![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() And yet, The Language of Remembering is not about rancour. For many, the subject is viscerally enfolded in shame and fear, anger and bitterness, adding to the difficulty of utterance”. But ultimately there remains something extraordinary about Partition that refuses South Asians the luxury of either ignoring or moving past it, forbidding it from withdrawing from the realm of private conversations to enter the public domain so that it may be discussed and reconciled with. As she writes, “Silence can also be a carrier, and one that is practised by many, and augmented by gestures of pain. Like my grandmother who would talk of Jessore, Barisal, Khulna – places where she once had family – their rivers, ponds, fish and vegetables, friends and neighbours, and not of India or Pakistan, Malhotra’s respondents, too, rarely mention the two countries. Like my grandmother’s accounts, these histories are less genealogical narratives, more stories, several times even vignettes. It’s about personal histories, several of them passed down generations. Language of Remembering is about somewhat different carriers of memory. In her earlier book, Remnants of Separation, Malhotra had brought alive Partition memory through objects such as jewelry, utensils, books, and even intangible artefacts such as ways of speaking. Grandma’s stories came back to me as I read Aanchal Malhotra’s, In the language of Remembering The Inheritance of Partition. ![]()
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