 Well, we're very pleased to have Gunita Malla here with us today who's come to basically give us a talk about a new book that's just come out, called 10,000 Memories. And many of you would already know about Gunita's work through the founder of the 1947 partition archive. Tonight what we'd like to do is we've got this as a book launch but also as a panel discussion. So we'd hope that this would open up the conversation as the archive itself has been doing with many of our students actually in fact having over the years been part of the, of the project in terms of the collection gathering of oral histories, Aritha's course as well and Eleanor here taught a course on the partition I think even today, there was a session that was kind of engaging with the archive itself as a resource material. But it's really wonderful for us to be able to have this event here today. So what I'd like to say is what we're going to have is as a, as a kind of a talk when he does going to speak for about 20, 25 minutes, and then we have some panelists as well. And I'll maybe I'll introduce now who is a doctoral candidate at King's College in the war studies department, who is the works on security issues. Dr Eleanor New Begin, who's a senior lecturer in modern South Asia, and is also co-investigator working with me on the border crossings project that's based here at SOAS. And finally, we have Isha Savika here, Dr Isha Savika, who has been a research associate here at South Asia Institute, also King's College London and a number of other places as well, who has been a very foremost prominent commentator on political events by some military security issues in the region as well. So we've got an array of different kinds of voices and perspectives, which aren't necessarily directly on the partition, but on the kind of legacies and aftermath and I think the archive itself has been opening up the ways in which the new conversations that we're having. So, I'd like to just welcome you to be in your talk and thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you all for taking time out of your evening. So thank you also to the organizers for organizing this event today. And to my team members and help organize community and Shwani Isha Savika. So you've got a bunch of team members, you've got people who participated, his families that participated in the project as well. So, go ahead and get started. So in a way, our work is also a demonstration of how you can document a history across a communal divide. And we're launching this book today, or in during this tour, I guess, 10,000 memories is the name of the book and I'm going to talk to you about basically the concept of our archive which was in the previous slide. And I'm going to talk to you about our book and what's in it and how it could be potentially useful to you. So just a little acknowledgement for our funders. We've had a little over 3000 individuals who donated anything from like one rupee $1 one pound to a lot more 15 family foundations have made this work possible. And hopefully, once we surpass a certain number of book sales they will also generate some sort of revenue, it's not going to be the case in the beginning. The latest institutional funders are the National Endowment for the Humanities in the US. We worked very, very hard to get them engaged and took many years, a decade over a decade. And the Institute of Museum and Library Services and we feel that those are feathers in our cap to be able to finally get those funders on board. So, you know, we know sort of what happened at that time it was the end of World War two. It was the end of the British Raj. We know that Britain was undergoing post World War two bankruptcy. If you were to ask me I don't think the allies or the access one I feel that both sides kind of lost the war. Maybe the US came out okay because it really didn't experience a war as much on the homeland. You know, and what happened in South Asia is that you pretty much had your entire governance structure kind of dissolve very, very quickly and you ended up having mass chaos land grab property grab and you know killing sprees. And there's a lot of lessons to be learned for politicians today. There's a lot of lessons to be learned on many, many levels from partition. And I don't know you know this is something that I think is going to come out more in the future as more and more archives become accessible because there's a lot of stuff that's still, you know not accessible that's kind of blacked out in government archives. There was also the situation of why did the British leave so quickly when there were voices within the British government saying we need 10 years to do this transition. Of course, there was a huge push in South Asia for the British to leave quickly there were the Congress Party in the Muslim League, pushing very, very hard for that so there's that component. There's also the American bailout. There was a deadline. They did it in March 1948. The Britain was a court Britain got, you know, Britain was devastated. And there was a huge grant that came from the US to help rebuild. The US was a huge voice in wanting the Britain out of India because they wanted to set up trade networks with former colonies, which they couldn't feel or World War Two was about these trade networks and, you know, the colonies were the British colonies were one trade network and so on. So I think you'll start to see more of the reasons in the future of why this happened so quickly and how it can be avoided in the future a tragedy like this. The maps were drawn very very quickly as we know and the consequences were absolutely devastating. Of course I'm sure everybody here that so as knows these boundaries but I just wanted to throw them up real quick. South Asia is looks like that. This is the largest country in South Asia and real fans the people who want to see the disputed parts of India as being shown that's in India as you know, within India that's a big thing right so. Okay, so what did South Asia look like before partition. There's a map pre published I'm sure many of you guys have already seen this. It's, you've got the pink areas, which are British India. You've got the green areas which are kingdom or the princely states that have an agreement, a military agreement essentially with the British. And what's really interesting is in the oral histories, it becomes really important that they're given their identities because people identify as being from their princely states or their kingdoms they don't think of them as being princely states as part of British India. They don't think of them as being a country on itself like in fish meat for example we've had a number of witnesses. Tell us very clearly that when you travel from fish meat between British India that you know there are passport controls there is immigration that you had to go through so that's really interesting to know. And it becomes important to keep this map in mind when doing our work with oral history so it's really interesting how when you document stories from the ground up, even your maps start to look different. I'm sure all of you've seen this and I really don't need to go into too much for this audience. This just kind of shows, you know, a lot of what happened, a lot of the migrations and whatnot during partition. So after August 1947, this is what the map looked like. Remember that June 3 is when the partition plan was declared by Mount Benton so that's really kind of the official date. It was August 17 when the lines were revealed, right, publicly August 13 is when they were finalized August 17 is when they were revealed that radical decline. This is what it looked like. You still had Hyderabad and Kashmir, Germany and Kashmir being independent. You had Pakistan on the green, on the left and the east and west Pakistan. And then you had India and then of course Burma separated at that point into an independent country. This is the story of how a disappearing public memory was revived and documented through crowdsourcing by engaging both sides of a community divide. It's a multidisciplinary approach. So you know I want to point out how in history, when people are writing histories researching history. In the past, the popular data sets have included government archives, because once they're, you know, they're created, they don't change once they're created. There's tangible heritage. There's newspaper archives. I want to point out that, you know, even though it appears that government archives are static and that they must be unbiased because you're static. But actually in the creation of them there is bias somebody decides what's important to be archive. And of course, governments have different metrics that they're measuring, and every government is going to be different. And they're not necessarily a complete representation of the society at that time. And similarly the newspapers we find in 47. We have newspapers that are aligned with their funders you have newspapers that are funded by the Russians, you have newspapers that are, you know, more aligned with the Congress Party, you have other newspapers that are more aligned with the Muslim League. And there's like more than 200 something of occasion they're all ideologically aligned and at this point by the 1940s, these publications are you know there's a lot of venomous stuff going on religious sentiment in the publications. It's actually very akin to what's happened in the last 10 years and social media polarization in society it was happening through these papers, but a very small segment of society was actually educated to read. And so that was a segment of society that was getting polarized. But I wanted to point out that because of that reason, even the newspaper archives are not perfect so you need to look at multiple. For one event you need to look at multiple newspapers to understand what was being said about it. And here we wanted to introduce a new data set oral histories. You know, I think it is in the last 10 years gaining a lot of popularity, which is really great because you hear a new events you hear new perspectives. And from oral history that you don't get from the other archives and it helps you build a more complete picture, a much more complete picture what happened in the past, because sentiment is a huge part. And that's not the only thing that comes out of world history. So why should we remember partition, we know that understanding the Holocaust gave us the UNHCR gave us understandings of human rights. We can detect genocides, hopefully intercept them before they happen we can detect dictatorships, hopefully before they happen. And from stories of Hiroshima we got the nuclear non proliferation movement. Hopefully it is those stories that I've possibly kept us alive and kept us from going into another nuclear war which I don't think our world would have been able to sustain and hopefully we won't get into another one. But you know, from that same event of World War two that same time period we had partition happen, but the stories of this disaster. This Asian disaster are missing from public discourse. It was the largest mass migration that at least the last century to forgotten event it was a dying memory when we started this work in 2009 2010. And really sharing these stories and I think by 2016 they were being shared on social media between 10 and 20 million times through our Facebook and whatnot. That has really helped transform, you know, public perception of public memory on partition after that I think around 2016 you also had that BBC documentary come out. You actually work with them on that partition my family partition I mean. I think your mom's interviews in there, right. Yeah. And I think that those types of things that really helped kind of bring out the public or create public memory partition create public interest. So there are critical lessons that remain unlearned from partition and leaving us vulnerable to repeating history. So you have identified the problem and our solution of course was to crowdsource these oral histories, some numbers around partition between 1946 and 1948 it's estimated that between 14 and 15 million people migrated. Not then bazaar as I made our research tells us that over the next 10 years, you had up to 25 million people or 1% of the world's population so 100 people became were displaced to partition. And then about 14% of the world, or, or one in eight people were impacted if you think of all of South Asia, being impacted people migrated everywhere. That's what we find through our story there wasn't any place that was spared. In and out of every place although, you know, very heavily in the northern parts of the subcontinent, Punjab, Bengal, but third British that area today. But it did happen everywhere. In 2011 we launched the 1947 partition archive officially and began documenting partition stories and aging population as fast as possible. So to record the people's memories quickly in a democratic way we invented this concept of crowdsourcing well we didn't invent the concept but we use the technique of this concept of crowdsourcing and applied it to oral history. And this was really borrowed from the physics department at UC Berkeley they were doing crowdsourcing experiments with some physics problems like protein folding. And our technique included training people every two weeks on how to document oral histories through a free workshop that is still taught every two weeks online and if you guys can log in. Take that free workshop, even if you want to document something totally other than partition, you can still learn the techniques. The number here is incorrect. It should be 10,000 11,000 individuals have started. Yeah, 11,000. No, no, no, sorry this. Yeah, okay so number of individuals have been trained that's actually over 17,000 people have taken our workshop, and of them, almost 1000 now are confirmed as citizen historians that means they've documented and oral history. They've gone through the rigorous process spent their 10 to 14 hours and submitted that interview online, and it's been double checked by our team members. So stories are recorded all over the world by train citizen historians and uploaded to our digital cloud. And it is a largely volunteer driven effort. Everybody is doing this out of passion. Although now we finally have funding for some of our internships to be paid internships, especially our digital archiving. So we had to create a lot of new processes for the digital archiving work. And that has bought what has that's what's drawn the funding to this project for training the next generation of archivists, because there has been a lot of stuff that we've had to do from scratch. We first created a new software which we're hoping to open source once we get funding to that and put it out there for other projects to use as well. And, you know, it's a collection that has to be sensitive to a lot of different communal needs in South Asia. The handling of this collection has to be sensitive to that. It has to be sensitive to all the different communities different languages that are coming in the different types of titles that people use from all these diverse areas. And that relates for some really unique archiving challenges. And even like with the names of places changing with time, they're, you know, in South Asia, place names are always changing. And so all of that, and then you have entire cities like no Akali which literally just moved, then there was a flood. So all of those changes end up needing to be accounted for when they're doing this type of archiving work. So all communities are participating on the same platform with a sensitivity to the communal feelings. So our first goal was to document 10,000 stories. And we have so far documented more than 11,000 now at this point. So because of our first goal of documenting 10,000 stories, our book is named 10,000 memories. And it's the first book in a series of books, we're going to actually try to bring out abstracts of all the 10,000 stories. So the book obviously it's got about 300 stories it doesn't have 10,000 obviously. And they are, I'll talk about how they're organized in a minute. But they're basically abstracts from the complete video interviews but we're going to put up all those interviews from the book so you can see the whole thing. Also I know you too. But it's a really great way because you may not have, you know, 300 hours, but you can, you can browse the book much quicker. So today, more than 1000 witnesses. Okay, I'm going to forget about that but there's 36 languages, and now from 18 countries in the archive and over 75,000 photos and documents from, you know, that time period also archived. We're working with Stanford University to put up so like I told you a minute ago that we're going to put up stories on YouTube they're going to be edited for viewership, but we're going to put up the original video interviews on Stanford's digital repositories anyone who wants to go stream those see the actual like video files with all its bloopers and everything can go and see the original files there. We're also actually working with universities in India and Pakistan, just saying that because I didn't ask that. So there's the Lahore University of Management Sciences. There's the Habib University, Guru Nanak Dev University and I'm going to serve. There's University of Delhi and Ashoka University. We're hoping to get job hardcore in Kolkata on board and hopefully in Bangladesh as well, very soon. And there we've been able to offer research residency so we've had students come in and faculty come in and kind of just use the archive very openly and fascinating new findings have come out which have blown me away as well. So yeah, this is just a little thing that we mapped Google alerts and we saw how over time, the sharing of these stories on social media, how that changed the trend of 1947 partition appearing on the web across the web and now how it's just grown exponentially. Here's some popular, sort of here's popular uses of the archive so two films you guys may have heard of, Padmila Kapak and Arath to Bollywood films where they actually research the archive in fact from Arath I even wonder the story is just so similar to one of the stories we have in the archive that the film is based on. I'm actually wondering if it's based on that film. Interestingly, we're not in their credits in the Indian version of the film maybe there's some issues with that but we are in their international credits like I saw us in the credits to the international version of Arath. The rest of the Calta Museum has an exhibit based on the archive. Then there's a museum of peace in Bradford and the Canadian Museum of Human Rights in Ottawa that also has a bit of space on the archives BBC film as you guys are all familiar by family partition and needs. Most well known in the UK, rather than other parts of the world. Television documentaries that we worked under some other from that recently came out on Channel four in the UK where they've actually used footage from interviews in the archive I think it's called partition and color. As I've seen it. A side effect of our work that a lot of people who lost family members, they get to, they found each other through our social media postings, and now we run a group on Facebook for people to find their own home old homes. And do research on their families called reconnect 1947 so if you guys want to plug into that it's really interesting. A philosophical point. This moment right now is pretty complex, for example, most of you guys will not know what's happening in your backyard what's happening outside of the street what's happening in Tokyo. I'm sure you do know what's happening in Sudan but you know it's every moment in history and time is really complex. Every moment before this moment is just as complex. Yeah, we have this tendency to reduce an entire person's lifetime into like a sentence and an entire event in the paragraph or book. Well, that's how we understand it our human beings are really, really limited. And I think we need to understand that because otherwise we have this tendency to get polarized. We don't look at the nuance it's not our human tendency. And that polarization actually creates a lot of social unrest and it's really unproductive for society and it's happening all over the world right now. And so I wanted to bring that up and I think AI will help us realize that you can look at much more. But anyway, so how are we teaching the world. Well, the first, what, what can we teach the world. I mentioned this earlier. And I mentioned what we can learn from the Holocaust what we did learn in the Holocaust in Hiroshima. And from memories of partition, we can understand communal violence. We can understand how that happens we can understand what happens when a colonial entity just goes away really fast, like the US and Iraq, maybe we're Afghanistan what we saw, and, you know, the UK, and it's South Asian it's Indian colonies. And we can teach intercommunity empathy through storytelling. I think that's one of the biggest things that, you know, being very general about this of course a million things we can learn, but just two really sort of big takeaways. Intercommunity empathy I think is more crucial than ever. We do have a very, very volatile border between India and Pakistan that's always on the edge right and it's nuclear. And we know that anything that happens there will affect the whole world it's not going to be limited to that space there. There's about 27 PhD thesis projects that I know of and probably many more that I don't know of where they did oral history work. And I think those histories to the archive that ended up writing PhD disease on the work that they did so. So how do we teach our first, you know, dissemination method is this book, there's a copy of it there but that's a dummy copy, and it's missing a lot of pages I just want to say that. So the book has two covers the East cover. And the West cover. It opens on both so there's no back of the book. Basically, we didn't want any side to feel that it came first, or that it was left out. So we gave both sides equal weight, and it starts out in Myanmar on the east. It starts up in Afghanistan on the left, and you meet in the middle at the deck in plateau. And this is not an interpretive work. It's not a critique. What you're getting is stories and very interesting highlighted excerpts, and we want you guys to make your own conclusions we're an archive so we're putting out you know what what's in the archive. I'm just going to show you a couple of pages. And so because very few pages are shown I'm not trying to leave out any community or any region. It's just because of time constraints. So this is sort of while the book is set up. This particular story is from the Bengal chapter of the book. What we've done is you'll see photographs. In the text, we have 30 curators work on this book so you don't get any one person's bias. And then you'll see anything any interesting sort of historic reference. There can be multiple but we've picked one and highlighted it. So for example, in his family, he talks about members of his family having joined the All India forward block which is founded by Subhas Chandra Bose. And the forward block is not the same as the INA which was also formed by Subhas Chandra Bose the Indian National Army. So I'm just going to read you his quote under the cover of night we would travel to distant villages to try to convince the populace about the adverse consequences of the imminent partition. On several occasions we were embroiled in vicious confrontations with armed mobs. Now you'll see a lot of perspectives in the book you'll actually see perspectives from people who were part of the armed mobs they'll talk about why they committed, you know, the violence that they did. And then you have people who were trying to stop the violence. So we have all types of stories, and you can see all types of perspectives. This story is interesting even the live in the 1930s when you have the Indian, the IRA, the Indian Revolutionary Army which was modeled after the Irish Revolutionary Army. So I'm just going to read you some of his quotes in 1930 at the age of 10, I carried out my first task of escorting three revolutionaries from Goree port to Rangobalpur so basically he's talking about the famous Chittagon Armory raid. I don't know if you guys are studying that but it was in the 1930s. And yeah, so in fact his family has family history that's connected to the battle of classy and that comes out in his family history and it's very fascinating. So you get to read about that you can see some of these individuals have family trees that go back hundreds, sometimes over 1000 years and that's absolutely fascinating. So we have 10 on the left, and we've had somebody actually from the Yad Vashem Museum, who researches this and it, he researches how Irish literature travels via the United States via the other party based in San Francisco over to India, via, you know, I think the Bombay, and you had communication between the two freedom movements there was ideas being exchanged and that's very fascinating so these did not happen in a vacuum. Now foreshadowing of the 1947 migration was the 1942 great migration out of Burma. So 1942 1941 rather, you guys probably know that two days after Pearl Harbor, Burma was bombed by the Japanese, and it was part of the sort of Pacific ring of bombings. And it led to a huge exodus of not only British personnel and British families, but Anglo Indian families and all families of, you know, from different cities across British India who had settled there. And somebody who was not from Burma or ethnic Burmese were seen as occupiers so there was sort of a land grab movement of taking their land back, and you had this huge exodus out of Burma it was very dangerous huge columns of people moved out. And I think about half a million people were involved in that a lot of people died along the way, you can hear some of those stories here so he says the British soldiers who were meeting our group would take everyone early in the morning, and the rest of the day was spent walking through the wilderness. Some of the adults traveled on elephants. So, in his case, and in many cases, people who were, you know, went through this migration in 42 went through another migration in 1947 that happened to him. His father stayed back so they migrated to Chittagong in now Chattogram in Bangladesh, now Bangladesh, then East Pakistan. And here's what he says my father never migrated and still been living in Chittagong East Bengal. In order to attend our father's last rights, my young brother and I pretended to be orange sellers on the train that ran from Sheldon station to Chittagong so that we would not be caught illegally trespassing the border. So you hear about people's unique struggles with families being split with elders, especially in places that were not attacked in 1947, staying back and sending their kids to the other side because they were too attached to their land and to their homes to want to leave. Story of a freedom fighter. My sister so in a song we see a very violent and strong uprising against the British. You don't see the same level of violence in other places, as you do here. So here she says my sister took the flag and marched forward with me the British flocked us and at one point they shot my sister. Seeing her dead I fainted and I was brought home by some of my relatives. So this story is from a song. Oh yeah so I'm ending there. If any of you guys want to get the pre order the book it's not going to arrive till June. You can use this coupon. I can also be have a little app. You can use on our phones later, and if you want to do it, want to tap your card you can do that. But I'm going to go ahead and open up the slides for some of the panelists come up to the front and then also I guess I'll have to surround but just a lot of ages missing even the front pages. And the final cover has metering while on it. So we're saying okay so we'll take you one at a time. Thank you for sharing this event. I'll not take long. I am here only to share my experience as a citizen historian and tell you very briefly tell you my connection with the archive. I basically joined for a free lunch. And the story goes as once a week on Tottenham Court Road. There's a temple Krishna temple. So I was there. I was surprised by the by the stories being told by the devotees there. And one of the person who was singing said that 20 years ago as a young teenager he was wasting his time on Tottenham Court Road on Oxford Street and he saw walk past the temple and he said they were serving free lunch. And he thought to himself that there is some catch I mean they can't be free lunch right and he said I was curious. So he said anyway I walked in I had that free lunch I saw what was going on there I sat there for a while he said 20 years later I'm still here. So he said there was no free lunch. So for my free lunch was that I heard about the archive back in 2014. And I just wanted to go out and store my grandmothers and my father's story with the archive both sides of the family had migrated during partition. And I've grown up listening to the stories that most of us have in who have been affected by the partition. And he was an opportunity to do it for free. So the only way to do it quickly to do it was become a citizen story yourself. Which I did while I was here in London on my first trip to India I called a story and archived it. To become an I'm still here after seven or eight years so that was my free lunch. To become a citizen historian all you have to do is to put your hand up right to the archive that you want to be a citizen historian. As Rita mentioned their workshops run every two weeks it's a two hour workshop which pretty well tells you the etiquettes of conducting an interview about South Asian culture if you're not familiar with it and so on. And once you qualify then within 30 days you have to record a story and submit in order to fully qualify as a citizen historian. The archive will send you updates with the stories available in your area. People who have want to record their family stories they go and register and based on the database you will be patched up with one of the stories which is available. And then you'll be linked with the family who wants to record their story. You once you've done that you make an initial call to a pre interview kind of thing do your little bit of research. And then you set a time and date as to when you go and record want to record and store record the story. Overall it's about eight to 10 hours job depending on the travel. If you if you're not going out of town or something like that. And on the day you go there you take some paperwork camera stand these days you can do it on phones. Very easy microphone the sound quality has to be very important because it's ultimately yours listening to the stories at the end of the day. And then on the day you go there have a little chat tell them what you're here for here about and then record the stories. We've had instances where like the family has picked you up from the station or they called you and they tell you that you know my dad or my mom she's very old. You don't really remember much. So I don't know how it's going to go. And once you sat down there with the camera on and you told them that you want to hear about the photo about the partition. And you asked them what happened. It has been a very very magical experience the stories that come out of that. I think we as kids you know we have this urge to listen to stories from people around us and we grew up with and as we grow up we lose that kind of that sense of enjoying stories. I mean my friends here is a good story teller he has saved with that. Storytelling is an art and story listening to those stories it sort of satisfy a lot of emotionally it sort of reset something within us. And once you sit down and listen to the story just let it flow without any interruption let them think let them speak let them pause and broad their memories. They may not remember everything but from my experience they have what has happened at that time. They say I can see it in front of my eyes like a movie as it's happening in front of me again. Record the story properly finish it doesn't matter how long it takes. Come back home you have to get one particular form signed that's it's for legal purposes. We get the permissions from the family as to you want to archive firstly you're happy to archive the story you're happy to us to the story to be part of book if you publish it on YouTube and all that so depending on the permissions we treat the story accordingly. And then you come back home and upload the story on the archive website. And once you've done that you've got a confirmation from the archive that it's done and the family also gets a confirmation that story has been archived and it's stored with us and when needed it can be shared with you. So this is what the whole a day looks like as a citizen historian we are always looking for volunteers. It's not only just for archiving we've done some fundraising as well a couple of years ago for which we came up with this concept. A couple of citizen historians got together Ashne here I was with me in London at that time. We came up that choose a story that is very close to you for me for example my grandmother and she had traveled 200 kilometers so I decided to run 200 kilometers and in the same time period that she took to travel over a month. Ashne did some cycling or based on his story that he had selected and we did run this campaign campaign globally and we raised some funds for the archive. We do a lot of events you can volunteer for the events and without the volunteers it's a it's a huge organization and without that it's not possible. So my only advice is that if you can do it and if you have any questions please find me and I'll be happy to answer that. Well thank you for inviting me and it's amazing to be part of this event and this book. So I'm based in the history department here at SOADS and have been working with my colleague Amrita Shodan on teaching history as a partition and my kind of contribution here comes from that perspective. And I think one of the things I wanted to flag was the way in which the book brings together memories and histories of the Second World War alongside memories and experiences of partition and I think that bringing them together into the same time frame is actually really critical for understanding this period and that the events of 47 can't really be understood or start to look very different if you dislodge them from the Second World War or think about them in isolation from them and I'll talk about that in a little more in just a moment. But we start to get this idea about 1947 as being the kind of the product of age old enmity that it's a long standing problem that comes through. But that argument becomes much harder to sustain if we start with the history of the Second World War. And I think the Second World War is crucial for understanding what happens in 47 on a number of different fronts. So firstly in terms of the politics of liberation and independence. So thinking about what happens to Congress with the declaration of war in 1939, thinking about the position that Jinnah is put into in terms of this kind of once the British are really ruling without any semblance of representative government through that period. There's a pressure on a lot of different kind of political parties. The Communist Party is recognized and Congress is not so the political situation created by the Second World War has been shaped by the decades before that but is itself quite particular. I think we also see in the Second World War a real change in the nature of British colonialism. I mean actually benign neglect often not so benign is the way which kind of colonialism is is characterised. But in the Second World War there was really massive intervention. There was food grain seized. There was rationing was food exported from bits of India here too. So you have a much, much more authoritarian state, which is then followed by this point of withdrawal at the end of the Second World War. The nature of British colonialism becomes much more draconian in that period, much more violent in many ways in itself. And then thirdly, I think the way in which the Second World War impacts social and lived experiences, particularly in Punjab and Bengal. And there, you know, we focus on Punjab and Bengal when we're talking about 1947 for all kinds of reasons. I mean in terms of the mixed population, they're the provinces that are divided themselves. But if you think about how the war affects those provinces, that also helps us to think about one of the questions that continues to animate kind of historical discussion around 1947, which is why was this partition so bloody and so violent. But if you start thinking about the bombing of Burma, if you think about the Bengal famine, if you think about the work of the INA and the and in the side of Bengal, if you think about the role of the Indian army in the Second World War in Punjab, the social experiences of that, but also the weaponry that that leaves to I mean that this is you can't make sense of what's going on in 1947 without those kinds of stories. And yet, and I say this particularly given we're hosting your hosting event here in London, I think those histories do get uncoupled very quickly. And I think particularly in Britain, they have been uncoupled in Britain. There's a very popular narrative about the Second World War, which is, you know, sort of plucky Britain versus these two superpowers, the story of victory, which we need to you questions at the beginning. But that's the story that's told that already prefigures Britain as a nation state rather than an imperial force. And I think there has been since I'd say 2017 in particular, there's been a growing push to ensure that partition is not just seen as a story or a history that's part of the subcontinent. But it is actually vital to the way that the Britain thinks about its own history, but that campaign has involved pushing against a very strong amnesia about empire that is itself framed by the way that we talk about history with dominant historical narrative. And so the book itself, I think is powerful on a number of fronts here and I really, you know, I really appreciate the way in which the book is designed to complicate dominant narratives that we have 10,000 voices that we have a book that has no beginning or no end or begins and in lots of sort of different ways. And I think that is a fantastically important and powerful task. There are a number of powerful dominant narratives that badly need to be questioned and upset. And I mean, I think there's maybe we can talk a bit more in the questions and answers about how pluralizing that works in that way, but also what other kinds of interventions are needed here to think about, you know, all voices are you talk about the complexity of the moment and all voices need to be listened to and some that have been silenced for longer and that we need to make a bit more space to hear, I think would be something to be interested in and just to sort of wrap up to connect back to that. One of the privileges of teaching about partition here at SOAS has been the students who come and study here, many of whom know about 1947 partition archive, who are interested in doing their own work involving, you know, this feels like a history that's kind of particularly connected to them. And the only thing I would say is the archive is wonderful, but it's great to hear about the experiences of undertaking the interviews to which I think are often transformative practices for the people who do them. Serge and I are currently working on a project that is thinking about how 47 is being remembered at this current moment. And I think the question of what younger generations are making of this history, the different kinds of questions that are being asked. The question of what do we want this history to do now moving forward or feel like extremely pertinent questions. And it would be great to I know that we have many citizens and historians here it'd be great to hear more thoughts and and hopes and work that people are doing around that so. First of all, thank you so much for doing this book, especially this age of artificial intelligence and chat GBT. You know, when people tend to forget and it's important. It's an important history to remember. It's because the, you know, what you've laid out, you've laid out in a much more complexity. I would say at a very emotional emotive nature of it at that level. I personally I study national security I study conflict in South Asia and one of the important conflicts that has infested our lives across the border continues for 75 years is so deeply rooted in partition in 1947. And these personal stories are going to probably help us understand why the conflict continues. I mean I personally understood it much more when I crossed over and I took my journey, a personal journey in 2006 was. I went to India first time in 2002 but 2006 I went to Punjab where mothers family and migrated for and it's when when I started searching for where she used to live and I found it very easily and started talking to people, you realize that how you know what an experience it would have been. I also learned firsthand then while doing my own interviews and my own search for my mother's history was that it's interesting how how people would have reacted and one of the reactions. I mean, growing up in Pakistan. The state narrative of the state reaction was tell stories of their part of partition. People traveled across border people. That there was there was carne there was deaf and destruction killing. And that's a baggage which the state and on both sides of the divide wanted to carry with you. And that is what has dominated our thinking of each other. But then there is also another reaction at a personal level which in some cases has been anger another complete silence. I mean I remember growing up. My mother would talk about her part of East Punjab but she would never talk about the violence and the loot and plunder and killing. It was not until 2006 that I realized that her family had traveled all that distance in 1947. I mean that came as a surprise to me when I when I visited there. And so there are many more stories which are which are which are there in the book. I think it's it's it's a it's a very important experience for people who who have volunteered to tell their stories. It's a personal catharsis for for many at that level. I haven't I haven't kind of had a chance to look into the book but I'm sure there are many stories. I mean there are people who were personally involved in violence that people were affected by violence. And I'd imagine that these getting these stories together is going to teach us about our behaviors or attitudes and learn help us learn to deal with that history. It would probably help us attain that maturity in kind of staring that experience in the face and see you know what has emerged out of it what can get me learn out of it. I mean it's interesting. I mean one one of the last points I want to make is that while you're going to school and learning about you know what was taught to state narrative on partition. Yeah my actual physical contact with partition was when my my father's sister and my my my family's from my father's family's from South Punjab. So my father's sister once you know began to talk about how the Hindus and Sikhs living there I mean how they experienced violence and how they were treated. And that was the first time I as a Pakistani Pakistani young person then realized that there was something far more complex in in the partition story that you are being taught. There was something much more much deeper that was happening in both sides it wasn't you can't find you can't hold one as a culprit and another as but you know as as a perpetrator of violence and another as victim. The victims and both sides and perpetrators of violence and both sides. And I think getting these stories out there and using them is also a manner of confronting our realities jointly. And say, we did it to ourselves we did it to each other. Now is it possible to learn from it and actually make it turn it into a building block. You know of our regional relations bilateral relations, even individual relations. Thank you so much. Well, what I like to I know we're running a little bit late but I think we have the room booked a bit longer so we'll probably carry on for another 10 minutes. So if there are any questions or comments. Thank you so much. I was interested to know how you dealt with language, because interviewing and the freedom that one finds in speaking the tongue that they most have been timidly familiar with. I was interested how the archive manages language and translation the issues of afterwards. Yeah, so we want people to conduct interviews in their native language, because of the connection and because of someone's comfort and being able to express themselves. We try to be, you know, we try to push that really hard as much as we can it also empowers people in communities, especially that haven't been represented very well and empowers the younger generation and empowers the elders as well. And in terms of translations. Yeah, you're gonna have loss of translation there's nothing that I think they can do about that there are concepts in certain languages that simply don't translate very well. I was just going to ask was there any languages because sometimes we're going to be or said there are certain dominant languages within the subcontinent that really sort of whether any languages that or people that you found quite interesting and and found it hard to match. Because I imagine that the citizen historians are being matched with right on a linguistic basis as well, whether any sort of lesser well known languages. So that happens, and then we work with the person to find younger people in their language group, who can interview them like, I think I haven't shown this video this talk, but in the more public talks. I show this video of one of our team members of their Thor valley, and he speaks a language that's always spoken by 3000 people in the in the swath region. And so yeah so he's one of the only people that you know does the interviews in that area and there's very few elders of course who remember that time period. So that does happen and then that's our technique and we've actually had people like very recently, someone was doing interviews in Nagaland or wanted to wanted to travel and then get a translator. And we highly discouraged it and we said why don't we train someone local to do the interviews instead of this whole thing with a translator because there's a lot of information the connection is lost because a connection between the oral historian and the person, telling their story is really important in the story coming out. Any other questions. I just want to say thank you again, I found it interesting as a student in a local considering position. And I wanted to know how you dealt with the professor so I told him to do one of his view of them, and kind of being sensitive about that topic. You know differences are huge. And what we do is when we're matching citizen historians with interviewers, sorry, interviewees. We asked the interviewee their preference do they prefer somebody with a certain religious background and many of them do because they do have views, and we honor that. So we honor everybody's views because we know partition was a devastating event. And it will shape people's views and that is fine and they are going to be different than the views we have ourselves. Thank you. Listen to all this. Excuse me. We have sort of had this opportunity of talking to our parents because we've all listened to stories from our parents and I too tried to record my mind my parents but what was very successful some of it was lost and so on. But what struck me at another talk that I attended on Sunday was this concept of intergenerational trauma. And I think our generation is actually living through all that this huge event that took place in world history. And I've been fortunate to sort of have lived in the three continents as a child I was in Africa. And then in my teenage years I was in India and then later part of my teenage years I came here and experienced the racism that actually maybe was by product of all those values that travel. And it's probably like you said history doesn't stop at any one point. And so maybe this history should should carry on. And perhaps we should have more histories of the people who have the second generation or the generation after that would that have experienced all that other type of racism and trauma coming from that because I've got a few personal stories about that as well. But obviously this is more important as time time is of importance, but perhaps that's something that you should think about doing further. Yeah, actually we kind of already do so we don't advertise it but if people want to submit stories that they remember that they've been told, we're taking them and writing at the moment, because we are resources are so limited which I hope will change. We've been hyper focusing them on the documentation of actual witnesses. But many people have stories, and they really want to have them preserved. We have them submit them by writing, and we're taking them we're writing eventually we'll do audio and video as well. But it's just a matter of resources but I think you were there at the Cindy community house event so good to see you again. But I wanted to mention, Shaili Jean has done work on generational trauma and partitioned witnesses. I think she says it takes nine generations or something she's a psychiatrist at Stanford. Thank you so much, and many congratulations for this wonderful collections. I've been also remotely indirectly connected with the archives from Delhi since 2015. My question, it's rather inquisitiveness because I also work with the material and memory culture is because being migrant myself here in the UK so I got both the stories stories from the subcontinent and the diaspora here. So it's more philosophical I would rather say, and since you have had now more than 11,000 stories, and it's, I come from the space of intergenerational memories and of course building on his comment. Do you feel there is a difference between the reconciliation process or the empathy process that's right now happening on subcontinent and, you know, internally displaced communities with within the subcontinent and the difference between the diaspora, you know across the world whether that's UK, US or Africa. So do you think there's a difference between a gap rather in that undergoing the process of reconciliation or empathy. I think I think so and I think probably others here, you guys can probably answer this to I feel so definitely because, you know, India and Pakistan and Bangladesh, they have got these walls between them, it's very difficult to penetrate those boundaries, but when you're in the diaspora there are no borders, and you can intermingle with other communities and eventually realize that people are not as scary as the rumors you may have heard growing up, and that everybody is just human. I think there's a huge difference in India and Pakistan, maybe Bangladesh not as much but they're still very very polarized Bangladesh yeah I think they had the bigger trauma between Bangladesh and Pakistan, more recent memory, but in terms of that, you know I don't think India and Bangladesh are as big of an animosity as maybe India and Pakistan do, and that's huge I mean if you're in Punjab it's not so much but as you start to travel towards Delhi in India I feel like it gets very strong, and as it gets further away in the south where there's no connection, it gets even stronger. Can I just add one thing sorry, you know my own experience was that, in fact, the generation or, which was, which had kind of seen experience suffered whatever term you may use partition. I thought when when I visited India and started to kind of talk or travel around and talk to people I found that they were upset and angry, I mean, leaving surrendering your home is not the best experience to have. It's very painful. Yet, it didn't naturally make them an enemy of the other side, because you were invested it that place had been your home once. It's the distance from that experience, which then produce more anger, more anxiety more hatred. I think that has to do with maybe potentially with memory, like the people who live through it also live through a more cosmopolitan past, they have the more positive memories of interacting between communities the mundane. And then that one event has that very strong memory. And I have not experienced hatred amongst people to went through the partition in the interviews that I did. And then you see the next generation their children and their grandchildren are way more polarized they're only hearing selective stories of violence which seem to get, you know, has done more. I think maybe one or two more questions or two periods and first you. Hi, I'm going to see you again. This is from my mom, who was one of the people that was interviewed she's very sorry she couldn't be here today. She might get emotional. She wanted to ask a question. She said, did you find a difference when you were interviewing men and women, because she was saying that from my memory women bought the brunt of the violence. She was doing partition and also the shame. A lot of them. And we found out after, after what you've been doing all this amazing work that my mom's Marcy. A bit of ductility and subtracted to, well, they'd imagine, and it's never spoken of. She's 98. That's thanks to the work that you're doing. Your mom's Marcy is talking. We need to interview her. Do you find a difference in men and women and what we mean now after so much time is willing to talk about that happens. Yeah, I'll also let maybe come up even a training talk like this and see guys and also done a lot of interviews. But yeah, I think there is definitely a difference, but there's differences in many ways. I also found that a lot of women who had, and they do start talking. They're actually more resolved with the trauma than some of the men that I've interviewed, because the women have talked about it a lot with other women over the years, and some men have not talked about it. And they have a hard time, particularly, and there's much more emotion, where I've actually interviewed women who've talked very openly about a lot of trauma like very easily. So, you know, when I talked to them about why that may have been, and they've said it's because, you know, they've talked about it so much over time with their other women in their circles. I mean, socially they've talked about it so much. But in terms of interviewing, women are less likely to want to be interviewed because they're afraid that the male members of the family may not let them. So all of that does happen. So I don't know. Do you guys have any experiences that are different? I personally haven't had a few interviews with women, but I think in terms of the emotion itself, so that comes out quite, I mean, mostly with idea, most of the people have ended up crying during the interview. And spending is always the partition itself, where they could be moments within their journey has triggered, for example, I do in the past, and he fought World War II in the British, and for him, the moment when, you know, when they were in Germany at their, when the army was killed by the German army, that was the moment which triggered him to cry. So they could be like the stories within the stories and you know, not necessarily all of them, you know, so not worth their journey, because we didn't get to put a statement on it. They tried to help you out there. So there could be various, so emotions could be created from different events. Thank you. Thank you once again. Sorry, and she cannot do that. It may turn into more of a comment as some of these questions got answered that I had. But so I have been documenting this from my father, who had to leave his house in the war. He moved early and pretty much walked his way. He has a lot of memories of this, and as every time he would talk about it, he would go from being very upset, leaving his house, even with everyone, while his father was not his, and died in the war as a doctor. And then to the point that he would come back and talk about this little pet he missed in his house in Lahore. That's when we wanted to go and I think that was a safe place where he would go to think of that. I'm glad to know that we can actually bring up some of this and present it from our angle like you may not want to talk about it. But what comes across from someone who then went into British for everything and became a doctor in England, worked there for 20 years, and then moved back to India. And I've grown up in India and then lived for 20 years in Canada and now I'm living here. I've gone back in so many different attitudes. How did you find the attitudes of not racism, but bad stereotype that got set at that time. Because people with remote things, we have trauma still that come out in the book that I just wait to read about it, we have to censor it out at some point. Yeah, we haven't really censored anything so the book is based on the summaries of interviews that are written by the interviewer. But in terms of attitudes, I mean, I'm just going to tell you what I've seen and again there will be different interpretations. Maybe again, you guys can have, you know, we have a different interpretation. I've seen that either it's children or the next generation who seem to be who seem to have those negative attitudes for the other side. I haven't seen adults, I haven't seen it yet in the interviews that I've come across with adults who experience that violence. They have lived through I think a time where they were more integrated with the other community. Okay, on rare occasions I do see it in interviews that people have conducted. If they belong to, you know, extreme groups, groups with extreme points of views, political groups, then they had certain attitudes for sure. But it's not very common amongst adults because they lived with, I think, my, in my view, more integrated societies, and they're able to separate partition from the rest and not have it be the defining moment. But for children and the next generation, it seems to become a defining moment. I was going to ask you later maybe, but also I thought it would be interesting for others. We've been doing, as they said, the history of partition here in 2009. And we found the archive very, very useful. So thank you very much for that. And there are several dissertations that mean undergraduate students that have used the publicly available summaries that you have on your website. I wonder how we could be back to the archive from those dissertations. And I can talk to you about it. You wonder how we can do feedback to the archive from the dissertations that the students have written because they've been writing several dissertations. That'd be really neat. Maybe that's something we can talk about later. But because I think there is very, very interesting stuff in the archive, even just in the summaries. You're absolutely right. And yeah, definitely there is. And just working on the book was kind of mind-blowing for those of us who did it. There's about 30 of us. And all of us were, yeah, they were like, you know, ties and loads of emotions all over the place, but it was really cool. Hopefully, whoever reads it will have similar experience. Thank you so much. I think there's so many interesting questions and thank you for that.