Hear-Telling the Chauraasi Archive: Performing Testimony After Trauma

Abstract

In 2014, 30 years after the anti-Sikh pogrom (Chauraasi) instigated by the Hindu Right destroyed Sikh lives in New Delhi, I listened to the survivors and witnesses of the 1984 pogrom chat casually about their memories of the violence. Several visited their former homes at the original site of the violence and undertook ‘walks’ to remember what they had experienced. As they did so, they talked, creating a record of where their autobiographical re-tellings of those events created communal memory. While sociological scholarship attends to the trauma of 1984 (Saluja 2015; Das 2006), there is yet to emerge a reckoning with the performance iterations of such event-narratives as the memory walks. Using frameworks of witnessing, describing, and walking, thinking with how a walk can ‘hear-tell’ memory, I ask in this article: how does one re-tell testimonies of trauma and rumour that the survivors of Chauraasi remembered to and with a non-survivor? In what ways does rumour operate officially and informally? How does the telling, description, and undertaking of the memory walk reproduce a crisis of witnessing, and how does the aural and embodied performance of the walk respond to this crisis? How does the aporia between the descriptions emerging on memory walks and the ineffability of traumatic memory conjure the epistemic limits of narration?