Situating the silencing and de-silencing of traumatic memories in 2016 students’ protests in Hyderabad, India: an auto-ethnographic analysis

Abstract

Psychologists, anthropologists, and historians have researched, revered, and replenished the past. Although the substance of their research is the same, their respective interpretations of the retrieved objects paint a plethora of images. This paper is a peek into the process of silencing and articulating memories. Both silencing and expression of memories are facilitated by temporal and spatial conditionalities, as would be argued here. With the help of an activist petition written by the author during the anti-Caste Discrimination Students’ Movement, known as “Justice for Rohith Vemula”, at the University of Hyderabad (India) in 2016, this study not only delves into the realms of individual memory but also critically evaluates the carrier of the memory undergoing the act of silencing and de-silencing (expression). As the Indian state brutally crushed the protest, the embodied memories carry the mark of the state’s brutality. This paper seeks to ask why and how memories and experiences are silenced, and how those memories find conduits for expression through narratives. How does trauma facilitate the silencing and anticipate the de-silencing of memory? Although the reading of trauma and memory as constitutive of each other helps us to place the narrative within a theoretical debate, the analysis of the author’s petition as an ‘evocative autoethnography’ helps to construct and follow the making and un-making of silence and expression and goes beyond the individual carrier of the traumatic memories. The petition serves as an ‘emotional recall’ and allows the author to enact the felt-emotions that engender the traumatic memory.