Why isn’t there a Partition Museum?

It’s not like no one had thought about it before. About 60 years ago, journalist Kuldip Nayar had broached the idea of a space that would honour the memories of the millions who lost their homes and lives. But it never came to be because even at that point, a decade after the Indo-Pak partition, the wounds felt too raw.

At least that is Kishwar Desai’s theory on why we waited nearly 70 years to properly commemorate an event in our history that has been compared in magnitude to the Holocaust. Chair of the trust that is helming the Partition Museum project, Desai says, “Perhaps in the past there was also a fear of further rifts in society when painful incidents are narrated. However, no lesson is ever learnt if we simply hide from the truth.”

Thanks to people like Desai and Aanchal Malhotra, we will soon have a Partition Museum — most likely in Amritsar. It will house, in Desai’s words, “not just stories of suffering during the migration and after, but also of survival and of the triumph of the human spirit beyond borders and boundaries.” 

Malhotra, an MFA student at a Montreal university who will collaborate in the building of the Museum, is also working on a similar project for her thesis. Remnants Of A Separation is a collection of images and stories of the things that people brought with them when they crossed the border. Just small, everyday objects that came to represent everything they left behind.

Flip through to see these images and read about Remnants Of A Separation

ELLE: What’s your own personal journey with Remnants Of A Separation?
Aanchal Malhotra: “It began in the autumn of 2013 on a seemingly banal visit to my grandfather's house when I was introduced to two objects that his parents had brought with them from Lahore during the Partition — a ghara (pot) and a gaz (yardstick). He talked about how his mother made lassi in the ghara and how his father used the gaz at their clothing store; it was almost as if they transported him to the past. I was struck then, by how much of ourselves we deposit into our belongings. Moreover, being someone whose grandparents are originally from what became Pakistan, I became interested in the journey of migration. If anything from this time still survives, it embodies the memory of home, of childhood, of belonging. This project is about those objects and the memories of the people they belong to.” 

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ELLE: What did you learn about the Partition from the things that people brought with them?
AM: “The Partition is complex. (Memories of it) are vast, intricate and tangential. The pre-occupations and priorities of people were different then—how they connected to one another, how interwoven the fabric of society was. Some of these objects were carried across the border by friends who belonged to different religions. The Partition was successful in dividing people, but the memories of these relationships are immortalized within these objects.

The other thing that struck me enormously about the Partition was the women of that time. In all the stories I heard, women were the central characters. Even in times of danger and facing an uncertain future, they possessed resilience and unfathomable strength.”

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ELLE: You travelled to Pakistan for this project too — were you able to add to your collection?
AM: “I worked with a wonderful organization called The Citizens Archive of Pakistan, that aims at archiving lives and memories. The trip was memorable in every way—I had the most interesting feeling of déjà vu, since Lahore is exactly like Delhi.

I also found the most fascinating objects in Pakistan—antique Basra pearls, a stone-carved nameplate, a khaas daan, libraries of old and fraying books, and clothes stitched with zari threads from the pre-Partition era.”

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