Confronting Epistemic Violence: The Kaurs' Resistance Against 1984

This research investigates the epistemic erasure of Kaur’s (Sikh women) experiences of the Delhi Ghallughara in 1984, a state-enabled massacre of Sikhs in postcolonial India. Employing abductive analysis, three datasets were analysed: documentaries providing oral accounts of survivors and witnesses, archives of newspaper excerpts, and legal reports. Adopting the lens of Southern decolonial feminist framework rooted in Sikh epistemologies, Qualitative Content Analysis (QCA) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) were implemented to explore: (1) the communal and gendered dimensions of 1984; (2) state-enabled structural silencing (3) how narratives have been re-narrated, through memory and epistemic erasure. Findings reveal that the Kaurs were not simply passive victims of communal violence, due to their gendered vulnerabilities, but they navigated immense violence with resistance and strategic silence. However, their testimonies remain underrepresented in newspapers, legal reports, and scholarly work. This paper argues that such erasure is not incidental, but rather systemically reinforced by cultural and patriarchal norms that intersect with political and institutional hierarchies. By centring the voices of Kaurs of 1984 and representing their stories, this study challenges dominant modes of knowledge production and calls for feminist reparative justice by legitimising their epistemologies and challenging systems that continue to silence them.