ABSTRACT
In Manoj Punj’s 2004 Punjabi film Des Hoyaa Prades, set in Punjab in the aftermath of the brutal retaliation against the Sikhs by the Indian Government following Gandhi’s assassination, I examine issues of violence, trauma, and dislocation due to land dispossession for the Sikh community in India and the diaspora. Few fictional texts deal with the 1984 terror and its aftermath of violence that Sikhs faced, but Punj tackles the issue of violence and displacement endured by the Sikhs head on. Punj was acutely aware of the paucity of regional Punjabi films and decided to make a film in the Punjabi language. The traumas of colonialism, the Partition of India, the 1984 Massacre, and the aftermath through state violence are represented in the displacement of Gurshan Singh Soman from Punjab to North America in 1987. Gurshan is represented as a Jat, a farmer, who engraves meaning on the body of his motherland, the land of Punjab, through agricultural endeavors. Land became an important marker of belonging during colonialism, and in the postcolonial nation, it signifies affiliation to the nation and to the community. To most rural Sikhs, belonging to a piece of land became a matter of survival.
