India’s amnesia on women survivors of 1984 Sikh riots isn’t natural. It’s a privilege

In 'The Kaurs of 1984', Sanam Sutirath Wazir shares the stories of survival that have been carried quietly for decades by the Sikh community in Delhi and other parts of North India.

Family members of the victims of 1984 anti-Sikh riots celebrate outside the Patiala House Court in New Delhi after the pronouncement of the first death punishment in the case | PTI

A few weeks ago, we silently marked another 31 October, 40 years since organised mobs turned Delhi’s streets into killing fields against the Sikh community. For those who survived the anti-Sikh pogrom of 1984, the date is less an anniversary and more a wound that is scratched annually, and then hurriedly bandaged again. It is a reminder of how decisively the ground beneath your home can shift, how neighbours can turn into vultures, and how a city built on the love, labour, and enterprise of a post-Partition refugee community can firmly turn against them. 

In Delhi’s collective conscience, it’s become almost customary to treat 1984 as a closed chapter, filed away under the sections “healing” and “moving on”. But for any Sikh family that lived through those days, survival taught lessons that no one should have to learn. For those who lost their fathers, brothers, sons to the violence, there has been no moving forward – only the daily recitation of that brutal lesson from October 1984.

I was only a few months old when mobs began to roam the Capital’s streets, armed with lists identifying Sikh houses, too young to remember anything except through stories that were rarely told. For my family, one particular object has come to represent everything about those days: a suitcase. My mother had it ready with two sterilised feeding bottles, a set of clothes, nappies, and an empty section carefully measured to hold two tiny bodies: mine and my cousin’s. She slept in her salwar kameez during those days, eliminating even the few minutes it might take to change if the mob came to our door. 

It was a meticulous escape plan that, mercifully, we never had to execute. The privilege of our address saved us, but thousands of others weren’t so fortunate. That’s the thing about systematic violence – it follows the familiar geography of class and power, choosing its victims with administrative precision. 

Unspoken history

These private choreographies of survival have been carried quietly for decades by the Sikh community in Delhi and other parts of North India. It’s this unspoken history that Sanam Sutirath Wazir attempts to tap into in his remarkable book, The Kaurs of 1984: The Untold, Unheard Stories of Sikh Women, published earlier this year by HarperCollins. During a research project for Amnesty International in 2014, Wazir noticed a void in the official narratives of 1984 – the voices of women who had survived. Through interviews across Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, and Delhi, Wazir pieces together oral histories that had remained buried for 40 years.

This decade-long labour started with the simple act of witnessing. For seven years, Wazir sat with women who survived the carnage and what followed in its wake, until one of them told him, “Hun tu puchh lei jo puchhna ai (Now go ahead and ask whatever you want to)”. The survivors connected Wazir with others like them, and he let them unspool their memories at their own pace, in their own words. What came forth were harrowing testimonies of how a few days of violence can reshape lives in ways that statistics and official reports can never capture. 

From the women of Trilokpuri who witnessed their homes being marked for destruction, to those who saw male members of their families burnt to death in a pattern that repeated across the city, and yet others who were sexually assaulted for days, the book maps a landscape of trauma that extends far beyond the immediate impact of the riots. “Violence always dies down,” Wazir told me. “But what about the loss of childhood? What about the loss of opportunity? Had things gone according to plan, maybe Darshan Kaur (one of the book’s subjects) could have been the Prime Minister. Where are the reparations for that?”

The result is less a conventional historical account and more an archive of aftermath: What happens to a community when the violence ends but justice remains elusive? In the years before former Congress MP Sajjan Kumar was sentenced to life in 2018, for inciting mobs during the 1984 riots, the search for justice had been reduced to a sequence of commissions of inquiry. Meanwhile, the alienation of the community continued in big and small ways. Wazir recounts how young Sikh children were doubly traumatised – first, because they’d lost their family members in the violence, and later, when they would be taunted mercilessly in schools, referred to as “seekh kebab” and “fatherless” children.   

Inheritance of trauma

My own family can recall the depths of this betrayal when our neighbours suggested with chilling casualness that my grandfather sign over the property to them, since death was inevitable for the rest of us. But for me, the most haunting image of that era isn’t even from my own history. It is from an entry in photographer Gauri Gill’s pamphlet ‘1984’, where writer Nilanjana Roy recalls a young girl found in a Trilokpuri house, who stood over a pile of bodies in her own home and pleaded, “Please take me home.” 

This kind of befuddlement must have felt like a repetition for so many people. For India’s Sikh community, 1984 was an illustration of history folding in on itself, recreating patterns of displacement and betrayal that many had witnessed barely four decades prior during the Partition, commonly labelled “ujaada” (devastation). The grammar of violence remained unchanged: the same methodical targeting and the same swift transformation of the familiar into the hostile. In conversations with Wazir, many women revealed how their bodies carried this memory of displacement. One woman told Wazir about her grandmother who, decades after Partition, would religiously make 40-50 rotis every night before going to bed. If they had to run again, at least the family wouldn’t go hungry. These contingency plans became part of the invisible inheritance of being a minority in India.

It’s telling that four decades on, this inheritance of trauma remains largely unacknowledged in our public spaces, institutional memory, and even among the community that has focused on forgetting. “In the subcontinent, we have a shameful history of burying survivors’ voices,” Wazir said.

He spoke about how similar tragedies – like the Holocaust, though separated by time and magnitude – have been preserved through museums, archives, and memorials. Our engagement with 1984, on the other hand, remains tokenistic at best. The museums in Delhi’s Tilak Vihar and Gurudwara Rakab Ganj Sahib were a tentative first step, but it raises more questions than it answers. Where are the artefacts that tell these stories? Where is the material evidence of what happened? 

Perhaps that’s why Wazir’s book feels so vital. In a country where forgetting is prescribed as a cure for trauma, remembering becomes an act of resistance. The Kaurs of 1984 didn’t just lose people and possessions during the second “ujaada” – they continued to lose in the years of silence that followed. Their stories remind us that a country’s amnesia isn’t natural. It’s a privilege reserved for those who never had to learn the art of survival.

Karanjeet Kaur is a journalist, former editor of Arré, and a partner at TWO Design. She tweets @Kaju_Katri. Views are personal.

(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)