WHO DESIRES THE RHINOCEROS? PROSAIC POETICAL AND MNEMONIC VISUAL REFRACTIONS OF VIOLENCE IN THE WAKE OF OPERATION BLUE STAR

Abstract

This paper seeks to bring together artistic and poetic productions as sites of historical memory wherein forgetting and remembering occur so as to forge dominant narratives as well as resistance and alterity through their mutual relation to the modern postcolonial technocratic state. Twenty-five years have passed since the armed altercation between a group of so-called ‘Sikh Separatists’ and the Indian Military within the confines of the Golden Temple, Amritsar, in Panjab. This watershed moment signalled a shift in the typically amicable relations between nationalist Hindus and Sikhs. It also led to a decade-long ordeal of reckless, unmitigated violence and torture of ‘men with beards’ being taken categorically to represent a national threat. I posit that art and poetry serve as a sites where the cathexis of Sikh desires are continually projected upon an imaginal canvas; it is here that the longing for a form of sovereignty in relation to the nation-state may potentially and partially begin to be engaged. This paper examines a small number of such emanations as latent resurrections of sublimated desires that challenge subjectivity as limited solely to a single purview but is rather mitigated through a process of altercation, contestation, continuation and re-association.