- History for Peace
- 3 days ago
- 18 min read
The past two days have been incredibly stimulating, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed our conversations. For the past eight years, I have worked in two types of institutions: archives and museums. Many of you have likely visited museums, where exhibits typically showcase paintings, sculptures, artefacts, and textiles. However, for five years, my work focused on preserving oral histories rather than objects.
As some of you might recall from Sreyasi’s workshop yesterday, oral history involves interviewing individuals who have firsthand experiences of historical events. To understand the past, we recorded and documented their memories as part of our collection. For three of those five years, I worked at the Partition Museum, which was dedicated to preserving the memories of those who witnessed the Partition.
In 1947, the Indian subcontinent, then under British rule, was divided into two nations: India and Pakistan (which later split into Pakistan and Bangladesh). This division, largely along religious lines, resulted in widespread violence and mass displacement. Historical records estimate that between 200,000 and 2 million people lost their lives, and up to 20 million were forced to leave their homes. The impact of Partition was not confined to 1947 alone—it continued to affect lives well into the 1960s and 1970s.
The Partition Museum was established in 2015, making it nine years old today. It was an initiative of the Arts and Cultural Heritage Trust, which began with no pre-existing collection. Instead, the museum sought to build its collection through crowdsourcing, reaching out to individuals and inviting them to share their personal stories. In this way, it became what we call a community museum.
During my three years there, I interviewed elderly individuals in their 80s and 90s who had lived through Partition. Carrying with us a camera, tripod, and a questionnaire, we conducted two-to-three-hour interviews, preserving these firsthand accounts. These recordings were later played in the museum galleries, allowing visitors to listen to personal stories of Partition. Although it has been four years since I worked there, I have learned that the museum now holds over 5,000 recorded interviews.
In recent years, several other projects have focused on Partition’s history. For example, the Partition Archive, which began recording interviews in the mid-2000s, has made its collection available online. Other initiatives, such as the Kolkata Partition Museum Project and Project Dastaan, use virtual reality technology to explore Partition’s impact. These projects shift the focus away from rulers, elites, and political decision-makers, instead highlighting the experiences of ordinary people—individuals who never imagined their stories would be preserved in a museum. This approach was referred to as people’s history or people’s memory.
Our goal was not just to document Partition but also to foster a sense of collective remembrance—a memory community. In this process, we were raising consciousness and creating a community who belonged to the memory of the Partition and claimed it as their own. This community consisted not only of the elderly individuals we interviewed but also of younger generations who discovered their own family’s Partition stories while conducting interviews for the museum. When museum visitors heard these interviews, they were often inspired to share the stories passed down in their families, further enriching the collection.
Ultimately, the project aimed to blur the boundaries between the museum and its audience, transforming history into a shared experience. This leads us to an important question: how do we use such initiatives to rethink national identity?
The museum made a very bold statement. It said that if we look at memories of people, these memories can often challenge what we are told by governments and the state––an official version of a historical event, which you can learn through reports, political speeches and often through newspapers. While we have access to a lot of documentary evidence that has been preserved, stories of violence, trauma and displacement remain in people's minds. Maybe they told close family and friends but otherwise it was largely silent and it became the museum's job to uncover this silenced history, reveal these memories and share them with the public. We compared these memories with official documents and spoke about how one was silent and the other became the official version.
A key reflection of this is how Independence Day is celebrated on August 15th, yet the trauma and violence that accompanied it are often forgotten. To address this, the museum commemorated 17th August as Partition Remembrance Day, aligning the project with the idea of the nation. While we were engaged in our work, we were also contributing to a collective remembrance of the nation’s past. At the same time, there was a conscious effort to acknowledge histories that transcended national borders. The interviews also highlighted the easy journeys between Amritsar and Lahore before the Partition. But that thirty-minute distance is now impossible to travel because of rigid borders.
We had a very lovely story in the museum told to us by a man named Pushpinder Singh Chopra who unfortunately passed away during COVID. His father, employed in the army, had been instructed to draw the border at Wagah in 1947. The same border that now requires extensive paperwork to cross to enter India or Pakistan. He had photographs of Wagah from that time where the ‘border’ was but a line drawn with chalk. It really conveyed to our audience how borders are constructed; they are not timeless entities.
We also realized that there are many common things between people on either side of borders, like those living in Amritsar and Lahore––language, culture, music, a shared sense of history and humanity. This was something that the project really was able to tap into.
There are many other aspects of belonging raised by the project but here I am, only addressing the issue of nations. There were certain questions and concerns that came up in the course of my three years in the project. The first question was: While we were creating a community of memory––comprising people who remember the Partition––was this community a singular thing? Aren't there divisions and hierarchies within them, usually along the lines of class, caste, region, gender?
Partition did affect different people differently but it is not addressed enough in museums or in heritage projects. For example, many families who owned lands and property but were forced to flee their homes, could apply for land compensation. They were often able to achieve a certain level of stability and security and social mobility, through their network. After a very traumatic experience, when one crossed the border and had family in India who were in government positions in the bureaucracy, they could help get compensation for land left behind.
This was, however, not an option available to people who were landless, often from oppressed caste communities. For example, the members of a sweeper caste from Sindh and Karachi, in newly created Pakistan were banned from leaving the country under a law called the Essential Services Maintenance Act. Most other people were able to move and leave if they felt unsafe. Certain scheduled caste groups who did cross the border were made to settle in only certain neighborhoods like Rehgarhpura in Delhi, receiving minimal financial support. In places like Bengal, they were forcibly resettled in areas such as Dandakaranya. So, essentially, the Partition reinforced caste and class hierarchies which is addressed in our work.
As mentioned by Sreyasi earlier, snowballing is one method of doing oral history where you find people and interview their family and friends on the subject. But the problem lies in the limited access to people belonging to a particular class and social background. One of the ways we tried to address this was by doing some field research involving numerous interns, volunteers, and staff. They would go to certain neighborhoods in Delhi and interview people in community centers, gurudwaras or any public gathering areas. A student named Ram Vishwanathan went to various neighborhoods, including Trilokpuri, Ashok Nagar and other areas where many people belonging to oppressed caste communities resided.
It was interesting to see that in many of the interviews they conducted, people didn’t necessarily consider Partition as this singular ‘most important traumatic’ event in their life; for them, trauma continued after that. I think that's something that our project didn't capture and reflect on enough.
The second question was: What about the role of our biases and prejudices that punctuate our memory? How does this affect our memory of the past and our sense of belonging? I'm drawing attention to the larger context of today's Hindu majoritarianism that we are currently living in and how that affected the work we did. Over the three years, I found that what people told me was very often mediated or influenced by their understanding of their place in society. For example, if I interviewed a Hindu person, they had a certain confidence and the freedom to express a range of opinions including one where they were able to express a sense of victimhood. They could reflect on a sense of connection or a sense of hatred with people of other religions. In contrast, among Muslim interviewees, I found a reluctance to share difficult stories, a certain wariness, hesitation and specific manner in which they would frame their stories––definitely condemning the demand for Pakistan, using carefully calculated words, keeping in mind that in today's country, they are being violently excluded.
A safeguard was also considered as these marginalized people were on the receiving end of violence. Consent forms were circulated to allow them to specify their choice about whether they wanted their story to be publicized. They could specify if they didn’t mind it being in the archive or being shared in the gallery but wanted to avoid it being shared online or on social media. Anonymity was an option as well but it's very difficult with oral history because it requires the person to share so much personal information, including where they studied, where they lived, what their jobs were. It's very hard to actually anonymize the person, thus it was avoided.
So, what we see here is memories are very clearly mediated or influenced by notions of belonging and un-belonging. It also made me reflect on oral history as a method of understanding the past because in most heritage spaces, memories are seen as very authentic. While reading a newspaper report, one might ask, who is the journalist? Why is he/she reporting it this way? This kind of skepticism should be applied during the oral history interview as well. With most projects, there is a tendency to treat the interview as isolated i.e. not linked to the larger context of the person's life, especially with stories of trauma and violence. It becomes very difficult to question the story and to question the memory. Even though we originally spoke about how oral histories were questioning documents and the official archives, questioning the interviews itself and letting the interviewees know about the reflection of biases and prejudices in their stories, came as a huge challenge that has not been resolved yet.
I do think that one of the most meaningful parts of the work that I had done in those years was working with students, who went out and did interviews. Even though there was a grand narrative of the experience of Partition, after having many interesting conversations with young people, with our own team and visitors to the museum, we found that the answer lies in more localized, ground-level conversations. I think that the classroom is also a very important space for having these kinds of difficult conversations and I look forward to taking this discussion forward.
Question and Answer Session
Audience Member 1: When we went to the Partition museum, we saw both Muslim and Hindu accounts, many of which focussed on rape and violence that occurred due to the Partition. You said that it wasn't possible to anonymize interviewees in oral history narratives. How is it possible then to display events that impact someone so much, while protecting their identity and also respecting their wishes and honoring their memories?
Priyanka Seshadri: We couldn't anonymize but during the interview there is a certain responsibility that we have to the interviewee. Much of this needs to be tackled when the person is speaking to us. While dealing with stories of rape and violence, if they feel a sense of discomfort talking about something, it’s important to not push or override them and to let them slowly talk about it, if they want to. These were some of the ways we tried to make sure that we were honoring their comfort while they were articulating these painful memories.
Audience Member 1: Were the questions standardized?
PS: The standardized questionnaire would have certain questions that we would use to populate the museum galleries. In the process of the interview, we first set up a brief discussion with the people about their experience over the phone. With that data I would help my team, including students, to do a bit of research beforehand on that specific context. If the person was from Karachi, then a question on Delhi or a question on Rawalpindi would not make sense. People often open up more when you show them that you know about their history. So, if I'm familiar with some of the geography of Karachi and Sindh, it would make a big difference for the person I were interviewing. The questionnaire would get adapted a little based on that particular context through research.
Audience Member 2: You said, the members of oppressed caste communities had trauma before and after the Partition leading them to feel alienated from the Partition itself. What did they feel about their place in the country? To what or to whom do they think they belong? Secondly, many people advocate for majority rule, even in India but personally, I feel that even if there is rule of the majority, caste-based discrimination will only rise further. What do you think about that?
PS: I can’t answer that question directly because I didn’t conduct those interviews—someone on my team did. I don’t believe they asked that specific question. Their focus was on the Partition, and the interviewees’ responses indicated that they didn’t identify completely with this memory of Partition as it was being recorded by museums like ours. As for the second question, I don’t think those hierarchies have been resolved. In fact, I believe they have been reinforced.
Audience Member 3: Earlier in your presentation, you mentioned that Partition isn’t talked about enough. Personally, I first learned about it when my sister’s class visited the Partition museum. Before that, I had no idea it had even happened.
So, what do you think should be the first steps? What small, initial efforts can we take to make Partition a widely discussed topic across India?
PS: There are a lot of good films and literature on Partition. I think an introduction to those would be a good first step. There are a lot of novels that talk about it, for example, Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan. Ritwick Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara, a Bengali movie is another wonderful perspective on the Partition.
Audience Member 4: When the Jews moved from Germany to Israel, they kept with them the memory of the Holocaust. It was very important for them to not forget the colossal murder of their people. Not only that, Holocaust museums were established. These maintained certain artefacts which kept those histories alive. They conducted talks with survivors who had gone through the experience of Holocaust––a series of lectures was recorded and made available online. Jewish youngsters from Israel were taken on tours to visit those Nazi sites––labour camps and death camps where they were actually burned or gassed to death.
These are certain ways, how one can spread or keep alive the memory to make sure that this doesn't occur again. Also, to make sure of that, not just be aware of that history, but also to make sure that these things don't repeat again in history.
Audience Member 5: I wanted to share that I was able to spend a couple of months in Germany––in Munich and Berlin, where I spent my artist residency––and was fascinated by Nazi history. And one of the things that I was really blown away by is how much effort the German government takes to remember this past because it is a mammoth effort to do this kind of work.
Memorializing and remembering a collective traumatic event––an event where many Germans felt that their parents and grandparents were complicit in the discrimination and murder of Jews––was performed with state support. The question to ask ourselves in India then is, why is it that even after so many years––nearly eighty years––why are we not able to have an honest conversation about this? There is so much prejudice and bias and an inability to look beyond who's Hindu, who's Muslim, who's Sikh and who's from a marginalized caste.
Audience Member 6: I just thought it is very interesting that you raise this point because I come from Bengal and there I feel that Partition has almost become like an industry. I personally know that every other person at various stages, like school or college, writes about the Partition. I also work on Partition but at times I feel tired and I feel like people need to talk about other things as well. There's so many autobiographies being published in Bengal. There are publishers who focus on Partition only. I'm not very excited about the Kolkata Partition Museum even after being associated with them for quite some time. There are deadlines and numbers that one has to match regarding the interviews.
I want to know if this process is adding anything new to our understanding of the Partition. Collecting a lot of material is often positivist in approach. That is where we need to also think that collecting a lot of material is not always nuancing our knowledge. Having said that, it is also very interesting that you, coming from another region, say that you have very little knowledge of Partition. It also tells us how diverse our historical memory is which is very productive. We also know very little about the momentous events of other regions and it is exciting in some way, where it can have a productive outcome.
Megha: The other crucial issue in our country is what we are doing with this material and how we are remembering it. This is why we wish to discuss the connection between memory and belonging. How is one reading memory through the lens of belonging and what does it mean individually to different communities?
Audience Member 7: Firstly, the conversation around Partition remains very active in Bengal, largely because it is intertwined with the region’s cultural industry—whether through the Bengal-Ghoti divide or the East Bengal-Mohun Bagan rivalry. These cultural elements help keep the memory alive.
Secondly, if you see the Peace Memorial in Hiroshima, they have a very powerful image that got circulated on social media––the human shadow. When the bomb was dropped, a human shadow remained on the steps of a building. They've actually preserved that shadow and it exists as a place to visit to relive the memory. When I was a student of history in school the bombs were dropped on Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and I had never really thought about it, but the trauma was re-lived after just seeing that one image.
In this age of social media, powerful images can ignite many important conversations. There was this famous image when we were students––in Sudan, a famine-struck emaciated boy was dying while a vulture lurked nearby. Human rights activists debated whether the photographer was acting as an observer or if he had a moral duty to intervene. So, powerful images can kindle dialogue but there are ethics behind capturing, sharing and talking about images that also need to be part of our conversations.
Audience Member 8: I'll offer a very personal account. I'm not an expert on the Partition but I do come from a family which has been greatly affected by the Partition. I still have relatives living in present-day Bangladesh. I was a very inquisitive person and I constantly asked my family about it. I like to understand the experience as more inward than outward that leads to our collective failure to grieve and mourn for what happened. In Bengal, like Anwesha said, Partition became an industry. We guarded our emotions behind culture. Partition was expressed via East Bengal vs Mohun Bagan or Meghe Dhaka Tara or tomes of literature. But are we mourning the Partition?
They say that there are six stages of grief but the trajectory looks different for the grief expressed after the Partition. First it was anger. Then we found our movies, our songs, our nostalgia which flourished into an industry. But honestly, we never reflected on what we lost––my grandmother who died at ninety-three was suffering from dementia for the last seven to eight years of her life. She would cry about a pond which was known as the Peer's Pond. That was the most honest grieving I had experienced my entire life and I grew up in the shackles of the Partition industry. Thank you.
Audience Member 9: The official history provided by the government i.e. the official evidence and research can be easily tampered with, so how should we trust the official history?
PS: One of the first books that I read on Partition was by a writer named Urvashi Butalia, called The Other Side of Silence, where she did interviews in the 1980s and 1990s. While talking about her research process, she mentioned that she had thought about the ways in which government files would have been duplicated during the Partition. At that time there was no photocopy machine or printer and most of the duplicates of these documents were handwritten. If this was the work of government servants, it was likely that there would be errors. That's when it occurred to her to question a government document.
I think that's a journey that a lot of researchers have gone through and they've also come to the same conclusion that we need to treat all sources with a certain level of skepticism.
Audience Member 10: I just wanted to share some thoughts. Partition is such a huge trauma that it is difficult to recall and remember. Can we afford to forget it? Is there closure in forgetting? I don’t think Partition is ever really over; new words are being created to describe the experience even today. There are new wounds being created that have their locus in the Partition and even today, people are trying to force a certain set of people to go to Pakistan and questioning their rights on their own land. So, in a sense, it's not a story that is over.
It was also interesting when you mentioned Japan. Shortly after the Fukushima nuclear accident happened (2011), I was invited to Japan for an academic conference (around 2012–13) and I took that chance to visit Fukushima as well as Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The conference was in Kyoto which is very close to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In Hiroshima, I visited a museum, called the Atomic Bomb Museum. The Hibakusha––the ones who are actually affected by the bombing––do regular volunteer work at the museum.
When the atomic bomb was dropped, there were no nuclear plants in Japan. It is only after that that the Japanese actually went atoms for peace. At that time there was a big debate in Japan about whether they should opt for nuclear power plants at all.
I interviewed many of the Hibakushas during the museum tour and it was interesting how some of them said that they regretted giving permission to the government to build nuclear power plants. Even though they had suffered at the time of Hiroshima-Nagasaki, at that time they were convinced that nuclear energy could also be used for peaceful and development purposes. They only ended up creating new Hibakushas
When I visited Japan there was a big movement where all these nuclear power plants were shut down. Japan is heavily dependent on nuclear power plants for energy purposes and that was the first time in Japan there was such a powerful movement against the nuclear power plants. It piqued my interest because beyond the immediate fallout of a nuclear disaster, there was also agitation against the big corporations who had owned the companies that ran these power plants, like TEPCO and others. Therefore, I feel that traumas are multilayered and require some degree of closure.
How can we achieve these closures, if we don't learn any lessons from them? There's a book by Paulo Freire called Pedagogy of the Oppressed about how oppressed persons have suffered trauma because of colonialism, imperialism and the Holocaust. What happens is, in a bid to gain their freedom, to be liberated, they end up following the same path of the oppressors. For them, the idea of a perfect man or a perfect nation is similar to what the colonial nation was or what the colonial man was. We can see the same thing happening in Israel. The structure of Zionism is very similar to Nazism. Similarly, here, the entire idea of one nation, one culture, one language, is something that we faced under British rule––a homogeneous structure, imitating what Britain had at that point. Thus, there are some traumas which need to come to an end, because we need to also grow as a nation. The oppressed need to stop being oppressed and after a point and have their own language, their own discourses, their own progress.
Audience Member 11: Whenever I hear people talk about Partition—which is rare—I notice that some say, ‘Yes! We did the right thing. The Muslims had to be chased off to Pakistan.’ Why do so many people still support the Partition and harbour hostility? In other countries, when events like the Holocaust occur, people overwhelmingly condemn them. Why is that not the case here?
PS: It’s interesting that you compare Partition to the Holocaust because, in many ways, they are not similar events. I’m cautious about making direct comparisons between such complex historical moments, as each has its own unique context.
The demand for Pakistan stemmed from a deep sense of alienation among some Muslims in India. There is a long history behind this—many people felt excluded from Indian politics before independence and believed that the only way to secure their future was through a separate nation-state.
Even today, there are people in India who believe Muslims do not belong in the country, without acknowledging how Muslims themselves feel. Many Muslims chose to stay in India despite Partition; those who left made a personal decision. Through our museum interviews, we have documented numerous families who remained in India. That is why I firmly believe that no country belongs to just one group of people. The museum’s goal was to help people recognize how absurd it is to tell those who have lived in a place for generations that they do not belong.
Audience Member 12: Over the years, many nations have experienced partition—North and South Korea, East and West Germany, India and Pakistan, to name a few. While these may seem like events of the past, future conflicts could lead to more divisions—splitting homes, families, and communities. What steps can we, as people united by a shared identity, take to prevent such divisions from happening again?
PS: That’s a big question. Partitions often result from top-down decisions, where governments decide to divide territories. As ordinary citizens, our role is to challenge and question the narratives we are given.
If someone tells you, ‘This is India, this is what it means and this is who belongs and this is who doesn’t,’ you should question that. Engage with history, read different perspectives, and talk to people. Understanding diverse viewpoints helps us develop critical thinking so that if another event threatens to tear society apart, we have the ability to analyze it, question it, and understand it properly.
Audience Member 13: Do you think that there is anyone to blame for the India–Pakistan Partition. I am asking this because in a democratic country, people should be able to live without any disputes; people of different opinions should be able to live together. But in our case, the Hindus were forced to remain in India and the Muslims were forced to go to Pakistan. So, was the possibility of living together not entertained? Why not?
PS: I don't think there is any one person to blame for the Partition. Moreover, I also want to avoid blaming people because I wasn't there and I didn't experience it. What I tried to do is to examine different points of view to just try and understand what happened and to look at who was responsible for certain things. But I don't think there was one person or one political party that could be blamed. I think we bear a collective responsibility for the Partition.
Priyanka Seshadri is a professional archivist. She has previously worked at several heritage organizations, including the Centre for Public History at the Srishti Manipal Institute of Design and the Partition Museum. She was involved in building an oral history archive for the Indian Museum, Kolkata, and in expanding the Partition Museum’s collection of material artefacts and oral histories. She also led the Partition Museum’s first international exhibition co-curated with Manchester Museum.
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