With over 12,000 oral histories, the 1947 partition archive is using storytelling to mend the scars of one of the most traumatic episodes that the subcontinent experienced
Madhavankutty Pillai
Madhavankutty Pillai
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14 Aug, 2025
Refugees leaving for Pakistan, New Delhi, September 27, 1947 (Photo: AP)
IN MAY 1947, SHUKLA LAL was 10 years old and living with her family in Lahore. Hindus were already leaving the city to head to India but her father thought normalcy would return. It was only when Lal’s aunt, who headed a committee to set up refugee camps in Amritsar, asked him what was he thinking given that his wife was six months pregnant with their fourth child, that they left for Shimla in their car. When they reached Ambala by twilight, the car’s tyres got punctured. It was near an army prison. An official agreed to give them shelter and asked them to choose any cell in the jail. That night, they wrapped themselves in the blankets and ate jail food. As the horrors of Partition were unfolding, the scale of it wasn’t clear in the beginning. So, even after coming to Shimla, her father returned to Lahore to resume work. A family friend again had to go to get him to leave. It was just in the nick of time as a mob was coming for him. With great difficulty, he managed to reunite with his family. They lost all their property. Lal’s mother remained traumatised and she does not remember her parents speaking about Partition even though it had been such a defining moment for the family.
“We did not believe we wouldn’t come back. We only took what could fit in the dicky [boot] of the car and how much could fit there?” she says. Shukla is however grateful for how welcoming the rest of her life was in India, where people everywhere and from all faiths accepted them. At the age of 80, she even wrote her first novel, based on Partition.
Shukla’s story is among over 12,000 experiences related to Partition recorded in the 1947 Partition Archive, a unique endeavour that addresses the silence and scars of Partition through oral histories. It was started by Guneeta Singh Bhalla, a US-based physicist. Her father was a year old when the family fled to India during Partition. In 2008, she was doing her PhD research in Tokyo and took a trip down to Hiroshima. There she saw the oral testimony archives of the nuclear bombing. “I was very moved by that. I realised that we needed the voices of Partition’s survivors because this history was being forgotten. We started posting stories in 2010 on social media. By 2016, we were getting around 10 million shares and interactions per year,” she says.
Bhalla was spurred by two insights. One, that young people had no idea about Partition. The second was that people who had experienced it were fast passing away. “I didn’t have any survivors of Partition left in my family. My grandparents were already gone. When I went online and searched, there was no archive of oral histories or any kind of public memory of Partition even though millions were affected. There seemed to be a huge contradiction between what people who went through it and people who didn’t go through it remember. I had a very strong desire, which was completely irrational, to change this,” she says.
In 2008, she came back from Japan and started talking to people about what she wanted to do. Most, even family, were dismissive because they thought no one really cared about something that happened so far back. She couldn’t let it go. In 2009, she came to India while still finishing her PhD. In Faridkot, Punjab, when looking for people from that period, she met an old man, the owner of a bookshop. “He loved my idea. He was the first person to say it. And he’s like, ‘I’m a freedom fighter. Record my story.’” A couple came in just then, overheard them and said that they were also affected by Partition. They too wanted to share their stories. The freedom fighter said to do them first and Bhalla took their interviews back-to-back. The man’s family had owned a fruit canning business in Montgomery, Pakistan, now called Sahiwal. They lost it all. The land they got in India was meagre. They never recovered financially. “They were living in a small place in Faridkot in their old age with their son, whereas before, they had huge palatial havelis in Sahiwal,” she says.
Based in Delhi, Meher Nandrajog has recorded more than 60 Partition stories. Nandrajog says that one of the principles they have while someone is sharing their story is to give the subject complete control over it, both during the interview and after that too
When she went home that day, her family listened to the recordings and, suddenly, started taking her seriously. “They said we can help you find many more families. So then the rest of my trip in India was spent speaking to a line of people that my family had found. It was then time to fly back. I couldn’t record the freedom fighter and unfortunately he died before my next trip. I also had one relative, my grandmother’s only surviving brother. He was 92 at that time. I wanted to record him. I went to him but didn’t have my camera that day. He said, bring it next time you come. When I was in the US, he also died. That was the spark. I thought I cannot wait any longer,” she says.
Bhalla had just got a job as a physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California in 2010. She showed up at a gurdwara in Fremont, California, and put a table there with a sign that said ‘Stories of 1947’. Thirty people lined up right away. Since she couldn’t get all their stories, she took names and numbers, and then went to student clubs at the University of California’s campus and asked for help. A lot of volunteers joined. “Everything happened organically. My house turned into a library. I borrowed lots of cameras. In those days, they were bulky ones with tapes inside. People were just going out recording these stories, and I was digitising them on the computer. By 2013, I left my job and started doing this full time,” she says.
In 2011, five from the initial team came to India and Bangladesh, and each recorded 60 stories. They began a new initiative called the Story Scholars Program, which gave people scholarships to come and work in India and Pakistan. In 2012, the American India Foundation sponsored the first scholarship. The spread of the Archive in India was entirely through Facebook. University of California, Berkeley, which had an oral history office, also helped. “They taught us all the techniques. We started teaching free workshops online. A lot of people in India and Pakistan started joining us through Facebook for those workshops. We were teaching them by online streaming,” she says.
The initial days involved a lot of hustling. There wasn’t enough bandwidth everywhere to upload video interviews. So volunteers would get their materials on discs, DVDs and flash drives to a big city, like Lahore or Delhi. They made collaborations with companies and used their internet to upload them. What wasn’t an issue was getting people to talk. “Requests were coming in overwhelmingly. People talk about silence around Partition. I think there was silence in families. People didn’t want to talk about it with their own children because it’s so traumatic. But when it comes to a platform, people wanted to talk about it. They wanted to make sure their story is not forgotten. A lot of people came forward to us over the years, and they still do, who have not talked about it with their families,” she says.
MOST OF THE stories collected in the Archive are from India, the second-largest number from Pakistan, and there are also many from Bangladesh and the US. Altogether, they have interviewed people from 17 countries and there are about 12,200 stories right now in the Archive. The stories span a wide spectrum. Stories of men who died young within a year or two of Partition because of the stress of losing everything and widows who raised their children alone. Stories of children who found sanctuary in a farm and continued to live and work there for decades. Stories of loss and escape. Like that of Amarjit Kour Itten who was born in Quetta in 1936. As the violence began to increase, the family thought that they would temporarily move to India but still vacillated. One day, a dead body turned up outside her father’s shop and that made them decide, but it was already too late. It took them six months to reach Delhi.
There are also stories of kindness and rebuilding. One that Bhalla was stricken by was of a man from Narowal district in Pakistan, who migrated to Gurdaspur during Partition. The journey was harrowing and he described it as an all-out war. But he was protected by a group of women on horseback. Once he arrived and found his footing, he started helping other refugees. The Archive has also recorded people from the air force who described flying their planes and diving down to scare away mobs.
Most of the stories collected in the Archive are from India, the second-largest number from Pakistan, and there are also many from Bangladesh and the US. Altogether, people from 17 countries have been interviewed
The person from the Archive who interviewed Shukla Lal was Meher Nandrajog. While still doing her undergraduate studies, she had joined as a copy editor with the organisation but soon got involved in field work. Based in Delhi, Nandrajog has recorded more than 60 Partition stories so far. “There’s a whole range of people from different professions I’ve interacted with. A lot of these interviews are, of course, about Partition, but a large part of the focus has also been about life post-Partition. Most were children when it happened and grew with the country. They were involved in building institutions here. It was really nice to see that,” she says. Nandrajog’s own grandfather was a Partition survivor. He saw family members killed, lost everything and came to India. He built a life from scratch and ended up being a very successful lawyer. And yet, she had never heard him talk about it. It was only after she became involved in the Archive that her grandfather spoke his story. And then he helped her reach out to others who had been affected.
NANDRAJOG SAYS THAT one of the principles they have while someone is sharing their story is to give the subject complete control over it, both while the interview is happening and after that too. Interviews are recorded on video, but the interviewee can choose to only do it on audio. They sign a release with permissions. There’s a provision for a time embargo, for people who don’t want testimonies released immediately. They can do it after whatever years they specify. There are also degrees of anonymity they can opt for, like stories not being shared in social or mainstream media. After each interview, a summary is generated that goes on the website for people to navigate. Subjects can choose what they want to talk about. “The first thing I tell them is that if you’re not comfortable speaking about anything, don’t answer and ask me to move on,” says Nandrajog.
Bhalla says that they are now trying to make the vast material more useful for both scholars and the public to engage with. They are going to open it up more widely to libraries from next January. “We’ve been giving access to researchers remotely for many years. For the public, we post the stories on social media. We do exhibitions. We’re also working on making this a resource so any library can subscribe and offer it to their students and faculty. That’s the safest way to get this collection out in a way that’s not going to be harmful to the families,” she says.
An archive like this, she believes, is necessary for a deeper appreciation of history and its impact. For those who share their stories, it can provide healing. Bhalla once recorded the story of a man in Punjab who in the end, after he had finished speaking, said, “Thank you. I think I can die now. I’ve been wanting to tell this.”
“And shortly after we recorded that story, he did pass away. It was a very powerful reminder that we need to do this work at all costs because these stories need to be told,” she says.
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