Faith, Gender, and Activism in the Punjab Conflict: The Wheat Fields Still Whisper Audiobook

Punjab was the arena of one of the first major armed conflicts of postcolonial India. During its deadliest decade, as many as 250,000 people were killed. This audiobook makes an urgent intervention in the history of the conflict, which to date has been characterized by a fixation on sensational violence—or ignored altogether.

Mallika Kaur unearths the stories of three people who found themselves at the center of Punjab’s human rights movement: Baljit Kaur, who armed herself with a video camera to record essential evidence of the conflict; Justice Ajit Singh Bains, who became a beloved “people’s judge”; and Inderjit Singh Jaijee, who returned to Punjab to document abuses even as other elites were fleeing. Together, they are credited with saving countless lives.

Braiding oral histories, personal snapshots, and primary documents recovered from at-risk archives, Kaur shows that when entire conflicts are marginalized, we miss essential stories: stories of faith, feminist action, and the power of citizen-activists.

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“There are many people who talk, but not many who listen…So it’s no wonder that many people who never told their stories or shared their records, opened their hearts and souls to Mallika.”

— Paramjit Kaur Khalra, human rights advocate, Amritsar, Punjab