Mapping Memory and Trauma in South Asia’s Civil Strife

Our investment in thinking about memory and trauma in Asia throughout this volume emerges from our own previous work in South Asian studies. The trauma in South Asia resonates with us through several intersecting matrices: religion, ethnicity, language, class, caste, gender, sexuality, regionalism, among others. We here recognize one of the bloodiest moments of collective trauma in South Asia’s history: the Partition of India sparked by the British Raj’s hasty exit from the subcontinent in August 1947 (which led to the 1971 creation of Bangladesh following a woeful civil war with Pakistan and ongoing conflict in Kashmir). The Partition resulted in the largest migration of human populations in history with up to two million people murdered (Talbot and Singh 2009, 2) in the bloodbath that hemorrhaged from conflict between the independent Republic of India and the Dominion of Pakistan. As Partition is still ongoing, mired in what Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar has dubbed “the long partition” that unsettles national closure (Zaminder 2010, 7), it is as if the traumatic memories rife throughout South Asia can never be laid to rest.

Indeed, it appears that this trauma will be perpetually handed down through generations of South Asians, even through the oral recounting of elders to their younger progeny. This is perhaps why Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak insists that we must consciously break from “the past into the present as it necessarily bears on the future” (Spivak 1999, 206), by which she means that we must face traumatic pasts for ourselves in order to psychically break the power they hold over us. We believe that this process of conscious breaking from painful pasts of partition, pogroms, ethnic cleansings, sexual violence, civil war, etc. can be facilitated by radically inclusive developments in West-centric memory and trauma studies as they recalibrate their compasses to face Asia. Seminal 21st-century partition texts include Debali Mookerjea-Leonard’s Literature, Gender, and the Trauma of Partition: The Paradox of Independence (2017), Baskar Sarkar’s Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition (2009), States of Trauma: Gender and Violence in South Asia edited by Piya Chatterjee, Manali Desai, and Parama Roy (2009), and Yasmin Khan’s The Great Partition (2008).

To this end, we round out this section by elucidating our personal and sociopolitical stakes in the present volume by acknowledging our own work in the context of trauma and memory in relation to South Asia, namely at the interface of state-sponsored genocide, inter-ethno-religious conflict, and gendered violence. Sharanya Jayawickrama’s work on trauma and identity in Sri Lanka comprises some of the most cogent scholarly meditations on how and why the postcolonial aftermath of the war-torn island warrants inclusion in this essay. She elegantly writes,

One of the most compelling trajectories in recent scholarship on twentieth-and twenty-first-century literature can be charted at the intersection between postcolonial and trauma studies, in the conceptualization of colonialism as trauma and in the investigation of colonialism’s traumatic recurrence in postcolonial legacies of race, gender, class, and identity

(Jayawickrama 2013, 105).

For her, the trauma of British colonialism and the aftermath of empire are historically constitutive of today’s crises around race, class, gender, and identity in relation to the nation-state in the era of COVID-19.

Jayawickrama’s incisive observation throws into question the very notion of memory’ as it blurs chronological linearity' between the past, on the one hand, and the present on the other. It de-normalizes the very' meaning of memory' by' demonstrating that our memories are often mediated, even formed, by' the nation-state rather than we as individual, sentient subjects. In articulating why' this project is crucial for meaningfully expanding the gamut of trauma studies in her reading of Shobasakthi’s novel Gorilla (2013), she continues by underscoring the ethical implications of Sri Lanka’s violent history:

Such work seeks to not only broaden the scope of contemporary trauma studies, which has tended to focus on predominantly Western voices, experiences, and texts, but also to consider whether existing concepts of trauma are useful for understanding history, society, identity, and representation in the postcolonial world...The reiteration of colonial trauma is borne out to particular effect in postcolonial conflict zones where the structural violence of the postcolonial nation-state marks the formation and expression of experience and subjectivity and is manifested in intense and protracted social and political violence. In the Sri Lankan context, while widespread violence erupted after decolonization, the civil war has significant roots in colonial practices that shaped the reification of ethnic identities, including the linking of race and class to political representation and the politicization of language and religion

(Jayawickrama 2013, 105-107)

This observation raises the stakes for a non-West-centric formulation of trauma studies given that civil war, ethnic conflict, genocide, and unresolved borders are unfortunate trademarks of postcolonial nation-states. Domestic violence, rooted in gender transgression and queer sexuality, follows state sanctioned violence, which facilitates the Sri Lankan Tamil woman poet to reclaim “spaces, rituals, rites” that have been denied to her in response to civil war (Jayawickrama 2010, 168). For example, in analyzing Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy, Jayawickrama carefully surveys the intersection of national identity, exclusion from the home/ land and queer adolescence. In doing so, she refuses to unlink the traumatic experiences of “coming out” in Selvadurai’s freshman novel while recognizing intergenerational bullying as a cruel trigger of trauma for the novel’s adolescent protagonist, Arjie.

Jayawickrama critically observes in the queer novel’s geopolitical context of war-torn, 1980s Sri Lanka,

Through the child’s perspective, notions of belonging and the experience of relationships of friendship and love become situated in the rapidly changing and increasingly violent space of communal and national history. The violence of everyday living under the powerful discourses that regulate both gender and ethnic norms initiates the careful negotiation of identity and the need for a new strategy of language

(Jayawickrama 2005, 124).

In drawing upon and extending Jayawickrama’s “need for a new strategy of language,” Rahul K. Gairola observes that this new language erupts through queer erotics that take place in the institutional space of the schoolhouse while narratively taking place in the final chapter of the novel (Gairola 2014,478). Both sites, the geographical and the literary, are vital to formations of a new identity lexicon for they occur against the backdrop of Arjie’s family’s escape from Sri Lanka to Canada as the violent Sinhalese persecution of Tamils in Colombo escalates. That is, the terrified family’s flight from the anti-Tamil pogrom in Colombo to a new home in Toronto conjures transnational trauma rooted in “being Asian.” The transnational trauma of Asian diasporas has been a focus of Gairola’s research as it complicates Vijay Mishra’s astute contention that “the history of diaspora is a history of trauma. ..the history of diaspora is both a history’ of forgetting and the experience of that forgetting” (2007, 114).

Gairola theorizes healing of queer diasporic trauma through the lens of “home” in Homelandings: Postcolonial Diasporas and Transatlantic Belonging, in which he writes,

“Homelanding” is an active process of culturally resisting and reappropriating exclusive domestic sites that consolidate essentialist social articulations of the homeland. The traditional “home” is thus doubly queered: On the one hand, hegemonic constructions of it are met with resistance; on the other hand, these practices produce new “homes” within which alternative modes of community and belonging flourish and reproduce

(2016a, 17).

As such, Gairola expands notions of Asian diasporic trauma by examining the counterpoints of resistance that they generate through what Meena Alexander calls “the shock of arrival” (1996, 152) to the West. Finally, Gairola examines how digital advertising that manipulates Partition trauma demonstrates that “the barriers removed between people are merely barriers removed between markets [... ] under the ruse of communal harmony now a quick fix for the pain of the past” (Gairola 2016b, 57).

In critically meditating on unsettled borders and border conflicts across South Asia, we would moreover recognize the terrible natural disasters that have painfully impacted the lives of hundreds of thousands of people working and residing in this part of Asia. These include the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami that devastated coastal enclaves in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, and Thailand. Following this, Cyclone Sidr devastated Bangladesh in 2007, followed by the 2011 earthquake in Sikkim, India. In April and May 2015, intense earthquakes demolished parts of Kathmandu and lefts hundreds of thousands of people homeless. More recently, horrific devastation was wrought upon Bangladesh and eastern India by Cyclone Amphan in May 2020. In all of these natural catastrophes that devastated South Asia, empathy, humanity, and financial assistance has arguably been less outpouring than when similar natural disasters afflicted Western nations. Perhaps this is just a coincidence. But the historical patterns of the withdrawal of empathy mapped onto the historical patterns of racialization, domination, colonialist expropriation, and capitalist cruelty testify to a different picture of what the reasons may be.

The compass needle of history ostensibly indicts, rather, the very histories of dehumanization that enable and facilitate cruelties underwritten by silenced discourses of white supremacy and resource extraction. While the essays in our volume attest to the valuable widening of the scope of trauma studies, they counter the weakening of its significance as an analytical category by engaging with fundamental questions: is trauma a concept that can be translated across cultures? Can it have global applicability and utility for literary and cultural analysis? Do the approaches and perspectives generated by literary and cultural work hold purchase for social and political interventions? These questions are merely interrogative prompts that we hope and expect will galvanize new queries - even those that question this and the other essays in the volume. While such questions weave in and out of this volume, we have organized the volume into three key parts that emerge across varying literary, cultural, and geopolitical Asian contexts.

The first is our opening essay, which offers a timely, comparative view of trauma studies and work in Asian studies by superimposing one upon the other. Part I examines the interplay between memory and testimony' as a means of experiencing trauma. We believe that this is crucial since trauma transcends time; indeed, memory' is an intermittent function of time that always erupts into the present and thus secures trauma as a current event that circulates throughout the heart and mind. Part II focuses on trauma that emerges from memory' and history' through material cultural practices. We have consciously organized the volume around timely themes rather than countries for we wanted to avoid defaulting to the tokenizing logic of the nation-state whereby each chapter represents a different country'; for us, memory' and trauma transcend time and space. This is not to suggest that these topics are exhaustive or representative, but rather that we have invested significant intellectual, emotional, and psychological energy into these critical inquiries.