Aanchal Malhotra: A Human History of Partition

One of the undercurrents of the migration narrative is the story told by the objects of exodus, that economy of objects transformed by the trip itself—relics of a former life that are sold or hidden away; keepsakes that molder, heirlooms pored over ritually, a subtle history inherited. All of which raises the question: If forced to flee your country, what would you take with you?

In her book Remnants of Partition, Aanchal Malhotra unpacks the history of twenty-one objects—a cigarette case, a shawl, a military medal, to name a few—in order to tell the story of each owner’s path out of the convulsive 1947 Partition that separated Pakistan from India. The drawing of that border, hastily executed as the British Empire relinquished control of the subcontinent, set off a violent political rupture among Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs that resulted in one million killed and fourteen million uprooted, a trauma that remains deeply embedded for many families in both countries. Following the publication of Remnants in 2019, Malhotra expanded the project online through the Museum of Material Memory, a crowd-sourced “digital repository of material culture” where objects are shared and written about by the public in an effort to explore South Asian culture and history.

Born and raised in Delhi, Malhotra left India at seventeen to study printmaking in Canada— first in Toronto, then Montreal—a practice that incorporates photography, papermaking, and metal engraving, all of which she considers vital to the work that followed. “Visual-arts education is probably the most holistic way of understanding the world,” she says. “It’s an all-encompassing experience. I learned things about the humanities there. I learned how to be a person of the world when I studied engraving.”

In 2013, nearly burned out, Malhotra returned to Delhi at twenty-three for a sabbatical, expecting her graduate thesis to take shape organically. A journalist friend asked if he could interview her grandfather, who lived in the northern part of Delhi, in an ancestral house he shared with his brothers and their families, for a story on old houses—a simple enough theme. While giving Malhotra and the journalist a tour, one of the residents, her great-uncle, brought out a few artifacts as a way to talk about the history of the house and the city: photographs, bookends, the like. He showed them two objects in particular—a metal vessel and a yardstick, used to measure fabric in the old shops—that his family had brought over during Partition. “When he started talking about them,” Malhotra recalls, “he seemed transported, and to see him be transported so seamlessly—not just to his childhood, but to a country that was now on the other side of a militarized border—was beautiful. I had never seen that happen before. So that was my moment, because of these two mundane objects that had this quiet migratory history.”

Malhotra’s paternal grandparents had been refugees of Partition, spending years afterward in camps until finally settling in Delhi. But it wasn’t until that afternoon that she began to inquire more deeply about their experiences— mostly, she says, because of what she regards as a kind of learned indifference. “When I was growing up, I learned more about the Spanish Civil War and the Holocaust than I did about Partition. Textbooks basically lumped the entire event into two pages that said there was violence, there were riots, people lost everything, many died, x number of Hindus came, x number of Muslims went. I understand that you can’t put everything into a school textbook, but even so it was exceptionally reductive.”

Sensing a thesis, Malhotra began to seek out strangers with any link at all to Partition. “India is all about ‘I know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone.’ And here I was, asking my grandparents if they knew anyone who’d come from Pakistan, if they’d carried anything. And...