AANCHAL    MALHOTRA

Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition Through Material Memory by  Aanchal Malhotra; Published by HarperCollins; Pages 385 ; Price Rs.799/-

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Sir Cyril Radcliffe  who drew the line that demarcates India and Pakistan , upon seeing the bloodshed his actions had caused, so repulsed by the horrifying consequences of his duty, refused to accept his fee, left for England, destroyed all his maps and papers pertaining to the Divide and made sure, in his long illustrious career as a judge, never to speak of what had happened in India ever again.

Alas ! Such silence is not easily obtained.

The Radcliffe Line has been drawn in blood and is littered with the possessions of those who crossed it—a piece of cloth here, utensils scattered there, jewelry, riches and money strewn across the sand.

Aanchal Malhotra’s book  is an unusual one that establishes “the ability of an object or a possession to retain memory and act as a stimulus for recollection”.

The author is an artist and oral historian --the  co-founder of the digitised  Museum of Material Memory.  She bases her  book on objects taken across the bloodied border created by Partition and what they meant to the people who carried them. These objects  speak of the owner's pasts as  testaments to the struggle, sacrifice, pain and belonging at an unparalleled moment in history. Malhotra dedicated the better part of her twenties curating this museum – finding people who crossed the border and people who remained, hearing their stories, and making it available to us.

 The book is in the form of a narration  by the last surviving generation that had undergone the trauma  firsthand.

Malhotra begins with  her  own grandparents. They came from the other side of the border;  she traces their  histories  through heirlooms, their value determined not by antiquity or price but by ‘the vulnerable act of unfolding a painful past’ and ‘the intimate nature of this experience.’ Some objects were carried for their value. Others were packed for their deep ties to family history. Most items   reveal haunting  tales of  survival.

Among the objects that find their way into this book from the millions that made the crossing are a ghara (a pot) and a gaz (a measuring device), a gift of pearls from a maharaja, a maang-tikka (bejewelled adornment for the forehead), a hand-stitched shawl that’s still worn with deep affection, a stone plaque. A notebook of poems, brought from Lahore to Kalyan, shows one woman's determination to pursue the written word despite the turmoil around her. A refugee certificate created in Calcutta evokes in a daughter the feelings of displacement her father had experienced upon leaving Mymensingh, presently part of  Bangladesh. A rusted pair of scissors, now used to cut flowers, narrates the tale of how precarious women's safety was at that time.

 The author has selected  19  stories, recounting them with colourful descriptions of their settings. "I was consumed by the stories. There came a time when I started having vivid dreams about Partition, as if all the stories that I had heard were yearning to be told and the only way to do justice to them was to write them down,"

 The author writes in first person, the conversations are colloquial, and we have quotes told cohesively. Her “special cases of migratory objects” include those that bind several generations, that people seek upon returning what they had abandoned years later, that relate to occupations, that were rediscovered  by sheer chance.

Malhotra writes with acuity---“ Memory  hides in the folds of clothes, among old records, inside boxes of inherited jewellry...it seeps into our years, it remains quiet, accumulating the past like layers of dust.

Writer and former Procter & Gamble CEO Gurcharan Das’s grandmother carried in a guchcha a set of fifty-one keys across the border believing she would return to unlock the fifty-one doors and cupboards she had carefully secured before leaving.

Malhotra’s  grandparents too were Partition survivors and it required a lot of effort before they decided to share their feelings. "They had a complex gamut of feelings – shame, agony, sadness – and so remained silent. My grandfather was a fiery 19-year-old when it happened. And, perhaps, the regret that he could do nothing to save his land and had to flee, never left him."

According to the author “The book is about childhood memories, friends and mohallas that have been left behind, but remain an inextricable part of you,"

Malhotra has  started a new contiguous project  - The Museum of Material Memory, a digital repository of material objects, tracing family histories and roots. The museum will provide a collective space to share stories of their struggles, sacrifice, pain and uprooting from their land.

The Partition affected the rich and the poor with a hard blow – people were forced to give up all their belongings and move to a land that would be their new home because of the religion they were born into. Some stayed, but at their own risk. Once in an alien city, these brave people stood tall and built their lives from scratch; from nothingness. These stories are a celebration of the human spirit that does not accept defeat; the spirit that makes a person look at ‘fate’ straight in the eye and carry on with life.

 The image of the train that arrives from the other side of the border is filled with dead bodies is revisited through the memories of different individuals as a constant reminder of the consequences of the partition.

Special mention must be made of deeply moving stories. Gifts from a Maharaja: The Pearls of Azra Haq and Stones from my Soil: The Maang –Tikka of Bhag Malhotra.  

 The prose is exquisite and so rich in imagery that the fragile textures of these ageing souvenirs are almost palpable. The photographs retain the softness of age.

In these tense conversations, Aanchal also discovers some  dialects like Samanishahi , which blends the coarseness of Hindi with the poetic softness of Urdu. In a way, this book then becomes a personal journey to an Undivided India for both, author and reader. A homecoming to a place we haven’t been to before.

 The book  is an alternative history of the Partition - the first and only one told through material memory that makes the event tangible even seven decades later.

PPR

15/07/2018.