Remembering natural disaster: Politics and culture of memorials in Gujarat and Sri Lanka

This article explores some of the memorial practices to have emerged after an earthquake in Gujarat during 2001 and along the eastern and southern coasts of Sri Lanka following the tsunami of 2004. In both locations, acts of memorialization have been inseparable from reconstruction initiatives and broader political currents. In the Gujarat case, this has tied memorials firmly to the politics of religious communalism, regionalism and mainstream Hindu nationalism. In the case of Sri Lanka, memorials have emerged as localized expressions of the more general patterns of ethnic conflict in the country. In both cases, politics of all kinds, and at all levels of collective representation, have influenced the ways in which memorials have been designed, located and inaugurated. Through this material we show that memorials can, somewhat paradoxically, have an uneasy relationship to memory (in any conventional sense of the term). By treating memorials as products of cultural compromise rather than as the epitomes of culture, we wish to direct the discussion away from the objects themselves towards the processes that allow memorial objects to exist.