Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory

DETAILS : 

• Author: by Aanchal Malhotra
  
• Publisher: ‎ Harpercollins Publishers
  
• Publication date: ‎ 25 August 2017
  
• Language: ‎ English
  
• Print length: ‎ 400 pages
  
• ISBN-10: ‎ 9352770129
  
• ISBN-13: ‎ 978-9352770120
  
• Item Weight: ‎ 750 g

ABOUT THE BOOK

Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory, authored by the acclaimed oral historian and artist Aanchal Malhotra, is a groundbreaking work of material culture and narrative history. First published in 2017 by HarperCollins India (and internationally published as In the Language of Remembering), this beautifully written monograph serves as a vital cross-border archive of the 1947 Partition of India. The core philosophy of this text centers on the animate power of the inanimate object to unlock suppressed human trauma—proposing that while human memory often sanitizes, buries, or fractures the pain of displacement, ordinary material belongings carried across the newly drawn borders act as unchanging, physical witnesses to history.

Malhotra structures her book as a series of deeply personal, cross-border case studies spanning India, Pakistan, and the wider diaspora. Rather than analyzing political treaties, maps, or macroeconomic statistics, she focuses on the ordinary things refugees chose to save when their worlds collapsed in an instant. The narrative tracks these objects—ranging from a set of kitchen utensils to a pocket knife, a traditional wedding tunic, or a simple folding ruler—using them as keys to open up decades of hidden grief, lost friendships, and the bittersweet nostalgia of a shared regional heritage.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Aanchal Malhotra is a New Delhi-based oral historian and artist who received her MFA in Studio Art from Concordia University, Montreal. Her unique artistic background allows her to approach historical research with immense visual sensitivity and emotional patience, transforming what began as a personal master's thesis into a monumental, internationally recognized historical project.

Malhotra’s writing style is lyrical, deeply empathetic, and highly descriptive. Writing with the careful touch of a museum conservator, she uses rich, evocative prose to detail every scratch on a silver pocket watch or the fraying threads of an old silk dress. Her narratives flow through continuous, deeply engaging paragraphs that blend raw transcriptions of interviews with her own sharp observations of the physical objects. By showing how a single, ordinary household item can hold the vast history of a broken nation, her classic work remains a mandatory reference for South Asian history departments, oral history archives, and human rights studies globally.