Beyond the long shadow

Kishwar Desai and Aanchal Malhotra speak to DEEPA ALEXANDER on their work that chronicles the triumphs and tragedies of Partition, and the need to document the reminiscences of the survivors

December 12, 2016 03:35 pm | Updated December 14, 2016 11:37 am IST

Kishwar Desai

Kishwar Desai

A memory is a double-edged sword — a black hole for those caught in its unkind sweep or a bridge across an abyss caused by an unfortunate history. The Partition is a barren term to describe an event so saturated in blood, madness and mass tragedy. Nearly 70 years after it happened, fracturing a subcontinent and forcing the largest migration in history, it is still incessantly spoken of as a time when things fell apart — homes, relationships and identities.

It remains enmeshed in our thoughts when we celebrate Independence Day or flip through black-and-white photographs that bring alive long columns of haunted people on the run — tired, poor and ‘yearning to breathe free’. It heavily influences the spirit of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, yet there has been no memorial, no marker to the lives that were ravaged in its cataclysmic upheaval except a lone stone pillar at the Attari-Wagah border.

As the distance widens between the extraordinary generation that survived it and the generations that struggle to understand its place in our history, these stories of hardship, heartache and robust optimism are slowly fading into a sepia-tinted world. It’s a world whose memory two women are trying to keep alive through oral histories and objects from the time of that great divide.

Both author-columnist Kishwar Desai —chair of The Arts and Cultural Heritage Trust (TACHT), which set up in October the world’s first Partition Museum in Amritsar’s Town Hall — and artist-oral historian and material archivist Aanchal Malhotra draw upon their familial backgrounds to delineate what drew them to chronicling Partition.

“My parents are from Lahore and they spoke about Partition a lot. I was disturbed that no one was doing anything about it. It was a wealth of information, and this generation of eyewitnesses was fast disappearing and needed to be documented,” says Desai. “All over the world, there are museums that commemorate traumatic happenings and those who went through them. The response has been tremendous for this project.”

Aanchal Malhotra at an oral history recording.

Aanchal Malhotra at an oral history recording.

For Malhotra, the impetus to put together a collage of Partition memoirs came from a visit to her grandfather’s house three years ago. Hailing from a family of renowned booksellers in Delhi, Malhotra was drawn to two objects — a ghara (metal vessel) and gaz (tailoring yardstick) that her great grandparents had brought to the city from Amritsar in 1947. “Though the objects were banal, my granduncle almost became a young boy again as he narrated how their mother would churn lassi in the ghara and his father would use the gaz in his shop. That was the first time I realised that the power embedded within objects from a certain time could be used as a catalyst for extracting memories.”

Malhotra made Remnants of a Separation , her thesis, into an ongoing project to collect, archive and preserve these objects. It became the first-ever study on the material that refugees took with them when they fled their homes. Working with the Citizens Archive of Pakistan helped hone her curiosity as a collector. “My aim is to record the histories of as many objects as I can through the first-hand accounts of people who brought them. Though my archive has come to include children and grandchildren, these narratives take on a completely different tone as they are essentially, inherited memories. I get in touch through word of mouth. Finding people who migrated is not difficult, but objects are incredibly rare,” says Malhotra, speaking of an astonishing range of things with poignant stories.

So, there is the 19th Century Guru Granth Sahib belonging to a lady originally from Rawalpindi and now settled in Delhi — the family’s book was handed over by a neighbour who had found it intact in the house they left behind, which was occupied by Muslim refugees; a stunning maang tikka created in Dera Ismail Khan that made the crossing in the cloth folds of Malhotra’s great-grandmother and is now a family heirloom; photographs of hockey clubs of yore and an engraved name board in Lahore, originally from Jalandhar — a touchable survival from a survivor’s childhood home.

As part of TACHT’s project, Amritsar’s Town Hall that stands barely a few kilometres from the railway station, the scene of much carnage during Partition, has recordings of oral histories, letters, clothes, vessels, newspapers and documents such as refugee cards. Shows at India International Centre, India Habitat Centre and the Art Fair in Delhi and a smaller exhibition in Amritsar publicised the collection that has London School of Economics’ South Asia Centre as its academic advisor.

“The Partition Museum Project, a not-for-profit organisation driven by volunteers, is spread across three rooms and examines stories of the common man, women and the audacity of hope. While it will eventually fill 16,000 sq.ft., for now, it addresses queries on Radcliffe’s Boundary Commission through the recollections of the family of Teja Singh who was member, inputs by feminist writer Ritu Menon on what happened to the women, and the ‘gallery of hope’ that looks at stories of optimism such as that of B.L. Munjal, patriarch of the Hero group. This museum is not just for today but for a time when nothing will be there,” says Desai.

On the arduous task of vetting the truth, Desai says, “People such as Urvashi Butalia have recorded these stories. It’s preferable if it’s the survivor who tells the story but even a second generation person comes to us out of a need to enshrine the memory of what their parents went through. Historians have helped us fill the gaps, and students from the Centre come here to research.”

Malhotra agrees that “memorialisation must be an active practice, not a sporadic indulgence. Through the history of what was brought across and the experiences attached to it, the pain is lessened, however little. The topography of Partition is peppered with all kinds of stories — hatred and bloodlust, but also hope and kindness”.

To this can be added destiny. In 1947, in Pakistan’s Punjab where they hailed from, Bhagwan Singh Maini and Pritam Kaur had been introduced to each other. But, before they were married, the families lost contact. Both, however, crossed into India, bereft of their belongings, except for a briefcase of documents and Pritam’s phulkari coat. In a queue at a refugee camp, they found each other again and were married. The briefcase and coat has been loaned by the family to the Partition Museum, a testimony to a life lost and found.

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