Memories of Subjective and Objective Violence of Amritsar Massacre in Bali Rai’s City of Ghosts1

Abstract

Amritsar is a site of contestation and representation that always cries for a trajectory of resistance and protest against all forms of dehumanization and genocide perpetrated by the regime of terror and enforcement. The ferocious onslaught and assimilationist mentality of the colonizer silenced the colonized into dumb anguish of horror. Applying Žižek’s theory of violence and Nora’s notion of sites of memory, this paper seeks to explore how Bali Rai’s heart-rendering tale City of Ghosts (2009) brings back the memory of black horror and unhealed trauma of soul-sapping scheme of random bloodshed engineered by Dyer and his Co. from the points of view of three young men, Gurdial, Jeevan, and Bissen Singh, through constructing the national memory of Amritsar as a patchwork of fact and fiction. I will also represent how this present fiction uses the ghostly figure of Heera who appears in each man’s narrative to provide an alternative worldview from the perspectives of the marginalised.