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One of my favourite poems is a miniature masterpiece that goes like this, Separation by W.S.
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Your absence has gone through me like thread through a needle, everything I do is stitched
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While recording the episode you are going to hear now, it struck me that Mervyn's
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evocative poem is not just true of personal relationships.
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Friends and societies can be haunted by the past in quite the same way.
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Indeed you can look at the world through the prism of the seen and the unseen.
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All the events that happen around you are what is seen, but the many layers of history
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that have led to them and that affect all our actions are unseen.
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This is true especially for India, a complex country with complex histories.
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In a sense everything that happens here is stitched with the colour of the past.
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And one of the things that I have realised about India's partition is that it was not
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just an event that unfolded over a couple of weeks or a couple of months or even a couple
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Instead it lives on today and its consequences are all around us.
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Welcome to the Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioural
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Please welcome your host Amit Verma.
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Welcome to the Seen and the Unseen.
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My guest today is Archal Malhotra, an artist, historian and writer.
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A few years ago Archal set out on a project to document oral histories of partition using
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the catalyst of physical objects that people carried with them on their trips from one
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side of the border to another.
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Simply put she would meet survivors of partition, get them to show objects from their past life
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and through that open up this deep well of experiences and memories.
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This came together in a remarkable and deeply moving book called Remnants of a Separation,
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published in the rest of the world as Remnants of Partition.
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Archal is also the co-founder of the Museum of Material Memory which she describes as
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quote, a digital repository of material culture of the Indian subcontinent tracing family
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histories and social ethnography through heirlooms, collectibles and objects of antiquity, stop
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I have found this entire project so fascinating and even heartbreaking because while so much
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history can seem abstract, she made it concrete by giving us intimate details of personal
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stories which added so much depth to my understanding of the horror of those times and also of human
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nature and the human condition.
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When the lives of others come alive for us then our own lives are enriched.
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I learnt a lot from this conversation with Archal but before we get to that let's take
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a quick commercial break.
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This scene on the Unseen has been a labour of love for me.
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I have enjoyed putting together many stimulating conversations, expanding my brain and my universe
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sceneunseen.in slash support Anshul, welcome to the scene on the Unseen.
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Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here Amit.
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Anshul, the shoe is really on the other foot now because instead of you asking other people
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about their past, I am going to start by asking you about your past.
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Tell me a little bit about yourself and how you came to doing what you are doing, you
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know being a chronicler of memory as it were, a historian of sorts, what are the different
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strands in your life which brought you here?
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I started any form of career that I had by being an artist and I don't know how many
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people know this but I trained to be a traditional printmaker, more specifically a metal engraver.
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Also for, I guess from the age of 17 to 26 or so, I worked in a print shop and worked
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with copper plates and acid and I really thought that that was the direction that my life was
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going to remain in because ever since I've been young, I've only been fond of the arts
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and I have been lucky enough to have a family that supports that.
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So I did my BFA in traditional print and art history, then I did my MFA in printmaking
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and I really thought that it could lead to a career in what is basically a master printer.
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And I think also the craft of printmaking is such an obstinate craft that what I loved
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about it is that I was associating myself to a kind of almost forgotten history, whether
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it is printing on a printing press or setting handset type and that was lovely, that was
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really lovely but I do realize that it has its limitations in the digital age.
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And in that sense, I kind of fell into history almost accidentally because I was working
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on my master's thesis in Montreal at the moment, this is around 2012, 2013 and what
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happens in a fine art program is that you can essentially work on any subject you want
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for your research as long as you produce a body of work, physical work that can be hung
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in a gallery and that you will defend.
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So like most people defend papers during their thesis, people like me would defend a body
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of artwork and for this, I don't know how I got really interested, I know how I got
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really interested in the partition of India, I was in my grad program for two years and
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the third year was supposed to be the thesis year and I remember taking a sabbatical year
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off because I just didn't have any ideas for my thesis and I think the thing with any creative
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practice is that the more you push it, the more it's visible that you've pushed it and
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it doesn't seem natural and it doesn't seem like it's coming from within.
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So I took a gap year, I moved home back to India from Canada and I said, okay, if the
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idea needs to come, it's going to come naturally.
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And I remember it was 2013, October and I have a friend, my uncle Austin Sufi, who's
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more popularly known as the Delhiwala and he and I went to my grandfather's house in
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North Delhi because my uncle was writing a story about old houses in the city at that
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time and he asked his questions of course about the house that my grandfather lived
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in which is built in the 50s and I that day started seeing the house through a very different
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Added to this fact was my grandfather's elder brother who brought out all these old objects
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and a lot of those objects had been carried from across the border before partition and
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two objects specifically that had been carried by his parents to Delhi, they came from Lahore
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to Amritsar and finally to Delhi and these were very, very mundane commonplace objects,
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the ghara in which Lassie has made a metal vessel and a ghaz, a yardstick, which was
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used in the clothing store to measure fabric, it's called a ghaz.
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And I think that when my grandfather's brother started talking about these two objects, it
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was so visceral because he was transported back to his childhood in Lahore and it was
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not just the fact that he was transported to the past, which happens quite commonly
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with the, you know, aged artifacts, but also the fact that he was transported across this
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really impenetrable border almost seamlessly in front of me and I don't think anyone else
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noticed that happening, but I became obsessed with the idea that the object can transport
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us somewhere and of course, you know, objects do this, old objects when we hold them, they
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remind us of other times, they remind us of other people, but that idea of being transported
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across a border by an object was so powerful for me and I think in that moment, I realized
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that I had found my MFA pieces idea.
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So I spent the next year, I would say, traveling around India, interviewing people about objects
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and I'm sure we'll go more into the interview process later.
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So I'm just going to tell you a very brief overview and when I went back to Canada after
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my one year sabbatical was when I started really working on using historical information
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to create artwork that I would finally showcase in a gallery and defend at some point.
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So, you know, my sort of interface with this project is of course a book.
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You know, when it originated, were you thinking of it as sort of artwork, were you thinking
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of it as, you know, it will come together as a book, were you merely simply at that
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point not thinking of form so much, but just fascinated by the process of, you know, excavating
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memory through talking about things as it were and then letting that lead where it will.
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What was your thought process that led you through this entire project?
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I don't think I ever thought of it as a book at the beginning and to be honest, I don't
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think I thought of it as a book until 2016, as late as 2016 and I have been raised in
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a family that owns a bookshop.
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So books are very intrinsic to me and despite that, I never did anything in it.
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It was always about the visual for me because I was interested in art, I was good at art
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and then I went to college for art as well.
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So I think when I started on the idea, it was very much about the physicality of the
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object, the emotions attached to the object.
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How can I portray something in a photograph that transports someone to that moment, right?
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And what I was also doing, and for this, I guess I have great hindsight, you know, I
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have great foresight, is that I was interviewing people about the object.
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So everything that would essentially be included in an oral history interview was happening
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anyway because I was curious about the object, which meant that when eventually I did realize
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that I wanted to make this into a book, I had a lot of subject matter ready, available
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But at the beginning, it was really just about the thesis and making something visual and
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I think also because I was living in Canada and people over there really did not know
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enough about South Asian history, so it also became a way to make people more aware of
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But the book was never really on the cards at the beginning.
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And how does the expected audience of a work play a part in shaping the work itself?
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For example, I've often found that, you know, a decade ago I used to write for foreign papers
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like The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian and so on, and I eventually stopped because
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I hated it because I found that a lot of shared knowledge that one takes for granted when
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one writes for an Indian audience, you know, you can't take that for granted and you have
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to dump everything down and you have to, you know, explain even the simplest thing.
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And the thing is that for an Indian reader of your book, knowing what I know about the
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partition, even my dad, you know, went from Lahore to Calcutta, so that was not at the
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partition but well before.
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And you know, there's a certain shared knowledge and empathy that you can take for granted,
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which is not so with the foreign reader.
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Does that then sort of shape the art that you're producing that a certain amount of
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the space goes into explanatory stuff, just giving the background, whereas, you know,
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for a different audience, perhaps you'd have less of that and more of just, you know, evoking
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the time and the emotions and all of that.
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I mean, I think there's a two-part answer to that.
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The first is that visual art can transcend language, which means that it can transcend
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specific histories, right?
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When you're looking at a painting or a photograph or even a film, you may not have to be born
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in that specific geographic area to feel something that it's trying to make you feel.
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So that's one of the positive aspects about art and obviously art has many positive aspects.
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But I didn't really feel like the images had to be explained.
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What I felt was that the history behind the images had to be explained, which is actually
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what also started getting me towards the book, that there was so much that an image could
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not give to someone that words had to be put, right?
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But the other thing, the second part about that answer is a sense of emotion.
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What you're trying to do is not to put together a conventional history of partition, but a
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human history of partition.
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And I think when it comes to feelings of migration, displacement, loss, particularly in the country
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where I was living, Canada, which is largely formed by immigrants, I think there was a
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lot of resonance, right?
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The larger themes had a lot of resonance.
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The specificity may have been lost, but the larger themes about leaving a place either
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by choice or by force could be felt by many people.
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How did you sort of then begin to speak about the interviewing itself?
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And we briefly spoke about it before we started recording, where you reminded me that you're
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a professional interviewer and therefore out of great curiosity and hoping that I can learn
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something from this, how did you approach that process?
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Because I, of course, I sort of have willing participants when I talk to people on my show,
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they know what I'm doing, there's that common ground.
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It's not that difficult, though one does have, you know, little things one does to make them
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But in your case, you're speaking to people who are literally decades older than you.
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And what is even harder is that many of the things you want them to talk about, they could
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include things that they've suppressed for years and years, so your task is first to
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make them comfortable and then to make them open up and to make them take you seriously.
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So what was that process of learning how to have these conversations and what tips can
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you share for other would be conversationalists?
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I think learning is the key word here because I'm still very much learning how to do it.
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And I think like working with people is, you know, gives you a sense of great humidity
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because you're constantly learning.
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I started this work when I was 23 years old, which meant 2013.
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23 is a very young age to do anything of this serious nature.
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And at the beginning, as you would expect, I had a lot of issues because I don't know
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why at that point, I thought it would be a great idea not to do any secondary research
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So to really go in straight, fresh, fill my head with personal knowledge about people
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and then later do my secondary research, which in hindsight was not a great idea because
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I didn't really know what I was getting into.
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But I have since thought about the interview process a lot and I can maybe start at the
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beginning as to what I felt at the beginning.
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So in those first few interviews in 2013, I found it very difficult to start asking
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questions because the thing is, you're right, you're not asking about how was your day,
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tell me about your kitty party.
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Let's talk about this tambola thing you played.
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It's actually, tell me when you left your home and tell me how it felt and tell me whether
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And these are really, how do you start seeing these things, how do you reach common ground?
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And so I have something which I unofficially call the plateau method, which is if you want
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someone to reach here, up here, then you have to make it your responsibility to also reach
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here, which means that if someone would be saying something of great vulnerability, I'm
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not saying that you have to say equally the same amount of vulnerable things, but you
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have to give yourself to the person as well, which means you have to be a couple of things,
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honest, sincere, and genuinely interested in what they're saying.
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I think the largest issue with being a millennial is that I have to learn how to listen to people,
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Which is a really underrated habit, listening.
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And I think when you're an older photo historian and you're working with older people, that
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is key, listen to them, because you can go in with a structured interview, which by the
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way is something I never do, and you can ask all the questions and they can answer all
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the questions, but you still may not get anything of significance from them.
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The point is to listen to what they're saying and ask follow-up questions based on what
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And these could be really mundane questions like, tell me how you made your hair, did
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you wear a braid or did you wear a ponytail when you were young, or tell me what you wore?
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Because I realized very, very early on that to talk about partition is very difficult
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still, which means that there is something so extraordinary about the 1947 partition
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that we haven't been able to let go of its heaviness.
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And part of that is because we haven't talked about its heaviness.
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So if something remains suppressed for years, then it's almost as if every conversation
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is starting at the beginning of unraveling something else, right?
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And so in that sense, because my study was about objects, it made it a little bit easier
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actually, because I could say, okay, tell me about this pen, why did you carry this
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How did you carry this pen?
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Oh, your father gave you this pen, okay, it is very expensive at the time.
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And then how did you know that you had to carry things?
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How did you learn about partition?
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You heard it on the radio, okay.
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What radio did you listen to?
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What newspaper did you get in your home?
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So what I was trying to do was not only archive memory about partition, because that's a limited
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What I was trying to do is to archive the social ethnography of life before partition
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in an undivided India and how it was structured because of partition.
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For that, we need to furnish people's lives with details.
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And I think that we have this great misconception that partition happened in August, 1947,
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and that's the month of mayhem.
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But in fact, it started much before that, and it took many months, even years to normalize.
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Some would argue that the repercussions still haven't normalized per se even now.
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But I think that in asking questions only about the violence or the trauma or migration
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of displacement, you already limit your interview to that lens.
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And there is a great injustice in that, because then you only paint the event of partition
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as an event of trauma, whereas there were moments of great sacrifice and friendship
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and camaraderie that came from that event that were born because of the circumstances
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of partition, and you lose out on the opportunity to cope with those.
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So one of the things that I did was to be completely open in my interviewing process,
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which leads you to a lot of tangential stories, particularly with old people, because they
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They talk a lot because someone is listening, and that's really what they want, for someone
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So we would be talking about a bomb blast at the time, then we would suddenly go to
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the school they went to, then from there, we would go to the stones they would collect
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as a child and a paper boat they made, and it was just really all over the place, which
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also tells you that memory is not chronological, and it does not work in a linear fashion.
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And I think that, if anything, the interview process continues to be a very humbling process
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for me, because it just makes you realize how small you are in the larger aspect of
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people's lives or national history.
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And the focus on objects, you know, it struck me while reading your book and reading you
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speak about it elsewhere that, you know, there are two ways in which the focus on objects
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And one is, of course, it's a catalyst, it can just get them to open up when you say,
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where did this pen come from, and they start talking about that and other memories flow.
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But also, objects can intrinsically be meaningful, like I was very moved by the story that you
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told near the start of the book of your paternal grandmother, who shows you her coin collection,
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And at that moment, it's just a mundane collection of old coins.
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But then she talks about how her parents lived in this joint family thing, and her dad died,
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and the rest of the family cut them all out, even though they were staying there.
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And her mom didn't know how to cope, and they didn't have any money.
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And one day, her mom sends her out to all the other relatives to, you know, get some
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money and none of them gives anything.
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And what is she asking for?
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She's asking for five rupees.
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And when she says this, she picks up five of those one rupee coins.
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You know, there are so many other stories like this, like the lady who carries a sword,
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and then you realize that that sword has a greater significance than just being the one
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item they carried with them, that when they were sort of running away through the jungles
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or whatever and getting away, she actually gave birth to her kid and that sword was used
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to cut the umbilical cord.
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So that's, you know, so sort of significant.
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There's also the, you know, the Gharah of Lassi, which you spoke about, where, and you
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know, when you were describing that bit, a Gharah in which Lassi was still made every
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day, and it struck me that it's almost like a series of cinematic shots where you're zooming
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out where first you have an inanimate object, which is a Gharah, and then you zoom out to
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And then you zoom out to the people making it and all the history and everything that
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Were these objects intrinsically valuable to these people already, or did they gain
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value as they sort of, you know, as these memories rolled through them?
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I think both, depending on the object.
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So say you carried something that was obviously valuable, and by that I mean monetarily valuable,
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jewelry, pieces of silver, an heirloom, then these objects were kept in beautiful pristine
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condition and brought out and sort of celebrated, look, I can put it on right now, it's almost
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like a celebration of things, you know, and this is particularly the case with jewelry.
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But say you brought something so mundane like a guzz, a yardstick, and you didn't use it,
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you weren't a clock seller anymore in India, then what happened to the guzz?
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It would be sitting in a corner of your house and you would almost forget about it.
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That was the case with the sword you mentioned, Ajit Kalkapur runs through the jungles of
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Kashmir state and arrives in Jammu having given birth on the third day of her flight
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and her husband uses the sword to cut her umbilical cord.
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So in that sense, the sword literally saves her life and yet the sword had been relegated
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to a dusty corner of the house.
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Now maybe that's because she didn't want to remember the trauma attached to that flight
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and thereby attached to that sword as well.
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But this should be an example of how objects can fall from grace and how they are not remembered.
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But generally I found if things were of extreme mundane nature, books, shawls, pens, this
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pocket knife that my grandmother carried, for example, then you would have to infuse
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importance into it, which also tells you about what is valuable for people in the subcontinent.
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If something is obviously sparkly and glittery and has money attached to it, then you will
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But if something is really mundane, it is not celebrated for its virtuosity or the fact
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that it has survived or the fact that it has seen so many important journeys, it is almost
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So in a sense, if we were talking about a shawl, for example, and I would say, oh, how
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beautiful and I would go on and I would talk about it.
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They may not have cared about it at the beginning of our conversation, but if by chance at the
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end of our two or three hour conversation, I would say, can I borrow this shawl for my
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They would say, no, no, no, it's mine, it's my mother's, it's my father's.
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So I think that the jump or the shift from nonchalance towards a particular object, particularly
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mundane things to proprietorship was so, it was almost like so cliched towards the end,
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because I knew that it would happen, right?
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In that sense, I think that objects teach you a lot of things as well, right?
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They teach you, as you said, how to be catalyst for certain things.
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And I think that this was a method of storytelling I discovered while on the field.
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So because I wasn't trained in history or English or any form of sociology, anthropology
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or ethnography, a lot of this had to be learned on the field.
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And I should say that there are dedicated programs in colleges and universities now
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that teach that, but because you have to learn everything on the field, a couple of things
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A, things are a lot harder for you, right?
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And you have to problem solve literally all the time.
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But the second thing that happens is that you develop really creative ways to do things.
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And these are things that people learn about in schools and stuff, and here you are because
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you've derived it from necessity almost.
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So in that sense, I think a lot of my methodology is really grounded into the discovery of specific
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I am not interested in the extraneous details at all.
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I am not interested in the larger scope of the landscape, the person, no, I'm interested
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in the nuanced, highly detailed, personal perspective of the person, because the history
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of partition has long been relegated to numbers and figures and facts and date.
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And I did not understand how my grandparents, all four of whom had migrated from what became
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Pakistan to India had become numbers.
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I just didn't get that.
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So that meant that for every number, there was a person story.
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And I was interested in that specific story.
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So I built methodology around trying to record the specificities of people's lives.
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In fact, one of the sort of continuous strands that comes up through your book is that many
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of these people sharing these memories, even if they're sort of insiders, even if they're
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part of the establishment at the time, to them, partition is an abstract concept before
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And then it becomes concrete.
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And it seems to me that a lot of what this book does is also make the abstract concrete
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that very often when you talk of history, dates, events, this happened, that happened,
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It's just stuff on the page.
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And what you've done is you've, of course, told all of these stories and made it kind
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of come to life and become so evocative for all of us.
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And the interesting thing is that so many of them at the time had no idea what the consequences
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of these abstract things would be until their lives are completely overturned.
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As an interviewer, did some of this sort of take you by surprise when you listen to all
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these stories, these people reliving memories that they might have suppressed for so long?
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And of course, you said in terms of that whole Platteau method, which, you know, I shall
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have to process and perhaps try out myself, you know, it must be so emotionally charged
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for you as well to listen to these stories.
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And particularly when some of these people are your relatives, so to say, and you also
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descended from four people affected by partition, all your grandparents.
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I think that interviewing your family is the hardest because you don't know what you may
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find and you don't know how that may affect the day to day after that.
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And I'm not just talking about like skeletons in the closet sort of things you may find,
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but just generally also like just discovering the sacrifices and difficulties that they
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had to go through really changes your perception of a person.
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The second thing is being emotionally involved in an interview.
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I don't know how to explain this without sounding like a very crass person, but I'm not a very
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emotional person and I'm very good at keeping, you know, work and personal life very separate.
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And I think that this is one of the reasons that people are often disappointed when they
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meet me because they often expect me to be like a very compassionate person, always wanting
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But in fact, it gets a lot to be honest, if you're listening to stories all the time,
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it gets, it gets quite mentally taxing.
#
So when I am on an interview, my main focus is to be able to record as much information
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as possible because I have a rule with people, I don't see them more than once.
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So the interview happens on one day and it may be for two hours or it may be for four
#
hours, it may have 10 breaks in the middle or it may have no breaks.
#
But I try my best not to go back to the person because I find that if you go back the second
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and third time, then they know exactly what you want to hear and how you want to hear
#
So, and then they would have had a chance to process and reason with their history in
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Whereas when you're talking to them for the first time, if they are rediscovering something,
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then you are discovering it along with them.
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So the process is very raw.
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But I think that you have to be very careful not to entangle yourself in that conversation
#
because you're still having to make sense of it and ask the questions.
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It's very easy to get swayed into the trauma and violence of what people saw and lose yourself
#
And this particular thing happens to me only when I'm listening to the interview again
#
When I'm in that moment, all I want to ask is the follow up question.
#
I want to ask how they feel.
#
I want to ask what it was like.
#
And often the responses take people by surprise as well, either because they are being asked
#
so directly or the fact that they are being asked at all.
#
Because for much of this generation's life, it's not that they just didn't talk about
#
It's also the fact that they were never asked about it.
#
So when I'm there, I'm trying to get as much information as I can.
#
Of course, things are emotional.
#
Of course, you feel it.
#
Of course, some of the things you hear are horribly inhuman.
#
So you can't help but be moved by them.
#
But you always have to remember that this story is not your story, even though it may
#
be unearthed because of you.
#
But when you're transcribing and you're really focusing on the words people are using, for
#
example, a thing that always gets to me a lot is that people of that generation say
#
something of that time of partition, they will always say, we have to dispose of the
#
And that word dispose, it really gets to me always because it's such a, like, I would
#
use it for trash, right?
#
I would use it, you know, I'm disposing of this, I don't need it anymore.
#
But they often use that word to describe people that had died and they had to either cremate
#
them or bury them at the time.
#
So I think that what I'm looking out for and I'm concentrating on is the vocabulary when
#
I'm transcribing and that really gets to me.
#
But again, I think that you need to make a certain amount of distance from the interview.
#
And it happens already because you're so much younger, and they are so much older, and the
#
distance is so, so large, so vast, not in terms of generation, but also in terms of
#
time and the fact that you have social media to help you understand other things and connect
#
with other people that you feel the same thing.
#
What was the original question?
#
I mean, I'm delighted that even I have sort of lost track of the original question, but
#
I think you answered it.
#
And then we went on a very Amitask digression, if I might say that, which is most welcome
#
So these are the tangents I'm talking about, like you just get very used to it, you know?
#
Because the thing is, I'm still trying to make sense of the craft of oral history.
#
I think that it's not given as much importance as it should be, particularly in the subcontinent.
#
It's history from beneath or it's only people's history.
#
And I think the biggest question I get sometimes with it that often aggravates me is how can
#
How can you trust memory?
#
Like even if someone is making something up, even if someone has adopted a collective history
#
to make it their personal history at the time, which is very common with partition.
#
So because everyone was seeing dead bodies, someone who may not have seen a dead body,
#
but only heard about it, may have adopted that story as their own.
#
But even if that is the case, how can you not listen to it and hold it as a valid source?
#
Because at some point oral history becomes the only way we can actually populate these
#
events with actual details.
#
Conventional history has not been able to do that, which is why we study partition in
#
school and not understand it to be an event that belongs to us, but an event that is so
#
far back in the pages of history that it cannot possibly have an effect on the present, which
#
as we've seen in recent years is obviously not the case.
#
Partition is still tickling down the generations.
#
So I think that, I don't know, over these last, and again, going off on a really weird
#
tangent here that I have learned how to be a champion for oral history, for people's
#
history, which I think more and more people are now.
#
So a two part question really, actually, there are a lot of questions which emerged from
#
what you just said, which is why I keep a notebook with me.
#
But a two part question to begin with, which is that, you know, one you pointed out during
#
the book, and this is something that we all know that a lot of people from that generation
#
who went through partition have never told these stories.
#
And perhaps the first time they were talking about it was talking about it to you.
#
Even the family didn't really know these things.
#
So number one, you know, why do you think so many of those people suppress these stories?
#
And the second part of that is that I guess one reason no one would have asked them about
#
these stories is that they would have, it would have felt impolite that you don't want
#
to go to a place where somebody else doesn't want to go, which of course, as part of your
#
So did you did you feel like an intruder?
#
And did you sometimes feel guilty for, you know, dredging up all this pain and trauma
#
Yes, yes, sometimes, not always, though, because that's what you're there for.
#
But I remember, you know, distinctly remember this interview that actually happened after
#
the book was published.
#
So I haven't, I haven't actually written about it anywhere.
#
But I remember interviewing this couple in Gurgaon, and the woman had come from erstwhile
#
And she had traveled to Jammu with this huge family.
#
And so the details that came out of that interview, they left on Karwa Chot day.
#
And how she knows that is because it was a full moon, it was a full moon.
#
And she knows everyone was fasting, all the women were fasting.
#
So she was particular to tell me that Karwa Chot ke din hum me tila the.
#
And they left with a really big group of people.
#
And they left in such a hurry that they actually left behind her sister.
#
She was sleeping in the house and they just left her behind and she was an older sister
#
So all these people are migrating to India at the time.
#
And, you know, there was not a lot of migration that happened in August 47 in JNK.
#
The migration only started in October, November with attacks from what were called Kabailis
#
It's difficult to say, but they call it Kabaili, so I will call it Kabaili as well.
#
And so she is saying that we are running and people are running after us and there's a
#
lot of confusion and we end up in this little house or small fort like thing and we're all
#
And then my aunt starts passing out what is called Ram Naam Ki Goli, which is cyanide
#
And they're passing it out, they're breaking it and she gets a small piece and everyone
#
is ingesting them so that they don't have to meet a worst fate.
#
If you have to die, die at your own hands, then something worse.
#
So she puts it in her mouth, she's very young at the time.
#
I don't think she was older than four or five.
#
She puts it in her mouth and she finds it very bitter, so she spits it out.
#
In that sense, she saves her life.
#
And from the large party that had left, I think four people remain and they come to
#
India, I believe they come to Delhi and the sister is still missing, right?
#
And they figure when they reach here, she's been left behind and not much can be done.
#
Ultimately, she's picked up by a Muslim man there, taken to his house.
#
He takes care of her as his child.
#
He then takes her after a couple of years to a camp where she realizes that someone
#
from the family has been looking for her all this time and they are reunited.
#
And now, narrating this incident is causing this woman a lot of pain, right?
#
But I can't explain it because she was so young at the time, the pain is also very childlike.
#
So the ways in which she describes it is when I saw my sister, I didn't recognize that
#
she was my sister, but I remember what she was wearing.
#
She was wearing a dress and she was very, very thin and she was walking down the stairs
#
and I saw her for the first time and I had to be reintroduced to my sister.
#
She tells me that she lost almost all her family on that journey.
#
And then she says, I don't blame Muslims for it.
#
In fact, I don't blame anyone for it.
#
And then she leaves the room and she goes to make a cup of tea.
#
Now I don't know whether she left the room because she was overwhelmed or she left the
#
room simply because she had to make a cup of tea for us.
#
But her husband, who's been sitting in on this conversation, he turns to me and says,
#
come help me take out the clothes from outside, and I walk with him.
#
And while we're walking, he says, why are you asking these questions?
#
Don't you see the pain that you're causing?
#
How do you respond to that?
#
I didn't know what to say, I was just on one hand, this is your work, because if you don't
#
do it, then no one will know.
#
And no one will know that means people will repeat this again and again.
#
So on one level, you're recording for public knowledge to make sure something like this
#
On the other hand, saying this may be causing someone pain, subliminal pain also that they
#
may not be telling you.
#
And who knows what kind of conversations emerge after you leave that house.
#
So what did I do in that moment?
#
So the gentleman takes off all the clothes that are drying outside, he takes them inside.
#
And then the clothes string is like very quickly that kind of plastic jute.
#
I didn't know what else to do.
#
So I just held on to it really tight until I felt some physical pain.
#
And I don't know, I don't know why I did that.
#
But I just felt really sad because of what he said.
#
You know, and you do feel like you're causing people pain, because not everyone, not everyone.
#
But then sometimes when stories are this traumatic, I don't know, I want to hope that some form
#
of healing happens after I leave, but you can never be certain about that.
#
So you know, what you earlier said about sort of that your general demeanor is sort of not
#
to be affected by this, and you just get the work done and you're affected by it later.
#
I'm also struck by someone who told me an identical thing.
#
I don't know if you heard that episode, Amardeep Singh, the historian of Nanak's travels and
#
And, you know, I did an episode with him and he spoke about how he went to Mirpur once
#
where, if I remember correctly, many of his family, his family is from Muzaffarabad actually.
#
I know him well and I know his work well, but this particular story is also from Mirpur.
#
So how he went to Mirpur and some distant members of his family or people he knew were
#
sort of things that happened there.
#
And I asked him, you know, was it an emotional moment to, you know, walk by the banks of
#
the same river and all of that?
#
And he was like, no, not at all, completely detached.
#
And it's later when you view the tapes and you go through the equipment again that the
#
emotion really happens.
#
The other thing that kind of struck me and just take me through your process of making
#
the choices you made here is that, you know, while speaking during this brief conversation
#
so far, you've, you know, used these phrases like body ko disposed kar diya aur us ramane
#
And these words have a flavor which is very hard to capture in pure English or it's very,
#
you know, I think a lot of the language would be very hard to capture.
#
And what you have, of course, done is while, you know, most of it is in very clear and
#
evocative English, you also use, you know, many bits of the original Punjabi or whatever
#
for the flavor, which I sort of appreciate it because I think that, you know, gave me
#
a sense of it's almost like you hear the person speaking and that's also very evocative.
#
So how do you then make those choices of what to do about the language?
#
Because the thing is, it's not that you're just listening to one or two languages, you're
#
listening to Punjabi and Urdu and Hindi, but you're listening to all kinds of different
#
Like you mentioned someone you met in Pakistan who was talking in a particular Patiala kind
#
of accent and whatever.
#
And but then you are writing a book in English or even if you're doing an art project, whatever
#
there is accompanying it is in English.
#
So how do you make these choices that how do I get this flavor across because it is
#
impossible to translate, right?
#
I mean, I think it connects to what you were originally saying about writing for foreign
#
Why do you need to write?
#
I mean, I guess the question is, are you not writing for your own people?
#
And if you are writing for your own people, then put something in there that they will
#
English is not our language.
#
English is a language that I think in.
#
English is my first language.
#
But for so many of us, the past is rendered through regional languages.
#
And while I realize that I couldn't write a book entirely in regional languages, there
#
are some things that I wouldn't say are untranslatable, but I would say that they don't get the significance
#
of the experience across as well in English.
#
I'll give you an example.
#
I'll give you another one.
#
The same woman who was talking about Patiala in Samana said,
#
To which I translate, I'll never forget the partition of India.
#
It's not the same because Taksim-e-Hind carries with it a history, a history of Hind and a
#
history of that line, Taksim, the line who methi.
#
It carries with it such a specific history that partition cannot, just the word partition
#
of India, it cannot put across in the same way.
#
So I think that the decision about language was pretty conscious.
#
And I knew always that I was going to do it.
#
There was just no question about it.
#
If you read my UK and US editions, they also have the exact same phrases because you're
#
writing for your people.
#
And, you know, with Indians and Pakistanis also, we do this thing where we say the same
#
thing in two or three different ways.
#
So for me, I know I'll say the same thing in Hindi, then I'll say it in Punjabi, then
#
I'll say it in English also, or we mix our languages, which is quite unusual because
#
I don't know if other people in other parts of the world do this as well.
#
So you know, to mix several languages within the same sentence.
#
And I think that it's a part of, it's a part of our culture, isn't it, like a part of our
#
I hate the sense that people don't consider their home market important enough, right?
#
I hate that because for me, the home market is where I do my research.
#
It is people in the subcontinent, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, who give me the history, who give
#
me access to their history.
#
They are the most important for me.
#
No matter how popular you may become in any book, anywhere in the world, I don't think
#
that I would like to forget that I write for my people.
#
And by my people, I mean people in India, people of Pakistan, people of Bangladesh.
#
I don't see a difference in that.
#
Let's kind of, you know, when you speak about how you write for the people of India, Pakistan,
#
Bangladesh, you don't really write for the people of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, you
#
don't really see a difference that we are all sort of one people.
#
This is a quote from your book, which I really like, where you quote Pran Neville as saying,
#
quote, when Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs broke sugar cane or ate aloo puri, they did so in
#
When they went to buy wares at anarkali bazaar, they did so together.
#
This was, is a shared Punjabi culture and it had little to do with religion, stop quote.
#
And you know, I had traveled, I spent a couple of months in Pakistan in 2006 when I was covering
#
the cricket tour there.
#
I had gone to all these places.
#
And you know, one of the first things that struck me, though it's a cliche and I should
#
have expected it, but it struck me was that I didn't feel I was away from home.
#
Apart from, you know, seeing Urdu signs everywhere, it was one, I didn't feel I was away from
#
And two, it also struck me again, that old cliche about how people contain multitudes,
#
that the same person may be living in an Islamic state and maybe a believer and all of that.
#
But at the same time, there is a Punjabi earth and there is a hospitality and there is all
#
So on the one hand, you may have your president banning kite flying on a particular festival,
#
but on the other hand, that's what your community does and you're jolly well going to do it.
#
And it seems to me that what happens during partition is that a stress on only one aspect
#
of identity, then it's almost like you've spoken not just of the physical displacement,
#
but also of the mental displacement.
#
And it seems to me that at some level, it's almost as if who you are is being partially
#
partitioned where you're saying that this part of your identity is critical and this
#
is going to displace you and this is everything to us, to the state now.
#
And the rest of all of those things which are common to you, how you eat aloo puri or
#
how you bond over sugarcane juices is kind of lost.
#
And yet it seems to me that many of the people you spoke to, you know, have sort of retained
#
an appreciation of that multiplicity of whatever makes them what they are.
#
What are your sort of thoughts?
#
Did you see, like, did you see a lot of bitterness, people slipping back into sort of, you know,
#
that aspect of what happened or was it just a sense of zamana hi waisa tha and whatever?
#
I mean, it depends, you can't generalize anything with partition and nor should you.
#
And I think that we make the mistake not just with partition, but also in life to think
#
So that if you're not this, you must be this and if you're not that, you must be this.
#
And this is unfair because people have, as you mentioned, multiplicity of facets within
#
them and they all contribute to making up that person.
#
It just so happens that at the time of partition, a lot of these facets may have been contradictory
#
How do you live with that?
#
And I think that this became most apparent in Pakistan, that a person could feel zealously
#
nationalistic for the cause of Pakistan, yet deeply in longing of the home they left behind
#
And this is very complicated.
#
This is extremely complicated.
#
Another interesting thing that I found there is that I would hear general statements like
#
which is so similar to how we hear here Muslims did this in that time and Muslims did that
#
And yet at the same time, here I was a Hindu sitting in Pakistan in someone's house, obviously
#
First time I had felt like the other.
#
And there people were saying Hindus were doing this in that time, they were doing that, they
#
But son, you are just like a family.
#
And I would say, but maybe I am also a Hindu and they would say, no, you are a daughter.
#
So this, what does this tell us about people's psyche?
#
It says that we are okay vilifying a community of people, particularly for an event in the
#
But the minute a person from that community becomes a personal acquaintance, we find it
#
very difficult to put them in the same category, which obviously means that large populations
#
of Indians and Pakistanis are okay saying Pakistani Kharabai or Hindustani Kharabai.
#
But if they meet an Indian or a Pakistani, say in Switzerland or Canada or America, or
#
even in Dubai, or even in their own hometown, the perception may change.
#
It is the personal, right?
#
I don't know, it's very complicated.
#
These multiple notions of identity and memory and belonging and unbelonging, when I was
#
doing the interviews, I wasn't thinking about any of this, but then you hear people make
#
contradictions in their own speech, things like what I just mentioned, and you think
#
to yourself that partition as an event is also a contradictory event.
#
It made people make decisions that they may not have known completely at the moment.
#
At the beginning of the conversation, you mentioned that you were shocked by how little
#
people, even in the governance, understood what the word partition meant.
#
And till date, if I ask my grandmother about what exactly happened at the time of partition
#
and why did you move from your home in the frontier province to Delhi, a trip that would
#
have taken you three days to make?
#
She would say façade the, dengue the, riots the, but she doesn't know where it started,
#
If you ask any common person from that generation, Angre es kabhi dekha tha?
#
Have you ever seen an Englishman?
#
They will more than likely say no.
#
So the people that allegedly drew this line and allegedly divided the country and also
#
propagated the idea of divide and rule were never even seen by common people.
#
And I think that this should tell you the incredible disconnect that happened at the
#
political level vis-a-vis the personal level.
#
The people moved entire homes because of the boomers, hawayen chal rahi thi, because of
#
danger, because of fear, because of misunderstanding.
#
And that's just heartbreaking, you know, which is why I say halat the.
#
It was, it was the time we didn't have enough news, we didn't have enough sources that
#
People weren't even educated.
#
Ek badi mazaidaar kahaani maine record kavithi of Boorewal mandi in Multan, where this woman
#
tells me that, you know, ek radio tha and every day at 9 p.m. that radio would be heard
#
by everyone in the village, Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, it didn't matter.
#
You would sit at that family's home, one family, Muslim family had a radio.
#
You would hear the news.
#
That is how we learned about the war starting.
#
That is how we learned about the war ending, the Second World War.
#
That is how we learned about partition.
#
It was during that 9 p.m. news that my brother was born and everyone celebrated.
#
And it was during that 9 p.m. news that people became strangers and enemies because we were
#
told that partition is happening.
#
How can you describe that?
#
How can you justify that?
#
I am still, this is the thing, I don't think that there are any answers to these questions.
#
Then how is it that Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, everyone from their village, men, women, children
#
are listening to a radio every day and then suddenly a radio broadcast tells them that
#
partition is happening and you need to go this way, you need to go that way.
#
Do they become enemies?
#
How does the creation of the other happen?
#
I think that these are things that even people who lived through at that time are still trying
#
to figure out, just that we have more distance from it, that's all.
#
Yeah, and just sort of thinking aloud, I mean this goes back to what I was sort of saying
#
earlier about the abstract versus the concrete, that some of the multitudes we contain, for
#
example, we might be deeply nationalistic, but in a toxic way at one level, but at another
#
level we are friends with everyone we know and we behave very nicely with them and all
#
of that and it strikes me that one is an abstract concept, that kind of nationalism and the
#
grievances of the past and all that, but the other is a concrete thing, the people we actually
#
So similarly, you know, when these gentlemen sit with you and you are in their home and
#
they tell you, oh Hindus so intolerant, that's an abstract statement to make, but you are
#
the concrete Hindu in front of them, so they are like naini beti, tum theek ho.
#
And the same thing about the radio and the bizarre thing is that these people sitting
#
together listening to the radio, that community, that's a concrete thing and yet it is broken
#
up by that abstract notion of, you know, you are actually enemies and that sort of the
#
dominance of the abstract over the concrete and you know why we need these abstract things
#
in the first place is sort of again fascinating to me and I'm just like completely thinking
#
So that's what I do every day, you know, Amit, like you could have heard hundreds of stories
#
as I have and you can hope that you come up with some concrete answer for why this happened
#
and I'm telling you as someone who's trying to do it, there are no answers, there are
#
There are only versions of what happened, which only tells you that, you know, no matter
#
how many people you speak to, there will be more versions and more contradictions and
#
Was it actually worth it?
#
If you ask India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, you may get different answers and that's also
#
a real, it's a real tragedy that the countries that partition happened to India, Pakistan,
#
East Pakistan, later Bangladesh and England don't have a shared official history of the
#
So no matter who you ask, you will get a different answer based on their national allegiance.
#
Yeah, and people will rationalize and we don't know counterfactual, so it's just too complicated.
#
I mean, I don't think there can be a shared national history.
#
I mean, I was kind of struck by the fact that, you know, you were musing on this very same
#
question long before your project started, I came across this quote in an old feature
#
on you by your friend, Mayank Austin Sufi, the awesome blogger.
#
And you had said at that time, and this is 2010, when you're just 20 years old at the
#
Was this with the horrible photograph of me at the time in Jhanno Masjid?
#
Yeah, it took me a while to figure out that was you.
#
But they're really nice photographs, I mean, yeah.
#
And you said, quote, I want to know why we Indians and Pakistanis are so different as
#
masses and so alike as individuals, stop quote.
#
And this has, of course, struck me every time I have actually interacted with Pakistanis,
#
including in Pakistan, where the, you know, the warmth I received was a bit too much.
#
And that's something that is, you know, visible in your book also, because you sort of intermingle
#
all the chapters with people who've gone there from here and people who have come here from
#
So that was a conscious decision, actually.
#
And I decided that at a very early stage that I was not going to divide the chapters by
#
Hindu, Muslim or Sikh or Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi or English.
#
It was by alphabetical order.
#
So if there were two women, one after the other, that was fine.
#
If there were two Pakistanis, one after the other, that was fine.
#
If there were two stories of shawls, one after the other, that was also fine.
#
But it felt like the only fair way where anyone and everyone would get a chance to say what
#
they had to say and be on a level field.
#
So I mean, I'm very clear about things like that.
#
Yeah, yeah, I figured it was deliberate, though not by alphabetical order, but I figured it
#
was a deliberate intermingling and that totally worked for me.
#
Because sometimes I'd be reading a chapter and I'd actually for a moment, I'd forget
#
key and I'd have to go back to the start of the chapter, alphabetical order of first
#
It was first name and the only time I broke that was the first chapter, which is about
#
the Ghazan Dukhara, which is a man starting with Y, my great-granduncle, but it was the
#
beginning of the project.
#
So I figured that it was best to put it at the front, otherwise it's my first name.
#
Yeah, which is great because you are of course Anshil and I'm Amit and I much prefer alphabetical
#
There have actually been studies which show that in the academic sciences, because you
#
have the convention of going by alphabetical order of last name, people whose names begin
#
with the later letters actually do verse over time because in citations it is the other
#
guy's name plus etc or whatever.
#
So I think was it in a Gladwell book that I read it, whatever, but you know, more power
#
to you and I can totally see why you do alphabetical order of first name.
#
But it just seemed like this was the only way someone wouldn't give preference to one
#
nationality over the other and the point was to forget who this person is and where they
#
are coming from and to just focus on their story and that's what I have done.
#
Yeah, yeah and it did work like a charm.
#
Let's take a quick commercial break and then when we come back, we shall talk more about
#
your journey back in time and your discoveries while talking to people about their objects
#
On the seen and the unseen, I often speak about positive sum games.
#
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And hey, for a 15% discount, use the code UNSEEN, that's right, Unseen for 15% off
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Welcome back to the Seen and the Unseen.
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I'm chatting with Aanchal Malhotra about her job as a keeper of memory as it were and even
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a drawer out of memory.
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Let's in fact talk about memory, I mean, which is also so fascinating to me and you alluded
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briefly earlier in this discussion and I've got a couple of quotes from your book which
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I also sort of want to ask you about.
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The first one goes this way, quote, if you imagine an experience to be the construction
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of a memory, then its recollection years later can be defined as this reconstruction.
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As the years pass, memory inherently malleable accumulates many perforations that can be
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filled with new experiences, imagine fabricated and sometimes even a seamless integration
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of several unconnected memories into one.
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Therefore it is possible to change or alter one's original memory depending on the conditions
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in which it is recalled.
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And sort of before I come to the next quote, it sort of strikes me, you know, one of the
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things that I have in fact read recently about memory is that the first time we remember
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an experience, we remember it, but the second time we are remembering the remembering it.
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And like that, as we keep reconstructing it, we can sort of add layers onto it and all
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of us, you know, just assume that, oh, I remember it so well and so vividly and yet memory is
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So, you know, one thing that, like I said, a basic example, when you're a child and you
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have a certain experience and this has happened to me several times.
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And then when you get older and you ask your parents, hey, remember that day when we did
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And they're always like, no, no, that's not what happened.
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And you're like, no, I remember it was like this and the parent is like, no, no, it was
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So you're both thinking of the same memory, but it is mediated by your newer experiences.
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And you know, another of the things that we do know is that so much of memory can be constructed
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by a suggestion or, you know, like you said, you don't meet them a second time because
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by that time, you know, they could be framing things according to what you want to hear
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and not necessarily even consciously.
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So what have you learned about memory and all of this while you've been doing this?
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What I've learned is probably contradictory to itself is that on one level, we cannot
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trust true memory because there is no true memory.
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On the other level, memory is probably the most intimate source in building a person
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There is no way that you would be able to furnish the lives of people with any form
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of academic history when it comes to partition.
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And so you have to rely on memory because you have to understand the perspectives and
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versions of what happened.
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So in that sense, memory is essential.
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And your other quote about the different kinds of memory, and I found this quite profound
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where you said, quote, there is the official memory of the state, one that strives to
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document the official facts and figures.
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There is political memory, the kind that is recorded in newspapers, journals and the political
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attributions of the time.
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There is geographic memory, the recollection of one's soil, the kind of memory that gets
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lost within the sand and rain of a land that now possesses a new name.
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There is a personal memory which involves one's personal experiences.
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There is collective memory, the memory of society, of a people, neighborhood or family.
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And then there is another brand, the kind that takes years to ferment, a memory residing
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between fact and fiction, a diluted malleable memory that encompasses all of the above coupled
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with the key ingredient of time.
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This is a kind of memory passed down through one's genealogy, a generational memory that
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I and many others being descendants of those men and women who witnessed a partition have
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And, you know, you began the project in a sense by, you know, speaking to your grandparents
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about memories that in a sense are part of your origin story as well.
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I mean, had partition not happened, who knows, you wouldn't have been here.
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I know, I think about that all the time.
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And I would have lost this episode.
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So been probably talking about policy with some boring man.
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So did you feel that, that in a sense, that if there is, you know, a sense of self that
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also comes from collective memory, that, you know, listening to these stories is also sort
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of adding to your sense of self in a way, I won't say adding to your memory, as it were,
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but adding to your sense of self and who you are and just adding a layer to the past?
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I mean, one thing that I would say is it struck me how different the official memory was from
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That's the first thing.
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Like, I couldn't believe the stories I was hearing were so different from the stories
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I'd read in textbooks and books, which obviously meant that there had been a gap.
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There had been a large void in understanding what happened to people at the time.
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But I think every single interview I do, whether it's with my family or someone else, it adds
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to an understanding of me being a person of this land.
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I don't know whether it adds to my memory, as you say, because, you know, these memories
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As I said, even if they have been uncovered by me, they are not mine.
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But at the same time, I think it gives me a sense of grounding and a sense of belonging
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So I'll give you an example, before I went to Lahore for the first time in 2014, or Pakistan
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in general, for that matter, I had recorded so many stories of people in India who had
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lived in different parts of Pakistan, that when I set foot on that land, I did not for
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a minute think that I didn't know it.
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It felt so seamless, because I somehow knew its core, its heart, its heart was undivided
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And I understood that heart.
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And I think I was open, so the city was open to me, and I never felt like it wasn't mine.
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So I think that in conversations with people, you can understand, you can understand in
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principle, in theory, in life and memory, the heart of undivided India, and it adds
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Of course, it adds to you.
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And you know, one of your chapters, which I liked a lot, and for the listeners, there
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are like 21 chapters, which are all incredible personal stories.
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I mean, each of them could be a movie or a series on its own.
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So if there's someone from Netflix, listening, kindly get in touch with Anshul, even if you
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have other authors on your list, go by alphabetical order of first name.
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But the chapter of yours, which I really enjoyed was the one on Prabhjot Singh, which was one
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a fascinating love story, how all of that unfolded, which I won't talk about, leave
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it to the reader to discover.
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And these two little snapshots of memory.
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And one is where she says, quote, we scrambled in leaving the house as it was, we had all
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I had been making the chapatis on the open chulha.
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And with the confusion of the convoy arriving, I even left the chulha on.
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I remember thinking only much later about the fate of the chapati left over the open
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And this is such a fantastic image.
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These are the things that she remembers.
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And you know, like, note that I met her at a very late stage in her life, like I met
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her at late eighties, and then I met her three years after that.
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And then the next year she died.
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So the fact that she remembered these incredibly poetic, just, okay, I'm not going to ruin
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Go on, go on to the second aspect of the thing.
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No, no, I mean, just to sort of elaborate on this, I think it can happen in everybody's
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life that you remember these little things, but you don't notice your remembering.
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And it is a noticing of the remembering that I think makes you a poet.
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And you know, I'm going to, in fact, give this example to my writing students as an
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example of how you can, you know, focus on the concrete and not the abstract and make
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I think also the bit, sorry to interrupt you, Anitha, also the bit when she talks about
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in the train, you know, everyone talks about trains and everyone talks about how cramped
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the train is and how difficult it was and how suffocated and how afraid people were.
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But she goes on to give really concrete examples, like I'm wearing a black chadar and through
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my chadar, the blood of other people is seeping in so I can see a pool of blood in my black
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That is how dark the blood was.
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And I think that, like, for those examples, those bring up such a visceral memory.
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Even if you may not have seen anything like that, immediately you know what she's talking
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No, and that's the second memory I was referring to, which is such an incredible, incredible
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image that she's left the chapati on the chula and gone to the station with her family and
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they wait a long time for a train.
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And when the train arrives, it's completely silent.
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And then they get in and they discover why it's full of dead bodies.
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Everybody's been killed, but there's no time to offload anyone.
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So they make the rest of the journey with the dead bodies, the living and the dead together,
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you know, and you have suitcases of dead people lying there and as you describe through the
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black chadar, the blood and all of that.
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And it is just such an incredible image that I am just amazed that no filmmaker has yet
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So kind of incredibly powerful and of course, like you said, she's a poet.
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So I guess that's sort of where it was coming from.
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But you know, when you were writing it, is this something that when you were interviewing
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these people, especially is this something that you were looking for all of these concrete,
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vivid things that bring it to life?
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Because I'm an artist, that is why I sometimes feel really sad for not spending time in the
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But this is how it comes out, because when you make when you make a piece of art, you're
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looking for the concrete ways in which people can enter that piece of art.
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You're looking for the relatable images.
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Why would you not do the same thing in a writing practice?
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I was always looking for the images, always, whether it is in the way that people spoke,
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in the gestures that they had, in the way the light fell on them, the colors of their
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hands, their hair, that was, I was preoccupied completely, because that's what my training
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has been to look for the details.
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And I think that in that sense, I'm very grateful that I don't have an education in either history
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or English or ethnography, because I know that the way that Remnants is written, it
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just is a melange of the visual art and the textual practice, it is.
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And another choice that you made during the writing, which I meant to ask you when I was
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asking you about the writing earlier, which I found interesting, is that you don't document
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what they say, you document the conversation.
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So you're also sort of documenting your own responses to what they are saying.
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Because, you know, others have, for example, treated it differently and just taken the
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words and, you know, put nothing between those and, and the reader and yet part of this is
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also your journey of discovery and understanding which is coming across.
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I think that you answered the question.
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And it's about me, of course, it's about me, it's about me learning about my history and
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So why would I not record how I feel, even if that feeling is of naivety, there could
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have been no other way, because if someone is saying something horrific, and I say something
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in response to that, like, how did you feel, that response is genuine, I can't imagine
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how it felt, I wasn't there.
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And I know that the reader who's my age is thinking the same thing.
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How could you do this, this story remnants is about me, it is about my generation, it
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is about the generation who has inherited these memories without actual knowledge of
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And I always, I don't know, it makes me feel really sad that we hear snippets of these
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stories, and we can never make sense of them, because they were never told to us in full.
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Because there was so much shame and sadness and pain attached or fear attached to the
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telling of that story, that it was never told to us start to finish, I always ask, how do
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you begin the conversation, you know, and for me, it's always really weird, like, if
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I have to ask my grandmother something, or my father something about this time, it'll
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always be like dilly dallying around, and at the end, when someone is getting up to
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leave, I'll be like, listen, tell me, you know, that time that partition took place,
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and it's like this really heavy conversation, but I am missing my window of chance, and
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Like, what are the words you use?
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And then, is the onus of asking not on you, rather than on the person who's witnessed
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And I very unfairly say that even never told stories, I was never told stories, ever, never.
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But is that not, I should ask, I should have asked, right?
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So I think that all these questions that I'm asking in the book are questions I know people
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my age are also asking to their families, and they're trying to make sense.
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So I get a lot of messages from people saying, I employed the same methods you used in the
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book to talk to my family, and it worked.
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And that's, that's what you're doing.
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I mean, honestly, this may be a document for India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, but it is also
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a public service as to how one can ask questions in their family, difficult questions, questions
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that you're afraid to hear the answers of questions that people are afraid to see the
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I feel like this document will outlive me because it is for a generation.
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It is for a generation.
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Also, because I think, you know, narratives of the past shape so much of what is happening
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in the present and history is weaponized so casually that I think, you know, history is
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like this sort of play a part in, you know, highlighting the concrete over the abstract
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as it were, and highlighting the lives of real people and what they go through.
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I was, you know, struck by another sort of stand in your book that while on one hand,
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in the present day, you are making objects come alive for these people and exploring
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their lives and, you know, bringing those objects alive.
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But on the other hand, one of the things that we realized through your book at different
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parts is how living people can be treated like things because of circumstances, how,
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you know, for example, in the chapter about General J N Sharma, he's talking about the
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time he was in the army at Rawalpindi and he writes, quote, one day a few of us were
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driving around the city trying to keep the peace and we heard a baby's cry.
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The drains were all open in those days.
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And so we stopped to find this one year old child abandoned in the drain.
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The boy's hands and feet had been cut off, maybe by the writers or whoever.
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These were good Indians.
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And by that I mean good Indians, good Pakistanis, good Bangladeshis are all the same.
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But when they begin writing, when they begin looting and raping and killing the innocent
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under the spell of unexplainable blood lust, then they are the worst people in the world.
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It was such an unthinkable act.
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And the boy's body must have been bleeding for a while since it lay in a pool of blood.
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He hadn't died yet, though he was screaming in pain, a limbless body, I can never forget
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And he goes on to talk about how one of his colleagues said, shall we shoot him and put
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him out of his misery and he can't get himself to do that.
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And later on, you write completely from a sort of a different angle when you're writing
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the chapter on Ajit or Kapoor.
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You write about how they are making that trip through the jungle that takes many days and
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you write and you quote her as saying, quote, lots of people abandoned their children in
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So many small children could not walk and so they walked ahead and left them behind.
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So many families even buried their children in the forest itself.
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This is buried alive and you pointed out about how when she is given birth and the sword
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is used to cut her umbilical cord, even they leave the child there and they walk a few
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steps before they hear the cry and other instincts kick in.
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And this is that sort of treating a human life as if it is suddenly in those extraordinary
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times a life loses its values.
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And, you know, people often think of partition as, you know, like you quoted that other person
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saying, you know, or whatever.
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But the point is that we are like this, humans are like this, that this is, you know, if
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you look at what happened during the Delhi riots or the Gujarat riots.
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I'm just going to say that the world was not just that time, this time is also that time.
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This time is also there and I think, you know, reveals a deep truth about human nature perhaps
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that, you know, all of our kindness and compassion is contingent and, you know, and into passion
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whipped by abstract concepts, we can cause so much concrete harm as it were.
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Was this, I mean, was some of this a surprise to you?
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Did you have to steal yourself to take all of this in and process it and then, you know,
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contextualize it to the modern time?
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Did you ever ask yourself, what would I do?
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All the time, to be able to put yourself in someone's shoes and feel what they are feeling
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That's what empathy is and I think that I did that all the time.
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So when Lefren General Sharma was talking about how it felt to leave that baby there,
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of course, I was thinking about how it felt.
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Of course, I asked him how it felt and you can only assume what his answer was because
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he was a real military man and yet these things tore him up from inside, right, which tells
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us that there are contradictions within the most disciplined of people, which can tell
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us that there must be contradictions within the most nationalist of people.
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But of course, like you question everything, you don't think that when the Delhi riots
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happened, the first thing I thought of was partition.
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Of course, I don't know, like, I am, you can still feel the tremors of partition today
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and not physically only within, you know, places like Kashmir or the Northeast.
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You can feel it every day.
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You can feel it every day if you're looking out for it and it is in the way that people
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have changed after partition, in the creation of the other, in the way in which we treat
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human lives as worthless, mob mentality is the same now as it was then.
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It is very difficult to extricate reason from that.
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It's just that now we should have had more onus and we should have had more responsibility
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to think the other way, but we haven't, we haven't and anyone who cannot see the comparison
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is not looking for it or trying very hard not to deny it.
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So one of the projects that I have been doing for many years on the side is to look at generational
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memory and to look at the ways in which people have been shaped by partition and how or what
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we feel because I think that a lot of people think partition memory ends at the first generation,
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but that's obviously not the case.
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And maybe a theory that I have, I don't know if it's like a firm enough theory or not,
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but maybe people who have not felt the pain of partition are the ones that instigate violence
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towards the other because never have I seen or heard in the generation that witnessed
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partition or even 84 riots for that matter, I don't know any malicious words for the other
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You hear stories in Delhi riots of Sikhs that were hunted in 1984 and they are the ones
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It tells you that people who witness violence do have the ability to look past it because
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they have witnessed something they don't want someone else to witness the same thing.
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I don't know, this is just me thinking out loud.
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I don't know whether this is the case.
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I haven't done enough research to know whether this is the case, but I'd like to think so.
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I don't even know where I'm going with this thought actually, just to understand whether
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or not we can draw connections to the present and why it was so important for me to put
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myself in this book because the world around us has never been more uncertain in so many
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I think that there are a lot of parallels to be made with partition and the birth of
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So I have a sort of big question relating to this, but before that, just an observation
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on what you said about people who have experienced violence may be more wary of going down that
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I'm not sure I agree and I would also say that perhaps there is a little bit of selection
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bias there because one of the things that I noted through your book is that everyone
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you spoke to was relatively very privileged and came out of it good.
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They are the ones who managed to build a life, who survived, who managed to build a life
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and who can therefore have the luxury of forgiveness as it were and who can leave the bitterness
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behind and I'm sure that's a thought that must have struck you also.
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The fact that you're looking at objects already means that you're looking at people who could
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I would be the first one to admit all sorts of gaps in my own research.
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I mean, it's with people, there's only so many criterias you can take with people.
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So yeah, of course, there are many limitations, that is one of them.
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Going back to what you just said about these times are more challenging than others and
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they're more challenging in one more aspect which you sort of hinted at in your book though
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I don't know if you consciously thought of it that way and that is the aspect of how
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people relate to each other.
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For example, in your book, you've quoted Khizarji, one of the subjects of your chapters saying
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quote, in the old days, people used to care for one another, but now they only think of
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The relationships between people have diminished between communities too and especially between
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In English you call it relation or Punjabi which and you can do it.
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My broad question for you, which also feeds into this is that one in modern times because
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life is faster and more fragmented, has community become less important and when you speak about
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today's times being more challenging than before, I agree with that but not just in
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a sense of what is happening around us in terms of politics because we have seen much
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of the 20th century, much of the world has been through authoritarian dictatorships where
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So in that sense, this may not seem that new but one way in which these modern times are
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different is that we are more in the sway, abstract ideas forming these online tribes
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of people we never meet, doing things in the virtual world which we would normally not
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do in the real world but who knows if driven to it by these passions we could even do them.
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But also what there is a sense of loss is a loss of community like for example, I have
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lived in the housing society where I lived for about seven years and I don't know any
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neighbors apart from one of the neighbors on our floor.
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We don't meet our neighbors, we don't hang around, there's no sense of community there
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and therefore you're not putting real faces to people and having those real interactions
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and even if you did as you pointed out in the example from Multan of all the villagers
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gathered around the radio who know each other and are still broken up by that.
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So do you think that's sort of the greater level of abstraction in our lives where we
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are interacting with real people, doing concrete things with them less and less is something
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that increases the dangers of sudden violence because then where is the empathy, where is
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the relating, where is the you know looking at your neighbor's kid and saying oh he's
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got a cold and let me give him something and just feeling that normal everyday thing.
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So is that you know I know it's conservatives who will bemoan the loss of community but
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is that then a real danger I mean like earlier you said for example that you know millennials
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don't know how to listen and you know to me that's also part of what is happening and
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it's not the fault of millennials or they're the inherently worse people than other generations
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older people might feel that way sometimes but just that you know these are the imperatives
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of the time where our attention is so fragmented and we have access to so much happening in
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Is that something you've thought about or that strikes any kind of thought?
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The loss of community is definitely ever present but I have not thought of it in the large
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I think of it in very small ways in terms of the loss of my collective history.
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So a small example of that is when you go to weddings Punjabi weddings specifically
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there are these aunties sitting with a dholak and a spoon singing songs.
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I don't know these songs, I can't say these songs, I don't speak Punjabi.
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After these aunties are gone who's going to sing these songs?
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So my worries are not always that large, my worries are smaller and to my immediate life
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but maybe you're right, maybe you're right this drifting apart, this loss of community,
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this fact that we don't find commonality with neighbors anymore or we're not even friends
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with our neighbors anymore you know.
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Maybe it is, maybe it is part of it, yes perhaps you're right.
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And you know just kind of thinking aloud and sort of inverting the lament about you know
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aunties singing Punjabi songs and I guess why that would feel like a loss is because
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those Punjabi songs carry so much else with them rather than the words and the music but
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they carry all of that for the people who are singing them or who remember them and
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maybe it is not a loss if a generation grows up without ever having heard them they might
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have their own modern current day versions of that just to think aloud, not to say that
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it is not a loss, anything that is lost is of course a loss but you know so much of what
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is lost is a loss because of all these other sort of resonances that they contain and those
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resonances are you know dependent on someone feeling the resonance.
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It's like you know the poet Vijay Shishadri wrote this beautiful poem, The Mountain at
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the End of the Universe where the poem was basically about if there is a mountain at
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the end of the universe and it's the only thing that is there then how can you say whether
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it is a big mountain or a small mountain.
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I'm sorry this is a ludicrous digression, it's not a question at all.
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No but I mean it's right I guess you know if there is something else taking the place
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within generations of something that's lost then maybe it makes up for it.
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For me like the Punjabi songs or tapas and stuff lose them, it's just a connection with
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a certain place that's being lost and a certain time and you know really like it's my responsibility
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to learn but in some parts it's also the responsibility of elders to say that come sit with us, do
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it you know so it's a dual responsibility but for me I always feel that I feel it, I
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And is there no way YouTube keeping it alive because I remember all through my childhood
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and I was born and I spent the first 12 years of my life in Chandigarh before I moved away
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and I'm like half Punjabi half Bengali but all through my childhood I never remember
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hearing any tapas but recently I've come across tapas on YouTube they went viral because there
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was this very charming couple which at their wedding were you know doing tapas to each
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other in the whole Jagjit Singh Chitra Singh style and you know so maybe who knows these
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technologies will keep these long tales of culture alive and help them find new audiences.
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I feel like also technology and social media help in just like now because we live in a
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digital age they help in breaking a lot of myths about the other side as well so that's
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another I have depended a lot on social media and technology to get contacts for the other
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side so yeah definitely but digital means we can become more connected to the past for
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Yeah no I used to love TikTok for that reason I mean it's I taught a course called TikTok
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in Indian society I think it's a great tragedy that is lost because it just empowered so
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many people and gave them a platform and also you know gave them the sense that there are
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other people like them and that and therefore gave them the confidence to produce content
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which other people would watch so I think it's it's fashionable in some circles to
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mock TikTok but I just think it was sort of incredible in that sense and you can't take
#
that effect for granted the technology came about and you had that cultural effect and
#
you had sort of preference cascades where especially I mean I mean I saw that in the
#
LGBTQI community where there was so much emboldened self-expression now happening and you know
#
which is that's that's kind of an up going that's a great tragedy.
#
I want to shift now to talking about people's conception of spaces especially the places
#
that they come from you know the small geographies as it were the intricate memories of childhood
#
places that they describe for example again I'm quoting from your book where you write
#
Balbir Singh Bir, born in Sillanwali close to Sargodha, drew a map of his city from memory
#
in my notebook it was detailed beyond imagination for a place he had fled 70 years ago complete
#
with where the neem trees grow where the grain market was and where the boys of the government
#
school set up by the British celebrated the victory of the allied forces during World
#
When I asked him if he wished to go back he smiled softly, man toh kar tha hai it is my
#
heart desire to find a way home but now I have no strength neither in my heart nor in
#
my body but memory that is a saving grace and so I close my eyes and I make the journey
#
back every single day I plunge into the heart of my memory, a rose and you know even in
#
other parts of your book like you asked someone I think to describe Jalandhar and they paused
#
for a moment and said oh I can't describe Jalandhar but I'll tell you what was around
#
my house which also strikes me that you know when we are using these sort of general terms
#
like Jalandhar or Quetta or whatever you know we are not actually talking about that city
#
in the way any other individual in the world would we are talking about our own sort of
#
special experience of it which is real only in our memories therefore it's nowhere it's
#
not even in Pakistan and that's something I've also felt when I revisited places from
#
my childhood like my college auditorium where I went a few years back as an adult and I
#
was like what the hell happened here this was such a big place why is it so small and
#
dingy and is there something very poignant in that you know that what they remember was
#
never really there it was you know are all the places that we know really constructed
#
in our memory in a sense even if we haven't been through a partition and actually been
#
Yes I call it the imagined landscape it's a very concrete term for me the house of the
#
past will always be more romantic because it doesn't exist it doesn't exist in this
#
case with partition it literally doesn't exist because you're always you're holding on to
#
the childhood notion of thing which is always beautiful it is untouched by tragedy it is
#
as you said it's not but I looked at how it's not so tiny you know and you know several
#
people point this out in the book as well.
#
Reed Singh says that when I was in Quetta as a child the Gurdwara was huge but then
#
she reads things and says maybe it seemed huge to me because I was a child or so many
#
other people who went back to their home Faiz Rawani goes back to Jalandhar and he says
#
that I thought that the city was so big but within five minutes I was at my home doorstep
#
you know so I think we hold on to things from our childhood in terms of geographic spaces
#
and they may be very different when we encounter them again maybe that's one of the reasons
#
why people don't want to go back Balbir Singh who sadly actually passed away this year because
#
of covid he didn't want to go back because he had no need to go back he used to see
#
the girl in his mind every day if we go back maybe we won't be able to do that that's
#
also one thing that one has to reckon with right that it may be very different Faiz Rawani
#
goes back to Jalandhar and he goes to the graveyard where his father and sister are
#
buried and he says there was an apartment complex there so I paid my respects to the
#
apartment complex you know the house of the past is always more beautiful and always in
#
some ways full of happiness because it doesn't exist anymore because it doesn't exist yeah
#
and is the landscape you occupy in the present also an imaginary landscape to use your term
#
that depends on our perspective what you can touch is tangible what you can see is real
#
but sometimes you have to see things to believe them and sometimes you have to believe things
#
to see them I was in fact struck by another poignant quote where you've quoted the architect
#
from Lahore Noor Qadir writing about his grandparents from Jalandhar and he sent you an email about
#
his maternal grandfather where he said quote Jalandhar was his weakness everything was
#
forgiven if you were from there my Nana would even send his car to Jalandhar autos in his
#
adopted city of Multan stop go to it which was quite tell me now a little bit about you
#
yeah so that's like hard core you know keeping with the tradition and abstract Jalandhar
#
as it were but in a good way but you know it gives people a sense of security I was
#
speaking to someone the other day and they said something very interesting they said
#
that partition did not change who you married in many circumstances because even when you
#
met people after partition particularly in Punjabi houses the first thing you would ask
#
is if you see pictures here okay you are also from Pindi we are also from Pindi so the relationship
#
you know they always sought out people that they knew or were familiar that's that's so
#
fascinating give me a sense now about what kind of items people chose to carry like some
#
of it is accidental like for example you've spoken about someone who has to leave at a
#
moment's notice to Missouri and they imagine that okay it's like a brief holiday and we'll
#
come back to Quetta or wherever they were and they just carry a shawl in your grandfather
#
Balraj Bari's case you've spoken about how their choice was a practical one of carrying
#
utensils because they didn't know if they'll get fed but they knew that they are likely
#
to get rations so why not carry utensils to cook them in and then those utensils become
#
such a repository of history and memory and all of that so what are the different kinds
#
of objects which you found people carrying when they were suddenly displaced as it were
#
so what people carry will also tell you how much time they knew they had or whether they
#
knew partition was going to happen or not if someone sent their entire household on
#
the goods train beforehand you knew that they had money and they had power right and they
#
would be okay people like my grandfather for example they did leave at a moment's notice
#
but they went from camp to camp to camp right and they did not know where they would get
#
to eat from but my great grandmother I don't know how she had the foresight she took utensils
#
because she had to cook in something okay now people carried all kinds of things everything
#
from mundane utensils everyday utensils to valuable things like jewelry or plates of
#
gold and silver or cultural items of cultural significance like hamamdastas or pandans and
#
khasdans and then totally bizarre things like a 15 and a half foot crocodile carcass someone
#
carried right like I think that's the most extraordinary object I've archived till date
#
and then you know also the means in which they carried it like there have been stories of people
#
putting gold inside laddus because food wasn't confiscated on the way or they have been
#
through this beautiful story I recorded once about a man who put a small tiny two by two
#
inch into the folds of his pagdi so that no one would take it along the way I think that objects
#
actually reveal a lot about people's circumstances and I was also struck by how also they reveal
#
customs which also maybe lost along with those objects like you've spoken about Narjas Khatun's
#
pandan for example which you know came down to her and you know you've written quote
#
one was expected to make a beautiful small pond tightly wrapped so none of the ingredients fell
#
out and then presented the guests would accept the pond pick it up and say adab in return going
#
their head politely so you know the pandan is not just a utilitarian thing that you do you make
#
pan in it but it's also sort of the repository of a certain cultural value and maybe an age past
#
and I think when you're saying when you're quoting all these things I can see how people said things
#
because she made a pond in front of me you know it was not the pond that I was expecting I would get
#
because it was a very like uh but she made the small type
#
because it was something they just had to learn she told me all this and I think that
#
if there's something quite ritualistic about that as well right or even the lassi thing for that
#
matter it's something very ritualistic and very um it's again a form of oral tradition right passed
#
down from one generation to another and I was struck by another beautiful thing she said which
#
you know where I'll you know quote her from your book where she says quote but the strangest thing
#
was that we never realized when it happened when India ended and Pakistan began there were no
#
obvious differences between one land and its conjoined neighbor and so I suspect that we gained
#
our new citizenship in a moment curiously lost on us tucked away in the corner of an overcrowded
#
train we had quietly become pakistani and and there's an echo of this also in an interview of
#
yours where you say about how you decided to cross the border by foot and go and while you
#
were checking your documents you suddenly realized that hey you'd already crossed over the line yeah
#
and you know I wanted to savor that moment that like crossing over it's such a reverential almost
#
it's such a big deal like you're walking across waga you know and it's just six inches it's a
#
white line that's it and you see my client you put up your papers your visa your luggage everything
#
is checked and before you realize it you've crossed it and I looked back and India had been
#
left behind and I was almost alarmed because I didn't even realize it's just like taking any
#
other step and another aspect of what she speaks about is this language Samani Shahi which is yeah
#
tell me a little bit about that because that was so incredibly fascinating like just a few days
#
ago I recorded an episode with Rajat Ubhekar where he told me about this language in Nagalandi came
#
across which is not documented anywhere called Nagamese which is you know which came about
#
through a combination of Naga and Assamese and later Bihari influences and how you have all these
#
different ways of speaking because you have Indo-Aryan, Austro-Asiatic and Tibeto-Burmese
#
language families kind of colliding in that space and equally you know we tend to think of these
#
languages as specific things but the truth is Urdu and Hindi are both in a manner of speaking
#
not just constantly evolving but very recent and it's not long back that they were one thing and
#
they were Hindustani and there are so many different ways of speaking and tell me a little
#
bit about Samani Shahi and you know the interview with Narzis Khatun was in Lahore and you know she
#
was a very I would say that she began as a shy interviewee and I hadn't planned on interviewing
#
her until after our dinner so I went to see the family at the home we had dinner and in the middle
#
of the dinner only she just kept looking at me so Hindustan se aaya, whereas her family is actually
#
quite cosmopolitan and yet the first thing she asked me was have you ever been to Patiala
#
it was almost very stern you know and like if you say no then I'm judging you but I said no
#
because I hadn't been and then she was you know she was very quiet and then I said then why don't
#
you tell me about your Patiala tell me what do you remember and that whole night she spoke in
#
Samani Shahi I only realized it was Samani Shahi after we had finished our conversation and her
#
granddaughter Bano asked me did you understand that I said yeah of course I understood you were in
#
the room as well didn't you she said I didn't understand it not entirely because I don't speak
#
Samani Shahi and I said well neither do I and up until right now I didn't know that it existed
#
what is Samani Shahi? Samani Shahi is a mixture of Hindi and Punjabi and in that sense it is a bit
#
cruder than Urdu it is a rural Hindi which is mixed with Punjabi and that is what she spoke
#
in fact when Bano was growing up both her Nani and her Dadi were from Samana and they used to speak
#
Samani Shahi and Bano was grown up learning Urdu thought that these two Dadi and Nani had made a
#
little language of their own because they were uneducated and they didn't speak pure Urdu whereas
#
actually they were speaking in the language that they came from so the fact that I was able to
#
understand what she was saying is because I was a Hindi speaker and not all words are different
#
but some words are certainly quite different and then Urdu and I just found it so strange that I am
#
able to understand a woman speaking a completely different language than I do solely because I
#
speak one part of it whereas it just didn't seem any different to me I mean you would be able to
#
understand it as well right but it was extraordinary and I think this is the kind of this is the kind
#
of joy of oral history and field research because we discover things like this. What I was also sort
#
of curious to ask about is not just the objects that act as a catalyst and as a sort of a gateway
#
into the memories but I noticed that at different parts of your book when people are sharing their
#
memories with you they are also talking about missing objects for example in your wonderful
#
chapter about Sumitra Kapoor like first I was very struck by how she could date parts of her life
#
because she said from the age of five because she said that that's when I started learning music and
#
music was a peg for her memories which struck me that there is also music in a sense playing
#
the role of these objects do as a peg for memories and I think with many of us I mean it's a common
#
tendency to associate particular songs or bits of music with memories and that was fascinating but
#
I was also struck by her sort of longing for her old pedal harmonium in Rawalpindi that when she
#
and her sister would go back from school at one corner they would start racing each other because
#
they wanted to play that pedal harmonium first and they had to leave that pedal harmonium behind
#
and just the fact that decades can pass and you can remember an old pedal harmonium which you
#
may not even recognize if you see it it'll seem like such a clanky instrument for all you know
#
but in their memory it's so precious was there a lot of that happening in the sense that it is
#
not just that you know these objects that they have now are an entry into their past lives but
#
that objects really have that kind of meaning that we hang memories on them and we remember
#
them especially the further back you go why the further back you go even now right I call these
#
objects ghost objects things that people wish they had carried things that they left behind
#
things that they regret carrying and could switch like Maya Mechandani's grandmother in her chapter
#
72 Mechandani I asked her if you could carry something what what would it have been and she
#
said that there was a big swing for my child and I wish I could have carried that so I think that
#
the conventional boundary of the physical object has been surpassed in this book that's for certain
#
because it's not just about objects that were carried it's also about objects that were not
#
carried objects that were stolen objects that were missed reminisced long for and then there
#
were objects that were deliberately foreboded in some way there's a story in the introduction
#
about a woman the woman has narrated the story to me in Karachi about a woman called Boa who
#
is migrating with her husband from Delhi to Lahore on train and in the event of their migration there
#
is diets on the train and people come and her husband is killed and he's thrown off the train
#
and he's bleeding and she Boa jumps off after him and she's pregnant so her husband is dying
#
and he's basically losing blood and she takes off her entire chadar and she just soaks his blood
#
in it and then she leaves him to die there and she travels through Lahore by herself and she gives
#
birth to her child and she buries the chadar in a grave as if it were the father and so there are
#
objects of really precious nature that are given up for special circumstances so I think that
#
yeah the physical object is a very loose term in this case yes yeah I mean I found that story
#
incredibly moving and I somehow in a morbid way expected her to keep the chadar but you know
#
soak with blood but you know the chadar as a proxy for her the essence of her husband and
#
therefore burying it and taking her kid every year through the grave was sort of quite something and
#
another sort of moving bit was in your chapter about Uma Sundi Ahmed she moves from Lahore to
#
Jalandhar during partition and then she later goes back to Lahore and she's going to her old
#
neighborhood and she stops somewhere to buy something at a store and the person says you
#
are not from here where are you from and she says oh I've come from Jalandhar and immediately he
#
says you know because he's sort of come from there which was also a kind of moving you know
#
I'll leave it to my listeners to read your wonderful book and discover much more of it
#
for themselves which even if they have no connection to partition that you know that
#
there's a lot in it that is so evocative and moving and thought-provoking itself
#
so let's kind of get back to you and your process of sort of writing this book like what was that
#
like in the sense that you know I teach an online writing course where people often ask me about
#
the different sort of writing methods that writers have and how do they find a voice what is their
#
discipline blah blah blah and I have to at pains I have to tell them that listen there's no one
#
method for doing it all except that one thing common to all writers who have written is that
#
they manage to get their butts down and write the damn thing and how they do it what hacks they use
#
can vary what's your sort of system like like you already mentioned that you didn't have the
#
book in mind where you were taking a lot of this material so obviously you're not going there with
#
a pre-formed narrative you're going there with an open mind and you're just trying to draw what you
#
can and you know get as many vivid images as you can but later when you sit about you know
#
uh looking at them how do you then construct it what's your discipline like uh did the sort of
#
format for the book was it there with you from the start how do you how did that work so I always knew
#
that the format was going to be conversational it was clear the minute I knew that I was going to
#
write something it was always going to be conversational because it just felt most comfortable
#
and most familiar and most true to the actual experience of interviewing um I recorded my
#
interviews in various languages and just to get you know the process going record the interviews
#
then I translate them and translate them into English and then I start writing after doing
#
secondary research specific to that person so I should preface by saying that I was incredibly
#
devoted to working on this because there was a need to work on this so in terms of either getting
#
your butt down or inspiring yourself there was nothing of that sense because I had to do it the
#
book was born out of a necessity because there was a void in knowledge and so in that sense I had to
#
do it and we also decided that the book would was to come out at the 70th anniversary of independence
#
so there was naturally a deadline for it the actual process of writing was honestly I had it
#
already in my conversations so I think that as field researchers we are able to rely a lot
#
on our conversations with people and they make up the bulk of our our chapters and I think because
#
I had so much detail from people so much sort of extraneous detail about all kinds of stuff
#
I was able to build that landscape as well not to mention the fact that I did a ton of secondary
#
research about the areas that they specifically mentioned I find it very daunting to think of
#
a book I find it really really daunting to think of like a full book so I always find it a lot
#
easier to think of chapter by chapter by chapter because if you think in bite-sized sort of
#
graspable segments then you won't get overwhelmed and I hate I hate to get overwhelmed like I'm a
#
very very meticulous person I would say so I took it chapter by chapter by chapter and for the
#
duration that I was working on any particular chapter everything else didn't exist for me
#
which is why you can have coinciding elements like child in Ajit Kaur's chapter to the child in
#
left in general Sharma's chapter and they don't have a connection but they if they have a connection
#
it's quite contradictory to one another I think that writing comes easily to me like I don't want
#
to lie about this and I don't want to make up something when it's not true writing comes easily
#
to me the feeling also came pretty easily to me I am a diligent mood taker which is something that
#
if if there are writers listening in on this conversation about especially field researchers
#
make this a habit when you are talking to people in the field you have an audio recorder or video
#
recorder on but make it a point to take your own notes as well and this could be maybe something
#
they're saying resonates with you more you know it's going to be there in your recording but you
#
want to write it down because that is kind of the essence of their conversation or what I did was
#
I made a note of gestures made a note of the light made a note of the way they spoke made a note of
#
whether their language changed from one thing to another for example when my grandparents spoke to
#
one another it was always in Punjabi but when my grandfather spoke to me it was always in English
#
this is a conscious choice that he made and it was up to me to discuss and understand why that was
#
things like that and you will find that your handwritten notes will not only make the story
#
stay with you longer but also help you to remember key aspects of that interview because if you're
#
like me and you're doing say like hundreds of interviews in a span of six or seven months
#
you may not remember everything so if you refer back to your notes it will become a lot clearer
#
so that was that but I think that the actual writing process putting things together it was
#
not hard it was not hard and where are you in regard to like do you do multiple drafts or are
#
you just very meticulous with the first draft revising every sentence and paragraph as you go
#
along how does okay so basically your first draft has already been edited 40 times while it was
#
being written in a sense yeah and I think that um see I I need a really good working system with
#
my editor every time I would finish a chapter I'd send it to him and that way we made our deadline
#
a lot easier as well because it wasn't a big chunk like this is a 500 and something page book
#
right it wasn't that that he was getting at the end it was just like chapter by chapter by chapter
#
which actually just made it a lot easier for both of us but I have certain things like I know that
#
a lot of people think okay I just want to get all this down and then we'll start working on it like
#
we'll just nuance it I can't do that what I do is I will make really detailed points about my entire
#
chapter so I want to talk about this this this this and then I follow that I follow that very
#
meticulously which means that yes I may make 40 revisions within the same chapter but my first
#
draft so to say will be something I can send to my editor and say here you go now you can work on it
#
and given to get that it's your first book I guess the journey through writing it is also a journey
#
of learning how to write in a sense so you know when you end the book and I presume the introduction
#
was the last thing you wrote in it epilogue was the last thing I wrote the epilogue okay okay
#
when was the introduction written I'm curious it was written after all the chapters yeah after
#
all the chapters yeah so you know and I really loved the introduction I love the chapters also
#
of course but I thought the introduction was fabulous it just brought everything together
#
very well so when you finish the book and you look back on the writing that you've done say
#
for the first chapter that you wrote in the book or whatever yeah I thought it was horrible
#
so did you rewrite it or did you just say no um I mean I just thought that the quality was really
#
different because I told you right I was sending chapters to my editor as I was going along
#
and I think even he saw that as I went towards the later chapters things became a lot more exciting
#
and a lot more crystal and you you really found the like Roland Barthes falls at the punctum of
#
the image right so you found that that part of something uh yeah I did a bit of revision in the
#
first couple of chapters definitely there was no other way because then it wouldn't have been of
#
the same quality and and what are you working on now I mean the book was came out yes so the
#
remnants came out in 2017 in India it came out in 2019 in the rest of the world
#
uh since then I have been working on a novel in fact that I finished in March this year
#
wow yeah well it took me three years and since then I have been working
#
since March I've been working on a book on generational memory of partition
#
so putting together a lot of the interviews I've taken over the last three or four years with
#
second or third generations of families who have witnessed partition to get a sense of
#
what we have inherited from the event and again I think I embarked on this book because I was
#
looking for some answers as to how younger people feel about partition have they inherited pain have
#
they inherited curiosity is it loss is it anger is it just longing for a place that you may never see
#
and I think what I have through a lot of my conversations is just many more questions
#
many more questions very nuanced questions on identity on belonging on religion on the duality
#
on the duality of people and the possible versions that exist within the same person and yes of course
#
a lot of lingering pain in a lot of people so that's that's what I'm writing these days a book of
#
audio history on generational memory having interviewed Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis
#
and people from the diaspora. I love reading this book and I look forward to reading more of your
#
work and you know I agree with you right I think this is really important work for my listeners I
#
must tell them it is not important in the sense of this it's important for you to read this but
#
it's boring but it's important but no I love reading it I was very moved by it and I think
#
it's a book that everyone should read and I look forward to your novel as well thank you so much
#
for coming on the show I'll have to process all the things you said about conversation and learn
#
to apply some of them myself. You know I think that this was a very nuanced conversation in itself
#
and I mentioned earlier to you I hadn't spoken about remnants in a long time which means that
#
some of the things that I am also saying are in retrospect thinking about because you know I
#
think that this kind of work you you grow up really fast whether you like it or not
#
and I'm 30 years old now and I feel like I'm 100 because I just have to process so many other
#
people's traumas really and you just there's a heaviness you know but when you think back on what
#
you have achieved by doing this it really feels like it has given and I know that I'm saying this
#
about my own book so it's a bit like um I don't know I guess it's a bit like not a good practice
#
I don't know but I know that it has encouraged more people to ask questions in their family
#
and that means that an organic archive of partition memory is beginning to be formed
#
and one of the things about partition is that because we don't talk about it there is no archive
#
of memory that remains and when we compare it to events like the holocaust which is often done
#
because of the sheer numbers we see that holocaust survivors have really shared stories and now
#
and now partition was way more complicated of course in the sense that there was no
#
one person to take blame for what happened because everyone was to blame at one point
#
but I think that we have not shared our stories which means that in some way our stories still
#
don't belong to us we need to voice them and I know that Remnants has changed a bit of that
#
and it has moved things in the right direction and of course not just me writers like Kavita Puri
#
and Anam Zakri and Urbashi Bhutali and Dutu Menon also do similar things and it is their efforts
#
as well as mine that are steering things in the right direction so I think the people who are
#
listening to this podcast if you have stories of partition or any hidden history in your family
#
start to ask questions. Yeah and I think that you know especially given all the resonances of that
#
in these current times I think it's both almost sort of urgent to come to terms with all of that
#
but equally sometimes I get a little negative about it and I think it's futile because we learn
#
nothing we have never learned anything from our past but regardless of that you know more power
#
to you and those like you and thanks again. Thank you it's my pleasure.
#
If you enjoyed listening to this episode of The Scene and the Unseen hop on over to your nearest
#
bookstore online or offline and pick up Aanchal Malhotra's excellent book Remnants of a Separation.
#
You can follow her on twitter at Aanchal Malhotra. You can follow me at Amit Verma,
#
A-M-I-T-B-A-R-M-A. You can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen at sceneunseen.in.
#
Thank you for listening.
#
Did you enjoy this episode of The Scene and the Unseen? If so would you like to support the
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production of the show? You can go over to sceneunseen.in slash support and contribute
#
any amount you like to keep this podcast alive and kicking. Thank you.
