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The beast within Aftermath: An Oral History of Violence
Both works are "oral" narratives and try to build a coherent plot out of the fragmented stories of participants, observers and neutral academic historians. In one sense, both explore motives behind the actions, as also the prevarications of those who lived to recall the events that forced their displacement from their original homes. Both question the tendency to romanticise nostalgia or to project violence as a fall from an assumed idyllic unhurried life. Verma’s intention in holding a dialogue with the survivors of genocidal violence is "to examine how social and individual memories are intertwined with identity politics and political practices". She goes beyond recording their stories and attempts an analytical understanding of the events described (Partition in 1947, anti-Sikh riots of 1984, the Bangladesh war in 1971 and the 2002 Gujarat riots). Hers is an "anthropologist’s exercise" to decipher the ways in which her respondents not only evoke the traumas caused by the violence of the events, but occasionally fabricate those events to justify their own behaviour. While recording the respondents’ memories, Verma reminds us that these may have been sites for dealing with the "complex interlinkages of reality and fantasy in representation and interpretation". We are led to ask whether the respondents were simply recapitulating their experiences of the violence or trying to interpret them as well after a safe distance of years. Considering that the violent occasions (particularly Partition) had now become history, memories may be blurred and one may even distort or invent these in order to emotionally involve the interviewer. The impulse to "interpret" is the result of hindsight and is closely linked to the unconscious ideological bent of the actors themselves. In the heat of the moment or what the survivors called junoon, people may have acted irrationally, "just like that", as Heera Lal confesses. Subsequently they produce alibis, while continuing to recoil from their memories. This is true as much of the Partition survivors like Baldev Sayal, whose life was closely connected to that of Noor Mohammad, as of Vachan Kaur who sees a pattern in the 1984 Delhi riots similar to the one Shaan Kaur sees in Amu. As the respondents become less circumspect, they reveal their unconscious orientations and beliefs. In this "therapy", Verma discovers contexts in which those beliefs and orientations were framed. The author offers a detailed account of her respondents’ life-experiences before the violent events. As they mature, there is a gradual hardening of positions through which new identities are projected. The Hindus, the Muslims and the Sikhs, all wear their religious distinctions as masks to justify behaviour formerly dubbed as irrational. But there is no infallible way to test the validity of assumed positions or to establish their effects on the future lives of the survivors. All we get from the author is a nagging doubt as to the real motivation behind particular acts.
The specific merit of this book lies in its refusal of
absolute credibility to "oral" narratives of publicly executed
violence. Verma perceives a reactionary agenda behind the political
exploitation of the survivors’ stories by communal parties, mainly by
the Hindu Right. This is debatable, since the Hindus alone don’t have
a patent on communal bestiality. But we must not lightly dismiss such a
possibility either. These stories do have incendiary potential and can
easily ignite hatred. |
Meenakshie Verma’s book immediately reminds you of
Shonali Bose’s haunting recent film, Amu, which
describes an American-Indian girl’s journey home to trace her roots in
the debris of the1984 anti-Sikh riots. Like the film, Aftermath
foregrounds the relationship of memory and history, of violence and its
impact on victims, survivors and other witnesses.