On August 14, which is Pakistan’s independence day, the Government of India announced that August 14 would be observed as “Partition Horrors Remembrance Day”.
It is believed that more than one million people were killed and 15 million displaced in the communal frenzy and mayhem that gripped undivided India as the British upped and left their jewel in the crown in 1947.
In large part, the memory of Partition is, perhaps, through story telling by family members of those who lived through the trauma. Memories passed on by one generation of family to another.
In this podcast, we deal with Partition and memory.
Guest: Urvashi Butalia, feminist, researcher and publisher, who has done extensive research on memories of Partition. She is the founder of Zubaan Books and author of The Other Side of Silence (1998), a book that features more than 70 interviews with those who survived Partition.
Host: Amit Baruah, Senior Associate Editor, The Hindu