1984: Violation without justice, memory after trauma

This paper responds to Wazir's The Kaurs of 1984, examining gendered dimensions of anti-Sikh violence through oral histories of women survivors. It argues that systematic sexual assault, torture, and forced witnessing endured by Sikh women constitute a crucial yet under-documented facet of the massacres, situated within a continuum of state-sanctioned repression from Partition to the present. Such archival labor counters state denial, challenging the false dichotomy between victimhood and survivorship. Reading these narratives as ‘medicine for a nightmare’, this study considers how collective documentation preserves Sikh history against Hindutva erasure, affirming the value of Sikh life beyond the Indian state's devaluation.