‘The Kaurs of 1984’: A critical book of testimonies of women who bore witness to anti-Sikh violence

Women are no strangers to cruelty, brutality, and injustice in a patriarchal society that thrives on power structures, a place where almost inevitably, violence becomes a gendered space. Centuries of women have been silenced and their cries muzzled against voicing the atrocities meted out to them. This is exactly what makes The Kaurs of 1984: The Untold, Unheard Stories of Sikh Women by Sanam Sutirath Wazir, a watershed moment in accounting for these near-lost voices. The author, as part of his rigorous research, documents an in-depth, heart-wrenching account of the suffering of those who bear witness to brutal violence in the wake of the anti-Sikh 1984 riots in the capital. With this book, for the first time, the voices and memories of Sikh women have been used to reconstruct – openly and in graphic, often horrifying, detail – not just the Sikh massacre but also the turbulent politics of the period and the hellish limbo that came in the aftermath of the violence.

A bloody history

The year 1984 has become etched in the collective social memory of not only the Sikhs but also of citizen groups. This record of marginalised women’s voices that stemmed from the author’s report for Amnesty International charts all the notes...

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