![]() ![]() I don’t think you can possibly blame everything on one event or one origin” she replies. “I am wary of associating everything to Partition. Author Aanchal Malhotra (Courtesy HarperCollins)ĭo you find, I asked Aanchal, this unexamined past affecting our present politics? Her latest work, In the Language of Remembering: The Inheritance of Partition, is a tome of close to 700 pages documenting the Partition memories of her own family members, and of around 125 other people from different regions of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Aanchal Malhotra, author of two books of oral history on Partition, is one who did. Few of the children and grandchildren bothered to ask. ![]() By and large, even the very people who had suffered Partition’s worst effects, its scarred survivors, spoke little about it – so little that in many cases, their own children and grandchildren barely knew what had befallen the family elders in that time of historic turmoil when the British Indian Empire split into fragments. ![]() Only some Punjabis and a few Bengalis, rare ones, broke the overwhelming silence that shrouded the story of their holocaust. In India, for decades after Partition, most of the country averted its gaze from the horrors of 1947 they had not suffered. Ashis Nandy had written in the foreword of a book of Partition stories several years ago that “An unexamined past has to be lived out over succeeding generations”. ![]()
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