Taking a different approach from the vast and well-mined documentary archive available on the subject, Aanchal Malhotra’s Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition Through Material Memory seeks to establish “the ability of an object or a possession to retain memory and act as a stimulus for recollection.” The artist and oral historian, also co-founder of the digitised Museum of Material Memory, bases her first book on objects taken across the bloodied border and what they meant to the people who carried them.
Beginning with her own moving observations on her paternal and maternal grandparents, who came from sarhad ke uss paar (the other side of the border), she traces family histories and social ethnography through heirlooms, their value determined not by antiquity or price but by ‘the vulnerable act of unfolding a painful past’ and ‘the intimate nature of this experience.’
Among the objects that find their way into this book from the millions that made the crossing are a ghara (a pot) and a gaz (a measuring device), a gift of pearls from a maharaja, a maang-tikka (bejewelled adornment for the forehead), a hand-stitched shawl that’s still worn with deep affection, a stone plaque, a notebook of poems and an assortment of curios, all of which are accompanied by telling photographs.
The book features 19 handpicked stories, embellished with the author’s expansively visualised descriptions of their settings and confined largely to circumstances of privilege. Moreover, Malhotra’s writing relies more on emotion than erudition.
The book is not without its attractions. The author writes effectively in first person, the conversations are genteel and colloquial, and she excels in weaving quotes into a cohesive narrative. She felt no homesickness researching for her book in Lahore, she says, for it appeared as familiar as the Delhi in which she lives. Her categories for the poorly understood terrain of ‘special cases of migratory objects’ include those that bind several generations, that people seek upon returning what they had abandoned years later, that relate to occupations, that were rediscovered serendipitously.
Malhotra’s observations on the mysterious ways in which material memory works are evocative (“It hides in the folds of clothes, among old records, inside boxes of inherited jewellery...it seeps into our years, it remains quiet, accumulating the past like layers of dust...”). Her dedication reads thus: ‘For her, who taught me the importance of one’s soil/ and/ for him, who tried so hard to forget it.’ This tentative exploration, grounded in tangible artefacts, hints not at a gap between the two, but a complex world of many indelible and interconnected strands, which is deserving of hardier scholarship.
Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition Through Material Memory ; Aanchal Malhotra, HarperCollins, ₹799.
