Exploration and Analysis of the collage of represented ‘Truth’: Variations in the narratives of Operation Blue Star

Abstract

“Punjab is not just a state. It is a state of mind... It is sometimes hard to find out where politics ends and religion begins.”- M.V.Kamath1
The Operation Blue Star is considered as one among the major political as well as historical events witnessed by the Indian state ever since independence. And like all major historical events are narrated based on the dynamics of locatedness of the author and the receptive tendency of the targeted audience, the narration of the Operation Blue Star follows the same trajectory. Therefore, there is a subterranean level of politics within the engagement in historiography and it is important to be investigated if not completely arrive at a speculative understanding altogether. There have been theories which mention that the truth is narrated by ones holding the seat of power. But the important point here in this paper is to understand how historiography differs within the ones with a dominant voice and how the same event is narrated differently by different narrators to give varying shades to the same event. The paper will delve into how historiography has a relation with the author’s socio-cultural and professional location, and will also look at how his/her ideological and subjective viewpoints re-orient and re-defined the actual event. The authors give a particular fact their subjective shade of understanding to glorify and magnify certain details and overlooks or trivialize certain others. So, down the generations when these various shades percolate down as sanctioned or canonised versions of reality, the reader actually gets a distorted picture of reality under the iron veil of apparent similarities and coherence.