Speak Memory

This chapter asserts the vital importance of memory narratives, if such blunders of modern Indian history as Indira Gandhi’s Emergency of 1975-77 and the anti-Sikh pogrom of 1984―both under-narrated compared to the atrocities of the colonial period or of Partition―are not to be forgotten and then perhaps repeated in the future. It focuses on two novels, Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance and K. R. Meera’s The Gospel of Yudas, and a film, Sashi Kumar’s Kaya Taran, based on a story by N. S. Madhavan, to illustrate the point that we all live in memory, and that the best books are memory-driven: without memory there is no history, because memory is the bridge linking the past with the present and future.