Echoes of many partitions

Aanchal Malhotra evocatively recreates the emotional responses of survivors and subsequent generations

In her stellar debut book Remnants of a Separation (2017), Aanchal Malhotra had documented Partition via the lens of material possessions. With her latest n the Language of Remembering: The Inheritance of Partition, she has become a keeper of intergenerational histories, memories, and even inherited silences.

An archive of personal memories of historical significance, the book is structured as a set of 24 groups of emotional responses to the fractured recollections of Partition survivors and subsequent generations. To be sure, the responses are not all the same: after all, it’s impossible to erase the hint of sadness in a story of hope, fear of loss in an anecdote of love, or the shimmer of malice in an awe-inspiring recollection. However, in the capable hands of its curator, who doesn’t shy away from admitting that this book is more a personal exercise rather than a political one, each story interacts with the other within the framework of a theme, underlining “the diversity of experience” its author actively sought.

Reading this book, it’s clear that Malhotra, a Delhi-based oral historian and co-founder of the Museum of Material Memory, “a digital repository of material culture from the Indian subcontinent”, has not only shown immense agility in manoeuvring difficult conversations but has also successfully unravelled the layers of meanings hidden in her interactions with the interviewees. 

The conversations, thoughts, and discussions she records are full of “nostalgia, sentimentality or lament” all at once. While reading them, I don’t remember how many times I felt the loss to be utterly personal. But I asked myself whether I was appropriating this loss. And at that precise moment, I found Zeba Talkhani, author of My Past Is a Foreign Country (Sceptre, 2019), expressing the same fear to Malhotra: “And this is what I struggle with sometimes — am I centring myself into something that is not mine to feel or discuss? Why do I think about this, why am I feeling like this? Sometimes I feel like it’s not my thing to talk about because I wasn’t … I mean, there are people like you and your family, who were directly displaced and still feel that loss and pain.”

Pondering over it for a long while, I conclude: Because “belonging” is an innate desire in sentient beings. But what’s unique in the case of humans is that they can locate themselves where they belong even while being physically displaced. Post-Partition, however, this exercise became challenging in more ways than one. Or as the author describes it: “It comprises not only physical belonging — a sense of ownership over land and tangible space — but also cognitive belonging, a psychological landscape of solace and familiarity, which is not necessarily always within reach.”

It’s that familiarity that became beyond people’s reach that they couldn’t utter unspeakable events for a long time. And there was no right set of questions either to exhume these stories. So, for 75 years, the Partition of India, which rewrote the fate of the whole of South Asia, and gave birth to independent nations, the pain, the loss, the regret, the fear, the longing remained silent. Sometimes out of habit, sometimes forced — one indiscernible from the other.

Author and journalist Aatish Taseer signals why this silence is getting broken now and why new initiatives are led to document Partition history. He says, “There’s a natural delay when something as historic as Partition occurs — there is a delay as people come to terms with the trauma that has happened. And then, thirty, forty, fifty years later, there’s an awakening.” This book is proof of that awakening. 

What’s interesting about this book is that it clearly shows that the subsequent riots after Partition and horrific incidents such as the Nellie massacre, the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom, the Babri Masjid demolition and other incidents of ethnic cleansing stemmed from manufactured hate. Be it the “us versus them” language by the popular media or the religious divide created by the political leaders, everyone legitimised such acts of violence.

Because if the benefactors of hate were to share the story of a Faiz Rabbani from the other side finding his ancestral three-storey haveli “still standing” in Jullundur then it’d convey a different, undesirable message. And saying that the Punjabis in Krishna Nagar rejoiced when one Mr Gossain visited Pakistan and brought ghar ka paani for them, wouldn’t that bring two communities close to each other?

Or as novelist Karan Mahajan notes: “Sometimes the vastness of numbers and statistics of the violence during Partition serve as a distraction from the truth of the situation. It’s a big rupture that obscures all the micro relationships that may have existed before.” Clearly, there’s a microcosm of its own when it comes to Partition. It has the potential of burgeoning into something else, like transforming into “a conversation of rebuilding”, as Avani, a photographer, notes in this book, but only select narratives are floated to help vested interest groups. That is why this book is what the subcontinent needs to read.

This otherwise outstanding book has one weakness: it focuses on the stories of only influential people. This is not to say that stories of such people weren’t moving or that these people didn’t suffer during the atrocities that befell them during the time or after Partition. What’s more concerning is that, given that the keepers of Partition memories have less and less time to document human-centric stories, aren’t we running the risk of ignoring stories that don’t involve grandchildren or great-grandchildren of former Chief Justices of India, owners of havelis or businesses with a turnover of an underdeveloped country’s GDP? Or were the stories of the less privileged omitted in the interest of brevity? Had some of their stories been included, this deeply researched account would’ve been flawless.

The reviewer is a Delhi-based writer and freelance journalist. Instagram/Twitter: @writerly_life

In the Language of Remembering: The Inheritance of Partition

Author: Aanchal Malhotra

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

Pages: 713

Price: Rs 799