Berkeley, CA. January 24, 2014– “I feel like a bottled plant,” relates Z. Ansari, on becoming homeless overnight in the wake of riots that engulfed his homeland during Great Britain’s accession from India. “I have no roots. I can be put anywhere.”
As a Muslim, he found himself on the wrong side of an artificially and hastily carved out border between newly created India and Pakistan, known as the Partition of 1947. Communal violence engulfed his homeland and his family was forced to flee, not knowing where they were going or why. Having lost all material property, he migrated with his family to Pakistan along with millions of other Muslim families, during what’s known as the world’s largest forced mass migration. Ox-cart caravans stretched nearly 15 miles in length and trains were overloaded and packed beyond capacity.
“I looked up to see the same sky, the same stars, but this was India,” explains J. Hemrajani upon arriving in Delhi from a small town in Sindh, Pakistan.
The year 1947 marked the end of the British Rule in South Asia, as well as the birth of India and Pakistan. During the transfer of power, law and order broke down. Chaos unfolded as India and Pakistan were divided along religious lines. An estimated 15 million people became homeless and over a million lost their lives. As many as 100,000 women were abducted and countless children were orphaned. Many of the eye-witnesses, now in their 70s and 80s, still remain deeply emotionally wounded. Moreover the global legacy of Partition lives on today in the form of the disputed Line of Control between India and Pakistan, the world’s second most heavily militarized border.
Yet, little has been done to capture and memorialize the victims’ voices. This is what a small team of volunteers based out of the University of California in Berkeley have set out to change, through their newly founded organization, The 1947 Partition Archive. The group uses web based “crowdsourcing” to record and preserve witness oral histories. Via free online workshops anyone, anywhere can learn the basic techniques for recording witness accounts in their family and community, which are then submitted to The 1947 Partition Archive for preservation into perpetuity. Over the last year nearly 500 individuals trained as Citizen Historians from over 20 countries. Nearly 1000 video interviews ranging in length from 1 to 9 hours were submitted for preservation.
There’s a great urgency to record the oral histories as witnesses who remember are now in their 80’s, 90’s and beyond. To reach as many Partition witnesses as possible, before it is too late, the group has launched a campaign on the international crowdfunding site IndieGoGo, to expand the organizations equipment and digital systems used for story collection. The IndieGoGo campaign will last through the end of January and over 150 individuals have already contributed $14,000 of the $35,000 goal. http://igg.me/at/1947Partition/
“Because we are huge believers in grassroots and crowdsourcing, we wanted to take that route. This way, anybody from anywhere can contribute,” says the founder, Guneeta Singh Bhalla.
Through their grassroots effort, The 1947 Partition Archive hopes to train up to 1000 Citizen Historians and preserve 3000 witness accounts in 2014. The crowdsourced funds raised from their IndieGoGo campaign will enable all the tools needed to reach this goal.
“I feel like I was forced into exile,” recalls refugee and witness G. S. Sekhon. “Except I did nothing wrong to deserve that.”