Inventing home: (de)membering the nation

This paper examines how identity is constructed and given meaning, especially for diasporic subjects. It focuses on a recent documentary film My Mother India by the Sikh-Australian, Safina Uberoi, whose work is a powerful mechanism to interpolate questions that are germane to considerations of identity, trauma and memory that have been characteristic of the Sikh condition. Safina Uberoi's film makes one confront civil violence through a personal narrative, centring on the experiences of an ordinary family. It illustrates what happens when neighbours perpetrate violence on their fellow citizens. Such violence fundamentally alters the way in which communities function. There is little wonder that the trauma which arises from such carnage is hardly talked about. A silence pervades the most horrific instances of violence that have marked Sikh identity in the last century.