The Gulbarg Memorial and the Problem of Memory

Abstract

This chapter attempts to show how anti-Muslim violence in India has been successively replicated after Partition. Just as the memories of Partition have never received state recognition or memorialisation, massacres of minorities that have taken place in the last few decades also get effaced from public memory. This happens as a result of state control of who is allowed to remember and mourn victimhood. These arguments are spelled out with reference to the Gulbarg Society massacre in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, 2002. The physical space of Gulbarg Society has been permanently scarred by violence. Since this is the only site of violence that has not been reclaimed by resettlement and human habitation, the abandoned and damaged houses of Gulbarg Society still bear traces of how the pogrom of 2002 was a disruption of the ordinary. The survivors of the Gulbarg Society massacre come together annually on 28 February to mourn and to remember, even though attempts to construct a memorial at Gulbarg Society have been thwarted. Their memories of the massacre show how the everyday lives of people were ruptured by violence. The memories contained within the Gulbarg Society are a testament against the state’s efforts to impose a majoritarian amnesia upon the anti-Muslim killings that occurred in Gujarat. But acknowledging and recognising these memories is an antidote to the consolidation of right-wing Hindu nationalism that took place in the years after the pogrom in Gujarat.