Books with author Aanchal Malhotra

Seventy years on from the partition of India, a momentous event now recedes in memory. Despite being born into a family affected by the great divide, artist and oral historian Aanchal Malhotra had thought little about it until she encountered the objects her own great-grandparents had saved as they fled their homes: jewelry, kitchen utensils, photographs, and a pocketknife.Remnants of Partition is a unique revisiting of Partition through dozens of personal belongings carried between the new India and Pakistan, amid the chaos of communal killings and mass displacement. Hidden in these objects is the memory of a time and place, a story of migration, and a life that once was. Malhotra unearths possessions from both sides of the border, interviewing their owners and uncovering a rich tapestry of struggle, sacrifice, pain, and identities forged and unforged. From a string of pearls gifted by a maharaja to a young woman's poetry notebook, this is an extraordinary alternative history of Partition, both powerful and poignant. Aanchal Malhotra takes the material legacy of a unique human drama, and places it back in our hands as vivid, living memory.

Seventy years on from the partition of India, a momentous event now recedes in memory. Despite being born into a family affected by the great divide, artist and oral historian Aanchal Malhotra had thought little about it until she encountered the objects her own great-grandparents had saved as they fled their homes: jewelry, kitchen utensils, photographs, and a pocketknife.Remnants of Partition is a unique revisiting of Partition through dozens of personal belongings carried between the new India and Pakistan, amid the chaos of communal killings and mass displacement. Hidden in these objects is the memory of a time and place, a story of migration, and a life that once was. Malhotra unearths possessions from both sides of the border, interviewing their owners and uncovering a rich tapestry of struggle, sacrifice, pain, and identities forged and unforged.From a string of pearls gifted by a maharaja to a young woman's poetry notebook, this is an extraordinary alternative history of Partition, both powerful and poignant. Aanchal Malhotra takes the material legacy of a unique human drama, and places it back in our hands as vivid, living memory.

A well-researched and richly readable book RAMACHANDRA GUHA SEVENTY YEARS HAVE PASSED SINCE THE PARTITION, and a momentous event now recedes in memory. Generations have grown up outside the shadow of the communal killings and mass displacement that shaped the contemporary history of the subcontinent. Despite being born into a family affected by the Divide, artist and oral historian Aanchal Malhotra too had thought little about the Partition until she encountered objects that had once belonged to her ancestors in an Undivided India. A gaz, a ghara, a maang-tikka, a pocketknife, a peacock-shaped bracelet, and a set of kitchen utensils: these were what accompanied her great-grandparents as they fled their homes, and through them she learnt of their migration and life before the Divide. This led her to search for the belongings of other migrants to discover the stories hidden in them. Remnants of a Separation is a unique attempt to revisit the Partition through such objects carried across the border. These objects absorbed the memory of a time and place, remaining latent and undisturbed for generations. They now speak of their owners pasts and emerge as testaments to the struggle, sacrifice, pain and belonging at an unparalleled moment in history. A string of pearls gifted by a maharaja, carried from Dalhousie to Lahore, reveals the grandeur of a life that once was. A notebook of poems, brought from Lahore to Kalyan, shows one woman s determination to pursue the written word despite the turmoil around her. A refugee certificate created in Calcutta evokes in a daughter the feelings of displacement her father had experienced on leaving Mymensingh, now in Bangladesh. Written as a crossover between history and anthropology, Remnants of a Separation tells stories from both sides of the border and is the product of years of painstaking and passionate research. It pieces together an alternative history of the Partition the first and only one told through material memory that makes the event tangible even seven decades later, lest we forget.