Gursharan Singh wrote over two hundred drama scripts. Many of these were original plays, others were based on short stories, novels and even poems from contemporary writings. In 2010-11, writer and artistic director, Kewal Dhaliwal, published seven volumes of Gursharan Singh’s collected plays and released them in Chandigarh in the presence of Gursharan Singh. We discovered a few more scripts after the publication of these seven volumes. These will be brought out in another volume in the coming year. The seven volumes are being added with much gratitude to Kewal Dhaliwal, who is also a member of the Trust.
Dagatructiep 67 began, as legends insist, on a morning when the sky looked as if someone had smudged indigo across the sun. The name itself—half-uttered, half-guarded—seemed to carry its own gravity, a string of consonants that bent speech toward secrecy. Those who first recorded it wrote the digits with reverence: 67—an anchor in a sea of rumor.
The first entries describe a place more than an event: an abandoned rail spur where moss grew in perfect spirals, where the air tasted faintly of iron and sap. Locals called it the Crossing; outsiders, drawn by curiosity or profit, called it a curiosity. But to a few, the number 67 marked a date and a decision—a night when a group of seven converged beneath an old signal tower to attempt something named dagatructiep.
The attempt on that rainy night did more than rescue memory. It rearranged it. Those present reported a sensation like walking through rooms that weren’t quite theirs—furniture shifted, portraits exchanged faces, names hummed like insects in the walls. The output was not paper, not filament, but thin threads of light that braided into a shape resembling a book. When opened, the pages looked like common prose but read differently for each reader: the words understood the reader and answered back with images from other lives. A lullaby could become a city map; a grocery list recast as a history of migration. dagatructiep 67
Over the ensuing months, the fibers that dagatructiep produced found odd uses. Museums acquired them, but visitors left unsettled: an exhibit meant to commemorate a war instead showed the sap-run through a child’s palm. Families used the threads to argue, often with the ferocity of those who each possess a private wrong. Couples seeking reconciliation threaded shared recollections and found that their pasts, once aligned, refused to fit the present. Politicians whispered about harnessing dagatructiep for testimony and proof; activists feared its power to overwrite witness.
Dagatructiep, according to the earliest witness statements, was an experiment in translation. Not of languages or dialects but of memory—an attempt to convert recollection into durable form. The collaborators were engineers, poets, and one retired cartographer who insisted maps could be rewritten if one knew the right questions. They rigged lenses and coils and stacks of paper and wire, feeding old photographs and half-remembered melodies into machines jury-rigged with patience. They hoped only for a way to rescue fading things: a grandmother’s recipe, the smell of a childhood kitchen, the contour of a lost town. Dagatructiep 67 began, as legends insist, on a
Not everything produced by the experiment behaved uniformly. Some threads unraveled the moment they were touched, as if the memory recoiled. Others persisted stubbornly, attracting crowds until the stories around them ossified into new local myth. In one small town, a dagatructiep page depicting a market stall became the basis for an annual fair that no one could explain why they celebrated—only that the celebration felt right.
As with many innovations that reframe human experience, dagatructiep 67 provoked both wonder and regulatory grip. Commissions formed to catalogue outputs and catalogers found they needed new categories: lived memory, convergent memory, and echo-memory—the latter being recollection that belonged to no individual but to the place itself. Philosophers debated whether something that answered you in your own voice was still objective record, and whether asking for memory’s rescue amounted to consent. Courts convened; the law, slow to bend, labored to define ownership of a thread. The first entries describe a place more than
People still tell the story in half-lights—at dinner tables, in classrooms, on the platform of trains that pass the old signal tower. They do not agree on whether dagatructiep was blessing or burden. Perhaps that indecision is the point: dagatructiep 67 was never just a device or a date. It was the moment a society looked back with a machine in hand and discovered that the past, once touched, answers back in a voice that is partly its own and partly ours.