Marichjhapi - Lest We Forget
Image Courtesy: The Wire Public memory is a strange beast. It takes little by way of throttling to erase it easily – restrict the discussion to intellectualism, or ensure a public amnesia about events by erasing the picture and its contents. However, memories of individuals fail to be erased. Truth can compete with official versions and public amnesia, but to what extent? When there is hardly anyone to do anything beyond reproducing the same arguments over and over again, even the proponent, the sufferer of the story is loathe to talk about it. After all, what does one achieve by scratching old wounds repeatedly except pain? Marichjhapi is an island in the Sundarbans, and little beyond it is remembered to this day. Any talk of it is merely talk today – absolutely nothing has been done about it to this day. While the Sundarbans is an interesting cultural complexity to study, the island of Marichjhapi hides in its womb the horrific memory of the massacre that took place in 1979. While