Spinning Wheel Film Festival

I saw the 4th cluster of SW film festival at the Asia Society. The first thing that I noticed was that Sikh women have started wearing a turban. Here is a link to Sikh women from the Sikhwiki. I have being around Sikh women all my life and have never seen women wear turbans so am curious if this is a current development? Are these women practising a different type of Sikhism? Is it in reponse to men that are taking off their turbans after 9.11 so as not to be confused with Muslims. If anyone has more knowledge about this do send me comments.

I saw two movies, the first was Ninteen Eighty Four and the via Dolorosa Project by the Singh Twins. The 23 minute movie explores the twin's painting, 1984 that depicts the storming of the Golden Temple at Amritsar by Indian troops. The connection with the Catholic Christian tradition of the Via Dolorosa was interesting.

The second movie was 73 minutes long, titled Widow Colony and directed by Harpreet Kaur. This movie took an indepth look into the lives of the widows of the Sikh men killed in the Anti-Sikh massacre of November 1984. The film explored the suffering of these women, their battle for justice and their struggle for survival in Delhi. The women were extremely angry, twenty years after the massacre, the politicians that instigated the frenzied killings are still in power and have been not held accountable. The women remind us that even with all the progress India has made, Sikhs are not safe and should not expect protection from the police. Patwant Singh reflected on the fact that no Sikh business has come forward to provide jobs for these widows and orphan boys, either in India or the diaspora. The movie focussed on the women who described what happened those 3 days in November 1984. 20 years later the memories were raw, and one of the women said don't come here if you cannot help us, all you all do is hear our story and then go away and that just brings up all these memories of loss, suffering and pain back. Go away (to your comfortable lives) and let us be.

More on the movie here

We thought we were going to set up, interview and leave.” But when they taped their first interview with Gurdeep Kaur, it was unimaginable what they heard. “When Gurdeep Kaur started talking, we started balling. Her strength and pain, we really felt it. We were then prepared to listen the most horrifying stories.”

The film takes the viewer to the areas of Trilokpuri, Kalyanpuri, Sultanpuri and Mongolpuri, the same localities that suffered the major brunt of the Sikh killings. In November of 1984, government-organized mobs went on a barbaric rampage to take their murderous revenge on Sikhs for the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on October 31. Conservative estimates say that over four thousand Sikhs, mostly men and some women and children, were butchered and burned alive during four days of lawlessness in Delhi alone. Left behind were thousands of widows and children. The trauma of 1984 still haunts them today.