Band Le Gandari (Tie Up Your Bundle): Unpartitioned Memory Cultures

Abstract

Through locating the Sikh diaspora worldwide and the partition diaspora within India in a narrative of migration imbricated in imperialist and nationalist politics, this chapter demonstrates that their location of the homeland in a Punjabi region, recalling the violence in the making of nations, underlines their loss of home to reaffirm an undivided Punjabi memory. It aims to isolate one such identity place among shared memories that enables the Punjabi diaspora to cross national, sectarian, linguistic, gender, class and caste boundaries to perform the Punjabi place. The performance of this Punjabi identity space intersects with as well as defies national borders reverting, in the process, to a non-essentialized prenational Punjabi imaginary fractured by sectarian and caste difference. The chapter concludes that these performative identity spaces can make the tortured and broken Punjabi body whole by reactivating a shared cultural and eco-regional memory. Keywords: Punjabi diaspora; Sikh diaspora; undivided Punjabi memory