January, February, March 2021

In addition to a quick recap of the digital talks we’ve held in the last quarter of 2020 (with video links so you can catch up!), we’ve put together for you resources both from our own archives and the world wide web, that we think can significantly add to how you address/uncover the subject of the subcontinent’s partitions (1947, 1971) in the classroom. PLUS a few enjoyable ways in which your students (or you!) can engage with the subject outside the classroom.

In July 2019, our fifth annual conference, The Idea of the Indian Constitution presented an exciting range of perspectives and new areas for thought and discussion: our speakers included Romila Thapar, A.G. Noorani, Nandini Sundar, Gautam Bhatia, Vrinda Grover and R. Siva Kumar. These talks were further supplemented with teachers’ workshops conducted by the likes of Urvashi Butalia, lokshahir Sambhaji Bhagat and experienced teaching practitioners.

ccccUntil circumstances permit us to organize the next annual conference, here are the proceedings of this one—now out as a freely accessible journal!

Thousands of farmers are protesting against the three Farm Acts at the Delhi border through one of the coldest winters the region has experienced. The position of the farmer has perhaps never been so vulnerable as it is today. But are the concerns of these essential workers entirely new? Or is there a history that we may trace of their struggles against systematic oppression?

ccccLet’s turn the clock back a few decades and take a look at what farmers and tea-garden workers have fiercely opposed in Bengal in the 1940s and 50s. What made them mobilize, how did these movements play out, what repercussions would they have on the discourse of labour rights in our country? Our module, based on artist Somnath Hore’s extraordinary documentation of the Tebhaga Movement and the Tea Garden workers’ movement, brought out in English translation by Seagull Books, presents you with a firsthand account of the largely unchanged circumstances of those who grow our food, and whose life’s conditions and crises have remained largely unaddressed over the years.

Wrested, like everyone else, from much of what he knew and loved, he spent sleepless evenings walking amongst the refugees and often stopping to sketch the visible evidence of all that was lost.

‘Has the Partition become a word whose meaning is bent by the ears that receive it? For young Indians now reaching adulthood, it could easily be an academic concept only, one as far away as Shah Jahan—important, but inaccessible. At a half century after Partition we are in a brief moment when intellectual, spiritual and social memory sometimes still coalesce.

ccccAs those born on the cusp of the shift from memory—what our parents told us—and re-memory—what we have to learn for ourselves—we must feel a special responsibility towards Partition, to the violence of the birth of modern India and to the unrecorded lost who paid with their expectations, often with their lives, for our current well-being. Parasher’s Partition Sketches are a window into this largely empty space. They are that rare transitional item that flows directly from the immediacy of his experience in a transit camp in 1947 to our experience in 2021 trying to imagine hopelessness and despair, of the lives which have given us our own, of a time where everything which was dependable had been ruptured and nothing of the future could be imagined. The very fragility of these pieces— they are largely on scraps of available paper—is testament to the nearly impossible journey they have made from that moment to this one. Unlike written records, scant as those are, and unlike recreations such as film, these sketches are a constant, as real now as they were in the muddy, fly strewn and exhausted moments of their creation.’

Join us for our next event in the ‘Political Partitions, Human Stories’ series : an illustrated talk on the artist S.L. Parasher by his daughter Prajna Parasher (Professor, Film and Media Arts, Chatham University), to be followed by a conversation with her sister, historian Aloka Parasher-Sen.

ccccVirtual international exchanges let students connect with peers in other countries to discuss concepts and ideas learned about in shared course materials, including presentations, videos, podcasts, songs, blogs, websites and articles. Through this project, we hope that students will have a clearer understanding of each other’s cultures, lifestyle and values.

ccccIn preparation, we have begun a digital pilot workshop series with a small group of high school students from the Shiv Nadar School. Drawing from the AFYN's existing resources, our sessions are focussed on critically understanding discrimination and injustice, and hope to inspire in the students the desire to become Human Rights Defenders.

Museums for the most part have been hugely under-utilised by the education sector in India—their potential for transforming history into a living breathing record of the past has remained largely untapped. In our constant endeavour to explore creative ways of teaching and learning history, we bring to you a series of digital workshops every Saturday, between 9 and 31 January 2021.

ccccFocussing on the 1947 Partition, this series, designed and conducted by Medhavi Gandhi, looks at objects that are testimony of a shared culture that existed before, during and after the division, with the aim of understanding and embracing a common heritage through meaningful engagement with these objects.

Gandhara

Muraqqa-e-Chughtai (and Phulkari): Rich artistic culture in pre-Partition India

Modern Artists: B.C Sanyal, S.L Parasher, Satish Gujral 

Tales of Partition in Contemporary Art : ‘Your History Gets in the Way of My Memory’

While registrations for this series are now closed, we will be updating our website with recordings of the sessions. So please follow us on our social media accounts, and do sign up on our website to stay updated!

Last December we began a programme with Class 4 and 5 students from Pathways World School, using films to encourage nuanced, meaningful engagement with varying facets of migration.

ccccWe use a carefully curated pool of fun, age-appropriate films to spark discussions towards the overall objective of the programme: creating awareness that will in turn help build peaceful and resilient societies capable of accepting and accommodating human difference of every kind.

One of a series of events following the release of Thapar’s Voices of Dissent: An Essay by Seagull Books in October, 2020.

A conversation between Urvashi Butalia and Nirupama Dutt engaging with the expansive scope and depth of the writings of Amrita Pritam, with a specific focus on those emerging out of the experience of Partition. ‘The Partition lived with her’, says Dutt. How deeply embedded was the trauma of Partition and the experience of that migration on Pritam's body of literature as a whole?

ccccIn this live online session, Professor Bandyopadhyay responded to pre-submitted questions from social-science school teachers based on his talk, ‘Decolonization: Change and Continuity’, delivered on the Karwaan: The Heritage Exploration Initiative platform.

Historian Aloka Parasher Sen took us travelling through time and space as she discussed her work, South of the Vindhyas: Early Deccan Histories, in a digital event organized by History for Peace in association with Karwaan-The Heritage Exploration Initiative.

‘Its “Histories” in the plural primarily because our vantage point is to discuss regional, sub-regional and local historical tendencies that then define the whole region we have identified as the Deccan. It’s also our concern to move beyond linguistically defined modern regional entities that are of recent origin to argue that most of these were historically constituted differently, often with flexible boundaries. Emphasizing on looking at histories of small regions and localities also enables one to move beyond mere dynastic history, which in their aim to valorise the present, talk of great individual rulers and icons to then privilege only political history to justify similar tendencies in the contemporary.

ccccThe task then is to share with you an inclusive historical narrative that suggests that before and after the rise of the so-called big “empires” there were political systems of organisation that we dismiss as merely “tribal” or those lacking in monumental grandeur. . .’.

A conundrum that often fazes the teacher is how to effectively transmit the enormity of events such as the partitions of the subcontinent (1947 and 1971), to recipients so very removed from that time and space. How far can the knowledge of ‘facts’ help with a more meaningful, critical engagement? To help the process along, here's a small selection of some of our favourite teaching resources on the subject from across the web, starting with our own archives.

‘When a country splits into two, how does that separation take place? Who gets what, who goes where? Where do you draw the boundaries? Before Partition, India and the country that became Pakistan were connected by railway lines and roads—what happens to those? We shared five rivers—what happened to those? There is a shared history there for us, waiting to be explored [ . . . .]Suppose you lived in Lahore, and you decided to migrate to Delhi, but your bank account was in Lahore—what would happen to your money? Where would you keep your pensions, the bank accounts, the administrative files, the job records, and so on and so on? These are the nuts and bolts of separation, and we tend not to think of them because it is as if the process of separation somehow magically does itself.

ccccSo, today, I would like to trace for you the history of one such institution. My particular interest is in the histories of women, and these institutions were set up to take care of the needs of women, more specifically widowed women.’

Click here to read a fascinating article on how the Reserve Bank was affected by 1947, from The Wire’s ‘Partition at 70’ series.

How do we make this integral history of separation relevant to our present? Bangla Stories created a cross-curriculum teaching resource comprising 8 thematic lesson plans, looking at migrations out of the Bengal delta region (including present day Bangladesh, the India state of West Bengal) since 1947. Take a look at it here.

ccccWith the virtual classroom continuing as a primary space of learning for the (un)foreseeable future, why not give your students the chance to play detective? With transcripts of radio speeches by Mountbatten, Subhash Chandra Bose, reading, listed risks of the event as perceived by British administration of the time, the National Archives UK’s collection of primary sources pertaining to the 1947 Partition is priceless. Get students to explore and come back with their understandings/analyses of specific subjects. For instance: international response to the decision of Partition, internal responses to the decision, chart out Jinnah and Gandhi’s takes—the possibilities are endless!

Everything does not need to be learnt in the confines of the classroom. Sometimes, classic sci-fi time-travel shows just tell the stories so much better! Watch ‘The Demons of the Punjab’, Doctor Who, S11, E6 (available to view on Amazon Prime, India, or on DVD) for a personal, enjoyable yet poignant perspective on the 1947 Partition.

ccccWhile there’s an enormous wealth of literature exploring the nuances of lived experience in 1947 and 1971, both in English and vernacular languages, did you know there exists a Marvel Comics character, Kamala Khan, whose storyline goes back to the 1947 Partition? Read about it here.