The 1947 Partition Archive

Last updated
The 1947 Partition Archive
Established2011;13 years ago (2011)
TypeOral history initiative
FounderDr Guneeta Singh Bhalla
Website https://in.1947partitionarchive.org/

The 1947 Partition Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit oral history organization in Berkeley, California, and a registered trust in Delhi, India, that collects, preserves, and shares first-hand accounts of the Partition of India in 1947. [1]

Contents

Given the sensitive relationship between Partition stories and Hindu–Muslim relations, only a small portion of the Archive's collection has been released to the public in edited form. [2] Currently, access to the stories is granted on a case-by-case basis to scholars for academic research.

In 2023, the Archive started to observe June 3 as the Partition Remembrance Day because it was on this day in 1947 that the viceroy declared the Mountbatten Plan to divide India. [3] It also announced to launch a book with 4000 oral testimonies and 1000 photographs illustrating the voices of the partition survivors spread across various countries in South Asia and elsewhere. [4]

History

The organization started in 2010 when Dr Guneeta Singh Bhalla [5] [6] began recording video interviews with elder Partition witnesses throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and was formalized in 2011. The creation of the 1947 Partition Archive was inspired by the Hiroshima Peace Memorial and the work of various Holocaust memorials. [2]

Organization

The 1947 Partition Archive crowd-sources the collection of Partition witness interviews and conducts free classes, in the form of an online Oral History Workshop, to train volunteers in story-collection and interviewing techniques. [7] As of July 2023, over 10,200 interviews have been collected from more than 450 cities and villages in 14 countries including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel among others. [8] [9] [10] These interviews are documented in diverse languages and dialects. The Archive's website includes a Story Map that shows the migration patterns of each interviewee. [11]

The Archive's methods of crowd-sourcing story collection include Story Scholars, a fellowship program in which individuals are chosen based on academic merit and prior experience to conduct interviews in a selected region, and Citizen Historians, a program in which volunteers can contribute Partition stories to the organization's website. [12] Based on the Archive's digital media platforms, ordinary citizens across the globe are "invited to join free oral history webinar workshops to learn the basic techniques for documenting oral histories, as outlined by the Oral History Association and Baylor University’s open source online resources." [13] According to Dr Bhalla, "workshop attendees who successfully submit their first oral history interview, and it matches The Archive’s standards with its nine-point criteria, are certified as ‘Citizen Historian’ volunteers." [13]

The Archive also offers funding for a one-month immersive residency to university faculties and students to research on Partition, known as the Tata Trusts Partition Archive Research Grants, in association with the University of Delhi, Ashoka University, and Guru Nanak Dev University. The primary objective of the Archive is to collect the "vanishing history of Punjab and South Asia through crowdsourced lived memories." [14] [15]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Oral history</span> History taken verbally and recorded or transcribed

Oral history is the collection and study of historical information from people, families, important events, or everyday life using audiotapes, videotapes, or transcriptions of planned interviews. These interviews are conducted with people who participated in or observed past events and whose memories and perceptions of these are to be preserved as an aural record for future generations. Oral history strives to obtain information from different perspectives and most of these cannot be found in written sources. Oral history also refers to information gathered in this manner and to a written work based on such data, often preserved in archives and large libraries. Knowledge presented by Oral History (OH) is unique in that it shares the tacit perspective, thoughts, opinions and understanding of the interviewee in its primary form.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Punjab</span> Geographical region in South Asia

Punjab, also known as the Land of the Five Rivers, is a geopolitical, cultural, and historical region in South Asia. It is specifically located in the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent, comprising areas of modern-day eastern-Pakistan and northwestern-India. Punjab's major cities are Lahore, Faisalabad, Rawalpindi, Gujranwala, Multan, Ludhiana, Amritsar, Sialkot, Chandigarh, Shimla, Jalandhar, Patiala, Gurugram, and Bahawalpur.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sikhism</span> Religion originating in Punjab, India

Sikhism, also known as Sikhi, is an Indian religion and philosophy that originated in the Punjab region of the Indian subcontinent around the end of the 15th century CE. It is one of the most recently founded major religions and among the largest in the world with about 25–30 million adherents.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Partition of India</span> 1947 division of British India

The Partition of India in 1947 was the change of political borders and the division of other assets that accompanied the dissolution of the British Raj in the Indian subcontinent and the creation of two independent dominions in South Asia: India and Pakistan. The Dominion of India is today the Republic of India, and the Dominion of Pakistan—which at the time comprised two regions lying on either side of India—is now the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and the People's Republic of Bangladesh. The partition was outlined in the Indian Independence Act 1947. The change of political borders notably included the division of two provinces of British India, Bengal and Punjab. The majority Muslim districts in these provinces were awarded to Pakistan and the majority non-Muslim to India. The other assets that were divided included the British Indian Army, the Royal Indian Navy, the Royal Indian Air Force, the Indian Civil Service, the railways, and the central treasury. Provisions for self-governing independent Pakistan and India legally came into existence at midnight on 14 and 15 August 1947 respectively.

Khushwant SinghFKC was an Indian author, lawyer, diplomat, journalist and politician. His experience in the 1947 Partition of India inspired him to write Train to Pakistan in 1956, which became his most well-known novel.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Radcliffe Line</span> Boundary of the Partition of India

The Radcliffe Line was the boundary demarcated by the two boundary commissions for the provinces of Punjab and Bengal during the Partition of India. It is named after Cyril Radcliffe, who, as the joint chairman of the two boundary commissions, had the ultimate responsibility to equitably divide 175,000 square miles (450,000 km2) of territory with 88 million people.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tara Singh (activist)</span> Indian Sikh political and religious leader

Tara Singh was a Sikh political and religious figure in India in the first half of the 20th century. He was instrumental in organising the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabhandak Committee and guiding the Sikhs during the partition of India, which he strongly opposed.

Majitha is a town and a municipal council in Amritsar district in the Indian state of Punjab. The 2011 Census of India recorded 14,503 people resident in the town.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee</span> Indian Sikh administrative organization

The Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee (DSGMC) is organization in India responsible for the management of Gurdwaras, Sikh places of worship in the City of Delhi. It also manages various educational institutions, hospitals, old age homes, libraries and other charitable institutions in Delhi. It is headquartered in Gurdwara Rakab Ganj Sahib, near Parliament House. Currently, the president of DSGMC is Harmeet Singh Kalka.

The Rashtriya Sikh Sangat is an India-based Sikh affiliate of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ethnic groups in Delhi</span>

Delhi's ethnic groups are diverse. The Yamuna river's flood plains provide fertile alluvial soil suitable for agriculture but are prone to recurrent floods. The Yamuna, a sacred river in Hinduism, is the only major river flowing through Delhi. The original natives of Delhi are those whose ancestors lived in the Yamuna basin, a region which spreads radially from the capital up to a distance of approximately 200 kilometres. This province was not ethnically homogeneous and large amounts of Hindi-speakers resided in the southeast, now Haryana, eastern side, now West Uttar Pradesh and in Delhi's Yamuna Basin. Today the migrant population consists largely of Punjabis, Haryanavis, Bengalis and recently, Biharis and Uttar Pradeshis etc.

The Rai Sikh is a Sikh community, mainly found in the states of Punjab, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Uttrakhand, Delhi and Haryana in India.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shiromani Akali Dal</span> Political party in India

The Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) is a centre-right Sikh-centric state political party in Punjab, India. The party is the second-oldest in India, after Congress, being founded in 1920. Although there are many parties with the description Akali Dal, the party that is recognized as "Shiromani Akali Dal" by the Election Commission of India is the one led by Sukhbir Singh Badal. The party has a moderate Punjabi agenda. On 26 September 2020, it left the National Democratic Alliance over the farm bills.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sukhbir Singh Badal</span> Indian politician

Sukhbir Singh Badal is an Indian politician and businessman who served twice as the Deputy Chief Minister of Punjab and is currently the president of Shiromani Akali Dal, and was a member of Parliament from the Firozpur Lok Sabha constituency. He is the son of Parkash Singh Badal, who has served five times as the Chief Minister of Punjab. He is influential over the Sikh organizations of the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee. Badal and his family have ownership stakes in an array of businesses- including real estate, transport and other activities.

Punjabi nationalism is an ideology which emphasizes that the Punjabis are one nation and promotes the cultural unity of Punjabis around the world. The demands of the Punjabi nationalist movement are linguistic, cultural, economic and political rights.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Partition Museum</span> Museum in Punjab, India

The Partition Museum is a public museum located in the town hall of Amritsar, Punjab, India. The museum aims to become the central repository of stories, materials, and documents related to the post-partition riots that followed the division of British India into two independent dominions: India and Pakistan. The museum also focuses on the history of the “anti-colonial movement, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, the Komagata Maru incident, the All India Muslim League and the Indian National Congress, and the journey of resilience and recuperation for women”. The building wherein the museum is located in Amritsar was also “once the British headquarters and a jail”. The museum was inaugurated on 25 August 2017.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aanchal Malhotra</span> Indian author and historian (born 1990)

Aanchal Malhotra is an Indian oral historian, author and artist, known for her work on the Partition of India. Her research and writings focus on the oral histories of individuals affected by the Partition, capturing their memories and the tangible remnants of that period.

Pushpindar Singh Chopra was an Indian military historian and the author of several books, chiefly on military aviation history of India. His work and developments on Indian Aviation lead to the Fairchild-Dornier 288 production in India. He is known as the 'Chronicler of Indian Aviation', a term given by Air Marshal Anil Chopra.

The Kolkata Partition Museum is an initiative dedicated to documenting the Partition of India from the Bengal perspective. Dissimilar to the Punjabi context, the Bengal province had been divided twice: once in 1905, and then in 1947. The aftermath of the second partition, as recorded by many historians, unfolded distinctly in postcolonial Bengal vis-à-vis Punjab. Not only was the impact long-drawn and can be witnessed even 75 years after the Partition, its affect can also be seen in the neighbouring states of Bengal and the rest of the country owing to refugee resettlements spread out to as far away states such as Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh. The idea behind the Kolkata Partition Museum is to preserve and present the vanishing memories of partition, to emphasise both the "rupture and continuities between West Bengal and Bangladesh – in terms of language and literature, food, fabric, and the performing arts – and to encourage collaboration between them." The museum aims "to do so by involving public participation in its programs and gearing all its activities in a way that makes it more accessible and interesting to the public at large."

Major General Mohindar Singh Chopra (1907–1990) was an Indian Army General Officer who was known for being in charge of stopping the Partition Riots in both corners of India; Punjab and Bengal. He stopped riots and genocides from taking place through military force.

References

  1. ↑ Sengupta, Somini (13 August 2013). "The New York Times" . Retrieved 2014-07-13.
  2. 1 2 "Now an archive that collects stories of Partition | The Indian Express". The Indian Express. 25 May 2014. Retrieved 2014-07-13.
  3. ↑ "First Partition remembrance day marked in US, India". The Times of India. 2022-06-05. ISSN   0971-8257 . Retrieved 2023-07-11.
  4. ↑ "Partition archive' inaugural book 10,000 Memories, a lived history of partition set to release on Friday". The Times of India. 2023-03-09. ISSN   0971-8257 . Retrieved 2023-07-11.
  5. ↑ Singh Bhalla, Guneeta (August 13, 2016). "Why we gave up our careers to bring you stories of Partition". Dawn.
  6. ↑ "75 years of India partition: How tech is opening window into past". Al Jazeera. August 12, 2022.
  7. ↑ "Archiving memories of shared, partitioned past". thenews.com.pk. Retrieved 2014-07-13.
  8. ↑ "1947 beyond the tracks". indiatoday.in. 25 January 2020. Retrieved 2020-02-19.
  9. ↑ "The 1947 Partition Archive website" . Retrieved 2019-02-02.
  10. ↑ Anand Chawla, Noor (July 30, 2022). "RECORDING STORIES OF PARTITION SURVIVORS FROM AROUND THE WORLD". The Sunday Guardian.
  11. ↑ "U.S. group preserves memories of partition". The Hindu. thehindu.com. 9 March 2014. Retrieved 2014-07-13.
  12. ↑ "1947 Partition Archive Project Director Interview". California Humanities Blog. calhum.org. Archived from the original on 2017-03-08. Retrieved 2017-03-07.
  13. 1 2 Singh Bhalla, Guneeta (May 19, 2023). "The 1947 Partition Archive: A Living, Evolving Crowdsourced Archive on India's 1947 Partition". Third Text: Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture.
  14. ↑ Singh Bhalla, Guneeta (2021). "Gathering the Vanishing History of Punjab and South Asia Through Crowdsourced Lived Memories" (PDF). Sikh Research Journal. 6 (1): 37–49. doi:10.62307/srj.v6i1.62 – via Sikh Foundation.
  15. ↑ Bhatt, Neha (August 12, 2022). "Legacy of India's Partition was reduced to a minor event. After 75 years, community groups are bringing private pain to the fore". The Globe and Mail.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.