BackPhoto Essay | Living history
A powerful series of photographs by Gauri Gill revisits the Sikh pogrom of 1984 and its aftermath
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In 2005, after the release of the Justice Nanavati Commision report on the tragedy of November 1984, photographer Gauri Gill started documenting the stories of the families that were affected. She visited areas like Trilokpuri, Tilak Vihar and Garhi in Delhi in 2009, heard the stories of the survivors, and took photographs of the protest rallies to mark the 25th anniversary of the pogrom. The original body of her work, 1984, appeared in Tehelka (with text by Hartosh Singh Bal) and in Outlook (with text by Shreevatsa Nevatia).
Gill is presenting the work now as a booklet at INSERT2014, an arts project conceptualized by the Raqs Media Collective. “To trigger a conversation about 1984, in early 2013 I asked some artist friends, who had lived in Delhi in November 1984, or have since or prior, or who see themselves as somehow part of this city, to write a comment alongside each photograph," writes Gill in a note on the work. Some of the responses came from Anusha Rizvi (see poem below), Meenal Baghel, Sarnath Banerjee, Rana Dasgupta, Anita Dube, Mahmood Farooqui, Ruchir Joshi, Saleem Kidwai, Pradip Krishen, Vivek Narayanan, Monica Narula, Nilanjana Roy, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Jaspreet Singh and Paromita Vohra.
INSERT2014 opened on Friday at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, New Delhi. Click here for details.
I remember it started in the afternoon.
There was a phone call, on the 1st of November.
My mother called to say that rioting had begun in central Delhi.
My father and I went to fetch her.
The road that seemed deserted had many men on it.
The Gurudwara was being set on fire.
There was a mob of men around it.
They were screaming at each other.
Some wore shiny watches on their wrists.
Some wore running shoes.
Some people had oil in their hair.
Their eyes were red.
It was also very dusty I remember.
But we weren’t there for too long.
Abbu took me back home and left again, alone this time.
His eyes were also red.
I ran up to the terrace and clicked pictures of the smoke now visible from our
house. They were for my school project on pollution.
I remember pretending to be asleep when my mother told my grandmother
about him.
She saw him being set on fire.
He had a white, flowing beard.
He ran towards a bus.
The drive couldn’t slow down.
They caught him.
They put a tyre around him and then petrol and then set him on fire.
Later I dreamt about him.
Some other women had come home with my mother that night.
Their families were in Bhogal.
They couldn’t reach each other.
They were always praying.
The road was matted with hair.
Hair was everywhere.
There was hair in food sometimes.
But the patka marks didn’t go away.
There was a solution, which could wipe the marks immediately.
No, the only thing that helped was foundation.
The barber down the road claimed to know a technique,
but he charged extra.
Rioting began in Bhogal.
There was a phone call.
The husband had called to say goodbye.
His building was on fire.
The wife collapsed.
Older women surrounded her.
Good news a few hours later.
There was retaliation and the mob dispersed.
I remember men patrolling the streets.
There was a man on a bike, who drove past screaming.
They are coming for the Muslims now.
We were pushed under the mattresses.
It was very hot.
I remember the tanks.
I learnt a new word, Flagmarch.
One of the tanks opened and a steel head popped out.
I was seven years old.
I was in Delhi in 1984.
— Anusha Rizvi
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