'Remnants of a Separation' retraces the tragic legacy of Partition

The fluidity of memory is moored with material objects in this book

On their way from Dalhousie to Lahore, right after Partition in August 1947, Azra Haq and her uncle and aunt — soon to be in-laws — carried with them a consignment of everyday treasures accumulated over a lifetime: her uncle’s carpets, furniture and silverware. Yet, in the course of the journey, escorted by an army guard, the party swelled as Haq and her relatives met more and more stranded refugees. The expensive but inanimate objects were all discarded. “And by the time we reached our destination, all I had were the clothes I was wearing... And these pearls,” Haq recalls to Malhotra.

Haq’s story is one of the 19 collected by Malhotra, a New Delhi-based artist and co-founder of the Museum of Material Memories. Narratives about Partition, in almost all mediums, are considerable, and adding to the pile might seem superfluous. Yet, this is an essential book, in more ways than one, as we celebrate the 70th year of Independence but also the sombre memory of the mutual genocide of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs that accompanied the cartographic cosmetic surgery. It tries to trace personal memories and narratives through objects carried by refugees as they escaped the bloodshed to new countries, taking whatever they could.

Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory, Author: Aanchal Malhotra, Publisher: HarperCollins, Pages: 386, Price: Rs 540 

 

In the introduction to the book, historian and journalist Rudrangshu Mukherjee highlights a significant concern of such a study: “What about those who did not even have the time to pick up an object when they fled to save themselves, their children and dear ones as madness and fury enveloped them? And two, in case of those who had the luxury of choosing, did they have regrets about choosing one thing over another?” Memory, of course, is notoriously slippery and subject to erosions and alterations over time. Malhotra recognises this in the Introduction: “Our memory is not a recording device”.

The fluidity of memory is moored with material objects in her book. She recollects the ubiquitous first response she got from many people she interviewed about what they got with them when they crossed the border in 1947: “Kuch nahi laaye the (We came with nothing)”. Malhotra recalls how things would then start crawling out of trunks and cupboards, and along with it would tumble out dusty, rusted memories. Her quest begins from within her family — once refugees from Pakistan in New Delhi (like my own grandparents who were refugees in Calcutta). Soon enough, what begins as her MFA dissertation expands, accommodating between its covers narratives from all sides of the many borders.

Malhotra is an empathetic chronicler, listening and observing her subjects with much care. Her chosen task is one of great responsibility because most of the tales she records are of loss, at times, visceral. The narrative technique she uses — of first person narration of interviews with her subjects — implicates her in these personal recollections. It is a telling artistic choice, contrary to the accepted third-person, historical narration. Instead of keeping an academic distance, she chooses narrative familiarity, describing not only the conditions of the interview in great detail but also revealing how the stories affect her. It is a daring, vulnerable form of writing.

This journalistic approach allows her access to details that other historians would find difficult to negotiate or even acknowledge.

Malhotra’s book reminded me immediately of Svetlana Alexievich’s Second-Hand Time, which records the experiences of Russians at the time of Perestroika and the fall of the Soviet Union. Alexievich’s compelling narratives — she has also written about the Afghan War (Zinky Boys, 1991) and Chernobyl (Voices from Chernobyl, 2005) — won her the Nobel Prize in Literature (2015). These mostly are a democratic cacophony of voices. Malhotra’s project similarly has democratic aspirations and she succeeds to a great extent.  

A book from the collection of Partha Mitter. Photo: HarperCollins.

Through these recollections emerges a stringent critique of murderous nationalism that seems to have been resurrected on both sides of the border in recent times. Two of the chapters, one from each side of the border, capture this perfectly: “Gifts from a Maharaja” and “Love in the Time of Nationalism”. The narrator of the first one is Arza Haq, with whom I began this review. She reveals — much to the surprise of Malhotra — how she took to the streets raising slogans demanding Pakistan.

The narrator of the second one is the poet Prabhjot Kaur, who recalls travelling to Delhi during the murderous riots of Partition on a train filled with dead bodies. These are cautionary tales for those who conflate religious identity with that of the nation.

Mirchandani's hamam-dasta. Photo: HarperCollins.

 

My only complaint about the book is that less attention is paid to the partition of Bengal. There are only two stories from the east, where the displacement and violence was just as intense as in the west. This is perhaps symptomatic of disproportionate attention paid to the troubles in my home state, and how the national imagination perceives it. The narrative of Partha Mitter — a descendent of Kaliprasanna Singha of Hutum Pechar Naksha fame and a historian himself — more or less covers the troubled 1940s in Bengal, but I was left thirsting for more. Having said this, one must also acknowledge that such a project is potentially endless. One hopes Malhotra will continue with her research and write more such volumes.