Nonica Datta (ND): Tell us why you wrote Jallianwala Bagh. VN Datta (VND): I was born in Amritsar. I came from a family of Husaini Brahmin...
Nonica Datta (ND): Tell us why you wrote Jallianwala Bagh.
VN Datta (VND): I was born in Amritsar. I came from a family of Husaini Brahmins and our house was in Katra Sher Singh, which was ten minutes away from Jallianwala Bagh. As a child, from the age of six, I would go to the Bagh every day and observe the bullet marks on the walls. In fact, the walls and the well, which people jumped into, left a deep impact on my mind. These images continue to haunt me. It was horrible...
In the 1920s and ’30s, stories about the Jallianwala Bagh massacre were still reverberating in the city. Amritsar was reeling under the trauma. People were trying to come to terms with the horror of violence. I was troubled by many stories of shared pain and intense suffering that I heard as a child from my elder sister, Shanti. She was ten years old in 1919, and my other sister, Shukla, was about six.
Shanti was the one who told me that my mother started beating her breasts thinking that my father had been shot dead in the garden. No one could escape this atmosphere of fear and violence. My father, Brahm Nath Datta...
