Chronicler of Memories

When Aanchal Malhotra's maternal granduncle showed her two age-old objects that his family carried from Lahore to Amritsar around the Partition, it sparked a curiosity in the historian, leading her on a decade-long research project across the subcontinent.

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Aanchal Malhotra
INDIAN HISTORIAN, WRITER

This journey culminated in two books, Remnants of Separation (2017) and In the Language of Remembering (2022), both of which delve into the memories of Partition in multi-generational families. In a conversation with Adila Matra, the author discusses poignant stories she encountered during her research and how genealogy travel can be incredibly educational.

Your first book Remnants of a Separation explores the stories of objects carried by refugees during the Partition of India. Could you share insights into your research process and how you discovered and collected these artefacts and narratives?

Remnants of a Separation is a project about objects of migration, but it is also an attempt to understand 'belonging' through 'belongings'. The memory of Partition has long been subsumed by silence and violence, and my effort was to see if an object from the past could help us better understand the social ethnography and relationships that once existed. Could we use the object to create language to speak about a time unspeakable? Could it be a reservoir of memory and rootedness? For several years I travelled across India, Pakistan and the UK-initially as a graduate student and later as an independent scholar-searching for things that refugees had brought with them, like identification cards and educational certificates, books and diaries, clothes, jewellery, utensils, weapons, objects of cultural significance, heirlooms, photographs, that become their companions on the way to new citizenship.

Is there any story from the course of writing In the Language of Remembering: The Inheritance of Partition that stands out to you?