Musical Recall: Postmemory and the Punjabi Diaspora

Abstract

The Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 has profoundly altered the geopolitics and demography of South Asia, generating also large-scale diasporic movements to Britain from the regions most deeply affected thereby, such as the Punjab. Deploying paradigms from Holocaust studies, the author connects diaspora with trauma to analyze the memory-work inscribed within contemporary music produced and enjoyed by British Punjabis in Britain. Arguing that such music expresses a 'neo-ethnic' Punjabi 'postmemory' that recalls pre-Partition Punjab, the author suggests that such 'musical recall' has a redemptive and commemorative potential inherent in its ability to bypass narratives of violence and nationalism, and articulate instead post- and transnational modes of identity formation and cultural belonging. ********** In British author Meera Syal's autobiographical novel Anita and Me, the narrative of a Punjabi girl growing up in an English village is interrupted at one point by memories of the Partition of India. One evening, the protagonist, Meena, overhears a musical soiree arranged by her parents and their friends turning into a heated emotional discussion: It was my Uncle Bhatnagar shouting.... "But it was a damn massacre!" he was spluttering, and then he talked in Punjabi of which I recognised a few words, "Family ... money ... death" and then, "They talk about their world wars ... We lost a million people! And who thought up Partition? These 'gores' [white people], that's who!" Then everyone launched in, the whispers squeezed through the gap in the door and I could make out familiar voices saying such terrible and alien things. "My mother and I, the Hindus marched us through the streets ... our heads uncovered ..." That must have been Auntie Mumtaz, one of our few Muslim friends. "They wanted to do such things to us ..." ... there was a long pause, I thought I heard someone sniff. "All the time we were walking, mama and I, papa was lying dead, his head cut from his body. They found it later lying in the fallen jasmine blooms ..." "We all have these stories, bhainji [sister]," Uncle Bhatnagar again, addressing her as sister. "What was happening to you was also happening to us. None of us could stop it, Mad people everywhere." There was a murmur of consensus, subdued, fearful maybe because of all the old wounds being reopened. "We were on the wrong side of the border also when the news came, none of us knew until that moment if we would be going or staying. My whole family, we walked from Syalcote across the border ... We maybe passed your family going the other way. The bodies piled high ... the trains pulling into stations full of dead families.... Hai Ram. What we have seen...." (Syal 73) Sisters lost to mobs, Sikhs shearing their uncut hair in trains, men's heads chopped off as yanked-down trousers yielded evidence of circumcision--overhearing these stories, Meena realises that the past for her parents was no sentimental journey, but "a murky bottomless pool full of monsters ... a deceptively still surface and a deadly undercurrent" (Syal 75). Two levels of memorial recall operate here: the elders remembering what had happened, and the adult author remembering them remembering. This memory of a memory lurks darkly beneath the comedic vision of a diasporic subjectivity developing out of the two strands of Meena's childhood: life outside the home, where she roams Tollington with her white friends, and life inside the home, site of a domestic and hospitable Punjabi culture. How do we explain this undigested fragment, extraneous to the narrative task of reconciling these strands? Holocaust scholar Marianne Hirsch's concept of "postmemory" provides a clue: postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are displaced by the stories of the previous generation, shaped by traumatic events that they can neither understand nor create . …