Every year, come Baisakhi, 13 April, Amritsar witnesses activity, both public and academic, around commemorating the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh. This year, one commemoration was in Delhi, where the book at the centre was by a well-known Bengali public historian, better known for her work on gender in Bengal. This is not as unusual as it seems. The crossings between Bengal and Punjab are frequent and diverse. The book is one such crossing. Rabindranath Tagore’s association with Punjab is another crossing. Tagore is an axis along which this book is aligned. This is not the well-known fact of his renouncing his knighthood in protest at the gruesome massacre. The author draws attention to Tagore’s critique of the usual kind of memorialization. This ties in with her own critique of recent memorialization at the Bagh site. She finds the recently renovated memorial woefully sanitized of the rawness of the horror enacted at the site.
Given that the authorial technique involves moving back and forth between the past and the present, it would be appropriate to share other perceptions of the remodelled memorial at the Bagh. One is by this reviewer, who visited the site in 2021 when thousands of villagers were in town in double-decker trolleys for a mela. One of the stops before the Swarn Mandir (Golden Temple) was the Bagh. But where was the Bagh I saw as a child? In its place was a shiny new memorial with museums cooled by Chinese air conditioners. The entry has been widened, and the walls of the entry passage are adorned with murals. An exit is provided, possibly to aid tourists. But wasn’t the defining feature of the massacre at the Bagh the absence of an exit? I recall as a child feeling the narrowness of the entry tensely and envisaging the scene in 1919 when the crowd was trying to flee, finding the only exit blocked by the firing soldiers, women and children jumping into the well, and others trying to scale the high walls.
To go back to the book, how does one describe it? The title ‘Jallianwala Bagh Journals’ indicates the format: entries in a journal. However, the entries are accompanied by detailed annotations and academic-style references for the academically inclined reader. This reviewer found it rewarding to read the book by opening it wherever it took one’s fancy. This was possible because the book was not intended to be a conventional history. Dutta Gupta is a student of literature, for one. However, she has written many works of what can be called interdisciplinary history. She evocatively describes her work as a quilted narrative in which poetry, music, cinema, art and public history are stitched together.
At the centre of the work stands the multifaceted author, beginning as a ten-year-old with her family and going on to be a sensitive scholar, a pioneering public historian, and a disappointed witness to the sanitized memorialization of the site by the government. Further disappointed by the absence of women in the memorialization of the site and the historical record. Dutta Gupta gives us a nugget of a story: Ratan Devi, who is there in popular memory of the day of the massacre, sitting up the entire night in the darkness that descended after the horror. Dutta Gupta finds a board declaring the lane named after her. But like her story, the name has been partly erased. This is one of many erasures which make up the history of Jallianwala Bagh. As a historian, one cannot help but note that if the historical record is made up of markings, it is equally made up of erasures.
There is a sense in which the book exemplifies the above description of history as a continuous process of inscribing and erasing. If the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919 inscribed the Punjab and its people in the mainstream of the freedom struggle, the Partition of the country in 1947 erased the possibility of a shared history of the massacre, subscribed to on both sides of the border in Punjab. In another sense, the memory of 1919 gets aligned with another memory, of a Bagh in another locale, a site of popular protest and resistance, Shaheen Bagh in New Delhi in 2019-2020, against the Citizenship Amendment Act. Last but not the least, the author draws on the history of the Farmers’ Movement in 2020, characterized by stoic courage in the face of the state’s callous neglect of their issues.
In a different sense, the nationwide pandemic in 2020-2021 put paid to the public history project of a multidisciplinary installation on the theme of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre at the Victoria Memorial Hall in Kolkata. The author collaborated with artists from Santiniketan and Kolkata to set up an installation that was extremely innovative in its experimentation with various media. Kantha weavers from Birbhum had stitched the names of the 379 people who lost their lives in the firing onto a scroll. The author pointed out that this brought the site’s history and the massacre directly face-to-face with those walking through the gallery, the scroll obviating the need to pore over tomes of historical records. However, the pandemic and the lockdown brought this experiment in public history to an end.
The author describes her work as gleaning; as picking up the ashes. This characterizes her work and its method as outside the usual domain of the professional academic historian and his attention to the dominant historical record. However, it is this very gleaning which makes her work of immense value to the historian. She traverses the bylanes, meets people hanging around, finds snatches of poems, and records them in her book, along with illustrations by artists from Kolkata, creating a world of crossings.
Perhaps the most moving episode in the book is the author’s interview with Professor VN Datta, the well-known historian of Punjab and the massacre, who grew up in a lane not far away from the Bagh. The interview was in New Delhi, and Datta was ailing. Yet he spoke to her as he was strongly associated with Amritsar. His daughter, Nonica, continued the scholarly association with Punjab. The author left the house, overwhelmed by the famed Punjabi hospitality.
Let me end with a couple of lines from his father, Brahm Nath Datta Qasir, about the change that the massacre brought about among the people of Punjab:
Ab to hai apne sud-o-zyan par nazar mujhe
Woh din gaye jab lab pe mere ‘ji huzur’ tha
We can now tell what’s good from the bad.
We are no longer yes men.
Sucheta Mahajan is former Professor, Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.