“It scares me how much we accumulate and how little we remember of that accumulation”

An Interview with Aanchal Malhotra

Illustrated by Neha Ayub

Aanchal Malhotra is one of the finest writers working in India today. From her two books that deal with the legacy of Partition in ways that combine oral history, material culture, research and narrative, to her debut novel The Book of Everlasting Things, her work has been widely acclaimed and admired. We had a wide-ranging chat that started with Partition and moved on to various aspects of her research and writing process ahead of the Siyahi Writers’ Retreats that she will be teaching in Jaipur next month.  

We’ve had a week where your work feels so relevant with the escalating conflict between India and Pakistan. I wanted to ask about your views about the current political scenario and the ways that a slower approach to history or your work around Partition interacts with the realities we see around us. 

I suppose it’s difficult not to have this on your mind these days, especially this week. One thing I’ve been grappling with is - how do you think about the past without letting the present consume it? Is the past powerful enough to sustain its own narrative, its own context, even in light of present circumstances? 

But more than anything else, I was surprised at how little vocabulary I had to counter the narrative of hate and war-mongering. All the years that I’ve spent writing about Partition, hearing stories of all three sides and all that our cultures have in common - all the pain, suffering, anger, even hate from Partition, but also all the longing, joy, dreams, friendships and experiences of life before it - I don’t know if all of that work prepared me for this. The language of power, retaliation and strength leaves very little room for the language of empathy and heartbreak. 

But the context of the past is also different from that of the present. I will say that the work I’ve done around Partition was only possible many years or decades after the event, because it needed that time to be contemplated and understood, slowly and gradually, testimony by testimony. Time and distance are essential factors that allow us perspective, which is evident as we are still building the vocabulary to think, feel and write about Partition.

Do you think that the vitriol or the ‘othering’ we see online is a sentiment that is being manufactured in the media or is it something that’s a part of our national character in some way?

I think this is the exact same question that I am often asked about Partition - do you think people always had this violence in them or was it created by the politics of the time? It’s something I’ve thought and read a lot about, and I think the answer cannot be generalized  - maybe some people always had it, maybe in some cases it was born or exacerbated by those circumstances, maybe in some cases it was rejected. 

Much like then, even today it takes a lot of courage to say no - I will not say this, I will not post this, I will not act on it, I will take the time to think about it. That resistance, particularly in the new digital age of news manufacturing, can lend us perspective.

When I would talk about my books on Partition, I would talk about the making and unmaking of the other. I thought a lot about that this week, particularly because for the first time, we can see our news and news from across the border, side by side. Sorry, I think I’m going on a bit of a tangent now. 

Not at all. I think this could be a good transition to the questions I had about your work. What drew you to writing about partition, and what do you think the role of the writer is when it comes to work that is historical or inherently political? 

So I want to preface this, firstly, by saying that last year I decided to completely stop writing about Partition. I’m also trying to retreat from social media as much as possible, just because it distracts from the writing, so I haven’t really told a lot of people this or talked about it anywhere. I have basically given much of my twenties and early thirties to this topic, and it takes a lot to carry this sadness, often the sadness of others, especially as a young person. For years, I was recording and transcribing and writing stories about people’s memories of Partition, and I decided I needed some distance from it. 

The generation that can furnish us with first-hand information of that time is receding so quickly, but I think that this topic had consumed me for such a long time that I had to put a hard stop to it. Often people will come up to me and tell me the story of their grandfather or their family member, ask if I can come talk to them, and it breaks my heart, but now I have to say no and point them towards other people who are still doing oral histories. 

I began thinking about Partition mainly because I didn’t know anything about it. The way we were taught about it in school wasn’t in a manner that felt narrative or personal, it was portrayed as a history that was so far back in the past and so factual, but of course we know that isn’t the case. All the questions I had stemmed from a lack of knowledge that only my family could fill for me. 

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this but talking to your own family is actually much harder than interviewing strangers. Because our families are so entwined, because there is so much baggage, you have to tread lightly. But speaking to elders in my own family got me interested in speaking to many others whose families had similar experiences. And the crux of that conversation was always a very formed silence, it was so palpable and practised. It was as though that entire generation had an unspoken understanding that they wouldn’t talk about Partition, or that they would only remember what they used to eat or wear rather than the traumatic parts around it.

I also realised that though we think Partition happened on 14th or 15th August and then formalising after these new nations were formed, that’s not really the case. Actually it started many years earlier and it continues till date, in a psychological and geopolitical way. It extends much beyond just migration or violence, it’s a part of the imagination and the identity of our nations in a way that manifests in fear or dreams or attitudes towards the other, which can be people in their own country as well as across borders. 

When I wrote Remnants it was about the things that people carried with them during this time, but as I continued to research the topic I realised that the demographic of people who I covered was quite narrow, mostly across undivided Punjab, UP and Bengal. But because it was about things, even as small as a utensil or a book, that was already a privilege. So when I started my second book, In the Language of Remembering, I wanted to draw a much larger canvas. I collected stories from Hyderabad, Sindh, UP, as far north as the Afghanistan border or Kashmir, as far south as Kerala, it included multiple generations and migrations and not just that singular ‘event’. That was the real education for me, that book was really close to me. 

Amidst this recent conflict the book has turned three, and I usually write to my interviewees but at the moment I am more scattered - perhaps with uncertainty and fear, for both my interviewees and me. But while my first book gave space to the silent generation, the second book was more conversational. The interviewees were younger, they had second-hand experiences like me, and I really started to resonate with their  inherited stories, different or similar to mine. I feel I deposited more parts of myself into that book.

Because so much of your work is about remembering and the preservation of memory, I wonder how you feel about the ways that our memories are shaped or changed by time or in modern life? 

You know, it’s a bit of a strange example but something I think about often: can you remember the route you took to play with your friends as a four year old? Can you draw it on a map? The reason I ask is because I was surprised that so many of the older people I spoke to had such intact memories of that time. If I gave them a piece of paper they could draw and explain exactly where a particular tree or a path or a stall was, and they had such an accurate memory of things from many decades earlier. As a child of the digital age, I absolutely haven’t inherited this skill of true visual remembering.

I feel like I took it upon myself to record memory in as nuanced and detailed a way as possible. Not just of the memory that was being shared but also the memory of our time together, of the textures of our interactions and light and how they speak or dress as much as what they’re actually saying. It really scares me that I will forget, it terrifies me that I can forget, that things are not recorded. I felt this most acutely when my grandfather died a year and a half ago. People kept talking about him, and I was sitting there with a pad and a pen. I wanted to write down everything people were saying about him, it scared me that I would miss out on some part of his  life. 

The role of memory is so enormous in my work, it is a lasting imprint. It speaks to a particular moment, a particular context that won’t be the same later. Because memory is not static like a photograph, it’s evolving, it’s growing, it’s permeated with newer memories or experiences or news or all kinds of information. Memory is very changeable, ephemeral and fragile, so I really fear losing these specific imprints and I try to record it as often and as truthfully as I can.

True, memory is so malleable and often hard to hold on to.  

It’s also so subjective. We have a reliance on things like photographs or objects which feel more permanent, but even with those memory isn’t the same. If I show you or your sibling the same photograph from many years ago, your memories of it will be different. So maybe the role of the writer is to capture these multiple layers of memory with as much care and nuance as possible. It scares me how much we accumulate and how little we remember of that accumulation. 

Linked to that, I wanted to know a bit more about your project called the Museum of Material Memory and how that came about. 

It was born out of my project around Partition, but then has grown beyond that. Me and a school friend of mine, Navdha, were both very interested in the personal histories around objects. Objects can be such a powerful receptacle for memory. So we created a crowdsourced digital archive that invites people to submit stories and memories of ordinary objects in their homes. We wanted to create an organic archive of material culture. In many south Asian homes, we often use a lot of things that are still quite historic, from textiles to jewellery to the kitchen to even language; so much is passed down from generations before us. 

We wanted to give a bit more context or space to things that we would see in museums because you might see an inkpot from 18th century India but it’s rare to actually know the story and the personal history around the specific object. A lot of our stories do reference documents or political information but we wanted to focus on the personal side of it, to show how these objects were used or preserved or loved, that a handprint existed on every object.

You’ve done so much work that is not just writing but also oral history, archiving and your art practice, as well as the Museum and so on. So how do you balance these different strands and separate them, if at all?

I started my career in the fine arts. I’m trained as a metal engraver. The only degrees I have are in metal engraving and art history. But everything I’ve done since has grown out of that in different ways. I think my writing practice is quite a visual practice. 

The thing I noticed that feels harder in literature than in the fine arts is the ability to be multi-disciplinary. You can draw from various sources and forms and disciplines and mediums. For instance, my undergraduate thesis was on the parallax view, which you study in physics but is also tied to how cameras work. So there was no limitation on the ability to draw from the scientific and the artistic side of things. 

Similarly, in my writing practice, I draw from all of these forms but I don’t see them as separate, and they feed off each other. We are multidisciplinary in our everyday lives, so why sequester ourselves into only a specific kind of art or history? That’s also why I didn’t feel it was strange to move from nonfiction to fiction because all of it comes down to creative making and drawing connections between things. I don’t feel that I’ve left the art studio behind because the way I write is very visual. I often think in images first and then that translates into my texts. Whether that’s the way sunlight comes through a window or a finger reaches out to touch something, I think it’s safe to say I think in images first. 

How does that translate in terms of oral histories or the kind of narrative nonfiction you’ve written, which is quite textured?

I think oral history is a response to the culture and history it originates from. The way I write, as I mentioned, draws upon the regional nuances of being Indian and the interviews I conduct, I also see them in terms of particular colours or details. But that is also a function of my interviews and not necessarily the only way. One of my great personal heroes is Svetlana Alexeivich, and her writing is absolutely pared down but it’s so deeply powerful. I think it just captures the crux of that moment and what is happening, and that’s a response to the culture she comes from, and the visuals that evokes are completely different. 

I think a big part of writing and oral history is framing. What we choose to keep or leave out is very similar to the framing of a photographer or an artist. Because my background came from the visual world and I never formally trained in writing, this process came about intuitively.

I don’t know if you’ve heard of synesthesia, but it’s something that people in the art world  were very attuned to but I haven’t seen as often in the literary community. It is when one sense triggers a response or experience in another, unrelated sense, like the perception of a taste when looking at a certain colour, or seeing a shape when listening to a sound. So one of the things I want to do in the Siyahi workshop is respond to different senses, whether that’s images or sounds or something else. In art school we used to do this thing called gesture drawing, where a model will sit and you draw an image in 30 seconds and then 1 minute then 5 minutes and so on, and you see the image develop and the details you’re able to bring in. 

I think that’s so important in terms of writing as well, to be able to look at things with depth. I remember this quote from a writer who was trained as an architect, who said the best training he received was simply to stare at buildings for long periods of time and really learn to observe. 

Absolutely, I think the power of observation is so vital. There’s a tiny book I really love, from the group called Oulipo in France. Georges Perec wrote a book called ‘An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris’, where he goes to the same place in Paris every day and sits and watches and writes about it until he has nothing else to notice. I think all writing or any practice has to draw upon this kind of process. If a story has come to you fully formed, there’s no evolution or joy of figuring out what you have to say. 

I think that’s a good transition into asking about your writing process and your journey from turning your practice into books. As someone who comes from a bookstore family and who initially studied art, when did you reach the point where you felt your work was ready to turn into a book? 

Well my first book, Remnants, was my  thesis project which I’d researched and prepared to show in a gallery space. But after defending my thesis, I still had all these hours of interviews and incredible photographs, and I realised that maybe I can write about it. So it came about quite organically from that. 

One of the downfalls of growing up in a bookshop is that you’re surrounded by great writers. You have access to the world, and I don’t think I recognized what an incredible privilege it was until later. You think you can write something, but you’re also intimidated by all of the writers you’ve read. 

Now I’ve come to the conclusion that in order to write meaningfully, you need to have great subject matter to drive you. Even if you have good language or insight, if you don’t have a subject that really drives you, it becomes very difficult. Remnants gave me that subject because I was so driven by curiosity and by wanting to excavate not just my family’s history, but a shared history across borders.

I also wanted to ask about the transition from nonfiction to fiction. Your latest book, The Book of Everlasting Things, is a novel. How did that come about? 

As I said earlier, a lot of the research I did for nonfiction is similar to the research you’d do for a novel, and I don’t necessarily see them as drastically different. The novel is a family story, which has been marketed in some ways as a romance book, although there are various kinds of love in it. When I began thinking of the story, I was thinking of two families who go through the monumental events of the two world wars, Partition and exile after that. So obviously, a lot of the context was present from my earlier research, but I knew that I wanted these two families to be a family of perfumers and calligraphers. So I had to research a lot of these things. 

I found people who were perfumers, spent years around them. I spent weeks at a time interviewing a perfumer in Paris, and it taught me so much about their way of living with smell, their way of understanding scent. Obviously, the science of perfume is really complex, but it’s not just about what happens in the lab but learning to see the world in a way that is different from your own perspective. To live with smell but not be assaulted by the many smells of the world. So my experiences with oral history and recording perfumers in Paris, in Delhi, in Kannauj, all of it helped create the landscape and details of the novel. It was the same with calligraphers, I spent a lot of time with them in old Delhi because it’s such a fascinating craft and one that has been passed down over generations. There are so many details like how you hold the kalam or a particular sound when you dip it in ink which you learn this way, and that’s what gives texture and reality to your writing. 

Similarly with the world wars, I interviewed various people or went through archives, and I studied these letters from the first World War. Nearly a million and a half Indians fought for the British on various fronts, and in the first few weeks alone in France, there were something like fifteen thousand letters per week being sent back home, and there is so much material that we rarely hear about. The emotions of these letters, their assumptions about the war. So the research for my novel was  similar to the kind of research I’ve always done for nonfiction, even if the writing process itself was a bit different. 

That’s very intensive. What about writing schedules and process? Do you create an outline? Are you a planner? Do you write daily? 

Well, when I’m writing nonfiction, it’s usually based on interviews and for that I usually like to follow the transcript and work with how it flows. With fiction, it was a bit different but I am a plotter. I do need to largely know what happens before I start writing. Sometimes I will plot out entire scenes, but even if I don’t do it fully, I do need to frame things first before getting into the scenes. I’m envious of writers who can just do it intuitively, but that’s not my personality. 

When I’m in the midst of a project, time becomes meaningless. I will write all day, sometimes all night, I will dream about the book. When you dream about a book is when you know you’re really in it. I make a lot of voice notes to put down thoughts that I have or things I just think of for a particular scene. I write first by hand and then transcribe them into a document. I don’t really have to write x number of words a day but I like to get immersed into a project. 

Okay, a final few things I wanted to ask about. Could you share some major influences or books you’ve enjoyed recently?

As I mentioned, Svetlana Alexeivich has had a profound impact. I also really like Anuradha Roy’s writing. I like Ritu Menon’s work a lot, and often go back to it because of the links with Partition but also because of the texture of her writing. I read this book a few years ago, by David Grossman, called More than I Love My Life. I think about that book a lot because it has multiple generations, complex family histories and war trauma, it also has cinematography because the character is a filmmaker recording her father, and that’s definitely a book I’ve learned from. This morning I was reading this book called Radio for the Millions by Isabel Huacuja Alonso, which has a section about radio broadcasts during the 1965 war from both sides of the border that felt very relevant in the current climate. 

The final thing I wanted to ask you about was the Siyahi Retreats next month. What are you planning for them and what are you most looking forward to?

Well I’m really looking forward to learning, to be honest. That sounds weird to say as an instructor but I think I always enjoy the collaboration and I’m so excited to see how the writers have developed their own work. I’m excited to translate some of the artistic and sensorial exercises into the writing world, and I think that’s a great way to bring texture into writing. 

***

Aanchal Malhotra is an oral historian and writer from New Delhi, India. She is the author of two books of nonfiction and a novel, and co-founder of the Museum of Material Memory, a crowd-sourced digital repository tracing family histories and social ethnography through heirlooms, collectibles and antiques from the Indian subcontinent. 

Abhay Puri is a writer and founding editor of Hammock Magazine.

Siyahi has curated two workshops this summer as their inaugural Writers’ Retreats. Chapter One (26 May to 2 June) is about Crafting Unforgettable Romantic Stories. Chapter Two (16 to 30 June) is titled the Art of Storytelling. Learn more about the retreats here.