The Politics of Remembering

There are a few places in India where a walk of less than a kilometre can take you through more than a century of the nation’s memory. In Amritsar, it can. Within walking distance stand Jallianwala Bagh, the Partition Museum and the Golden Temple. Together, they mark three moments when India's sense of itself was profoundly altered. Jallianwala Bagh reminds us of the brutality of colonial rule. The Partition Museum bears witness to the human cost of Independence and Partition. The Golden Temple, one of the holiest places of worship for the Sikhs, embodies not only centuries of faith and devotion but also the memory of 1984, a chapter that continues to shape India’s political and moral imagination.

What fascinates me is not merely their proximity, but the order in which these memories enter our national consciousness. Jallianwala Bagh has long occupied its place in India's story. The Golden Temple has, for decades, been associated not only with faith but also with the events of 1984. The Partition Museum, however, arrived decades after Partition itself. Not because history changed, but because perhaps our relationship with it did.

Standing there, I found myself wondering whether history waits patiently to be remembered or whether every generation simply remembers the history it is finally ready to confront.

Intense Debates

That question returned to me as I watched the public debate around Satluj and Dhurandhar: The Revenge. Both films revisit Punjab’s troubled past. Both have been accused of propaganda. Both have been criticised for reopening old wounds. Yet perhaps the more interesting question is not whether they should have been made, but why they are being made now. Why are stories that remained at the margins of public conversation for decades suddenly finding their way into museums, documentaries, streaming platforms and cinema?

Every nation seems to have an unwritten statute of limitations on memory. Immediately after a traumatic event, society argues that it is too soon to revisit it. People need healing, not introspection. Decades later, when the same questions return, the response often becomes, “Why reopen old wounds?” Between too soon and too late lies a curious silence during which history retreats from public life. It survives in family conversations, inherited grief and private memory until another generation decides it is ready to bring those stories back into the open.

Perhaps that is because history and memory are not the same thing. History records what happened. Memory decides what each generation chooses to carry forward. Every generation rearranges the past according to the questions it seeks to answer. One generation may seek national unity, another justice, another identity. Museums, textbooks, films, court judgments and public debates become instruments through which societies continually renegotiate what deserves to be remembered and what remains in the shadows.

This is also why I find myself reconsidering my own reading of Dhurandhar as propaganda and resisting the temptation to dismiss Satluj with the same label. Every historical narrative is selective because it has to be. No historian, filmmaker or museum curator can tell every story. The moment we decide where to place the camera, we have already chosen a perspective.

Satluj looks back at Punjab through the life of Jaswant Singh Khalra, the human rights activist who documented disappearances and illegal cremations during the counter-insurgency. Dhurandhar approaches the same history differently. It does not revisit the insurgency so much as imagine its aftermath. Jaskirat Singh Rangi is not a participant in the violence of the 1980s; he is a child of its consequences. His journey begins in a Punjab shaped by years of militancy, counter-insurgency, fractured institutions, and the growing shadow of narcotics, organised crime, and cross-border networks. One film asks what happened during the conflict. The other asks what the conflict left behind.

Lopsided Perspective

Neither perspective is complete, yet neither is without value. The problem arises when perspective presents itself as the entire landscape. Punjab cannot be understood only through Bhindranwale, only through K.P.S. Gill, only through Operation Blue Star, only through the anti-Sikh violence of 1984, only through terrorism, or only through disappearances; only through Pakistan's role or only through Congress's political miscalculations. Each is a fragment of a larger, more uncomfortable history. The challenge is not to choose one fragment over another, but to resist mistaking any fragment for the whole.

Perhaps nations remember like someone gathering the pieces of a shattered glass. The larger fragments are picked up immediately because they are impossible to ignore. The smaller shards remain hidden beneath furniture until years later, when someone reaches into a forgotten corner and wonders how they escaped notice for so long. Amritsar feels like that room. Jallianwala Bagh, the Partition Museum and the Golden Temple are not simply monuments. They are pieces of the same broken glass discovered by different generations.

The debate over Punjab is therefore not merely about two films. It is about India’s ongoing negotiation with its past. Every generation inherits the same history, but not the same memories. Some inherit silence; others inherit questions. Whether that negotiation takes place in a museum, a courtroom, a textbook, or a film matters less than our willingness to accept that memory is never finished. A confident nation is not one that remembers only the stories that comfort it. It is one that has the confidence to revisit the stories that unsettle it, while resisting the temptation to mistake any single narrative for the whole truth.

Perhaps no one decides, once and for all, when history is ready to be remembered. Every generation does. The stories we choose to recover tell us as much about the present as they do about the past. History does not wait to be remembered. Every generation simply remembers the history it is finally ready to confront.

(The writer is a learning and development professional. Views personal.)