This project is a part of a larger research study called, Looking Back, Informing the Future – The 1947 Partition of British India.
Goals of the Partition Stories Project:
- Preserve and enrich the historical knowledge of Partition in crowd proportions,
- Discover the different yet merging perspectives of the largest migration in history,
- Analyze the past and prevailing rhetoric surrounding the Partition,
- Provide free access to the stories through the Harvard SAI Partition portal.
The project is being co-led by Karim Lakhani, Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, and Tarun Khanna, Director of the Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute at Harvard University; Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor, Harvard Business School.
The three month pilot phase included a collection of 350 stories from the sub-continent and United States. The preliminary analysis can be viewed in Professor Khanna’s presentation at the World Economic Forum in China, this summer.
The project hopes to contribute to the scholarship around the events that led to the largest involuntary migration in recent history. In addition, it will inform scholarship about, and policies related to, other such societal schisms, subsequent to that time, and those occurring today.
We aim to collect stories, reflections, memories, or experiences through crowdsourcing as well as through an online survey.