Placating a pogrom

My novel explores how a society riven by a seemingly-unending spiral of violence, needs to open up to the stories of its survivors and fold them into its national and social history, Manpreet Sodhi Someshwar tells Sheila Kumar

Manreet Sodhi Someshwar’s The Radiance of a Thousand Suns revisits the atrocities faced by the Sikh community, both at the time of Partition as well as during the 1984 violence. Manreet talks to Sheila Kumar about the book.

Give us the backstory on this book. Was this something that you always wanted to write about or a sudden decision?

Radiance… was something that stayed in my head for 20 long years. A desire to understand and explore the pogrom of 1984 was my entry into writing. However, I felt I had not been able to do justice to it in The Long Walk Home, which is the first fictional examination of the turbulent 20th century history of Punjab.

In hindsight, I realise I wasn’t skilled enough yet to write the book that is now The Radiance of a Thousand Suns.

In 1947, when women’s bodies became the battlefield, did that template of sexual violence derive from our foundational epic? Does the fact that women bore the brunt of that violence echo in this time of #metoo?

The power of the story lies in the hands of the storyteller. As women, we must dig them out, dust them off, dress them up, imagine them, grow them, tell them… our stories.

As a Sikhni, do you feel you have the necessary distance that writing about one`s own history calls for? And having written the book, is there a sense of catharsis now?

Writing is a complex dance between intimacy and distance. Which is why so many talk about the process like it were an act of birthing. But once the child is in the world, you have to discipline and mould this being.

If Radiance… works, then I guess I have managed that perfect balance. I think I have a few more books to write, in order to exorcise the demon completely.

There is nothing clinical about the telling of this tale. Is that deliberate or purely involuntary?

In India, the past is forever intruding upon the present. And yet, it is a syncopated vision of the past where the male narrative of nation-building is what is celebrated on every anniversary of India’s independence.

The female narratives of pain, humiliation and extraordinary courage have been submerged as if they never occurred.

My novel explores how a society riven by a seemingly-unending spiral of violence, needs to open up to the stories of its survivors and fold them into its national and social history.

With this book, you’ve assertively entered the political fiction arena. Hence this question: simply put, what will it take to achieve closure on the atrocities let loose on the Sikh community in 1984?

All writing is political. Kafka’s dictum — A book must be the axe for the
frozen sea within us — informs my impulse to take pen to paper. This year marks the 35th anniversary of the anti-Sikh violence.

Four commissions, nine committees and two special investigation teams later, there have been only two milestone convictions.

Women who lost male members of their families live in cramped conditions in west Delhi in what is called “Widow’s Colony”.

Most of the survivors are yet to receive any semblance of justice. We must
ask ourselves: Why were people so
ready to believe the worst of their neighbours?

In The Intimate Enemy, psychologist and social scientist Ashis Nandy suggests that in close communities, people will latch on to minor differences to feel distinct and superior to others when, paradoxically, the “other” is more similar to their own selves.