The 1947 Partition Archive, Survivors and their Memories

Reviewed by: Majel Peters

Review started: February 12, 2023

Review last updated: February 14, 2023

Site Links

• https://exhibits.stanford.edu/1947-partition
• https://www.1947partitionarchive.org/ (Citizen Historian hub)

Data and Sources

• 4,000 Video-based interviews of individuals who personally experienced the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 captured by Citizen Historians
• Still images of the interview process featuring the Citizen Historian and interviewee (usually in their home)
• Archival photographs provided by the interviewee

Citizen Historians (trained volunteer oral historians) were selected using a competitive process that resulted in a training workshop and stipend in exchange for capturing interviews in their native language and home region in South Asia.

Processes

• The 1947 Partition Archive devised a crowdsourced platform to facilitate the recruiting and training of Citizen Historians as well as upload of captured interviews
• Only suggested questions are provided; Citizen Historians shape the interviews at their discretion
• Curation of 51 of the 4,000 captured interviews available through a public archive presented in partnership with Stanford University  
• Interview summarized and translated into written English  

All videos are currently part of the Stanford University Libraries Department of Special Collections and University Archives. An option on the homepage to sort videos by repository suggests a potential future collaboration with a similar repository.

Presentation

• 1947 Partition Archive

• Features 10,348 stories accessible via an interactive map

• biographical data; limited number include video

• Volunteer and Citizen Historian training information, news, about, and historical resources

• The Stanford hosted online archive

• Features 51 video interviews

• filterable from the homepage by language, author (interviewee), location or date of capture, collector (Citizen Historian name), and repository.
• Sortable by date captured, author, and English alphabetization via an array offered under the “Browse” option  

• Landing pages for individual interviews include:

• Archival images provided by the interviewee
• Stills captured during the interview
• A detailed English language synopsis of the interviewee’s biography  
• Data relevant to the search and filter criteria
• Geographical data based on interviewees migration

Digital Tools Used

The 1947 Partition Archive, Survivors and their Memories:

• Ruby on Rails
• HTML5
• JS

Citizen Historian Hub:

• Drupal
• Google Maps
• Carto DB
• Leaflet JS
• Angular JS (discontinued)

Languages

8 in the public facing archive:

• English, Urdu, Hindi, Panjabi, Bengali, Indic (Other), Marathi, SIndhi

(22 were captured in the full repository.)

Review

The 1947 Partition Archive, Survivors and their Memories, was developed by Dr. Guneeta Singh Bhalla. Driven by a sense of urgency to memorialize the Partition and its victims in the face of losing access to memories as survivors pass away, Dr. Singh Bhalla’s project engages a formidable collective of volunteer oral historians to capture stories from the period. The resulting archive includes some 10,348 individuals documented in an interactive map, with about 4,000 accompanied by oral history interviews. Although the original project portal is still accessible, the collection appears to reside at Stanford University as part of the Partition Archive. Stanford, through its own site, offers access to 51 of the oral histories.

The Stanford interface is a generally easy to navigate oral history archive that offers rich insight into the impact of the Partition of Pakistan and India via first person accounts, although it feels much more institutional, even sterilized, in comparison to the original project portal. The  “About” page discusses the inclination of many to attribute the shocking violence of the partition to a specific root cause, such as Britain’s decision to hastily draw new borders and hand over power earlier than anticipated or the rise in Hindu and Muslim nationalism in the area, but C.Ryan Perkins, the South Asian Studies Library at Stanford’s Green Library, stresses that the archive enables a more complex and nuanced understanding of the events through the sharing of lived experience.

Watching a single video offers a detailed and often emotional retelling of, at times, shocking events and dramatic changes in fortune. The interviewees saw their lives completely and suddenly changed — loss of homes, sense of safety, opportunity, and dispersal of community—during their formative years. Taken together as a fuller archive, one begins to feel the continued global impact of one of the largest mass migrations in human history. Stories were collected from all over South Asia as well as the United States, Canada and England where some interviewees eventually settled.

The simplicity of the Stanford site is a merit, however there are instances where the user experience impairs full investigation of the materials. The widget that displays the videos features a menu indicated by an unlabeled sequence of three dots just below the image. Only by clicking (not rolling over)  these easily missed dots can you reveal various videos for the single interviewee, photo stills from the interview, and archival photos provided by the interviewee. This is crucial contextualizing data that risks being overlooked due to the design shortcomings. In addition, the filtering options and rollovers of the videos provided for the content array under the “browse” option does not include language. If you have language requirements—like seeking a recount in a specific native language or simply preferring to hear the interviewee speak in their own words rather than rely on the written English synopsis—you will need to click into each video landing page to determine the spoken language.

The 51 videos offered in the archive, however, only tell a small sliver of the fuller project’s story. The work cannot be fully understood without also looking at the public hub used to recruit, train and engage citizen historians, the trained amateur oral historians whose volunteer work enabled the capture of 4,000 interviews in over 300 cities, 12 countries and in 12 languages for the original archive. This site, linked to the Stanford archive via the “This Collection” page, features an incredible array of web-, print- and film-based resources to gain deeper knowledge about the events, as well as various ways to become involved in the topic and work, including resources for seeking funding. Additional promotional material including a podcast, event listings, a newsletter, and media kit all offer extensive ways to continually engage in the project and topic, although they have not been updated in a few years. The jewel of the site, however, is the homepage’s interactive map that enables visualization of the migration of interviewees. Featuring representation of 10,348 individuals,  the map encompasses much more than the mere 51 featured in the Stanford archive, although most do not include interview video. By selecting a starting or end point one can see paths taken by individuals and gain biographical information that humanizes them and adds dimension to their experience. Selecting a dot on the map calls up the English language synopsis of an individual’s life, and where available, archival images and stills from their interview.

The sites clearly perform different purposes, yet taken together one feels what fuller vision of the Stanford archival project might be as more content is migrated to its public facing interface. The Citizen Historian site makes it clear that this community-led effort offers an empowering mechanism by which to engage with history and take part in something larger than oneself. The clearly heavily active Citizen Historian community has served as an engine for capturing these important oral histories from the inception of the project in 2011, and the website creates a site of belonging and purpose for participants. The Stanford archival site, on the other hand, offers an opportunity to engage in the very personal stories of the interviewees, perhaps unfortunately, somewhat divorced from an understanding of the community that enabled their collection. It sets the highlighted videos apart, creating a resource for scholars and the public invested in the study or better understanding of the complex realities of the era. With the goal of promoting deeper scholarship, it might be beneficial for the archive to also provide some of the excellent resources listed on the Citizen Historian site and showcase the interactive map to facilitate further understanding of the scale and impact of the stories recounted in the archive.

In her introduction to Stanford’s Partition Archive, Priya Satia, Professor of Modern British History at the Department of History, Stanford University and daughter of immigrants whose grandparents were directly impacted by the Partition, describes her inability to complete an honors thesis  during her undergraduate studies due to a lack of access to documents and accounts from the period. Overall, the two sites together are a powerful response to the lacuna that existed before their inception.