Reframing Silence of the Victims of the Indian-Chinese Diaspora of India: A Study of the Condition of Silence through the Framework of Taboos

My engagement with the Indian-Chinese community began in 2016 during my doctoral research with an interest in locating how they memorize their history of living in India and experiences of citizenship. Amongst these experiences the Indo-China War of 1962 stood out as the most well-known event that reportedly caused a major overhaul in the community’s outlook about itself. My fieldwork-based interviews were often met with refusal, reticence, surprise or silence. When Veena Das (1990) interviewed women amongst the Sikh riot victims of 1984 in Delhi she found that many were not willing or able to let go of the violence in its immediate aftermath. Despite the external erasure of the signs of violence, the personal symbols of loss remain. The matter of listening to such victims leads us to view their version of the violence and may help them to find closure.

However, my encounters from the field reveal that there are outliers to such a scenario. This led me to believe that the silence around the 1962 war or its aftermath is writ into the very social being of the Indian-Chinese people. Taboo in anthropological literature refers to conscious and explicit prohibitions which sometimes have been used to classify the difference between what is sacred and profane, especially to rationalize fear of the unknown. But in a structural sense it also reproduces an unconscious means of defining social relations, kin ties and generate social sentiments. In the essay

I will be using taboo to explain how the Indian-Chinese have found their own way to cope with their victimhood, i.e., through ethnographic narratives which invoke refusal to engage with the 1962 war. The significance of the essay lies in reidentifying alternate ways in which victims make sense of victimhood especially when it raises questions of collective belonging as a diaspora.