Listening to Aanchal Malhotra on Memories, Oral Histories, Objects, and the Need for Archiving
I like listening to podcasts and discussions these days. There's something in the spoken word and being spoken to, that influences me, motivates me and delights me as well in equal measure. Owing to the current situation, many interviews and conversations around books have come up in the online platforms, be it Facebook lives or Instagram lives. And YouTube is serving as a great repository for these videos too. One such is Aanchal Malhotra's conversation here. She is the author of a non-fiction book "Remnants of a Separation" that deals with individual accounts of first generation migrants of the partition. She captures memories around a certain tangible object that the bearer carried with him during the migration, while leaving behind their home. The sub-continent was divided into three parts over the years, decades infact, and history in its ideal sense is not able to capture the diverse experiences of multitudes, the millions who were a part of the world's g...