Mallika Kaur - Faith, Gender, and Activism in the Punjab Conflict

Cover illustration: Bilas Design

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The Wheatfields Still Whisper and the voices of the murdered, the tortured, the imprisoned, the dispossessed, the resisting, the expelled, and the returned still speak in this compelling volume. For the Sikh population of northern Indias Punjab region, the centurys arc from the late colonial to the current regime was and to some extent remains a journey across a battleground from which no village, no familyno man, woman, or childcould escape or leave unscathed.

Mallika Kaur harvests these voices with respect and empathy, with love and care, and also with a historically reflective eye that clearly sees the complex realities and wave patterns of that turbulent century.

Brilliantly and succinctly, she overlays the voices of this land with a sympathetic yet balanced account of its history. Different epochs rise and recede within that long historythe shared Indian drive toward decolonization in the first decades of the twentieth century; the uniquely horrific impact on the Punjab of the shameful British abandonment of the subcontinent to partition ; the early Nehru years and their vacillation toward the Sikh homelands; the disastrous consequences of Indira Gandhis partisan actions, leading to a regime that often resembled a ferocious military occupationleading in turn to sporadic armed resistance with the inevitable consequence of yet harsher military and police treatment; and in the most recent decades the resurgent Hindu nationalism that leaves little breathing space for difference and dissent.

But endemic violence not only disrupts; over time it also constructs lives, communities, places, political affiliations, andperhaps above allgendered categories and identities. With impressive sensitivity, Kaur brings to vivid life the ways in which normative ideas of masculinity and heterosexuality are disseminated amid a pervasive context of militarism. Yet, the identity and capabilities of the victims (and not only the female victims) often is strengthened and their voice and agency created and maintained over generations. And again, Kaur does not tell the reader of these tragedies and survivals; she presents these histories through the peoples own narratives.

Kaurs recount of that history is rigorously underpinned by her primary sources, many from the dominant Indian official and media documents. It successfully exemplifies the hybrid approach of personal narrative and scholarly analysis. Thiswhen well done, as herein turn extends the stylistic scope of traditional oral history projects, framing the voices within the larger social history while in turn framing that history through the voiced lives of its subjects.

Kaur successfully engages interlocutors who had not spoken about their experiences in such personal terms before. The lessons/strategies/principles highlighted in each chapter work toward a prescription of bringing human rights home, and respond to relevant discussions in the world of transitional justice and international human rights advocacy. This is highly relevant to India today, where access to human rights defenders is increasingly curtailed, and is a lesson for future work in increasingly unstable countries and regions.