Objects Of Their Affection

Anchal Malhotra at work

The trail from Delhi to Lahore ends in Montreal — on Aanchal Malhotra’s pin board that has numerous photographs with scribbled notes. Each tell a story. In the summer of 2013 the Masters student at Concordia University had pasted the first print. This one had her paternal grandmother wearing an ornate maang teeka. This represented the trauma of Partition, brought across the border concealed in clothes. There was also Malhotra’s maternal grandfather standing against a bare wall with an old gaz (yardstick). This was used by his father to measure fabric at his cloth store in Lahore. It was in the luggage brought to India post- Partition. Now, these are part of the family heirlooms.

The photographs had no red of the blood that was shed during Partition but there are fragments from the lives of the migrants. “It struck me that banal objects could lay claim to a rich past. I realised how they could become storehouses of memories,” says Malhotra, 25. Her grandfather also had a ghara (earthen pot), used by his mother to churn butter milk, which led Malhotra to hunt for more objects that had crossed the border. At the home of a Delhi University professor, she found a silver glass and rusty pair of metallic scissors. In Delhi’s Defence Colony, a woman had a carefully wrapped Guru Granth Sahib, dating back to the early 1900s. The family had left the book in Rawalpindi when they moved to Shimla in 1947, and a neighbour brought it down for them after the Partition. “The perpetrators of the riots were a handful, the rest wanted to help and respected each others’ religion,” says Malhotra.

There were more personal memories beyond material objects. A Sahitya Academy Award winner and prominent Punjabi nationalist poet had writings she had penned at the age of eight. Displaced from Langaryal village in Gujarat, she has journals and notes in Punjabi.

In September 2013, Malhotra broadened the horizon of her search. Across the border, in Lahore, the editor and literary agent for Red Ink Literary Agency interviewed families who had left India. When her family was fleeing from India, a young girl from Dalhousie just wanted to take a black-and-white photograph of her house there. It moved with her from Dalhousie to Gurgaon to Mianwali and then Lahore. Now it is in Gulberg. Malhotra juxtaposes it with a more recent photograph of the same house. An engraved stone slab that was once the nameplate of a home in Jalandhar also travelled to Lahore’s Defence Housing Authority colony years after its owners did. “A woman brought it over from India to her old uncle, who had grown up in that house, giving him the only tangible fragment of his childhood,” says Malhotra. The objects have now found permanence in her photographs and notes. She has concealed the names of their owners, to be revealed in an exhibition she hopes to organise soon. The list though will remain open-ended; with scope for more stories.