The Wheat Fields Still Whisper: Mallika Kaur and Navkiran Kaur Khalra

The Wheat Fields Still Whisper: Mallika Kaur and Navkiran Kaur Khalra

Punjab was the arena of one of the first major armed conflicts of post-colonial India. During its deadliest decade, as many as 250,000 people were killed. Mallika Kaur unearths the stories of people who found themselves at the center of Punjab’s human rights movement, including a grandmother armed with a video camera; a former appellate judge whisked away to a secret Pr*son; a motorcycling enthusiastic called back to document the killing fields of Punjab; and the man who exposed the secret cremations (Khalra), and his wife and children who launched a decades-long struggle to prosecute his own enforced disappearance and M**der (30 years ago this September). 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--apt for our times.

An interdisciplinary author, lawyer, teacher, and community organizer, Mallika Kaur’s work focuses on human rights with a specialization in gender and minority issues. She has worked with victim-survivors of gendered violence for two decades, including as an emergency room crisis counselor, expert witness on domestic violence and sexual violence, researcher, and attorney. Mallika is the author of the book “Faith, Gender, and Activism in the Punjab Conflict: The Wheat Fields Still Whisper” that engages with issues of intergenerational trauma, community trauma and resilience, and human rights defenders of Punjab's recent and turbulent past. Mallika especially set out to excavate gendered stories that have been silenced.

At UC Berkeley School of Law, Mallika directs the Domestic Violence and Gender-Based Violence Practicum Program and teaches various social justice classes, including the course she created on “Negotiating Trauma, Emotions and the Practice of Law.” Mallika is the co-founder and Executive Director of Sikh Family Center, the only Sikh American organization focused on gender-based violence. She believes what happens inside a home is intimately connected to what happens inside a community as a whole: since struggles are interconnected, commitment to justice must never be selective.

Navkiran Kaur Khalra, an Electrical Engineer by profession, has along with her mother and brother fiercely advocated for human rights since the 1995 abduction and M**der of her father, Punjab's famed human rights investigator, Jaswant Singh Khalra. Jaswant Singh Khalra had expoxed the grisly reality of the 25,000 unclaimed Sikh dead bodies cremated by the security forces of Panjab (India) during 1980s and 90s. Soon after he traveled across the UK and US, on the invitation of human rights groups, MPs and Congresspeople, Jaswant Singh Khalra was abducted and murdered by the Panjab Police led by then Director KPS Gill.

, in its second chapter, traces the fight launched by Navkiran's mother to get justice not only for Mr. Khalra but all the unclaimed bodies that had been secretly cremated in Punjab. Navkiran migrated to the US about 16 years ago for her graduate school. She has been involved in collaborating various Human Rights organizations and has kept the legacy of her father alive; his most famous public speech, almost exactly 30 years ago, reminds all to "Challenge the Darkness!"

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