Aanchal Malhotra is an oral historian whose work on the 1947 Partition of India has been published as Remnants of A Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory (HarperCollins, 2017) in South Asia and Remnants of Partition: 21 Objects from a Continent Divided (Hurst, 2019) elsewhere. Malhotra currently lives in Delhi, India, and is the cofounder of the Museum of Material Memory.
One of the undercurrents of the migration narrative is the story told by the objects of exodus, that economy of objects transformed by the trip itself—relics of a former life that are sold or hidden away; keepsakes that molder, heirlooms pored over ritually, a subtle history inherited. All of which raises the question: If forced to flee your country, what would you take with you?
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