Interview: Author Aanchal Malhotra

Aanchal Malhotra is an Indian author and historian best known for groundbreaking work on the oral history of the Partition of India in 1947. Her debut book Remnants of a Separation was published by Harper Collins in India in 2017 to mark the 70th anniversary of Indian Independence and has changed the narrative around the Partition. Since then, it was published internationally as Remnants of Partition (2019) and was recently published in French as Vestiges d’une separation by Editions Heloise d’Ormesson. The book was translated into French by Camille Cloarec. I sat down with Aanchal to have a candid chat about what it’s like to be the keeper of other people’s most guarded memories. 

Diya Katyal: The Partition is one of the biggest forced migrations in the world, but it’s been brushed under the rug. To some extent, people don’t really talk about it, why do you feel this is? 

Aanchal Malhotra: Events that impact people to such a large degree like the Holocaust or Partition are remembered also because of the people who lived through it. So, where there is the state memory of the event, there must also be a personal memory of the event, which is the way it gets passed down the generations and recorded through family history. Unfortunately, in the case of the Partition, this hasn’t really happened.

For a long time, Partition was a story of silence, and it wasn’t even known to families. People spent decades not knowing what their families went through. For example, I was 23 when I found out what my grandparents went through — just because I never thought to ask. I’ve found that if something isn’t in your consciousness and is perceived as something that is so far back in history that it cannot impact you. You won’t converse about it.

Also, the process of decolonization happened so quickly and people had to start their lives so quickly all over again, I don’t think a lot of them processed what had happened. So many years later they have consigned memories to oblivion. Being removed from your home and never being allowed to return isn’t a nice thing to think about.

The gravity of the border is strong. It doesn’t really let you forget that you can’t cross it anymore. So I think that’s the reason it’s not talked about. But, I have to say, that the 70th anniversary did something to this process and younger people started talking about it. There were many people who became interested in their ancestor’s history after 2017 because their grandparents were getting older. As you get older you want to know where you are from. Especially people from our generation. 

DK: Partition is an event in history that we are aware of but for you, this whole journey was a very personal one. Can you tell us more about that? 

AM: I was in my MFA program. It was 2013 and I was living in Montreal, and I took a sabbatical year and came back to India because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do for my thesis. Because I was in a creative program, I thought that if an idea were to come to me, it would happen naturally at home. While I was there, I accompanied a friend who was doing a story on the old houses of Delhi. My mother grew up in an ancestral house in North Delhi in Roop Nagar and my friend wanted to write about it. While we were talking about the house, my grandfather who lives with his brothers in a joint family, got out all these objects and some of them had come from Lahore. He brought them from Lahore to Amritsar.

There was a Ghara to make lassi, and a Gaz, a yardstick. I think this was the first time that I understood what Partition meant, and I understood it through objects. You took whatever you could, and you could never go back for more. Suddenly the event was not only something about history, but it became about my family’s history.

Two of my grandparents are from Lahore. One is from a small village in Punjab, Pakistan and another is from the frontier province which is quite close to Afghanistan. This means that my history is spread across Pakistan. Because I came to Partition through objects, I became curious. If you had to leave your home and possibly never return, what would you carry?

I started speaking to people who knew my parents at first. Then, I started to include strangers, and then strangers’ friends, and it grew exponentially. I think that the catalyst of the object was always very important to me because it suddenly made things real and tactile, and I felt like I was holding a part of history. 

DK: How does focusing on material objects help you to unearth people’s most deep routed and fiercely guarded memories? 

AM: How do you break the silence? Imagine talking to someone about a moment that would go on to destroy their lives. I don’t think anyone would feel comfortable talking about that. My interviewees started asking me questions in return. My grandfather asked me “Why do you want to know, and what will it change?” He couldn’t understand my interest in it because he had left it behind and was not interested in revisiting that time and examining what he lost. When you introduce an object and ask “Well, you got this from there, why? Did you bring a pen? Oh, you needed it for college. What college did you go to? And what did you study? And what languages did you speak?”

So, I started to build a landscape of the past through the object. We incorrectly believe that Partition happened only in August and then it became normal, but what actually happened was an entire way of life was disrupted. What I had to do for my readers was build that way of life in order to show how it was disrupted. The objects were like the furniture of my story. Through it, I learned about people’s languages, friends, neighbors, and ultimately arrived at Partition.

DK: Is there any story that really impacted or stayed with you? 

AM: Everything stays with you, but I would say portions of stories stay. Azra Haq, who came from such a wealthy family, didn’t even have two rupees in her pocket to buy an apple after migrating. Partition destroyed peoples’ lives to such an extent that they had no semblance of security. But there are also heartwarming stories that stayed, like someone who fell in love with her husband through the poems that they wrote one another across battlefields and the independence movement. I can’t forget these stories and these people. 

DK: Being the keeper of other people’s stories is a privilege, but it can also feel extremely heavy. What coping mechanisms have you developed to deal with it? 

AM: Honestly, I’m not very good at it because of the responsibility that comes with it. You know you must do justice to the words people use without contorting or coloring their story with your own prejudices or opinions.

I didn’t realize what was happening to me until I was done with the book. By then it had changed me as a person. I didn’t know how to be around people my age who were talking about flippant things. I didn’t know how to make small take anymore and I feel very crippled by this. It takes a lot to hold on to people’s sadness and not misuse it.

I think you must learn to consciously distance yourself. But it’s hard. I don’t think I will ever feel like I have done enough. Some of the most gruesome testimonies have never been written down before. People read it and think, “This didn’t happen,” and you know it did because you have 40 stories recorded on it. I was constructing the language of that story for the first time. I put a lot of pressure on myself. The only way I stay sane is by taking short breaks from it and distancing myself. 

DK: Do you feel that our generation cares enough? What should we be doing? 

AM: My entire next book is centered around this question. I don’t believe that Partition is a thing of the past. But I wanted to know, do we feel it? Is it in our everyday? I had no answer for this and so I spoke to hundreds of people across India, Pakistan, Bangladesh the diaspora in the US, and the UK to know whether young people care about Partition. Very simply I would say yes. People in our generation are connected to it in a way that they don’t understand and don’t know how to verbalize until a scholar sits when them and talks to them.

Our grandparent’s generation went through it and didn’t really want to discuss it. Our parents’ generation never asked because they grew up in an independent India where their parents had constructed a life for them to grow up in. They were never made to feel anything was missing. We, as grandchildren, are more comfortable asking our grandparents and the storytelling happens more naturally between these two generations. I think our generation cares even more now that politics are becoming more divisive. 

You can earn more about Aanchal Malhotra by visiting her website.

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