Aanchal Malhotra’s new book is a salve on Partition’s wounds | Books and Literature News,The Indian Express
The Language of Remembering threads together personal histories of Partition to build a narrative of hope and reconciliation
Among my fondest memories of my grandmother are her accounts of her ancestral home and stories of the family she married into. She wasn’t a Partition refugee – my grandfather had migrated with his nuclear family to Lucknow five years before the Muslim League’s Direct Action Day. But almost all her relatives remained in undivided Bengal and the family would look forward to their annual visits during Durga Puja – celebrated with much fanfare at the feudal estate of her in laws.
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At one point in grandma’s narrative, there was a break. The Durga Puja visits are now to Calcutta or other places in West Bengal. Grandma passed on when I was too young to join the dots and connect this shift in the location of the puja to Partition. Years later as a student of history, I did. But grandma, too, hardly mentioned Partition. And that continues to remain a matter of curiosity.
Grandma’s stories came back to me as I read Aanchal Malhotra’s, In the language of Remembering; The Inheritance of Partition. In her earlier book, Remnants of Separation, Malhotra had brought alive Partition memory through objects such as jewelry, utensils, books, and even intangible artefacts such as ways of speaking. Language of Remembering is about somewhat different carriers of memory. It’s about personal histories, several of them passed down generations. Like my grandmother’s accounts, these histories are less genealogical narratives, more stories, several times even vignettes. Like my grandmother who would talk of Jessore, Barisal, Khulna – places where she once had family – their rivers, ponds, fish and vegetables, friends and neighbours, and not of India or Pakistan, Malhotra’s respondents, too, rarely mention the two countries. As she writes, “Silence can also be a carrier, and one that is practised by many, and augmented by gestures of pain. But ultimately there remains something extraordinary about Partition that refuses South Asians the luxury of either ignoring or moving past it, forbidding it from withdrawing from the realm of private conversations to enter the public domain so that it may be discussed and reconciled with. For many, the subject is viscerally enfolded in shame and fear, anger and bitterness, adding to the difficulty of utterance”. And yet, The Language of Remembering is not about rancour. Unlike, perhaps, the most well-known tradition of Partition literature, violence is not the leitmotif of Malhotra’s account.
Instead, her skills as an interviewer prompt many of her respondents to dig deeper into themselves. Belonging, she writes, conveying the sentiments of her respondents, “may not be a physical space but a sense we carry in our bodies and pass down generations”. It goes deeper than the name of a place or “a stamp on the passport. It’s as deep as the soil of the Earth”.
Rating: 5