Aanchal

In a world where the word his-tory defines the past, author Aanchal Malhotra has unearthed tales of the Partition with her words. As the first Indian woman to record oral history and material memory of the Partition, this 33-year-old writer and co-founder of the Museum of Material Memory — a crowd-sourced digital repository tracing family histories and social ethnography through heirlooms, collectibles and antiques from the Indian subcontinent — knows hows to stay sensitive and true to human emotions through her words.…

In Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory (2017), Aanchal Malhotra traced family histories through objects people carried across the border during Partition. The book was well-researched and eminently readable. It established Malhotra (whose grandparents were refugees from what would become Pakistan) as an authority on the Partition. She came to be known as a memory keeper. Last year, In the Language of Remembering: The Inheritance of Partition explored the legacy of the Partition,…

How do you feel about the award? As someone who describes herself as an oral historian, what is it like to be welcomed by another discipline?It is an enormous honour to be recognized for the work, and particularly for it to find resonance in landscapes across the world from where it was written. As far as being welcomed by another discipline is concerned, perhaps this speaks to the malleability of Remnants as a project. When I began working on it, I too came from another discipline – visual art – and was able to carve a…

Ashis Nandy had written in the foreword of a book of Partition stories several years ago that “An unexamined past has to be lived out over succeeding generations”. In India, for decades after Partition, most of the country averted its gaze from the horrors of 1947; they had not suffered. Only some Punjabis and a few Bengalis, rare ones, broke the overwhelming silence that shrouded the story of their holocaust. By and large, even the very people who had suffered Partition’s worst effects, its scarred survivors, spoke…