‘Diaspora’s Partition survivors are finally breaking their silence’

'Objects are often the only connection to a land long fled. In one home in Edinburgh, there was a brick in a glass cabinet. My interviewee had brought it back from Pakistan.'

- Ketaki Desai

INTERVIEW

Migration has meant that the stories of Partition are scattered across the world. In Britain, where a huge South Asian diaspora resides, there was a culture of silence that journalist, broadcaster and author Kavita Puri decided to challenge by gathering the testimonies of Partition survivors and their descendants, first via her radio series ‘Partition Voices: Untold British Stories’ and then a book by the same name. Puri talks to Ketaki Desai about the floodgates that opened up

What made you take up this project?

It begins, as it often does for writers of Partition, with my own family Partition story which I didn’t know much of because nobody talked about it. As the 70th anniversary in 2017 approached, I thought, what if we never know, what if these stories are lost forever? I embarked upon a BBC radio series to collect these first-hand testimonies. What I realised very quickly was that it was a huge awakening not only for me, but that anniversary was a watershed for the diaspora. It was also a significant moment on the path of Britain talking about that colonial past.

Why the silence around it?