Aanchal Malhotra

About: Aanchal Malhotra (b.1990) is an oral historian and writer from New Delhi, India. She is the co-founder of the Museum of Material Memory, a crowd-sourced digital repository tracing family histories and social ethnography through heirlooms, collectibles and antiques from the Indian subcontinent. Malhotra has written extensively on the 1947 Partition and its related topics. Her first book, published in South Asia as Remnants of a Separation (2017) and internationally as Remnants of Partition (2019), won the Council for Museum Anthropology Book Award 2022, and was shortlisted for the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar, British Academy Book Prize, Hindu Lit for Life Non Fiction Prize, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize and the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize. Her second book, In the Language of Remembering, tracing the long-term, cross-border, generational legacy of Partition, was published to critical acclaim in early 2022 and named one of History Today's Best Books of the Year. Malhotra's latest work is a debut novel titled The Book of Everlasting Things.

BOOK

Name: Remnants of a Separation

Description:

Remnants of a Separation is a unique attempt to revisit the Partition through objects that refugees carried with them across the border. These belongings absorbed the memory of a time and place, remaining latent and undisturbed for generations. They now speak of their owner's pasts as they emerge as testaments to the struggle, sacrifice, pain and belonging at an unparalleled moment in history. A string of pearls gifted by a maharaja, carried from Dalhousie to Lahore, reveals the grandeur of a life that once was. A notebook of poems, brought from Lahore to Kalyan, shows one woman's determination to pursue the written word despite the turmoil around her. A refugee certificate created in Calcutta evokes in a daughter the feelings of displacement her father had experienced upon leaving Mymensingh zila, now in Bangladesh.Written as a crossover between history and anthropology, Remnants of a Separation is the product of years of passionate research. It is an alternative history of the Partition -- the first and only one told through material memory that makes the event tangible even seven decades later.