This story is from May 17, 2016

Lost Partition tales set to rise from dust

The letter is dated April 6, 1949.Asif Khwaja from Lahore writes to his friend Amar Kapur, who now lives in Faridabad.There is plenty of catching up.
Lost Partition tales set to rise from dust
New Delhi: The letter is dated April 6, 1949. Asif Khwaja from Lahore writes to his friend Amar Kapur, who now lives in Faridabad. There is plenty of catching up. He has joined a newspaper, Khwaja tells his 20-year-old friend, and asks him if he has found a career, too. Their friend Ahmad, he says, has gotten fat and bald. Pained by the Partition, he wants the good old days back.
"Rest assured that we on this side will do all in our power to bring laughter and happiness back in our peoples so they may live once again as brothers and golden days return," he writes. The letter is one of the over hundred exhibits that will be on display at Partition Museum Project's exhibition in the capital this week.
Called 'Rising from the Dust: Hidden Tales from India's 1947 Refugee Camps', the eight-day exhibition at India Habitat Centre starts on Thursday. It will have objects (clothes, utensils, books etc) that people brought along with them as they migrated, photographs, documentary films (silent), archival documents and letters, and artwork, all dating back to 1947. A series of lectures on the Partition from international scholars is also scheduled. The venue will also have camera teams to record interviews of people who have lived through the mass migration and have stories to share. "We have to build an archival record of the largest mass migration in history," says Kishwar Desai, who heads the project.
Since the exhibition theme is that of refugee camps, a large focus is on the work of artist Sardari Lal Parasher, which includes sketches and sculptures based on Ambala's Baldev Nagar refugee camp, where Parasher was also the camp commander. Among his sculptures is that of a woman's head, made from the earth of the camp itself.
Desai is currently collecting material for the museum she aims to set up eventually. "The importance of these objects comes from the fact that they are a part of a lived experience. We need to gather and mine the experience of the Partition," says Desai.
She shows TOI a phulkari jacket and a brown leather briefcase. These were among the few things that Bhagwan Singh Maini and Pritam Kaur from Pakistan carried with them before they landed up in the Amritsar refugee camp. The family of the two had spoken of getting them engaged before the families had to flee due to the Partition. "They eventually met waiting in a queue at the refugee camp. They got married soon after that," says Desai, who has also collected letters from public and private archives. "There are many letters where people have written to the government about the things or people they have lost."

There are also newspaper archives with long lists of missing persons with their descriptions. "Strangely, I still haven't come across a single letter where the authorities have written back saying they found something that has been reported missing," says Desai, whose own parents made a trip from across the border back in 1947.
Collecting stories of the time can be tricky, say architect Shobha Patpatia and historian Aloka Parasher-Sen, Parasher's daughters. "Our father never spoke to us about the time of the Partition or about the refugee camp. We did not know all this artwork even existed before he passed away (in 1990)," says Patpatia, who, along with her siblings, has now restored, preserved and exhibited his works in the basement of her south Delhi house.
Parasher was vice-principal at Lahore's Mayo School of Art. In India, he set up Government School of Arts in Shimla where the five Parasher siblings spent their childhood. "Daddy and I would go trekking, and then he would talk about these memories if the subject came up. It was never spoken about in detail. He was not preachy, but we knew where the line was drawn," recalls Patpatia. "The question is, why did he not talk about it? Because it was too traumatic? Or was it because it was not a part of our lives?" says Parasher-Sen, pointing out that "a society chooses to remember or forget".
A remembrance is long overdue.
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