Let's Go Back to the Narratives: Diasporic Sikhs, 1984 Violence and Digital Memory Work

• In Event: 392 - Section on Asia and Asian America Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 05. The Politics of Erasing Violence

Abstract

1984 is a critical year in Sikh memory when the most sacred of all Sikh shrines was desecrated by the Indian Army and organized state-sponsored violence unleashed against unsuspecting Sikhs in New Delhi and other parts of North India. It was also the year that began a systematic period of suppression and stigmatization of Sikhs in India and marking them in irrevocable ways. In this paper I focus on present-day active and deliberate online or virtual “memory work” (Kuhn 1995), largely initiated and propelled by second and succeeding generations of Sikhs in the diaspora or what Arlene Stein calls “memory workers” (2009). Diasporic and Internet generated memory work is deliberately and actively incorporating what has been publicly invisible, silenced, shamed and excluded because of the traumatic nature of events, the willful maneuvering by the state machinery and internalization of this official narrative by Sikhs. I draw a collective portrait of memory workers who are using new media to construct and contest narratives so that they are becoming what I call owners of social memories, rather than captives of state and traditional mass media controlled official accounts. I argue that diasporic Sikh memory work via the Internet is distinctive not only because they are using this new technology to puncture prevalent memories but also because they are using it to slow down time and glance back, reconstruct, reinterpret, upset and recast narratives that have so far has been determined almost entirely by the Indian state and mass media.

Author

• Shruti Devgan, State University of New Jersey-Rutgers