Talking about younger people, Aanchal also added that so many of them reach out to Samuel (for Project Dastaan) because they want to know where their families come from and want to show to their grandparents. I think it is very important to say that you can be of one nationality but still for the city or village that your family came from,” she said while addressing a question about native village and family origins. 'I don’t think I have any identity crisis, but we are just curious about where the origin lies. In speaking to younger people, I have come to realise that there is a lot of curiosity to look beyond the border, to see where their families came from.'

My own grandmother told me that we never want to pass the memory along further.

I was told many times that partition stories end with the first generation. While talking about the same, she said, 'My second book is about the second, third and fourth generation, who have inherited these stories. And, then trying to put them in touch with families on the other side of the border who could show them what their houses and school look like today,” he said.Īnchal Malhotra is also the author of In the Language of Remembering: The Inheritance of Partition. My first project with partition was called Project Dastaan, where we were interviewing partition families that migrated. “I became very much inspired by Aanchal’s work. It is an alternative history of the Partition - the first and only one told through material memory that makes the event tangible even seven decades later.During the session, Samuel Dalrymple, co-founder of Project Dastaan and son of historian William Dalrymple, opened up about his projects and the upcoming book. A refugee certificate created in Calcutta evokes in a daughter the feelings of displacement her father had experienced upon leaving Mymensingh zila, now in Bangladesh.Written as a crossover between history and anthropology, Remnants of a Separation is the product of years of passionate research. 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 string of pearls gifted by a maharaja, carried from Dalhousie to Lahore, reveals the grandeur of a life that once was. They now speak of their owner's pasts as they emerge as testaments to the struggle, sacrifice, pain and belonging at an unparalleled moment in history.

These belongings absorbed the memory of a time and place, remaining latent and undisturbed for generations. Remnants of a Separation is a unique attempt to revisit the Partition through objects that refugees carried with them across the border.

Remnants of separation aanchal malhotra