Author tells the history of Partition through memories of objects migrants took along

One of the fascinating stories – and there are many such - that Aanchal Malhotra narrates when discussing her delightful book, Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition Through Material Memory, is the heartwarming, goosebump-inducing tale of how one house helped unite two families that were divided by the subcontinent’s partition in 1947.

Perched on the eastern aspect of the Upper Bakrota Hill in Dalhousie, India, the house holds a myriad memories for Lahore resident Sitara Fiyaz Ali, and if there is one image that often comes to her mind when she thinks of her younger days, it is of the cottage built in 1943 by her father Mian Afzal Hussain ‘with great love and passion’.

This is also the house, with rounded windows and green wooden shutters, that she and her family had to abandon more than seven decades ago during the partition. However, little did she realize that decades later, an author would become the medium to help connect her, albeit virtually, to her erstwhile home.

A writer and historian whose works open a new window to the subcontinent’s history, Aanchal initially began her journey for Remnants of a Separation collecting, studying and archiving objects and memories that survivors of the partition had treasured and preserved. (Aanchal, whose most recent work is her debut novel titled The Book of Everlasting Things, will be speaking at the forthcoming Emirates Airline Festival of Literature.)

‘It began when I came across some objects my family carried with them when they moved to Delhi from Pakistan in 1947,’ she says, in a video interview to Friday, from her home in Delhi.

But it was in 2013 that she began to take a greater interest in two objects - a vessel in which milk was churned, and a yardstick used by her great grandfather in his clothing store – that her maternal grandfather’s family had brought along with them from Lahore. ‘Whenever these objects were brought out, they seemed to inspire memories of a time when the border between the two countries did not exist,’ she says.

Intrigued, she was curious to know more. ‘And the longer we spoke about the objects, the more the ‘real’ Lahore appeared to me’.

It did not take long for her to realize that the picture she was being painted by her grandparents was starkly different from ‘what I understood about the fracture between Pakistan and India.

‘They were talking about ordinary things in life- where they used to live, how they used interact with their neighbours, food they used to eat, schools they attended… It sounded like a very rural, largely peaceful life. But of course, this is one perspective. Obviously there were places that weren’t as peaceful.’

The interaction with the elders in her family got Aanchal thinking about was how an object could become the catalyst for a memory; how it could be a portal into a past and how it could help draft a new narrative.

Keen to expand the scope of her exercise, Aanchal started interviewing refugees from either sides of the border gently coaxing them to reveal the memories associated with objects they had taken along with them during the migration, and of their life pre and post Partition.

Even as her research and interviews began taking her across India, Pakistan and the UK, Aanchal met with Lahore-based Sitara and her family for whom pictures of their former home were enveloped with layers of fond memories.

When the subcontinent’s partition was announced in 1947, Sitara and her family fled across the border, taking along barely a few things but plenty of memories of her beloved home in India, and in the course of the conversation, Sitara showed Aanchal two photographs of her erstwhile house in India- a black and white taken in 1947, and a colour photograph taken by a family friend who visited Dalhousie decades later.

‘Sitara pointed to the photograph and explained that the highlight of the house is the rounded living room, above which is a bedroom that boasts a large semi-circular sun and a constellation of stars carved on the roof,’ says Aanchal. ‘The name of the cottage, Kehkashan which means galaxy, was said to have been inspired by her and her sister’s names - Sitara (star) and Surya (sun).’

THE VIRTUAL MEETING

Aanchal included photographs of the cottage in her book Remnants... that was published in 2019, and a couple of months later, she received a call from a gentleman with a request to meet her. ‘It’s about the house…chapter 17… Kehkashan,’ he told her.

The gentleman, Gurdip Singh Bedi, a retired diplomat, who was accompanied by his brother Colonel Harinder Singh Bedi, said how he chanced upon the book and was surprised to see the photograph of the house their father had bought as evacuee property in lieu of their ancestral home that they had left behind in Kallar Syedan in Pakistan when they migrated to India during the partition.

The Bedis had several stories to narrate about the house and the objects in it. They told Aanchal how they had preserved the original sofa sets, a writing desk, the dining table and cane chairs left behind by the previous owners.

Excited, Aanchal telephoned Sitara to share the news of how she had touched base with the new owners of Kehkeshan. To say Sitara was overwhelmed would be an understatement. ‘Can they share pictures?’ the lady in Lahore asked, delighted to connect once again with a piece of her past.

Aanchal planned something better. She decided to visit Dalhousie and the hospitable Bedis threw open the doors of Kehkeshan to her, taking her on a tour of the cottage.

Aanchal then decided to give Sitara a pleasant surprise- a video call with the Bedi family and a view of the house she once lived in. As the call went through and Sitara appeared on the phone screen, Aanchal slowly turned the phone so the camera faced the house. ‘For the first time in 70 years Sitara saw Kehkeshan again and the smile on the 93-year-old's face grew,’ recalls the author.

Then overwhelmed by emotions, the nonagenarian began tearing up as Aanchal took her on a virtual tour of the home.

Questions came thick and fast as Sitara wanted to know about a certain room or a table or a desk in the house, even as she was overjoyed to see that a lot of the house was preserved much the way it had been when she had left.

She also offered a surprise to the Bedis, telling them to check out a secret compartment in the kitchen. Later, seeing the study table she once used and which still held pride of place in the cottage, she told them how she had left behind a little engraving in it. The Bedi family opened the drawer and, surprise, the engraving was resting there!

‘It was really, really, moving,’ recalls Aanchal.

‘It really shows that while there may be differences and distance between India and Pakistan, it’s during moments like these that they disappear. And you realise just how close we can be as people and just how intimately we are woven into each other’s lives.’

DOCUMENTING MEMORIES

How did she go about documenting the memories of migrants? I ask.

‘I wish there was like an organised way that I did that,’ says Aanchal, who was in her early 20s when she began work on her project. ‘The biggest question on my mind was, how can I possibly empathise with something I haven’t seen? I didn’t really know the full scale of it, and was very limited in my understanding of it.’

She admits that this was where the objects helped because they became a catalyst to go into people’s history.

‘So, instead of telling someone ‘it must have been awful witnessing partition but can you tell me about it?’ which is extremely insensitive, I’d start by asking ‘What made you carry this particular book from Lucknow to Lahore? What kind of school were you in? What did you learn? What else did you take with you?’’ says the Delhi resident who has a Masters in Fine Arts from Canada.

Thus, employing a unique methodology that relied on material culture, objects became conversation starters.

‘Every interview was a learning experience,’ she says. ‘With each interview, I understood how much or how little I could ask; how that really depended on how much or how little people wanted to speak to me.’

With each interview, her connections too grew and she could meet and interview more people for the book which went on to win the 2022 Council for Museum Anthropology Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar, and half a dozen other awards.

‘I have enormous respect for people who chose to talk about what happened to them because it helps us, future generations, to understand more about that time,’ she says. ‘It also helps us to look beyond the violence [that is a common theme in most narratives].’

One of the spin-offs of employing such a methodology to tell the story is that it has led to a resurgence in younger people being interested in partition because they started employing the same kind of methodology of asking their parents and grandparents about certain objects- a gentler way to enter into ‘an otherwise quite traumatic discussion.

‘For instance, they would say, ‘tell me about this sewing machine’ or, ‘why did you carry this piece of jewellery with you?’’ she says.

Several readers wrote to her saying how the book had in many ways helped them connect with their past. ‘I think that it is a way we can start a kind of organic understanding of history,’ says the author whose second book, In the Language of Remembering, traces the generational legacy of Partition, and was named one of History Today’s Best Books of the Year.

Quite like Sitara’s story about the house in Dalhousie, Aanchal’s book has plenty of tales- of people recollecting memories through objects that they took along during Partition.

Aanchal shares pictures of a set of plaques from a certain Justice Bakhshi Tek Chand’s home in Lahore that was returned to the family in Delhi decades after Partition; a lock that Om Prakash Khanna’s family brought along from Multan to Lucknow; a 10-inch circular stone mortar Raj Kapur Suneja’s mother-in-law carried along with her from Lyallpur to Delhi; a foldable pocketknife made of ivory given to Bhag Gulyani for her protection; Usha Chaudhary’s photo album showing pictures of childhood summers spent in Karachi and Jhang.

Then there were people who also spoke about objects they did not bring along: Harmeet Singh Baweja, who was born in Mintgumri (now Sahiwal) recalled helping his family to carefully roll up their valuables in a large carpet and bury it in the floor of their haveli- certain they would return some day.

What is also particularly remarkable are objects whose stories and memories have been preserved not by their original owners, but by their kin who were happy to share the stories, says Aanchal.

Even as we come to the end of the interview, I ask her to share another tale from her book. ‘Let me tell you about my great grand mother. She was a single mother who came to Delhi with five young children from what is the North West Frontier Province.

‘The only thing she carried with her was a headpiece – that’s the image on the book’s cover. Studded with precious stones, this maang-tikka was carried to sell, if required, to feed the family once in India.

‘Initially she stays with some relatives, but soon realizes that they are finding it difficult to take care of her and her children as they themselves are struggling. So the proud woman that she is, she decides to return to Pakistan. However while on the platform waiting for the train to arrive, she is persuaded to stay back by a gentleman who was in charge of a refugee camp in Meerut, where the family then went to live for several months before moving to Delhi.

'She works at some schools, becomes financially independent and not only that, she never has to sell that piece of jewellery that she brought with her.'

Aanchal’s grandfather, Balraj Bahri Malhotra, too has an interesting story of his own . Arriving in India as a 19-year-old medical student from Pakistan, he was open to taking up any job while living in the refugee camp in Delhi.

‘He did just about everything,’ says the author, ‘from selling coal, train seats, and ink pens to working in a bullock cart.’

One day he learns that shops are being allocated to refugees in the nearby market, and pooling in his savings and with some help from his family, he purchases a shop. However, not knowing what to do in it, he seeks the help of other refugees and one of them, a bookseller, offers to teach him how to sell books.

He agrees. ‘Soon he begins making meticulous lists of books that people wanted which is how he learnt what customers in this young, newly-independent India were interested in reading. He was personable and quickly learnt the ways of the business.’

Established in 1953, the store is Bahrisons, one of the most well-known books stores in India, with 9 outlets across the country. 

Aanchal’s latest work is a debut novel titled The Book of Everlasting Things.