The Jallianwala Bagh Journals [Sarmistha Dutta Gupta]

Remembering Rabindranath Tagore’s long and largely forgotten engagement with the Jallianwala Bagh episode also became a part of her journey of tracing people’s stories and their emotional connections with the site of the massacre. Dutta Gupta creates a feminist perspective drawing on family and community memories of people of Amritsar. She collaborated with artist Sanchayan Ghosh in doing an installation at Kolkata’s Victoria Memorial Hall as an experiment in public history that would vivify dormant or forgotten histories.

The Jallianwala Bagh Journals is a chronicle of this manifold journey, a narrative not just of the massacre that took place a century ago, but also of our own troubled times. The book too is a pedagogic experiment and is enriched with rare photographs, documents and stills from the installation at Victoria Memorial Hall, making it an important resource for researchers in history, pedagogues and curators.