At the annual conference, 'On History and Literature' held in Calcutta in 2025 Sarmistha Dutta Gupta delivered a talk drawing on her book The Jallianwala Bagh Journals which revolves around Jallianwala Bagh and the politics of memory. She made a multi-media presentation on recovering local histories and diverse narratives, especially family and community memories of people of Punjab, which have been mostly rendered invisible in statist histories of the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre. Using poems, letters, songs and interviews, Dutta Gupta placed literary, aural and oral narratives alongside archival records to foreground histories of ‘survival,’ instead of focussing only on histories of ‘martyrdom.’ Critically remembering Rabindranath Tagore’s long and deep engagement with the Jallianwala Bagh episode—hitherto largely forgotten—also became an integral part of her journey of tracing people’s stories and their emotional connections with the site of the massacre.

The talk is available in print in the journal for the annual conference 'On History and Literature'. Alongside, here are some digital resources:

Ways of Remembering Jallianwala Bagh

https://www.youtube.com/watchv=uySeLHxW1z4

Tagore's letter renouncing knighthood

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SowR1rNIfU0

Manto's short story Tamasha

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9CEHRlSI_I

Krishan Chander's novel 'Amritsar Azadi se Pehle, Azadi ke Baad'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atEj_hurZYc

On curating the installation at Victoria Memorial

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsRaDKVVB6Q

Download the PDF of 'Recontextualizing Jallianwala Bagh at Victoria Memorial Hall', a conversation between Sarmistha Dutta Gupta, Sanchayan Ghosh and Vidhu Gandhi, Seminar 750 (Feb 2022): 12–19.

750-Dialogue-Sarmistha-Sanchayan-Vidhu.pdf

Download PDF • 426KB