Too often, the stories connected to them are forgotten to time. The inherent misfortune of mundane objects, unlike those which may be either monetarily valuable or visibly precious, is that they are often underappreciated. With the exception of physical museums, there are few places where the life and materiality of an object of age is celebrated. Gauging this interest, I co-founded the Museum of Material Memory with a friend, Navdha Malhotra, who works in the social impact space, in September 2017. This method of excavating personal history through material culture found resonance even with many who had no history of Partition. Over time, this research coalesced into a book published in South Asia as Remnants of a Separation and internationally as Remnants of Partition. The intention was to understand whether the notion of belonging to a particular land can be imbued within an object carried from that land, even though the land itself now remained on the other side of a border. In the year 2013, I embarked on a cross-border research project, trying to archive the objects that had migrated with refugees during the 1947 Partition of India. It was during my masters’ thesis at Concordia University (Montréal) that I would come to understand the intimate relationships that humans share with objects, particularly heirlooms whose origin may lie in geographies that are inaccessible, both physically and temporally.
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