![]() ![]() Its an act that has echoes today in the continued uneasy relaitonship between the two countries. Suddenly a lot of people found themselves on the wrong side and subject to horrific violence by their neighbours. India gained independence from Britain in 1947 and immediately split into 2 countries, India and Pakistan, which was mostly muslim. This was an interesting way to tell a story that is rapidly fading from living memory. 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. 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. ![]()
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