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In the Language of Remembering : The Inheritance of Partition

By Aanchal Malhotra

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About the book

Oral historian Aanchal Malhotra’s first book, Remnants of a Separation, was published in 2017 to mark the seventieth anniversary of India’s Partition. It told a human history of the monumental event by exhuming the stories lying latent in ordinary objects that survivors had carried with them across the newly made border. It was acclaimed for the freshness of its approach to a decades-old, much-written-about subject. But more significantly, it inspired conversations within families: between the generation that had witnessed Partition and those who had only inherited its memories.

In the Language of Remembering, as a natural progression, explores that very notion as it reveals how Partition is not yet an event of the past and its legacy is threaded into the daily lives of subsequent generations. Bringing together conversations recorded over many years with generations of Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and their respective diaspora, it looks at how Partition memory is preserved and bequeathed, its consequences disseminated and manifested within family, community and nation. With the oldest interviewees in their nineties and the youngest just teenagers, the voices in this living archive intimately and sincerely answer questions such as: Is Partition relevant? Should we still talk about it? Does it define our relationships? Does it build our characteristics or augment our fears, without us even realizing?

As the subcontinent marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of Partition, In the Language of Remembering will most importantly serve as a reminder of the price this land once paid for not guarding against communal strife – and what could happen once again should we ever choose division over inclusion.

Pages: 756

Available in: Hardback

Language: English

Aanchal Malhotra

Aanchal Malhotra is a writer and oral historian from New Delhi. She is the co-founder of the Museum of Material Memory, and the author of two critically acclaimed and award-winning books, Remnants of a Separation and In the Language of Remembering, that explore the human history and generational impact of the 1947 Partition. The Book of Everlasting Things is her debut novel.

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Lifts Partition from disembodied numbers and statistics, from maps and borders, to highlight the very human nature of the tragedy - MANU S. PILLAI

Aanchal has [done] a great service … The nuanced stories and experiences of Partition survivors offer an essential lens into our past and present. It is a lens that, for me, provides the only hope to move beyond distorted, jingoistic and censored state histories. - FROM THE FOREWORD BY ANAM ZAKARIA

Compassionate, caring and insightful, Aanchal Malhotra’s deeply personal enquiry traces a complex and multi-layered history to reflect on and come to terms with its many legacies ... It offers that precious thing: hope. - URVASHI BUTALIA

It is at the intersection of history and memory – national, familial, individual – that we get an insight into how trauma unfolds over time. In this unique intergenerational account, Aanchal has given us a sensitive and precious archive. - RITU MENON

A work of immense courage and grace. Aanchal delicately redirects our gaze and imagination to generations which continue to be affected from the horrors of displacement that haunt the subcontinent. - FARAH BASHIR

The 1947 and 1971 partitions and divisions in South Asia acquire in Aanchal Malhotra’s sensitive prose an immediacy and a pressing relevance, two and even three generations after the actual events. A worthy sequel to Remnants of a Separation. - T.C.A. RAGHAVAN

A moving and emotional meditation on South Asia’s history and the way that Partition still resonates in the present. - YASMIN KHAN

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