Apocalyptic Amritsar: Destruction, Creation and Trans-Urbanity

— Raminder Kaur

When visiting Harmandir Sahib (Golden Temple) in the Panjabi city of Amritsar in India, it is virtually impossible to not notice bullet marks and other signs of destruction preserved in the gateways, walls and columns around the central sanctum sanctorum in the middle of the holy pool, sarovar (Figures 1-2). There is no visible indication of why this was the case for the onlooker, but talk to any of the staff, volunteers or visitors-in-the-know, they will simply say charasi, the Panjabi term for ‘84 – that is, 1984. Indeed, the acclaimed writer, Amitav Ghosh (1995), had stated, ‘Nowhere else in the world did the year 1984 fulfil its apocalyptic portents as it did in India’.

In June 1984, a 70,000-strong Indian army under the Indian National Congress leadership of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi attacked this holiest of Sikh shrines to oust around 150 dissidents who had adopted the Akal Takht building opposite the causeway to the main shrine as their make-do fortress. Depending upon sources, this attack codenamed Operation Blue Star, left anywhere between a few hundred to a few thousand staff, pilgrims and volunteers dead.

To outline a convoluted history, the charismatic religious preacher, Bhindranwale, had been earlier courted by Congress politicians – especially by Sanjay Gandhi and Giani Zail Singh – as a counter to the Shiromani Akali Dal party who had ousted Congress out of state power in 1977 (Tully and Jacob 2006). However, Bhindranwale outgrew their expectations, and began to challenge these Congress kingmakers, so much so that by 1982, he decided to camp in the holy complex to avoid police arrest in a region that had succumbed to state and counter-state violence, a phenomenon that was communalised in the national narrative as Hindu-Sikh rivalries (Siddhu 2020).

In retaliation for the deaths and destruction due to Operation Blue Star, four months later, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her two Sikh bodyguards, Beant Singh and Satwant Singh, on October 31st. In the interim, the two men had gone to Harmandir Sahib and became baptised amritdhari while pledging to defend the Sikh faith and seek revenge against the prime minister for instigating the operation.

The assassination led to state-backed massacres in India, when around 10,000 Sikhs died. These pogroms had been orchestrated by local Congress leaders and their henchmen through organising busloads of attackers, petrol distribution for ‘necklacing’ and arson attacks, and wholescale abductions and rape of women, most notoriously in the Delhi districts of Trilokpuri and Sultanpuri where Sikh male members of all ages were wiped out (Singh 2017; Siddhu 2020).

1984 saw the first state-sponsored sectarian massacre of a religious minority in India. Rather than the book by George Orwell, ‘1984’ became shorthand for the tensions between the Sikh community and the state, as well as civilian abuse and atrocities in Panjab during that period. This was around the time of the reemergence of communal politics in post-independent India with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP, currently in power since 2014). The politics of Hindu majoritarianism – where Hindus form about 80% of India’s population – was indeed an electoral experiment concocted by the supposedly ‘secular’ Congress party from the late 1970s.

When conducting fieldwork in Amritsar, I heard many stories about 1984 – some first-hand accounts, and some who knew about them through word-of-mouth. Shopkeepers recalled how they saw tanks going towards the holy shrine and had to shutter off expecting the worst. Those men who were trapped inside the holy complex talked about how they survived the assault and their subsequent arrest for being a turban-headed Sikh, all of whom suspected of being ‘terrorists’. Onlookers from distant rooves remembered seeing the flashing lights and fires from the bombardments in the holy complex in horror. Those that lived further away from the centre of the city heard sounds that were so thunderous that they thought that their neighbourly foe, Pakistan, was attacking India, not realising that it was their government attacking its own people.

While Panjab was spared the post-October pogroms, residents did not escape state repression in the city, nor indeed in the state. Some older men who were volunteers in Harmandir Sahib recounted how they endured endless days in prison being tortured by the police so as they submit to signing fabricated statements about their ‘terrorist activities’. Such stories do not enter national narratives that highlight instead the commemoration of Gandhi’s assassination, even naming New Delhi’s international airport after her, and sidelining both ordinary people’s experiences and the series of events that led up to this momentous year (Vrishali 2023).

Whether it be attacks by Afghani raiders during the eighteenth century (Chopra 2010); the Jallianwala Bagh massacres of 1919 during the British colonial era when Colonel Reginald Dyer instructed his officers to shoot at thousands in a walled-off garden on the day of Vaisakhi (Wagner 2019); the communal violence around the 1947 partition in what effectively became a border city when the new nation of Pakistan was formed (Talbot 2006); or the events around 1984 among many other incidents, violence on the basis of ethnicity, race and/or religion, is a formative part of Amritsar’s urbanity. The episodes did not just inform histories and memories but also the rebuilding of the city in different ways. On the one hand, in more recent history, state-backed functionaries led a cleaning operation and bulldozed much of the maze of bazaar alleyways outside the sacred complex so that they had clearer approaches and surveillance of the shrine – a Panjabi ‘Haussmannisation’ process known as the Galliara (Corridor) Project in 1988. On the other hand, within the sacred compound, led by the management committee, the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC), staff and volunteers began a national and international fund-raising initiative in the form of seva (selfless service or donations) to reconstruct the Akal Takht while rejecting the sarkari building – that is, the one built by the government (Figures 3-4). The SGPC also saw to the renovation of other damaged areas, yet left certain parts of the walls, gateways and columns untouched ‘lest anyone forgets’ (Kaur 2023). This partial remediation to ‘commemorate hurt’ (Chopra 2010) came with a massive volunteer-led operation – karseva – to cleanse the sarovar that had been left saturated in blood and floating bodies during the 1984 attack.

A distinct separation emerged within urban histories, where the state tried to wipe away all traces of the violence in 1984 while commemorating others prior to and during the colonial era; whereas the SGPC tried to commemorate 1984 as part of Amritsar’s bloody heritage into the post-independent era. With the former, the impulse was to rebuild while sanitising all signs of troubling pasts that implicated the modern state. With the latter, the impulse was to rebuild yet also conserve rugged elements of its destruction as an enduring sign of threats and violence against it. This bifurcated phenomenon is also apparent in the respective visual cultures. Within the sacred complex, there are several commemorative sites including a shrine dedicated to shahidi (martyrs), the Sikh Museum, and a recently opened exhibition featuring those who had died in 1984. By contrast, underneath the marble plaza just outside one of the main entrances, the state-backed Amritsar Development Authority has organised multi-media histories of the holy shrine recounting multiple formative as well as turbulent events that marked the city, yet with no mention whatsoever of anything to with 1984 (Figures 5-6).

While my fieldwork was rich in community-based oral histories about 1984, there were several lacunae especially when it came to narratives about political figureheads (see also Behal 2021). Thirty years after Operation Blue Star, when archival documents were released in 2014 in adherence to Britain’s Public Records Act (1958), it transpired that Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government had advised Gandhi’s about how to attack Bhindrawale’s men in the Harmandir Sahib complex while trying to sell Westland helicopters and armament to them in 1984. Thatcher had been good friends with Gandhi, both graduates of Oxford University’s Somerville College, although at different times.

How can you tell these stories, eclipsed in the formalities of political personalities and national sovereignty? How can you account for the marginalised experiences of those ordinary people who were subjugated to the violence without compromising their dignity? These were some of the questions that I struggled with when trying to recount the city’s recent history.

Weaving various real-life testimonies, interviews and reports of the period (see Kaur 2017), I decided to write a theatre script focusing on stories of women to commemorate forty years since the events – on the one hand, Prime Ministers, Gandhi and Thatcher, and on the other, lesser-known women – a young mother, Bibi Pritam Kaur, and a library assistant, Paramjit Kaur – who tried to defend their community and honour, while seeking justice for the atrocities after they had become widowed. I called the play Iron Aurataan (aurataan meaning women in Urdu/Panjabi). ‘Iron Lady’ is a term often associated with Thatcher in Britain and Gandhi in India – strong and defiant women in a patriarchal political world (Purewal 2014). But there were several other Iron Ladies from less privileged backgrounds who had to remain strong at a time where they were subjected to threats, violence, court cases and so forth.

The irony with the official Iron Ladies is that even though they got plentiful media coverage, we still do not know much about their private lives. This is where fictionalised extrapolations from the available evidence come in. Such creative excerpts were interwoven with real-life narratives of ordinary women whose husbands were either killed or disappeared. With Bibi Pritam Kaur who was in the sacred complex in June 1984, her husband, Bhai Rashapl Singh, a personal assistant, perished alongside their three-week baby. With Paramjit Kaur, her husband, Jaswant Singh, a bank director, was tortured to death for becoming a human rights proponent, having exposed lists of nearly three thousand disappeared males in three districts of Panjab about a decade later. The police had secretly cremated boys and men with no name nor ceremony. Yet the details of the deceased were recorded in the municipal allocation of wood for the pyres, which Singh obtained and publicised to the chagrin of the authorities.[1]

Produced by Sohaya Visions, we dramatised the script as part of a R&D (research and development) performance in London and Birmingham (Figures 7-8). Along with British Asian actors, we also engaged Panjabi musician singers, hazuri ragi, from Harmandir Sahib who had been touring Britain at the time (Figure 9).[2] They acted as a reminder of how ragi in the middle of the shrine during Operation Blue Star did not stop their devotional song and music (kirtan) even while bullets and bombs rained around them. How must it have been for them? These ragi were also included as characters in the script trying to conduct their duties amid a battle between the army and Bhindranwale’s men. While mainly performed in English, their kirtan at the beginning and end of the performance, transported us from the urban environs of England to the spiritual location in the heart of Panjab. It was a trans-urbanity enabled by performative journeys, where – going by the audience feedback – people were quite expressively moved emotionally, spatially, and temporally.

While efforts have been made in national histories to erase the memories and consequences of Operation Blue Star, narratives of violence continue to be recounted and emblazoned in the bricks, mortar and marble of the sacred city of Amritsar (Kaur 2024). This includes even the holy book, the Shri Guru Granth Sahib, from Harmandir Sahib that still has a bullet lodged within its 1,430 pages as the building was caught in the crossfire that led to the death of a priest, a ragi and other volunteers who could not abandon their duties, nor the daily recitals and rituals around the Shri Guru Granth Sahib.

The theatre script probed the national script that marginalised ordinary people’s lives and deaths. The work also became a creative way to weave the known and unknown aspects of the way people navigated religion – both in the form of its manipulative pathologisation in politics, and as a resource for spiritual salvation at times of trouble. Even while Harmandir Sahib continues to be the heart of the city’s sacrality, violence is indelibly engrained in the urban fabric, material and immaterial, remembered as well as lost to the ethereal mists of time.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to my interlocutors in Amritsar, the cast, creatives and crew for their work on Iron Aurataan, Bhai Bhupinder Singh Jatha Hazuri Ragi Sri Darbar Sahib, Amritsar, Ranajit Rana, Pinter Studio at QMUL, the JAAG festival team and Arts Council England. Thanks also to Susanne Rau for her comments. Consolidated research in Amritsar began at the Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (Kollegforschungsgruppe) ‘Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations’ (DFG, FOR 2779), 2021-22, and continued with ‘Pilgrimonics: Integrative Analyses of Global Pilgrimage and Circuits of Exchange’ funded by the Leverhulme Trust. Photographs are by Raminder Kaur, except Figure 3, which is from https://www.sikhiwiki.org/index.php/File:Akal-takhat1984.jpg.

References

Behal, Rana. “Religion, Religiosity and the Urban World: Everyday Lives of People in Amritsar City, Punjab, India”. Religion and Urbanity Online, edited by Susanne Rau and Jörg Rüpke. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1515/urbrel.17467644

Chopra, R. (2010). ‘Commemorating Hurt: Memorializing Operation Bluestar’. Sikh Formations, 6(2), 119–152. https://doi.org/10.1080/17448727.2010.530509

Ghosh, A. (1995). ‘The Ghosts of Mrs Gandhi: Amitav Ghosh looks back at the 1984 Massacre of Sikhs’ https://scroll.in/article/906350/the-ghosts-of-mrs-gandhi-amitav-ghosh-looks-back-at-the-1984-massacre-of-sikhs. Accessed 16-08-2024.

Kaur, R. (2017). ‘Skipping Memories on Partition and the Intersensory Field in Subcontinental Britain’. Third Text, 31(2–3)387–418. https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2017.1384596

Kaur, R. (2023) ‘The Global Temple’. Pilgrimonics. https://www.sussex.ac.uk/research/projects/pilgrimonics/sikh-border-crossings/blog/the_global_temple Accessed 02-09-2024.

Kaur, Raminder. (2024) ‘Compound Metamorphoses and the Spirit of the City of Amritsar’. Religion and Urbanity Online, edited by Susanne Rau and Jörg Rüpke. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/urbrel.22664747.

Purewal, N. (2014) ‘The Two Iron Ladies of 1984: Remembering the Postcoloniality of Operation Blue Star Thirty Years On’. Discover Society 9. https://archive.discoversociety.org/2014/06/03/the-two-iron-ladies-of-1984-remembering-the-postcoloniality-of-operation-blue-star-thirty-years-on/ Accessed 02-09-2024.

Siddhu, G.B.S. (2020). The Khalistan Conspiracy: A Former RAW Officer Unravels the Path To 1984. New Delhi: Harper Collins.

Singh, P. (2017). 1984: India’s Guilty Secret. New Delhi: Rupa Publications. 

Talbot, I. (2006). Divided Cities: Partition and its Aftermath in Lahore and Amritsar 1947–1957. New York: Oxford University Press.

Tully, M. and S. Jacob (2006). Amritsar: Mrs Gandhi’s Last Battle. New Delhi: Rupa Publications.

Wagner, K.A. (2019). Amritsar 1919. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Vrishali. (2023). ‘Of Loud Speech and Silences Louder Still’. Pilgrimonics https://www.sussex.ac.uk/research/projects/pilgrimonics/sikh-border-crossings/blog/of_loud_speech_and_silences_louder_still Accessed 02-09-2024.

---

[1] National Human Rights Commission, July 15, 2004, Reference Case No. 1/97/NHRC, The Tribune, https://www.tribuneindia.com/2004/20040730/nhrc1.htm Accessed 2-09-2024.

[2] Iron Aurataan produced by Sohaya Visions https://www.sohayavisions.com/iron-auraatan Accessed 2-09-2024.

---

---