Preetika Nanda

During the insurgency in Punjab (1980-1995) more than 25,000 Sikhs were disappeared or extrajudicially executed and their bodies were secretly cremated by the Indian counterinsurgency apparatus. This mass phenomenon disordered the traditional funeral sociality of the Sikh community, leaving an enduring traumatic effect on Sikh body-politic. This project seeks to understand the ongoing unofficial forensic practices led by the Punjabi Sikh community in India to restore the disappeared/extrajudicially executed members to the family and community. It will examine their use of embodied knowledge, court battles, counter-archival documentation efforts and reliance on Sikh religious ethos to foreground forms of memory keeping and political mobilisation which resist and refuse spatio-corporeal-temporal state violence. The project will therefore illuminate persistent logics of coloniality of power embedded in governance practices in India. Crucially, it will also demonstrate how minoritised communities build infrastructures of care which sustains them during and after heightened state repression.