‘Jallianwala Bagh Journals: Political Lives of Memory’ by Sarmistha Dutta Gupta: Discarded Jallianwala Bagh stories

Puran Devi was 19 years old and pregnant with her first child when her husband Lala Wasoo Mal was killed at the Jallianwala Bagh. In order that her pregnancy did not become a scandal, the fact that she was carrying her husband’s child was publicly declared before his funeral. She refused to take compensation from the British and raised her son alone. He was unfortunately killed in the Partition riots and Puran Devi had to then take up the responsibility of her grandson and widowed daughter-in-law. This poignant story of Puran Devi is but one of the many stories of women, children and families that were lost in the retellings of the history of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, and which got subsumed within the larger history of Gandhian mobilisation and the nationalist memorialisation of the event. Sarmistha Dutta Gupta’s book, therefore, is an attempt to decentre the Gandhi-centric and the statist/textbook narratives of the event.

Designed as a public-facing history project, Dutta Gupta initially presented her research on the history of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre and Rabindranath Tagore’s response to it in the form of an artistic installation, which opened at Kolkata’s Victoria Memorial Hall in March 2020. However, the pandemic cut short the public exhibition and led Dutta Gupta to compile her research into this book with a novel narrative form. It is written as a journal — year-long diary entries — of the author’s writing journey. The narrative weaves connections between the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, the stories of people who lived through it, its reverberations in India and elsewhere, its long memory and ties them all with present-day political events that unfolded as the author wrote the book (between December 2020 and 2021). The stories of people — past and present — appear seamlessly in the book’s rich narrative tapestry.

For instance, the journal entry for May 29, 2021, opens with the present-day story of a 13-year-old boy who had been abandoned by his father, a daily-wager, on Kolkata’s Sealdah station. Unable to get the child tested for Covid, a requirement for the care home where the father wanted to leave the child, he abandoned him at the train station. While the government was making provisions for Covid orphans, the fate of children who were abandoned hung in balance. The narrative segued into the stories of the Jallianwala Bagh orphans and the poor response of the British government. In fact, the injured survivors were not even able to receive medical help because of the fear of being arrested. The collapsing of time in the narrative not only enlivens a fragment of history, but also provides a stark commentary of our times.

The next journal entry, dated May 30, 2021, offers us something similar. It documents the public furore around Tagore’s renunciation of knighthood in response to the massacre. Incidentally, it was on May 31, 1919, that Tagore dispatched a telegram informing the Viceroy of his decision and simultaneously sent a copy of his letter to the media. While the British newspapers refused to publish the news, it was splashed across all the nationalist ones. The latter urged other Indians to also follow Tagore’s example and renounce British honours. Tagore’s renunciation, although not mentioned by the author, brought to mind the Indian writers’ protest in 2015, whereby they returned their Sahitya Akademi awards to call attention to the murder of Kannada scholar MM Kalburgi and the ‘beef lynchings’.

The author’s quest to collect ‘discarded stories [of the Jallianwala Bagh] lying by the wayside’ also led to the discovery of archival records about one of her ancestors, Birendranath Dutta Gupta, a member of the revolutionary organisation Jugantar, and a visit to the Presidency Jail to see the place where he had been executed — serendipitously tying the story of Dutta Gupta’s family with those impacted by the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.

The book, as it gently explores and gathers the resonances of the Jallianwala Bagh to our present, exudes a sense of sadness, loss and mourning. It critiques nationalist memorials, which in telling the celebratory stories of sacrifice, invisibilised the stories of personal loss. At a more intimate level, the writing of the book was also marked by the death of the author’s two interlocutors — Prof VN Datta (the foremost historian of Jallianwala Bagh), with whom her research journey started, and Aveek Sen, a friend who inspired her research project.

Reading this book feels like beach-combing — pausing, picking up and examining soulful vignettes that fell out of time. Dutta Gupta has sieved and collected them into this volume and put them in conversation with the politics of our times. This book makes for a refreshing, engaging and rewarding read.