![]() ![]() ![]() I read very few non fiction titles this year and I was amazed by how touching the stories are. This book is one of my favourite reads of 2017. 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. 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. 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 string of pearls gifted by a maharaja, carried from Dalhousie to Lahore, reveals the grandeur of a life that once was. 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. These belongings absorbed the memory of a time and place, remaining latent and undisturbed for generations. ![]() Remnants of a Separation is a unique attempt to revisit the Partition through objects that refugees carried with them across the border. ![]()
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