The Partition of the Indian Subcontinent Externalized: How to Challenge Borders? Julie Alary Lavallée

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Eugenia Agnes Lamb
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1 The Partition of the Indian Subcontinent Externalized: How to Challenge Borders? Julie Alary Lavallée The independence of India in 1947, which resulted in the division of the territory and the creation of Pakistan (East and West), is known for causing the largest mass migration in human history. Established along religious lines, the Partition triggered instability and conflicts unresolved to this day between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. Few memorials commemorating the Partition exist in India or Pakistan today (Nasar 2012). The Museum of Peace (Amritsar, India) is most likely the only institution that deals openly with the Partition, bringing to the fore the common cultural heritage of pre-partition Punjab (Museum of Peace 2015) 1. Meanwhile, people who, along with their offspring, have had first-hand experience of this precipitated liberation process, are left with unresolved memories and suffering. Although the Partition of the Indian Subcontinent has been largely addressed from a political and historical perspective, and analyzed under the scope of women s conditions, this unfinished chapter remains a taboo subject in society. Often related to shame or volatile refugee situations, personal accounts of the Partition are still kept silent. More recently, endeavours have been undertaken to focus on the nature of human experience, lending voice to those who were and continue to be affected by this tragedy (Butalia 1998). Other attempts have been initiated to introduce the Partition in the sphere of the visual arts (Nasar 2012). Aanchal Malhotra (b. 1990, Delhi) and Sharlene Bamboat (b. 1984, Karachi), two emerging South Asian Canadian artists, began respectively to develop artistic projects in link with the Partition, more specifically addressing how it had affected their families. Then, a series of challenges pose themselves: how is it possible to make the Partition visible? How does one introduce into the present such traumatic circumstances, which can be related to what Jacques Lacan calls the real (Foster 1996)? Without answering these complex questions, it is necessary to state that none of the artists has intended to represent this troubling historical event through visual components per se. Instead, their intentions stress the importance of memory transmission, be it fictional or real, as a healing process across generations, and the necessity to question and transcend various types of borders that have had an impact on their surrounding environment. The photo installation Remnants of a Separation (2015) by Aanchal Malhotra a compilation of various visual and textual sources sheds light on the individuals and the objects they took with them when fleeing their home (fig. 1). It explores the ways in which everyday objects can be powerful repositories of memories and catalysts of an eloquent and verbal externalisation process. The selected compilation of eclectic data by Malhotra, collected mostly through interviews conducted on both sides of the Pakistani-Indian border in the cities of Delhi and Lahore, acts as a tribute to the first generation of people who experienced Partition. This emphasis on material objects offers a unique access to testimonies, sometimes buried deep, breaking with the existence of this tacit belief that people did not carry anything of interest given the emergency nature of the situation. 1 On August 29 th 2015, a consultation took place in Delhi on the construction of a Partition Museum. For more information: 1

Fig. 1 Aanchal Malhotra, Remnants of a Separation, 2015. In-progress installation. In the artists' studio in Montréal. Courtesy of the artist.

During an interview with her great aunt carried out for another art project, she discovered that her great-grandfather committed suicide two years after the independence (Jejisher Gill 2014).

2 Fig. 1 Aanchal Malhotra, Remnants of a Separation, In-progress installation. In the artists' studio in Montréal. Courtesy of the artist. And Memory (2009-) by Sharlene Bamboat is an ongoing and multifaceted project that incorporates video, body art and storytelling. During an interview with her great aunt carried out for another art project, she discovered that her great-grandfather committed suicide two years after the independence (Jejisher Gill 2014). Due to risky business dealings involving a family that had migrated to India (Ibid.) and worries that ultimately affected his mental health, he jumped off a building in Karachi, which is currently the Indus Valley School of Art & Architecture. As an intergenerational act of memory transfer and a way to physically make this story her own, Bamboat had an image of the art school building tattooed on her arm (fig. 2). Although And Memory involves a variety of media, only the indexical record on the skin is analyzed in this short essay. Fig. 2 Left: Photographer Unknown. Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Collection of the South Asian Visual Art Centre (SAVAC) Archive, Circa Black and White Photograph, Courtesy of Sharlene Bamboat. Right: Sharlene Bamboat.,And Memory, Documentation. Courtesy of the Artist. 2

3 Both artists opted for a similar methodology for their projects based on ethnographic methods, such as unstructured conversations and interviews. In either case, the process of data collection and transmission put forward the participation of a multiplicity of actors and voices. Malhotra has conducted dozens of interviews, some of which lasted for more than one day. She first started in Delhi, where she lives now with her family, then went to Lahore (on her Canadian passport), where she discovered a very welcoming Pakistan, different than the one described in Indian books. For And Memory, which is still a work in process today and may never be concluded, Bamboat turned her great aunt s testimony into an archival process and a storytelling construction. Although this project does not yet concretively exist, it was extensively studied in a master thesis completed in 2014, thanks to a series of conversations between the artist and the graduate student. This unusual research context reveals the prominence of orality -the importance for Bamboat to keep records of her project s evolution (Ibid.) as well as the urge to take steps towards eliminating the silence surrounding this family story. Hence, it sets out the terms of a never-ending transmission process of information, which started between her great-aunt and herself, the graduate student and herself, then between the graduate student and the readers (me here), and so forth. What also emerges from these projects is a strong gesture of appropriation or a visible act of authorship coming from the artists. The use of the their own body affirms their artistic authority on what is being made, shown and told. It makes explicit their attempt to make visible their binds to these stories as third or fourth generation after the Partition, which finds echo in the concept of Postmemory developed by Marianne Hirsch. According to her postmemory is not an identity position but a generational structure of transmission embedded in multiple forms of mediation (35). Bamboat has literally marked her skin with a tattoo. There are many meanings attached to a tattoo, but it surely is an index, fixed in the skin permanently as an act of memorization for life (Müller 2013). Seeing Malhotra seated from the back in front of her photo mural collage confirms her predominance, her role in giving form to the collected testimonies, and to the participant s identities and objects. Her presence is also well detected in the written notes added to the collage, taking the shape of short perceptions she had of the people during the interview process (fig. 3). They disclose the intricacies of their personality that photography cannot expose. But what kind of social involvement does this collage engage in? How does it give voice and power back to the participants? Coming from a family of editors, Malhotra is working on a book in which the stories of these people will be told in their words and terms, where the artist will not be monopolising what is being said. This brings us back to the concept of polyphony set forth by Bakhtin, which involves a multiplicity of voices uncoordinated with that of the author, due to their own perspective, their own validity, and their own narrative weight within the novel (Robinson 2011). 3

4 Fig. 1 Aanchal Malhotra, Remnants of a Separation, In-progress installation. In the artists' studio in Montréal. Courtesy of the artist. The act of telling, present in both projects, is echoed in the notion of cultural regulation developed by William Mazarella and Raminder Kaur. In Censorship in South Asia (2008), they stress distinctions between censorship and cultural regulation: the first being linked to repressive actions of states and state-sanctioned institutions (6) and the latter to the performative, the productive, and the affective aspect of public culture (14). As a productive concept, cultural regulation involves a wider range of actions that can be implemented due to censorship, and other regulation practices, such as non-state censorship and self-regulation. Both projects deal with individual voices and the possibility for participants to filter their discourse and decide what to say. In the case of the Partition and its terrible aftermaths that took place in 1947 and continue to be lived in the present, memories are most likely to change and become unreliable. As the Indian historian and feminist Urvashi Butalia highlights, fictions can emerge out of stories told by survivors, they are not deviations of the truth but part of the truth in a particular version (20), Although the Partition means a literal division of borders, what is also interesting is how Bamboat and Malhotra are transgressing boundaries. In Remnant of a Separation, the collage disposition is not reproducing the Radcliffe line, which is the name given to the line of demarcation between India and Pakistan (East and West) by the British to commemorate the architect of this ungrateful 4

5 task, Sir Cyril Radcliff. It is rather illustrated as a photocopied map, mixed with images (portraits and fragments of people and objects) reorganised according to a new logic, which dismisses the reinforcement of territorial division. There is no clear entry or exit point where the eyes begin and end their reading and observation of the material being collected; hence, it is multidirectional. This collage becomes an allegory of abundance, incompleteness, fragmented memories, and lack of hierarchy. Since many more testimonies could have been added to this project, Malhotra had to draw her own limit. Beyond this project, the Partition legacy is definitely bigger and difficult to grasp. For its part, And Memory transcended many types of borders, more evidently, the one set between private and public spaces, thereby making her family secret visible on the surface of her skin upon entering the public realm. While her body crosses geographical barriers, unconfined to one side of the border, the tattooed image commemorates a past incident in the present and projects the inscription into the future where Bamboat will go. This physical mark participates in the construction of the self, inscribed in a personal narrative. It is not a gesture of victimisation but rather a claim for history. As both projects deal with an economy of circulation of objects and memories, what can we learn from them? Perhaps that art has the power to challenge the official discourse of the nation-state on Partition, which consolidates national legitimacy and hatred of the other (Khan 2007). These artistic endeavours also stress the necessity to carry out discussions about Partition and to privilege oral narratives as they can make us see and imagine the world differently. References BUTALIA, Urvashi (1998). The Other Side of Silence. London, Penguins Books India. FOSTER, Hal (1996). The Return of the Real. In The Return of the Real. The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century, 4 (2001) ed. Cambridge/Mass., London: The MIT Press. HIRSCH, Marianne (2012). The Generation of Postmemory: Visual Culture After the Holocaust. New York, Columbia University Press. JEJISHER GILL, Rajee Paña (2014). Partition and Postmemory in the Work of Kriti Arora and Sharlene Bamboat. Masters thesis, Concordia University. KHAN, Yasmin (2007). The great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan. New Hawen and London, Yale University Press. NASAR, Hammad (2012). Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space, in Iftikhar Dadi and Hammad Nasar, Line of Control: Partition as a productive Space, Exhibition catalogue, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art (Ithaca, New York), January 21 April 1, 2012, London; Green Cardamon. MAZARELLA, William and Raminder KAUR (2009) Thinking Censorship in South Asia in Censorship in South Asia : Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction, edited by Raminder Kaur and William Mazzarella. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, MÜLLER, Élise (2013). Une anthropologie du tatouage contemporain. L Harmattan : Paris. MUSEUM OF PEACE (2015). Welcome to the world s first Fusion Museum. Museum of Peace, [On line], Accessed on August 25th ROBINSON, Andrew (2011). In Theory Bakhtin: Dialogism, Polyphony and Heteroglossia. Ceasefire Magazine [On line], Friday, July 9 th, Accessed on August 25 th TRIPATHI, Shailaja (2015). Museum of Memories. The Hindu. [On line], August 16 th. Accessed on August 20th

Lalla Essaydi s photographs

PROFILE LALLA ESSAYDI Lalla Essaydi s photographs are multifaceted explorations of female identity in Islamic culture, inspired by her own personal history. Her childhood in Morocco was full of women.