Anusha Rizvi and Meera

“A whole bunch of us, teenagers, students of all kinds, were trying to make sense of what was happening, even though we obviously couldn’t because it was so shocking. The only thing we could do, was to have some action: we used to spend the entire day going door-to-door collecting relief material, in the evening we made posters, and in the night we took up peace marches”

Filmmaker Anusha Rizvi and her sister Meera Rizvi, both schoolchildren residing in Jamia Nagar (Delhi) in November 1984, became witness to the violence of the pogrom and contributors to the relief work that followed.

While their mother was trying to make her way back from her office in Central in Delhi, Meera was left profoundly shocked. On one hand, she was left speechless at the often-insensitive reactions of her classmates to the violence, and on the other, she was exposed to the pervasiveness of frenzied mobs being led by people who later joined the political elite. For Anusha, the pictures of people coming to their colony to get their hair cut in an attempt to escape the violence are etched in her memory alongside images of a burning Defence Colony gurudwara.

Watch as Anusha and Meera recount the impact of what they describe as their most profound experience with violence….