Reported By:
| Edited By: Gargi Gupta |Source: DNA |Updated: Dec 05, 2017, 02:02 PM IST
I grew up listening to stories about Partition from both sets of my grandparents, but mainly from my paternal grandparents who actually did the migration. They never really got over having to leave their ancestral home and land behind, even 50 or 60 years later. I knew it was a really traumatic and large scale event but I never learned about it in high school here in the US. In fact, it was not even mentioned in my textbooks while in contrast, we learned about the Holocaust in Europe and Hiroshima/Nagasaki for a whole semester in my World History class. At the time when I had tried to tell my classmates, and even years later when I tried to talk about it in college and graduate school, the reaction was always the same: it was probably not "a big deal" because it was not written about in textbooks. That bothered me because the sentiment contrasted so sharply with the stories I heard.
The thought that we could let such a massive historical event slip through the cracks without documenting it at the level that it should have been deeply troubled me. I feared we were going to live in a world where history would keep repeating itself. In the early 2000s for example, I saw the same chaos unfold in Iraq on television, as had happened during Partition, when an entire system of governance was replaced very quickly. In my mind, knowing what I had about Partition, the events I was seeing on television were predictable.
I also realized that first hand accounts validated the experience of Partition. They made it human and palatable and accessible. The numbers that we find on Wikipedia and in books simply cannot convey the true meaning of Partition and what it meant to live through that time and the decisions made during that time. People needed to hear about Partition from my grandmother, and not me or books. Only those with lived experiences could truly attempt to convey the horrors and trauma of that time. A trauma that affected millions upon millions of people – a population larger than many Western European nations combined! Yet, no one was talking about it. And most people I had known had not even heard about it. This includes most South Asians I knew.
How it all started: I had been living with the thoughts and sentiments I mentioned above for years and years. I knew one day I wanted to change the lack of knowledge about Partition. I did not know how until I visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial in 2008. I was doing part of my PhD research at the University of Tokyo in Japan at the time, and happened to take a trip down to Hiroshima. My great grandfather was stationed there during World War II and was not far from Hiroshima when the bomb was dropped. That was my motivation to visit. However, when I came across the witness archives in Hiroshima, that's when it clicked. It was so powerful to hear the stories of experiencing the atomic bomb from survivors. Suddenly it was all very real and human and I felt their pain much more than watching videos of the mushroom cloud or reading written accounts of those hours that followed the dropping of the bomb. It was an immediate click for me. I knew the same had to be done for Partition.
I began recording witness accounts on a hobby camcorder I always carried with me, while on a trip to India in 2009 in Faridkot. In 2010, the last member of my family who remembered Partition as an adult died before I could reach him to record his story. I was living in Berkeley by then. I was deeply troubled, not only by his passing, but by the tremendous loss of knowledge that my generation was facing. My great uncle took with him an immense amount of knowledge and wisdom, and it was now gone forever. We would have no other chance to learn from it. It was the absolute totality of that moment that made me realise that this work needed to be done on a larger scale. There needed to be many others like me out there collecting stories. We, ordinary people from all walks of life needed to come together to build a library of stories from elders who experienced those times and were now spread across the world.
I began recruiting a team in late 2010/early 2011 and we registered The 1947 Partition Archive in 2011. To collect stories from across the globe quickly and cost effectively, we decided to crowd-source the story collection.
Essentially, we teach people how to record oral history interviews via free online seminars. Citizen Historians record and submit stories to The Archive for posterity. The story collection process is also very powerful and both the Citizen Historian as well as the Partition witness come away changed. In our modern lives, we don't experience this sort of intergenerational interaction as much, and it can be a very moving experience when it happens.
Testimonies have been recorded from 14 countries, including India and Pakistan. Nearly 3,000 have been recorded, and they are 1-9 hours in length and on video. Today, our team is global and hundreds of volunteers have made this work possible. Currently, we have a total of 25 team members in South Asia, and five in the USA. Volunteer Citizen Historians have helped collect stories in nine countries.
We are crowdfunded. So we rely on donations from ordinary people, and welcome institutional support as well. Time is running out very quickly to do this work, so the more people that support us the better for the stories we are trying to preserve.
It is maintained on a digital cloud. We have offices in Delhi and Berkeley.
We want to make The Archive is available to anyone, not just scholars. We are currently working on that. There are a few ways we are going to do this and we will announce the details soon: 1) We are partnering with a number of top universities across the world and in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh to create local libraries of the stories that anyone can access. 2) We are working on a master plan right now, with experts around the world in developing a research center that also serves as a museum and memorial on Partition. We will announce this soon as well.
I believe that the long silence has several reasons: 1) The culture in South Asia does not promote historical preservation like other cultures in the world, such as in Europe. Hence people often like to forget and move on. 2) The political atmosphere did not allow a public memory of Partition to flourish. 3) The resources were not available to do this work because people were mainly focused on rebuilding their lives. 4) The desire and intellectual appreciation of this sort of work was not present.
Not at all. We have a very volatile “Line of Control” that constantly reminds us of Partition. We also have a lot of unresolved political and cultural issues that remain unresolved due to Partition. Partition lives on in the form of our communal feelings today, and the temperaments that it has taught us.
