The Partition is not dead or forgotten. On the contrary, that gash on the subcontinent has spawned a prolific industry—films, novels, poetry, academic articles, journalism, commentaries, documentaries, museum installations, oral histories, paintings, music, diaries, memoirs, short stories. It seems we will not forget the Partition, or perhaps, more accurately, we cannot forget it. We seek to record it, analyse it, understand it.
Yet, while the Partition seems to fairly saturate our popular culture, our schools barely gloss over it. The history of how one freedom struggle resulted in the creation of two Independence Day celebrations is not an easy one to narrate. It stumbles through dangerous terrain, among the swamps of religion, nation, justice and freedom.
In February 2020, I was approached by the ReReeti Foundation to create a workshop on the Partition for middle- and high-school students, primarily in South India. The ReReeti Foundation is a Bengaluru-based organisation that works to revitalise museums and the teaching of history in schools. I was ambivalent. What would be the motivation to expose young people to a concatenation of the horrors, the murders and rapes, the abductions, the pain of betrayal, the loss of home, the grief, and the suffering that is the Partition? Would they be able to stomach it, to keep it at the distance that allows analysis? Should they be able to? There would have to be an essential reason to pass on the trauma of the event, even if at second, or fifth, or eighteenth remove. Yes, there were stories of great courage and heart, stories of love and friendship, of unflinching bravery, but the overall landscape seemed to be coloured with red.
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