Making the Disappeared Appear: Ensaaf’s Archive of Loss and Remains
PDF

Keywords

Ensaaf
disappeared
liminal death
social media
rituals of remembrance

How to Cite

Shruti Devgan. (2020). Making the Disappeared Appear: Ensaaf’s Archive of Loss and Remains. Sikh Research Journal, 5(1), 73–81. https://doi.org/10.62307/srj.v5i1.110

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.
https://doi.org/10.62307/srj.v5i1.110
PDF

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]

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Copyright (c) 2025 Shruti Devgan