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Guha and Subaltern Studies argued that elite history writes out the peasant, the worker, the ordinary. Khalra was that subaltern: not a general, not a minister, a bank manager. Without a film, his archive becomes a footnote. With the film banned, the erasure doubles. Hannah Arendt warned that totalitarianism’s most effective weapon is not violence alone but the destruction of memory. Make people forget the sequence, and you can rewrite the meaning. ‘Satluj’ resists that. It insists memory is a civic act.

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