If anything, Bengal bore a slow and prolonged parturition and unlike the western arm, it was partitioned not just once but thrice: in 1905, 1947 and again in 1971. Thinking, writing, recreating the days and understanding the consequences of Partition require us not just to be borderless in our thoughts and perceptions but also impartial and honest in our research.”Ī post shared by Aanchal Malhotra Punjab became a bloodied passage for those fleeing to the newly-created countries across a newly-demarcated border, the eastern border too witnessed large-scale violence and migration. But what emerges from a close reading is the author’s repeated assertion that when writing about Partition, “one needs to embrace both sides equally and do justice to the experiences that occurred on both sides of the border. The stories themselves are too many and too layered and nuanced to be recapitulated for the purpose of a review here. And, so instead of the oft-repeated stories of blood and gore, of trains heaped with corpses, of unimaginable horrors especially those against girls and women, there are vignettes here of humanity and friendship and sacrifice.
If people were to listen to each other’s stories, there is a possibility of peace and reconciliation.
The underlying impulse behind this book, as also behind Remnants., is a deeply humane one. To those who think Partition is so far back in time that it cannot affect our present, there is the haunting declaration by one of the interviewees: “.those who say Partition doesn’t affect us are similar to the people who say caste doesn’t exist, and that perspective comes from a place of immense privilege.” Clearly, for as long as the consequences of Partition keep unspooling, there is no way that it can be relegated to history books, something to be studied in a detached manner and not carried around as a continuing legacy of pain and bewilderment. A post shared by Aanchal Malhotra her second book, In the Language of Remembering: The Inheritance of Partition, a natural progression from the first, Malhotra carries the Partition narrative forward by speaking with the third, sometimes fourth generation of survivors about conversation within families: about the ‘relevance’ of the events of 1947, its lingering after-effect and how, and to what extent, it defines those whose grandparents, or even great-grandparents, lived through it.
0 kommentar(er)
