Remnants of a Separation: Aanchal Malhotra
“History can be told in many different ways” History of the Siege of Lisbon, Jose Saramago
Partition of the Indian subcontinent1947 is perhaps one of the darkest chapters in the human history that needs no further introduction. Documented by historians, writers, travellers, the people themselves, data and numbers shaded with colours of violence is what marks the history of partition. Cinema and songs tell of the same. The rage, the death, the loss, the mayhem.
Here is a book that talks about the same incident, but through remembrance. Remembrance, tinged with hope and despair. Coloured with disbelief and belief. Of losing lives and building it again. Of memories sharp and half forgotten, “forgetting is as important as remembering.” It tells the similar stories from both the sides of the border. Stories of the people who had fled. Stories of the people who had remained. Stories of the people who went back, to their homeland. Holding on to their memory of their past lives, no longer there, through objects they can hold, touch, smell and see. A journey of remembrance through material memory.
Each of us surround ourselves with things, knowingly and unknowingly. They become a part of us, seeping into our everyday existence. Quiet and surreptitious, they lie at the back of the cupboards, in the frayed pages of a book, polished surface of a bangle, the yellowed sepia of a photograph. They hold a bit of our lives and over generations, a bit of the lives of all who has lived there.
This large volume holds twenty-one stories. Stories of love and friendship, of childhood and hardships, of elegance and affluence, of wealth and poverty. Gleaned from memories, aided by the relationship between the narrators and their families, each is a journey and each a story in itself. They are strikingly similar and intrinsically different. The materials, through which the stories are narrated, around which they are remembered, perhaps taking a life of their own tells the history, of the land and its people. “The object expands to transcend its own physicality, creating a tangible link to an intangible place or state of being.”
There is no one true memory. Tales of remembering and forgetting are simultaneous. Trying to recall and trying to forget. The ambivalence between the two. The immense, unimaginable pain of leaving everything behind. Not just the home and the land but every shred of memory, every laughter and tear, every joy and heartbreak, each precious moment of friendship. The collective memory of a group, a society, a neighbourhood, a family. To leave them all behind and set foot for the unknown amidst such uncertainties and in the face of hatred. Remnants of a separation is not just a sojourn into the memory of partition; it is perhaps a glimpse into the memory of tens and thousand of people who have been rendered homeless. Who are being rendered homeless every day. Refugees, of war, climate catastrophe, political unrest, civil war, religious indoctrination and play of politics. It resonates with many stories, heard and unheard! In the authors own words, it is an attempt to “unravel a deeper understanding of the personal narratives around Partition.”
This book brough back personal memories as well. Of a green leather covered flask that baba used during his days as a doctor with the Indian army. An old black and white photograph of him with his colleagues bears the mark. He had brought it along from Chittagong. Now in Bangladesh. Then the undivided India, East Bengal. Frayed and yellowed, it still triggered memories, even a few years ago. An old brass rose bowl of ma, and the musical powder case, gifts from her father to the young girl held stories too. Did I hear them well enough? Or caught up in the fast moving everyday busy ness left them largely unheard perhaps.
‘Remnants of a Separation’, is a narration of many voices journeying through collective memory. Many voices of different contexts, unknown to each other, all bound together by a singular event of history and an underlying yearning of what they remembered of their place of birth, their childhood home, a fistful of soil from the homeland- mutthi -bhar mitti!