TRACING A MEMORY

What much-loved objects can tell us about the lived past

- TISHARA RAJAGOPAL, ARJUNVIR SINGH,RAJITA BANERJEE

From the cultural diasporas of the recent past to the increasingly location-independent present, humans are on the move like never before. We’re sharing our cultures, customs, and languages in an increasingly connected world, and it’s a beautiful thing. At the same time, it’s also important to step back and remember how we became who we are today. Our roots and heritage inevitably shape our identity, and it’s up to us to ensure that they are not lost to time and to keep them alive for future generations.

The Museum of Material Memory, a crowdsourced, digital repository of the material culture of the Indian subcontinent, aims to do just that. Tracing family histories and social ethnography through heirlooms, collectibles, and objects of antiquity, founders Aanchal Malhotra (the idea for the Museum stemmed from her research on objects that migrated across the border during the Partition, on both sides) and Navdha Malhotra tell me that the premise of the project is to promote the preservation of material memory infused within objects and further advance the knowledge and appreciation of it as a significant resource in understanding culture and civilisation. It is interesting to note that the objects in the archive are from or before the 1970s.

LEELA CHANDER’S BIRYANI POT

Chennai, Tamil Nadu

This brass cooking pot belonged to my maternal great-grandmother, Leela Chander, and its story was told to me by my grandmother, Sabita Radhakrishna. Referred to as a dekchi, it is a wide-mouthed pot, that sits obediently in my grandmother's drawing-room. I've walked past it countless times and traced my fingers across the fern that now grows wildly out of it, rarely looking down the repurposed planter.