What marks out Remnants of a Separation is the originality of its method. There is a vast and growing literature on the Partition. A well-researched and richly readable book. 'There is a vast and growing literature on the Partition.

For, after all, once people get on with the business of life, memory tends to fade and become more diffused and the act of remembering then becomes an act of will.’ If memory lies at the heart of this book, so does its opposite – the act of forgetting. How do people remember, what do they remember, how do they hold on to memory, how does memory change and transform in its telling, and more specifically for her, how memory comes to crystallize around an object, a thing that becomes to its articulation. The idea that she locates as the heart of her book is one that has been at the core of much recent work on Partition – that of memory. 'Aanchal Malhotra’s book drew me in from its very first story and its basic premise. It is a book to treasure.’ - Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare With Amber Eyes ‘This is a book of startling originality, weaving stories of intimate connections with objects and harrowing histories of displacement into beautifully cadenced prose. William Dalrymple, historian and author 'Aanchal Malhotra is a new star of Indian non-fiction' This moving book provides a uniquely personal view of the event and its enduring impact.' - Publishers Weekly

To view an Illustrated Reading Guide, click here. They uncover a rich tapestry of pain and rupture, but also of hope and connection – in belonging through belongings, and identities reforged. From a string of pearls to a young woman’s poetry, this extraordinary book gives voice to the voiceless, restoring the everyday to a great drama of the twentieth century. It was published in South Asia as Remnants of a Separation: A History of Partition through Material Memory (HarperCollins India, 2017) and internationally as Remnants of Partition: 21 Objects from a Continent Divided (Hurst, 2019). The product of years of painstaking and passionate research, it is a remarkable alternative history, telling the family stories hidden within items carried between the new India and Pakistan, amid chaos and violence. Written as crossover between history and anthropology, it tells stories from both sides of the Radcliffe Line, using precious and mundane personal objects as catalysts to evoke memory. Remnants is an oral history archive and the first and only study of the belongings carried by refugees who migrated during the 1947 Partition of India.

Remnants of separation aanchal malhotra