remnants of a separation by aanchal malhotra

I’ve found that if something isn’t in your consciousness and is perceived as something that is so far back in history that it cannot impact you. For example, I was 23 when I found out what my grandparents went through - just because I never thought to ask. People spent decades not knowing what their families went through. Unfortunately, in the case of the Partition, this hasn’t really happened.įor a long time, Partition was a story of silence, and it wasn’t even known to families. So, where there is the state memory of the event, there must also be a personal memory of the event, which is the way it gets passed down the generations and recorded through family history. To some extent, people don’t really talk about it, why do you feel this is?Īanchal Malhotra: Events that impact people to such a large degree like the Holocaust or Partition are remembered also because of the people who lived through it. I sat down with Aanchal to have a candid chat about what it’s like to be the keeper of other people’s most guarded memories.ĭiya Katyal: The Partition is one of the biggest forced migrations in the world, but it’s been brushed under the rug. The book was translated into French by Camille Cloarec. Since then, it was published internationally as Remnants of Partition (2019) and was recently published in French as Vestiges d’une separation by Editions Heloise d’Ormesson.

Her debut book Remnants of a Separation was published by Harper Collins in India in 2017 to mark the 70th anniversary of Indian Independence and has changed the narrative around the Partition. It is an alternative history of the Partition - the first and only one told through material memory that makes the event tangible even seven decades later.Aanchal Malhotra is an Indian author and historian best known for groundbreaking work on the oral history of the Partition of India in 1947.

A refugee certificate created in Calcutta evokes in a daughter the feelings of displacement her father had experienced upon leaving Mymensingh zila, now in Bangladesh.Written as a crossover between history and anthropology, Remnants of a Separation is the product of years of passionate research. A notebook of poems, brought from Lahore to Kalyan, shows one woman's determination to pursue the written word despite the turmoil around her. A string of pearls gifted by a maharaja, carried from Dalhousie to Lahore, reveals the grandeur of a life that once was. They now speak of their owner's pasts as they emerge as testaments to the struggle, sacrifice, pain and belonging at an unparalleled moment in history. These belongings absorbed the memory of a time and place, remaining latent and undisturbed for generations. Remnants of a Separation is a unique attempt to revisit the Partition through objects that refugees carried with them across the border.

Remnants of a separation by aanchal malhotra