as memories of the aftermath and the
loss of dear ones. These memories can be stressful and can lead to
a range of psychological symptoms, including anxiety, memory loss,
depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Memory can also play a crucial role in the recovery and healing
process following a traumatic event. By working through traumatic
memories and processing them in a safe and supportive
environment, individuals can begin to integrate the experience and
move toward recovery. Attempts can be made for addressing the
psychological impact of trauma may include therapies that focus on
memory processing, like cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and eye
movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR). These therapies
aim to help survivors process and integrate traumatic memories,
reducing the intensity and frequency of distressing symptoms.
Evidently, memory and trauma are closely related in the context
of the Syria-Turkey earthquake scenario, with traumatic events
having a significant impact on memory processing and the
development of psychological symptoms. Effective interventions
aimed at addressing trauma can help survivors work through
traumatic memories and move toward recovery and healing.
Relocation can have a momentous influence on the mental
health and well-being of native populations. For many indigenous
people, relocation can disrupt their sense of place, identity, and
community, leading to a range of psychological and emotional
challenges. One of the primary ways that relocation can affect the
native mind is through a loss of cultural identity and connection to
the land. Indigenous people often have deep cultural connections
to their traditional lands, including knowledge of the land, sacred
sites, and cultural practices. Relocation can sever these connections,
leading to a sense of dislocation and loss of cultural identity. For
many communities, relocation can lead to a loss of social support
networks, economic opportunities, and access to services and

250
resources. This loss can lead to feelings of isolation, depression,
and anxiety.
In addition, relocation can result in trauma and historical
trauma. Forced relocation, in particular, can be traumatic for
individuals and communities, leading to a range of psychological
and emotional challenges, including post-traumatic stress disorder
and depression. Historical trauma can also impact future
generations, as trauma and loss are passed down through families
and communities.
In short, relocation impacts the mental health and well-being of
native populations. Effective interventions to address the
psychological impact of relocation may include community-based
interventions that promote cultural identity, connection to the land,
and social and economic well-being. These interventions may also
include trauma-informed care and culturally sensitive therapies
aimed at addressing the psychological effects of trauma and loss.
The memory of the past can be linked to present trauma in
innumerable ways. Traumatic experiences have a significant impact
on memory, both in terms of how the traumatic event is
remembered and how the brain perceives it. Traumatic memories
can be fragmented, disorganized, and vivid, making them difficult
to process and integrate. One way that the memory of the past can
be linked to present trauma is through the phenomenon of
“triggering”. Triggering occurs when a current event or situation
reminds an individual of a past traumatic experience, causing them
to experience intense emotional or psychological distress. This
triggering can be caused by a range of stimuli, including sights,
sounds, smells, and other sensory experiences. Janet remarks how
frequently the episodes of torment flicker in the survivor’s mind
that “certain happenings would leave indelible and distressing
memories— memories to which the sufferer was continually
returning, and by which he was tormented by day and by night”
(Janet, 25).
In addition, traumatic experiences can result in changes to the
brain’s stress response system, making individuals more susceptible
to experiencing trauma in the future. For instance, people who

251
have confronted trauma in the past may be more likely to face post-
traumatic stress disorder following a subsequent traumatic event.
Finally, traumatic experiences can impact an individual’s sense
of safety and trust, leading to feelings of anxiety, depression, and other
emotional and psychological challenges. These feelings can be triggered
by current events or situations that are perceived as threatening, leading
to a sense of ongoing trauma and psychological distress.
The memory of the past can be associated with present trauma
in different ways, including triggering, changes to the brain’s stress
response system, and the impact of traumatic experiences on an
individual’s sense of security and belongingness. Effective
interventions aimed at addressing trauma may involve working
through traumatic memories, developing coping strategies for
triggering, and addressing the psychological effects of trauma and
loss. Sigmund Freud elucidates traumatic memories appear like
nightmares, especially to accident victims. It seemed to be a waking
memory in a repeated pattern but in the form of dreams. “[People]
think the fact that the traumatic experience is forcing itself upon the
patient is a proof of the strength of the experience: the patient is, as
one might say, fixated to his trauma. ... I am not aware, however, that
patients suffering from traumatic neurosis are much occupied in their
waking lives with memories of their accident. Perhaps they are more
concerned with not thinking of it” (Freud, 13).
Traumatic events can have a significant impact on memory, and
people who have experienced trauma may have difficulty
remembering certain aspects of the event or may have vivid,
intrusive memories that are difficult to forget. One common
phenomenon related to trauma and memory is called “flashbacks”,
which are sudden and intense recollections of the traumatic event.
Flashbacks can be triggered by certain sights, sounds, or smells that
remind the person of the trauma. These intrusive memories can be
very distressing and can interfere with daily functioning. At the
same time, traumatic events can also lead to memory problems,
such as difficulty recalling specific details or events leading up to or
following the trauma. This can be due to the intense emotions and
physiological arousal that accompany traumatic events, which can
interfere with the encoding and retrieval of memories.
252
Peter A. Levine remarks on the human capacity to withstand
traumatic experiences by survival, adaptation, and transformation.
A wide range of events including assault, abuse, molestation, war,
accidents, natural calamities, and untimely death can lead to
traumatic experiences. As an aftermath, there remain certain fits of
shock. “All of these “shocks” to the organism can alter a person’s
biological, psychological, and social equilibrium to such a degree
that the memory of one particular event comes to taint, and
dominate, all other experiences, spoiling an appreciation of the
present moment” (Levine, 16). Moreover, memories are imbued
with a mix of both pleasant and repelling feelings and sensations.
Memories of the past can impact the future and the very present.
He adds “past imprints influence present and future planning, often
under the radar of conscious awareness. In contrast to a repetitive
news clip, our memories are mutable, molded, and remolded many
times throughout our lives. They are continuously in flux,
perpetually in a process of forming and reforming” (24).
The human experience of suffering and recollection has no
bounds. Traumatic experiences and events make communities and
individuals' psyches think and relate further occurrences in a unique
way. The unexpected earthquake in Syria-Turkey is a tragic episode
that will have enduring psychological, cultural, and economic
repercussions in the long run. Trauma is universal and can be
perceived as inclusive. Cathy Caruth opines that “trauma has seemed to
become all-inclusive, but it has done so precisely because it brings us to
the limits of our understanding: if psychoanalysis, psychiatry, sociology,
and even literature are beginning to hear each other anew in the study of
trauma, it is because they are listening through the radical disruption and
gaps of traumatic experience” (04).
To conclude, the psychologically inflicted tremors of trauma
can bring in distorted memories, which will have lasting
impressions in the survivor’s minds, especially the children who
underwent all these events. As pain and the associated trauma are
universal in nature, the whole of humanity can identify with the
situation and elevate the suffering community.

253
Works Cited
Alexander, Jeffrey C. Trauma a Social Theory. Polity, 2012.
Caruth, Cathy. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. John Hopkins University
Press,1995.
“Devastating Earthquakes Strike Syria and Türkiye.” UNICEF,https://
www.unicef.org/emergencies/Syria-Turkiye-earthquake.
Erikson, Kai. “Notes on Trauma and Community”. Trauma and Memory: Brain
and Body in a Search for the Living Past: A Practical Guide for Understanding and Working
with Traumatic Memory. North Atlantic, 2015.
Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud. Vol. 18. Translated under the editorship of James Strachey in collaboration
with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson. Hogarth, 1920.
Janet, Pierre. Les medications psychologiques. 3 vols. Paris: Societe Pierre Janet. 1984.
Levine, Peter A. Trauma and Memory: Brain and Body in a Search for the Living
Past: A Practical Guide for Understanding and Working with Traumatic Memory. North
Atlantic, 2015.

254
 Contributors
Abhinaba Chatterjee holds a Masters degree in English Literature
and Translation Studies from Calcutta University & Annamalai
University respectively and an M. Phil degree from Delhi
University. He has published extensively on various fields of
English literature, including Shakespeare, Indian Writings in
English (IWE), postcolonial theory and Absurd Theatre. He has
presented papers in many National and International seminars,
both in India and abroad. He is particularly interested in Indian
Writings in English, Modernity in Indian Literature, Modern
Drama, Postcolonial Literature and Translation Studies. He is
presently pursuing doctoral research in Absurd Drama.
Abhishek Sarkar is an Assistant Professor in English,
Murshidabad College of Engineering & Technology, (MCET)
Berhampore, West Bengal.He was a Visiting Faculty in Berhampore
College Directorate of Open and Distance Learning (PG) under the
University of Kalyani since 2016. He has more than 10 publications
and presentations since 2015 and a few of the recent publications
include a chapter entitled Trendsetters of Indian Writing in English at
the onset of Indian Independence in the Book “Situating India in the
Globalized World” by PS OPUS Publication, New Delhi. He is
Currently working on: Partition narratives with special focus on Bengal.
Anuranj CK is a doctorate fellow under School of Social
Sciences and Languages Vellore-Institute of Technology, Vellore,
Tamil Nadu.
Ayushi Rakesh is a research scholar with a passion for literary
theory and cultural studies. She received her undergraduate degree
from Vivekananda Institute of Professional Studies, where she
earned the top rank in the university. She is continuing her
academic pursuits at the University of Warwick, where she is
completing a Master's degree in English Literature. Her field of
study focuses on cultural theory, critical theory, petroculture, and
postcolonial theory. Ayushi has published one article, "Transition
of Romanticism through Ages," and isworking on others to get
herself published. She aspires to be a literary scholar of stature and

255
is dedicated to expanding her knowledge. In her free time, she
enjoys eating variety of cuisine and pursuing her passion for travel.
Debojyoti Dan has been working in Naba Ballygunge
Mahavidyalaya, since 2009, as SACH II. He has special interests in
Modern and Postmodern literature and theories. He learned French
initially From Rama Krishna Mission and then pursued further
diplomas in French from Alliance Française du Bengal. He has
several publications to his credit including a book of poems
Enigma of Red Shadows. He was awarded the first prize in the
world French Poetry Competition known as ‘Le Printemps des
Poètes’ in 2007. He had worked in Alliance Française du Bengal as
a cultural co-ordinator in the Cine club from 2007-2009. He has
presented many papers in International Seminars and conferences.
Jasmine Sharma is an Assistant Professor of English at
Vivekananda Institute of Professional Studies (VIPS) New Delhi,
India. She has previously taught at ARSD College and Mata Sundri
College for Women (NCWEB centre), University of Delhi.
Recipient of for completing her doctorate in English and MHRD
travel grants she holds a PhD degree in English awarded by the
Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Ropar for her thesis titled,
“Technopower, Technobodies, Technoconsumption: The
Representation of Technoculture in the SF Novels of Margaret
Atwood. Her areas of interest include feminism and gender studies,
science fiction and post-human studies. She has published book
chapters and research articles in edited volumes and international,
UGC care, Scopus indexed and peer-reviewed journals respectively.
Jaspreet Kaur is working as an Assistant Professor in the
Department of English at Sri Guru Granth Sahib World University,
Fatehgarh Sahib, Punjab. She has been teaching Linguistics and
Phonetics and British Poetry to the students pursuing BA Hons. in
English, Master of English and Teaching of English to the
prospective teachers. She is a doctoral candidate in English
Literature. Her research areas are 'War Poetry', 'Violence',
'Witnessing', 'Trauma', 'Memory' and 'Feminism and Womanism'.
She has published seven research papers in reputed national and
international journals. She has also presented seven research papers
in many national and international conferences and seminars.
256
 Kevin Martens Wong is an award-winning gay, non-binary
Kristang/Portuguese-Eurasian independent scholar born, bred and
based in Singapore. He was formerly a Ministry of Education
Teaching Scholar teaching H1 General Paper in Eunoia Junior
College, and is the founder and director of the Kodrah Kristang
language revitalisation initiative for his critically endangered
heritage language Kristang, and the developer of a new
creole/indigenous approach to the psyche known as Osura
Pesuasang / Individuation Theory. He has been featured by the
BBC, AFP, the Straits Times, Channel NewsAsia, and over 130
other international publications and media, as well as Singapore’s
2018 National Day Parade celebrations, and was the 2017 recipient
of both the President of Singapore's Volunteer and Philanthropy
Award (Individual-Youth) and the Lee Hsien Loong Award for
Outstanding All-Round Achievement, both pinnacle national
awards awarded to a single individual. He is also a speculative
fiction writer, with his first novel, Altered Straits, longlisted for the
2015 Epigram Books Fiction Prize and nominated for the 2018
Singapore Literature Prize. He currently runs his own freelance life
coaching and consulting initiative known as Merlionsman Coaching
& Consulting (merlionsman.com).
Manodip Chakraborty has completed his M.A. in English
Literature from Cooch Behar Panchanan Barma University. He is
presently an assistant prof. of English (Department of Applied
Science and Humanities) in Teegala Krishna Reddy Engineering
(Autonomous) College. He has been participating in various
national and international seminars/ webinars, also is contributing
to journals and in books. His research interests include Cultural
Studies, films and advertising, Memory Studies, and Media Studies.
Namrata Chowdhury completed her Master degree from the
Department of English, Presidency University, Kolkata in 2013.
She qualified the UGC-NET (National Eligibility Test) in the year
2013. At St. Xavier's College (Autonomous), Kolkata since 2019,
she works as an Assistant Professor till date. She has presented
papers in national and international seminars and conferences and
published in academic journals. She is also a doctoral scholar at the
Department of English, West Bengal State University. The subject
257
of her doctoral research is the mapping of the city, Calcutta
through a decoding of the culinary registers in select non-fiction
works by the migrant and immigrant authors. Her research interests
also include the city and the space, postcolonial literature, Indian
English Literature, popular culture, cultural studies.
Oyeshi Ganguly is an Indo-German Young Leaders Forum
Scholar, currently pursuing her Master’s in International Affairs at
the Hertie School, Berlin, Germany. She obtained her Bachelor’s
degree in Political Science from the Department of International
Relations at Jadavpur University, India. She is the co-founder of the
archival research project Agnijug Archive which documents the
oral history of the Indian anti-colonial revolutionaries. She has
previously worked as a Project Manager for the Cultural Studies
Project at the Institute for Asian and African Studies at the
Humboldt University of Berlin and presented academic papers at
the University of Bonn, Humboldt University of Berlin and the
Martin Luther University, Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. She has
written for journals and edited books. Her research focuses on
South Asian Studies, history of post colonial societies, politics of
memory and cultural studies.
Rajashri Ghosh is a recent Postgraduate from Adam
Mickiewicz University ofPoznań, Poland, holding a Master’s degree
in International Relations under the faculty of Political Science and
Journalism. Her paper, titled ‘Between Criminals and Victims: The
Image of Indian Female Felons in Bride Trafficking’ has got
published in the proceedings’ Book of the 8th International
Baskent Congresson Humanities and Social Sciences. She is
interested in Human Rights, Social Movements and Radicalization,
and Human Trafficking.
Sandeep T G is working as an Assistant Professor, department
of English, Sree Kerala Varma College, Thrissur. He is currently
pursuing his Phd in the topic ‘Mnemonic Paradigms of Resistance
and Representation: A Comparative Analysis of Select Works of
Seamus Heaney, Yehuda Amichai and K. Satchidanandan’. He has
authoured numerous scholarly articles in various national and
international journals. His areas of academic interests include

258
Cultural Studies, Literary Theory, Memory Studies and
Postcolonial Studies.
Sheeba Rajan currently teaches at Sri Ramachandra Faculty
of Engineering and Technology as Lecturer. She is also a
doctorate fellow.
Shriya Dasgupta is currently pursuing Master’s in Politics and
International Relations at Pondicherry University, India and
graduated from the Department of Comparative Literature,
Jadavpur University, India. She is a research intern at the Netaji
Institute of Asian Studies and the co-founder of Agnijug Archive, a
digital archive that aims to document, preserve, and share oral
histories of the Bengal revolutionaries and the anti-colonial
resistance that they espoused. She has authored a number of
chapters to journals and books. She has co-authored the paper. Her
research areas include modern South Asian history and politics,
gender and intellectual roots of resistance movements. She has
interned with several newspapers such as The Telegraph in Schools,
Times of India and The Indian Express.
Sruthi Mohan is a research scholar in the Dept. of English and
Foreign Languages, College of Science and Humanities, SRMIST,
Ramapuram Campus, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. She currently
works as Assistant Professor of English at Sreenidhi Institute of
Science and Technology, Hyderabad, Telangana State.
Suyasha Dwivedi is pursuing a master’s in English from the
University of Delhi. She has previously presented a research article
at the conference organized by Presidency University. Her research
interests include modernism and metamodernism, trauma studies,
memory studies and feminism.
Dr. T Sri Devi is an Assistant Professor, Dept. of English and
Foreign Languages, College of Science and Humanities, SRMIST,
Ramapuram Campus, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. She is a
research supervisor as well and has certain publications in UGC
care listed and Scopus indexed journals to her credit.

259