THE MEMORY PROJECT

Saadia Gardezi and her teammates at Project Dastaan use technology to help Partition veterans find closure By Shweta Bhandral

- Shweta Bhandral

Jinne Lahore ni wakheya o jami-ya ni (one who has not seen Lahore is not born). Saadia Gardezi grew up in Lahore, a city of history, art, culture, and literature. “Working with people who migrated between India and Pakistan in 1947, I cannot imagine how heart-wrenching it would be to leave home for good, especially a home-like Lahore,” says the co-founder of Project Dastaan, a unique initiative that uses technology to help the Partition generation revisit the land of their birth.

A journalist who has worked for several news networks and a political cartoonist for The Nation in Pakistan, Saadia is also an artist and runs her own art studio called Penguin Pop. The 34-year-old’s vibrant sense of colour turns shoes, jackets, and bags into something unique and quirky. At present, she is pursuing her PhD in international relations at Warwick University, UK.

Earlier, as a Weidenfeld-Hoffmann Scholar at Oxford University in 2017, Saadia and her friends sowed the seeds of a unique collaboration called Project Daastan. Their mission is to give emotional closure to a generation living with broken memories of the most challenging times of their lives. Saadia explains, “Project Dastaan came into being when Indian and Pakistani friends studying in Oxford spoke to each other about the difficulty of being able to help their grandparents travel across the border. Due to wars, old age, and trauma, there are still too many barriers for this generation to return to see their ancestral villages, whether in India or Pakistan. Project Dastaan could make that return possible.”