Bhag Gulyani, who lived in a camp when she and her family first arrived in India in 1947 talks about the maang-tika that helps her feel connected to the women in her life, including her mother and great-grandmother. It was a piece of jewellery that had withstood years of stress, changes in time, a variety of trying situations, physical boundaries, etc. She felt as though she was a part of someone’s life that she had never met owing to this item.
There are several stories like this, and a great deal of history is known to us through written records, which always appear to have more significance. We never noticed how objects and materials that are passed through generations of a family can be both read as well as counted as history. In an article titled “Material Culture and Cultural History,” Richard Grassby discusses how objects make clear comments about social strata. They are in charge of transporting a great deal of private information about a person’s social and personal life. Material culture provides insight into how people perceived themselves and what their past was in their own eyes. How do they wish to be remembered? According to Grassby, lifestyles, and preferences are cultural rather than subjective or utilitarian. The maang-tika of Bhag Gulayni is an essential element of the history of her family but it also contains a wealth of information about the culture she acquired from her forefathers.
When you are in the moment, it may not seem like it will be memorable later in life, but it is only later that you realize how significant those moments—which are now memories—were. These items, which include utensils, vintage photos, jewellery, briefcases, and more, look extremely commonplace. These artefacts tell stories that illustrate the people’s history and various cultural practices at the time they were made. The author and oral historian Aanchal Malhotra discusses the value of tangible memory in her book Remnants of Partition: 21 Objects from a Continent Divided. According to her, memories can sometimes get ingrained in things to the point that they serve as the only tangible reminders of a particular location or a specific moment in time. She emphasizes how, even in times of scarcity caused by impenetrable national borders, material memory is still a crucial tool for comprehending both personal and societal histories. A similar line of reasoning can be seen in Richard Grassby’s piece, where he claims that particular items and their arrangements can conjure a home’s or room’s ambience. Through sight, smell, touch, and texture objects can transmit sensory awareness of the past.
Every memory is unique and cannot be duplicated, according to Susan Sontag. In the singular, memory dies with the individual to whom it is attached. Regarding partition, how accurate is this? It is impossible to ignore the effects that the partition, which occurred 76 years ago, had on entire family generations. Malhotra shares in an interview with the Hindustan Times that you comprehend that individuals live with wounds that are older than you are and you become accustomed to attending to other people’s grief. Similarly, the Dalhousie’s Kehkashan Cottage has a shared past with two families who experienced the division at the same time. In an interview with Malhotra, Sitara Faiyaz Ali discusses the Dalhousie home that her father, Khan Bahadur Muhammad Afzal Husain, had constructed between 1932 and 1947 and that she still misses. “But sometimes when I close my eyes, I can see the Dalhousie house that my father built with his own two hands. The house we left behind in India. Oh yes, that is unforgettable, as clear as the sky.” says Sitara. Since their father, Baba Surinder Singh Bedi purchased the Dalhousie house after the partition, Mr. Gurdip Singh Bedi and Col. Harinder Singh Bedi now reside there. The Dalhousie house serves as the common thread that ties the memories of the two families together, which reveals a lot about how material memory encompasses several stories in comparison to written records of history.
What these anecdotes make clear is the importance of individual accounts in the grand narrative of History. Although this stands crucial, the anecdotal memory is not devoid of the collective experience. The concept of “collective memory” is linked to another phrase termed “social frame” by Maurice Halbwachs, who coined it. He asserts that no memory is possible apart from the frameworks that members of society employ to identify and access their collections. Humans never have a time in which they have a distinct experience; instead, they join several groups throughout their lives, adopting their individual social frameworks and ‘we’ in the process. Aleida Assmann points out in her article “Transformation between History and Memory” that it is up to us to determine which memories we want to relive and which ones we want to bury (and if they allow any burial). It’s critical to distinguish between pleasant and terrible memories, and it’s crucial to decide which memories we want future generations to cherish. As a result, transmitting this memory through objects has always been a key element in preserving history.
There are many differences between the inhabitants of the two countries, but the one thing that unites them all is the longing for a place that was once their home and the longing for objects that remind them of it. This very material memory has altered the discourse surrounding the partition. In the summer of 1947, a Hindu family was stuck in Shimla from Rawalpindi, now in Pakistan. When Roshan Lal Khanna, their neighbour, decided to take the name Roshan Din and travel back to Pakistan to retrieve some of his assets, he asked them if he might get something from them. In reference to the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh community’s sacred book, the mother of the family grinned and exclaimed, “Babaji, sirf Babaji.” After gathering his stuff, he rang the doorbell of the house next to him and inquired as to the likelihood that a holy book had survived the bloody rioting. He was escorted to the house’s unaltered prayer room by the Muslim family who resided there and said “Some things are sacred and those things must never be disturbed or disrespected.”
We must remember when we talk about partition, its history and memory are two different things. History is something that trained historians do, they research, critically understand, write and articulate a historical narrative within the academic space. Thus, it is only understandable that it might appear far away from the everyday dwelling of the subjects of history—its habitants. As Mark A. Greene puts it, “If history is shared and secular, memory is often treated as a sacred set of absolute meanings and stories, possessed as the heritage or identity of a community.” Memory is something that is passed down to generation as it is but with history, there come additions, subtractions, revisions, etc. Memory is more intimate and sensitive. It is devoid of any critical thinking, it is like a warm soup that you would want to have even in summer, because that is what you like and nothing will change it. Thus, although being separated by international borders and various cultures, the people who went through partition are all united by their shared experience of the same, which has been made simpler to recall and pass on to future generations through material memory.
Also read: Relief Denied: The Impact of Caste Identity on Dalits during Disasters
About the author …
Hi! I am Anu and I am currently in my third year at LSR college, studying history. I love talking about films and art, and exploring them in both historical and social context. in the meantime, you will always find me logging movies on letterboxd.
