"Through the course of research for this book, a lot of things that are ingrained within me, I had to shed.
The problem with that is that silence gives rise to prejudice," she said. "For a lot of people who witnessed partition, what they saw receded into a silence within them. At least 2,000 people were killed and over 4,000 injured.
Policemen in Calcutta use tear gas bombs during communal riots in the city. The stories of the objects became an entry point for talking about a larger history - one that is often obscured by silence. She began the interviews for her master's thesis at Concordia University in Montreal, then turned them into a book. But, 'You took this earring with you? Oh, wow.'" "But how can you possibly sit across from somebody and be so direct as to ask, 'Tell me about your most vulnerable, dramatic memory?'" she said. More than a million died.Īt first, Malhotra told The Sunday Edition's host Michael Enright, asking people about what they took with them felt "petty and insignificant, when compared to the mammoth trauma they might have witnessed." In 1947, after independence from Britain, the creation of Pakistan, and an explosion of sectarian violence,14 million people were forced to leave their homes. Its power and poignancy will haunt the reader.Aanchal Malhotra says it alarms her how many languages she's learned to say the word "things" in.įor her book Remnants of Partition: 21 Objects from a Continent Divided, the artist and oral historian interviewed survivors of the Partition of India about the physical objects they took with them as they fled in both directions. They uncover a rich tapestry of pain and rupture, but also of hope and connection – in belonging through belongings, and identities reforged.įrom a string of pearls to a young woman’s poetry, this extraordinary book gives voice to the voiceless, restoring the everyday to a great drama of the twentieth century.
Remnants of Partition is a remarkable alternative history, telling the family stories hidden within items carried between the new India and Pakistan, amid chaos and violence. Through the possessions saved by her own great-grandparents as they fled their homes, she discovers the unique power of such objects: to unlock the secrets of a colossal human migration, and a life that once was. The emotion and trauma of the Partition are buried deep, but Aanchal Malhotra has found a way to recover them.
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