Abstract
Ensaaf, a transnational non-profit organization, is in the process of creating an expansive digital archive of “disappeared” Sikhs in Punjab, India. This essay offers a reflection on Ensaaf’s latest digital project: sharing the stories of the disappeared every day on their social media pages— Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Through such daily sharing, Ensaaf is performing a mediated ritual of remembrance. By employing the aliveness and dynamism of social media sites Ensaaf’s team is actively and creatively engaging with loss and what remains.References
Butalia, Urvashi (1998) The Other Side of Violence: Voices from the Partition of India, New Delhi: Penguin.
Butler, Judith (2006) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London: Verso.
Chopra, Radhika (2010) “Commemorating Hurt: Memorializing Operation Bluestar,” Sikh Formations, 6:2, pp. 119-152.
Eng, David L. and David Kazanjian (2003) “Introduction: Mourning Remains,” in eds. D.L. Eng and D. Kazanjian, Loss: The Politics of Mourning, Berkeley: UC Press
Goméz-Barris, Macarena and Herman Gray (2010) “Toward a Sociology of the Trace,” in eds. H. Gray and M. Goméz-Barris, Toward a Sociology of the Trace, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 1-14
Gordon, Avery (2008) Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Grewal, Inderpal and Sasha Sabherwal (2020) “Slow Violence in Post-1984 Punjab: Remembering, Forgetting and Refusals,” Sikh Formations, 15: 3-4, pp. 343-360.
Jacobs, Janet (2016) The Holocaust Across Generations: Trauma and its Inheritance among Descendants of Survivors, New York: NYU Press.
Kaur, Mallika (2019) Faith, Gender, and Activism in the Punjab Conflict: The Wheat Fields Still Whisper, Springer Nature Switzerland AG: Palgrave Macmillan
Zia, Ather (2019) Resisting Disappearance: Military Occupation and Women’s Activism in Kashmir, Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Electronic Sources:
Ensaaf website: https://ensaaf.org/ [Accessed April-May 2020]
Facebook Ensaaf page: https://www.facebook.com/Ensaaf/ [Accessed April 2020]
Instagram Ensaaf page: https://www.instagram.com/ensaaf/?hl=en [Accessed April 2020]
Twitter Ensaaf page: https://twitter.com/ensaaf [Accessed April 2020]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Copyright (c) 2025 Shruti Devgan
