Metro Newspaper Reviews Book On Sikh Genocide - National Coverage

[lsingh]

Jaspreet Singh’s novel Helium confronts memories of the 1984 pogrom against the Sikhs.

http://metro.co.uk/2013/11/26/jaspreet-singhs-harrowing-novel-of-genocide-in-the-wake-of-indira-gandhis-assassination-4201439/

In November 1984, after Indira Gandhi’s assassination, politicians of India’s Congress party directed mobs to burn alive as many Sikhs as possible. Members of parliament and cabinet ministers distributed kerosene oil and white phosphorous. Witnesses talked about the use of rubber tyres to trap the target, create thick clouds of toxins and facilitate combustion.

I was a teenager in Delhi. A mob passed our block, attacking Sikhs on the street. We hid in a neighbour’s house. The few hours we were there fill a huge space in my mind. I’ve not been able to articulate those few hours, the burned remains of the books and buildings I saw later and the tiny particles of ash floating in the air. For years I tried hard to forget those moments.

Raj, the narrator of Helium, faces a huge predicament. His own father, a senior police officer, facilitated the violence in November 1984. The police were under direct control of the government. Under the watchful eyes of the cops, a mob directed by senior Congress party leaders burned alive Raj’s beloved professor. Later, Raj asks a question, which may be significant to younger generations in India: How do sons and daughters deal with the crimes of their fathers?

I wrote my first story, Arjun, in 2000. I had flown to San Francisco for a conference but skipped most of it and finished the first draft in 14 straight hours. Arjun is told from the point of view of a Sikh boy travelling with his mother and grandfather on the day of Indira Gandhi’s assassination.

My plan was to allow Arjun to grow into a novel but when I picked it up, I felt a narrative crisis. Most known models were inadequate to narrate November 1984. I had to figure out a new way to write. Helium was a resolution of a creative crisis.

In 2008, after finishing my first novel, I was invited to Delhi to work with HIV-positive orphans. They wanted ghost stories. After storytelling, I took long walks through the city and it was then the ghosts of 1984 returned. As I processed those Delhi experiences, walking with the ghosts, I started writing.

Helium has a hybrid form to better access the pogroms of November 1984 and the years that followed. It let me reveal traces of the horrific. To do it otherwise – as in a human rights’ report – is a paralysing affair and affects our capacity as humans to engage fully with the crime of crimes.

Helium’s hybrid form allowed me to pose questions such as: ‘What happened?’ and ‘What could have happened?’ It also allowed me to create distance. Despite all this, it was not easy to write. Helium involved a lot of research and is informed by survivor and relief-worker testimonials and is based on oral histories and private archives. These are stories of complicated grief and collective trauma. Unfinished mourning. Not just memory but post-memory and the transmission of trauma. It was not easy. Several times I tried to abandon the project.

Helium (Publisher:Bloomsbury) is out now by Jaspreet Singh

Books

[S4NGH]

NO WAY! in the metro?! yay metro

[S4NGH]

brits grab your copy from:

http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/products/jaspreet+singh/helium/9390206/

[lsingh]

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/book-review-helium-by-jaspreet-singh-8904540.html

ind

Book Review: Helium, By Jaspreet Singh

Leyla Sanai

Sunday, 27 October 2013

The year 1984 was catastrophic for India’s Sikhs. On 6 June, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered her troops to fire on the Golden Temple, killing thousands. On 1 November, the day after Gandhi was assassinated by two of her Sikh bodyguards, a pogrom of the country’s Sikhs occurred during which up to 8,000 people died.

The government and police force were believed complicit in these crimes, a view echoed in 2011’s WikiLeaks, which showed the US administration also believed this to have been the case.

In his second novel, the multiple award-winning writer Jaspreet Singh investigates this massacre. Raj is a chemical engineering professor at Cornell University who gained his first degree in Delhi. He remembers as a 19-year-old student watching his beloved professor being incinerated.

Twenty-five years later he returns to India to seek out his late professor’s widow and find out more about what happened. In the process he will need to examine his feelings about his father, a retired police chief, who may have been involved in the attacks.

Singh tackles an important and relatively neglected aspect of history, the story taking in not just the anti-Sikh pogroms but also 2002’s anti-Muslim ones. Other themes tackled include the continued existence of dalits (untouchables) in India’s unjust caste system.

Raj is not an easy first-person narrator to follow: his testimony drifts and obfuscates like Himalayan mists. These digressions of his may be partly related to his identity as a somewhat paranoid man prone to mistakes, but more lucidity would have been preferable to the endless meandering of his thoughts.

Still, Singh’s prose is capable of moments of great power: “ ... dozens of Sikh bodies on fire. Smell of burning wool and rubber tyres and human flesh ... the black cloud of smoke touched the sky ... This was our Periodic Table of hate.”

The mention of the Periodic Table is no accident. Primo Levi’s classic of that title is foremost in Raj’s mind; the dark irony of a survivor of the massacres eventually being destroyed by them is nonetheless never far beneath the surface.

In one particularly chilling part, a politician offers the Congress Party immunity from investigation for the 1984 anti-Sikh pogroms. The condition is that he in turn must promise not to delve into the 2002 anti-Muslim pogroms by the Hindu party. This is a thought-provoking, if wandering, tale.