The remains of the disappeared: digital melancholia and Ensaaf (justice)

Abstract

In March 2019, Ensaaf, a transnational, non-profit organization, launched the project of daily posts on their social media pages consisting of remains or traces of disappeared Sikhs (an ethnoreligious minority community in India and the diaspora), that is, their photographs and biographical details. In this paper, I reflect on the meanings implicit in Ensaaf’s daily work of remembering and circulating remains of the disappearance on social media, specifically Facebook. By creating an archive that circulates regularly and frequently in and through social media, Ensaaf is performing what I call digital melancholia: continuous and ongoing grief work. The medium in which Ensaaf enacts its melancholic attachment with the disappeared leaves its imprint on the meaning of the performance itself. The daily work of melancholia performed in the constantly evolving space of Facebook is a form of “epistemic resistance” against the Indian state’s “necropolitics.”