The Sahitya Akademi Award winning novel Requiem in Raga Janki by Neelam Saran Gour is a revival of the scabbed life of Janki Bai Ilahabadi, the Hindustani legend in music, called Chhappan Chhuri (Fifty-Six Knives) after a rough stabbing at the age of eight. This article discusses the way Gour turns the archival silences and fragmented memories into a counter-narrative, which theorizes music as a testimony and therapy. The analysis is based on the theory of trauma brought forward by Cathy Caruth, the abjection concept developed by Julia Kristeva, and necropolitics introduced by Achille Mbemba to decode how the scarred body of Janki is transformed into a place where violence is turned into raga.

The non-linear form of the novel is reflected in the deferred action of trauma (Nachtraglichkeit), and the multilingual texture of the book, which is a combination of English, Hindi, and Urdu, is in opposition to the monolingual colonial archives. The article is based on close reading, which posits that Gour does not discuss “tavāyaf” as subaltern silence but as a form of agential witness whose performances document what the official documentation erases. The technological change in the gramophone age, the Anti Nautch movement with moral policing, as well as how Janki’s moved to Allahabad, Varanasi, and Rewa enable and restrain female agency in the arts. Finally, Requiem in Raga Janki is an example of an indigenous postcolonial ethics of archiving in which raag as somatic healing challenges Eurocentric psychoanalytic structures.