Framing the scars

Life, loss, hope and betrayal—as seen through the lens of photographer Taha Ahmad in his series on partition

- ANJULY MATHAI

In a metal box in a burnt-down house in Punjab lay a wedding photo, crumpled and yellow. A young lad in a suit and his wide-eyed bride, her head covered with a shawl. They look content, staring into a future that held much promise. But it proved to be a short-lived happiness. Two months later, partition happened. The house of Khalid Muhammad and his new bride Nazia was burnt down by a Hindu-Sikh mob. Fearing for his young wife’s honour, Khalid shot her dead and moved to Pakistan, leaving his Sikh neighbour to take care of his ancestral property. No one from Khalid’s family ever returned to India to reclaim the property, which is now being looked after by the neighbour’s son.

The wedding photo is part of documentary photographer Taha Ahmad’s series on partition—Drawn Into Two: Which Way Home?—now being exhibited at the Reach Gallery Museum in Abbotsford, Canada. The exhibition—Duje Pase Ton (From the other side): Arts Across the Border. From the Two Punjabs—brings together the work of 22 international artists from India and Pakistan. “I never wanted it to be just about testimonies of the last-remaining partition survivors,” says the Lucknowi photographer. “Today, in Punjab, we see caste discrimination, drug issues and gun violence. But sometime during my research, I realised that all these problems are actually the aftermath of the seeds planted during partition. So, I went back and started searching for those seeds which would depict how, over the years, partition has shaped today’s Punjab.”