About - Stolen Years

Keynote

An emotionally charged memoir of Simranjit Singh Mann, told by his daughter. A personal story, the story of a family.

Description

In 1984, Simranjit Singh Mann resigned from the Indian Police Service in protest of Operation Blue Star, the Indian Army operation ordered by Indira Gandhi, then prime minister, that cleared the Golden Temple complex of Sikh militants. Mann was subsequently charged, among other things, with conspiracy to assassinate Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. A passionate Sikh whose radical beliefs were honed by his family, Mann went underground and was apprehended while trying to flee the country. He spent five years in prison, after which all charges were dropped.

Three decades after Blue Star, his daughter Pavit Kaur looks back on the years her father spent in prison. In this disarmingly honest and emotionally charged account, Pavit Kaur documents her father’s hellish journey through the Indian prison system. This is also a personal story and the story of a family during one of the most fraught times in India’s history.

About the Author:

Pavit Kaur lives in Chandigarh. This is her first book.

Stolen Years is one of few Indian prison memoirs that brings you face-to-face with the bovine bureaucratic brutality of the Indian prison system and the Indian state. It is a remarkable book of deprivation and the power of the will to survive Pavit Kaur’s memory and eye for detail will feed the curiosity of today’s reality obsessed reader.

People are curious about other people. They want to learn who they are, what makes them work, how they feel, how they grow. The insights from memoirs take them far beyond their own experience, and pushes their comfort zone. This is the 30th anniversary year of Operation Blue Star, and will provide a peg for Publicity