Abstract
Sanam Sutirath Wazir, The Kaurs of 1984: The Untold, Unheard Stories of Sikh Women (Gurugram: Harper Collins, 2024), xxiii + 229 pp.
Wazir, in his testimonial book, breaks the silence of nearly four decades about the experiences of women during the 1984 Operation Blue Star which was followed by the assassination of the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi that led to massive rioting in Delhi and different parts of the country, including the anti-Sikh massacres. Since there are neither any official documents nor any historical records about the molestation of women, gang rapes and exploitation of the wives of the Khalistani militants, Wazir’s book makes a fundamental contribution towards documenting and archiving the oral accounts of the women who witnessed these events in the 1980s in Punjab and Delhi. Spread over twelve chapters, Wazir weaves together women’s narratives of the memories of grief, violence, separation and courage from the turbulent years following the 1984 riots.
The book opens with the story of Rajbir Kaur, who lived in the small, isolated town of Ganji in Punjab, on the international boundary between India and Pakistan (p. 2). Her husband Jasbir Singh, an Akali Dal leader, was a follower of Harchand Singh Longowal. While he was at the Golden Temple in Amritsar in May–June 1984, without the knowledge of his family, the Indian police raided Rajbir’s house in the village. Following this, Rajbir spent the next few days along with her two adolescent daughters, at the Teja Singh Samundari Hall in the Golden Temple Complex at Amritsar where the majority of the Akali Dal’s followers and their families were camping. Rajbir lost his life during Operation Blue Star that began on 1 June 1984. Subsequently, Rajbir and her daughters together with many other women were detained in a camp as ‘militant’s spouses’. In chapter 1, Rajbir narrates how she constantly moved cities for nearly ten years after in order to avoid being targeted with suspicion-based interrogations. Tying together such narratives of women like Rajbir who were eyewitnesses to Operation Blue Star, chapter 1 builds for the reader a background of this event. The book remains lively and engaging through a collection of stories, some of which belong to women who only witnessed the events, and some others to those who consciously joined the Khalistani movement and took up arms.
Wazir’s research took him to different locations in Punjab and eventually to, what is now known by the sad acronym, ‘Tilak Vihar Widows Colony’ in New Delhi. This is where the Sikh widows of the men killed in the Delhi massacres of 1984 were relocated. Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5 focus on the memories of widows in different locations in and around Delhi. On his visits to the Gurudwara in the colony, Wazir witnessed survivors who silently stood watching the photographs, others crying incessantly, and some others who expressed their grief by speaking about the family members they had lost.
In Chapter 6, Wazir eloquently captures the nuances in conversations with various women, such as the girl who referred to herself as a ‘girl from 1984 (main Chaurasi ki ladki hoon)’ (p. 81), leaving the reader with a vivid impression of how words and phrases often cocoon powerful memories. Through each chapter, the book explores women’s experiences in different situations. From heartbreaking memories of a mother who witnessed her daughters being raped (pp. 81–2), to narratives of many who were victims of sexual harassment themselves, the book throws open the centrality of sexual abuse in communal riots, both as a tool of power and outrage (p. 53). Admirably, Wazir describes these experiences (p. 92), while simultaneously tackling the limitations of his positionality as a male researcher who was recording these delicate narratives of dishonour and abuse experienced by Sikh women.
Recollections of elderly women in Chapter 7 reveal that the pattern of violence in 1984 was not very different from that which occurred during the partition in 1947. In Chapters 8, 9 and 10, the book explores the accounts of women, not only as victims of violence, but also as perpetrators of it. Wazir’s interviews with women who joined the insurgency and became part of the Khalistani movement discuss the circumstances that led them to join the movement, their experiences with militancy and their peers, and their complex relationship with state agencies such as the police.
In Chapter 11, the reader is met with present-day life stories of some of these women. Not entirely cut off from society or defeated by grief and violence, some of them support orphanages, taking care of children who were born in jails or those whose parents were killed in police custody or in fake encounters. Although Bilkis Bano’s case opened a much-needed discussion about the vulnerability of women during riots, and massacres in pogroms, Wazir finds that there were hardly any First Information Reports (FIRs) registered with the police about the sexual violence inflicted during the 1984 riots. In the few cases that made it to court, Wazir found they were lost in procedure due to a lack of being rigorously followed up. While women survivors of the violence unflinchingly voiced their demands of justice for the death of their male family members, it seems that they chose to remain silent about experiences and incidences of sexual violence for fear of social disrepute (beizzati), loss of family honour and the possibility of being unable to find a spouse in case of single women. In her work exploring women’s testimonies about sexual violence in communal riots, Baxi (2007, p. 83) relates similar narratives of women who were unwilling to speak of sexual violence in households with living male family members for fear that such revelations could be perceived as a sign of their men’s inability to protect them from this brutality.
Chapter 12 returns in more detail to the life of widows, providing detailed life accounts of a few widows, their life and dreams before the carnage, their experiences of the carnage, the difficulties and challenges they met while bringing up their children. Some of them were reduced to poverty, and some were eventually abandoned by their own children for who they narrate they made such sacrifices.
The book concludes with an Epilogue which initiates a discourse on the legal system, its difficulties and failures in the context of the cases of 1984.
Wazir’s book is an archive of women’s narratives, their experiences, their stories of struggle, survival and strength. Uma Chakravarthy and Nandita Haksar in their work titled The Delhi Riots: Three Days in the Life of a Nation recorded, in 1985, several interviews with men and women in the relief camps post the riots. Their documentation represented a fear and hurt that was fresh and then recent. Wazir’s book almost builds on where they left off, bridging the memories over forty years since the communal riots of 1984. Historical, biographical and ethnographic, this book would be of interest to scholars of religion and politics, history and women’s studies.