Kavita Puri's hidden histories: "We mustn’t overlook the toll of surfacing traumatic histories"

Kavita Puri explores lesser-known stories from our past. This month she considers the emotional trauma that historians can endure while researching the most horrific events of the past, and talk about the unspeakable

Published: August 30, 2024 at 10:47 AM

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I’ve been researching a new project and have just finished one of the most harrowing books I have ever read: Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II.

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Written in 1997, and drawing on interviews with survivors and newly discovered documents, Chang chronicled the devastating weeks during the Second Sino-Japanese War in December 1937 when the Imperial Japanese army swept into the ancient Chinese city of Nanking (now called Nanjing). What followed was the systematic rape and torture of tens of thousands of Chinese civilians.

What is so disturbing about the book is the excruciating detail Chang goes into of the crimes inflicted. I imagine she didn’t shirk from including the specificity of what the victims endured because she wanted to document the horror in its totality, and leave it for the public record. But there were points at which I could not continue reading.

The book was a sensation. It made me think of the toll that researching, interviewing survivors, documenting, editing and promoting the book must have had on Chang, as well as the responsibility to do justice to the victims.

Years later, in 2004, Chang was working on another book about another Japanese war crime, featuring the stories of Filipinos and Americans forced to travel across the Philippines on the 1942 Bataan Death March. One morning, Chang took her own life at the age of 36, after experiencing depression. It’s impossible to know what connection, if any, there was to her work.

The author and journalist Sathnam Sanghera, in his 2024 book Empireworld, considers the impact that reading about colonial violence has on historians who analyse such accounts on an almost daily basis.

He quotes James Robins, author of 2020’s When We Dead Awaken: Australia, New Zealand, and the Armenian Genocide, who lost the ability to fall comfortably asleep during the five years he spent studying that subject and had uncovered “a reservoir of pain” among scholars of such events.

Writing in the The New Republic, Robins documents the symptoms experienced by historians involved in traumatic research, including “insomnia, rapid weight gain or loss, abuse of booze or pills, unexplainable anger or fear, paralysing anxieties”.

“Some reactions,” he continues, “are more subtle: the sudden unwillingness to watch a particular film or read graphic news reports, claustrophobia in a crowd. Traditionally, we’ve supposed that these kinds of reactions would afflict only first-hand witnesses to violence: the victims, the bystanders, maybe the journalists… Historians, by contrast, have neither seen nor heard the catastrophes they study – they’ve reached them through imagination and immersion.”

Robins is not alone in hearing these kinds of stories. I’ve spoken to fellow oral historians about the heaviness that comes from collecting traumatic testimonies, and from sifting through archival accounts of the worst of crimes. It doesn’t make for great small talk when you’re asked what you do for a living.

I remember, at one of the first events that were held to publicise my book based on recordings of first-hand partition testimonies, being asked by an audience member about the impact of hearing so many harrowing accounts. I was completely floored. What my interviewees had gone through was far, far worse than listening to them. Although I still believe that, I am now less dismissive of the emotional effect of documenting such stories and events.

Many factors shape which histories are remembered and recorded. One reason some histories remain hidden for as long as they do is that testimonies recounting horrific crimes are too awful: too awful to research, to say out loud, to hear or to collectively acknowledge. This is all the more true when they bring up questions of shame, guilt or justice.

Historians can take some solace in the redemptive nature of surfacing these histories, but we mustn’t overlook the toll it takes on the bearer.

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This article was first published in the July 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine

Authors

Kavita Puri

Kavita Puri is a journalist, author and broadcaster. A new edition of her book Partition Voices: Untold British Stories, marking the 75th anniversary of partition, is out now, published by Bloomsbury

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