Book Talk: The 1947 Partition of British India: Forced Migration and its Reverberations
in collaboration with the Partition Museum, Amritsar
Tuesday, October 11, 2022 | 6:30 pm to 8:00 pm IST
Venue: The Partition Museum, Town Hall, Amritsar
The 1947 Partition of British India remains the largest instance of forced migration in the recorded human history. Over 75 years on, the partition continues to be central to modern identity in the Indian subcontinent. Etched painfully onto regional consciousness, it influences how the people and states of postcolonial South Asia envisage their past, present, and future.
In “The 1947 Partition of British India: Forced Migration and Its Reverberations”, faculty members from Harvard University under the aegis of Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, Harvard University brought together researchers from various disciplines from the three impacted countries — India, Pakistan and Bangladesh — to develop a nuanced understanding of the consequences of Partition and its impact on the people of the region. This discussion will mark the in-region release of this book on Partition and provides an opportunity to reflect on how this massive event has shaped the subcontinent’s cultural, economic, political and social dimensions including architecture, art, demographics, language, and music.
Jennifer Leaning (Senior Research Fellow at the Harvard FXB Center for Health and Human Rights and retired Professor of the Practice at Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health) and Kishwar Desai (Chair, The Arts And Cultural Heritage Trust, Partition Museum, Amritsar and Delhi) shall unpack the complexities of the far-reaching violent legacy of the Partition in conversation with Hitesh Hathi (Executive Director, Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute).
