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Moving Stories Make Up India’s ‘1947Partition Archive’By Lisa Tsering, Staff ReporterMar 05, 2014
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A small army of volunteers is painstakingly collecting hundreds ofstories from India’s great migration in the years following thecountry’s independence and Partition in 1947.
The ongoing project, which can be seen online at1947PartitionArchive.org, features an online Story Map showingwhere each person’s story originated.
The Partition of British India into modern day India, Pakistan andBangladesh marks the largest forced human migration in history,notes the Web site. Nearly 15 million people lost their homes in1947 and that number stands at over 20 million today.
One of the site’s most active contributors, Guneeta Singh Bhalla,felt so strongly about the archive that she left a research position atUC Berkeley in December 2012 to volunteer full time for the project.Working with other volunteers who put in thousands of manhoursat no charge, the team led an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaignthat raised over $35,000.
Volunteer citizen historian Ranjanpreet Nagra conducts an interview in Punjab for the 1947Partition Archive. (Metha Skylab Daoheung/The 1947 Partition Archive photos
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Together with communitydonations and a grant fromthe American IndiaFoundation, the 1947Partition Archive — a501(c)3 nonprofit — hasmore than 650 storiesposted to the Story Map inEnglish, Urdu, Punjabi,
Hindi, Bengali, Gujrati, Sindhi and other languages.
Now, Bhalla and her colleagues are urging Indian Americans toshare their stories, too.
“We are seeking input from witnesses of Partition all over the world,not just NRIs,” she told IndiaWest in a recent email. “There areindividuals from the borders of Afghanistan to Burma that havebeen affected, and of course many British personnel. It isessentially a global story at this point.”
Since the Indian government has not created any monument orarchive of this type, the group feels it’s up to volunteers to make ithappen. “We provide a platform for anyone anywhere in the world tocollect, archive and display oral histories that document not onlyPartition, but prePartition life and culture as well as postPartitionmigrations and life changes,” reads the Web site. The full works willsoon be made available for educational purposes to academicresearchers, students and the public.
Bhalla explains why she left Lawrence Berkeley Lab in her email.“While I am still very passionate about physics and the basicinquiry into Nature, I felt an immense urgency to record memoriesor Partition,” she told IndiaWest.
“Also, being in the United States, and having so many tools to mydisposal to make the documentation of Partition possible, I felt asort of moral responsibility to make this happen. It is essentially ourlast chance to give this important history a serious chapter in ourglobal history books …
“With the nearly gone memories of Partition, there won’t be anotherchance to ‘plug back in.’ It’s now or never.”
Bhalla told the New York Times that she first became fascinatedwith the stories of Partition when she heard her grandmotherdescribe her own traumatic train ride, clutching her three children toher as she observed carnage and saw dead bodies around therailroad tracks. “My paternal grandparents and my father were allfrom Lahore. My father was an infant at the time of Partition, whenhe and his brothers fled with my grandmother to Amritsar. Hence, itis a part of my existence,” said Bhalla.
Visit 1947PartitionArchive.org to learn more and contribute yourown story.
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