ABSTRACT
I examine the representations of trauma and memory in Amitoj Mann’s 2003 Hindi film Hawayein. The representation of trauma and cultural memory is an endeavor by artists occurring in the present, but their past is simultaneously being re-inscribed even as the future is being reshaped. Mann represents the 1984 Massacre through a gendered heteropatriarchal discourse where he attempts to narrate the past in order to rewrite the Sikhs’ future in India. I argue that the film does not lead to social forgetting, reintegration, or cultural healing for the traumatized Sikh subjects, male and particularly female, due to the fragmentary narrative and due to the repetition compulsion of the screenwriter, director, and producer. The narrative resurfaces as a symptom of Sikh trauma. In an interview, Mann confessed that he cried at least 25 times during the writing of the screenplay, as he felt the pain that the brutalized Sikhs felt—the violence of 1984. One of the reasons there are so few films about the 1984 Massacre, he says, is that people are afraid to tell the stories. His film was banned in the Punjab and in Delhi.
