She knows when to ask questions, when to prod for details, and when to meet a recollection with silence. She limits her role only insofar as to unlock the necessary information.
This is further enriched by the nature of Malhotra's interviewing. Reading these memories imprint you with the dawning realisation of just what it means to be born of this subcontinent. Blissful childhood days give way to the very real trauma and tragedy of leaving one's home, boarding train compartments filled with slain strangers, and building life anew in a place where the language, culture, and locality are all unfamiliar.
A somewhat common characteristic appears to be their levels of literacy, so that most of the interviewees are either highly educated, or believed strongly in educating their future generations because they were deprived of it themselves.Īs author and researcher, she is constantly present in the prose-and what gorgeous, heartfelt prose! One could call Malhotra's writing evocative, or immersive, or enchanting, but none of that would fully encompass just how sensory the experience of reading these stories is. Each narrator is allowed utterly to be themselves-if Professor Mittar's narration of the past is "glacial and beautiful" with a reliance on the "visual and sensorial", then poet Prabhjot Kaur's pronunciation is described to be "an amalgamated accent that had once been Punjabi," and Lt Gen S N Sharma's speech is said to be "refined, with the slightest tinge of a lingering British accent." Malhotra's research is extensive, and more can be found online, but her published book contains stories from a diverse selection of people in terms of gender, religion, social status, occupation, and whether they were forced to cross the border or not, and when.
The storytellers are introduced, not just as they appear to her, but simultaneously as they were in the pasts they recount. And yet, while reading their stories one after the other under Malhotra's curation, the transformation of the personal to the collective reveals meaningful similarities: how most of these families believed that the Partition was a distant political turmoil, how they didn't expect to experience it in any permanent way, and also how they never expected their neighbours and friends of differing faiths to turn violent on each other overnight.īeing an ethnographic research, these memories are all presented in the form of conversations, and Malhotra's ability to translate interview notes into cohesive stories is masterful. Because most of them are strangers to one another, their respective versions of the exodus add valuable layers of subjectivity to the narrative being constructed in Malhotra's book-something that is perhaps the most significant power of any archive in adding nuance to history. Remnants, therefore, takes readers to the moment in which each person's personal archive of the Partition was created.
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