Revealing the pain of Partition through fact and fiction

In 2013, while on sabbatical from her graduate program in studio arts at Concordia, Aanchal Malhotra, MFA 15, went back to her hometown of New Delhi, India. It was a trip that would change the trajectory of her artistic career.

Then studying to be a traditional printmaker, Malhotra visited her maternal granduncle. In a rare moment of candor, he opened up to her about the partition of British India in August 1947. Partition — the arbitrary imposition of new borders by the departing British Raj and designation of Pakistan as the homeland for the subcontinent’s Muslims — forced Hindus and Sikhs to migrate eastward to India, and Muslims westward to Pakistan, displacing approximately 14 million people and killing another million.

“There was usually silence about Partition, my family didn’t talk about it,” recalls Malhotra, 33, in a Zoom interview from New Delhi, where she now lives after moving there in 2016. But through objects he kept all these years — a vessel and a yardstick — her granduncle revealed how he spent his childhood in Lahore, Pakistan, where he would fly kites and ride his bicycle.

Inspired by that conversation, Malhotra embarked on a decade-long journey to interview generations of families impacted by Partition, compiling an emotional oral history through photographs and open-hearted interviews that formed the foundation of two published books: Remnants of a Partition (2019), and In the Language of Remembering (2022).

“There’s something about looking at objects as catalysts of remembrance,” Malhotra says. These resurfaced memories can do more than just bring catharsis to the witnesses of Partition, she adds. There’s something special about “excavating a story, witnessing it being uttered and, sometimes, for the first time, allowing it to fill the room and hope that its retelling can lead to a learning and prevent such acts from happening again.”

Now she’s shifted away from non-fiction to pen her first novel, which focuses on how Partition and the First World War impact two different families. In The Book of Everlasting Things, released in December 2022, Malhotra brings readers into late-1930s Lahore, where a perfumer’s apprentice and a calligrapher’s apprentice fall in love but are soon separated by the forces of Partition. Per the Associated Press review, “Malhotra tried her hand at longform fiction and succeeded with elegance. At all turns, The Book of Everlasting Things is deeply human, with careful attention paid to both factual and emotional accuracy.”

“It’s a slow-moving book, quiet and tender, that I want readers to really sink into — to really live within — just as I did while writing it,” says Malhotra, who plans on returning to Montreal in the spring for several book-launch events.