The Partition Museum Reminded Me That India’s History Is Also My Family’s History

Before I visited the Partition Museum, I had a sense that all the years of self-erasure could be undone if I just heard, watched, read enough. Now I’m beginning to rethink that strategy.

This summer, after returning home to India for the first time since going to college in the States, I decided to take a trip around the country. Having traveled around Europe alone for a whole semester abroad, I felt a great sense of duty to practice my newfound independence back home.

That’s what I told everyone. But the real reason I wanted to travel around India was something I couldn’t quite admit out loud, even to myself. Four years in the States had left me hollow, haunted by a feeling of rootlessness. I needed to feel connected to the place I had left, needed to find answers to questions that leaving home had forced me to ask. I knew that this would require a lot more digging than my cushy life in the elite circles of New Delhi would allow me to do.

Amritsar was the logical choice for my first weekend away. A cultural Mecca for Sikhs that was still reassuringly similar to Delhi, it was a warm-up for all the longer trips I imagined myself taking. The fact that I had family there and that it was close to home contributed to the feeling that I was “safe.”

Amritsar is only a six-hour train journey away from Delhi. Or so they tell you. In truth, the cheaper the train, the longer your journey is likely to be. I naively took the cheapest train and arrived a full five hours later than I was supposed to. My plans to see the Wagah-Attari border ceremony, during which the flags of India and Pakistan are simultaneously lowered in a choreographed drill at sunset, were totally derailed. It was far too late to find a good seat among the throngs that frequent the border every evening.

It was in college when I first read about Amritsar’s Partition Museum, the only physical archive of artifacts from the 1947 division of India and Pakistan. The partition of the two countries is the largest documented migration in human history, having displaced an approximately 14 million Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs on both sides of the border. Orchestrated by the British as part of the “Divide and Rule” strategy that exploited the religious divide between Hindus and Muslims to quash anti-British solidarity, the partition was a chaotic and almost entirely unplanned affair.

Cyril Radcliffe, the barrister brought in by the British to slice the subcontinent up into India and Pakistan, had never even set foot in India before. The final boundaries, drawn up by this total outsider in a rushed five weeks, were kept secret from Indian leaders until two days before the actual partition. Consequently, when it actually hit, many on either side of the border had to literally grab a suitcase and leave overnight.

Since my own grandparents had migrated from what is now Pakistan to India during partition, the museum had an obvious allure to it. But Amritsar’s cultural history is so vast that, with age-old tourist spots like Jallianwala Bagh, The Golden Temple, Hall Bazaar, and the Wagah-Attari border on the menu, the museum hadn’t even come close to making the cut.

After spending twelve hours between stations and trains however, my aspirational agenda wavered. I was ready to head to my Airbnb, order some amritsari kulcha and call it a night. But with a few hours to kill before sundown and a determination to fit in as much soul-searching as I could, I ended up at the museum. Though it was an afterthought, my trip to the museum would become the most significant experience of my year.

Housed in Amritsar’s Town Hall, a formidable nineteenth-century sandstone structure, you get the sense that the museum will be a grand affair. Walking in, you are immediately dispelled of that notion. Walls lined with maps of undivided India, newspaper cutouts from the 1940s, and grainy grayscale photographs make you feel like you’ve gone back in time. The space is deeply intimate, with a fireplace and lamps that make it feel less like a museum and more like a home. And it is, in a sense. The museum is the closest thing to an ancestral home for families whose ancestors left all their earthly possessions on the other side of the border.

The partition has undergone years of deliberate sanitization. Our history books downplay the violence of partition and our families choose to ignore its traumas to “get on with life.” This historical forgetting has only deepened as we move further and further towards a new modernity wrapped up in visions of the “west.”

Maybe that’s why, when I walked through the museum, the intimacy and immediacy of the experience was unnerving. I couldn’t place it, but I was very aware that being here, this physically close to the trauma, was nothing like reading about the British’s “Divide and Rule” policy or reciting the number of people who had been displaced. This felt real in a way that pierced the layers of denial I had grown up with.

For a long time, this is all I could piece together of partition:

My dad saying, “I wish we knew where we came from.”

A house somewhere, on some street of Lahore, where my grandparents once lived. Or maybe it is no longer a house; I wouldn’t know.

Feeling nothing about Pakistan. Always knowing I was supposed to either hate it or to very vocally profess my solidarity with the other side. But, despite my intense investment in having an opinion, I never quite knew how to feel about Pakistan.

A book of Urdu poetry whose words we cannot access since Dada, my granddad, died.

A black-and-white picture in my political science textbook of women at refugee camps captioned “women always carried daggers and knives on them so they could kill themselves before being raped.”

Everything I had was intangible. For most of my life, that was enough.

Then I went to college, a white preppy liberal arts college in New England. Like all the other international students, I was subjected to “the questions.”

“I wish we knew where we came from.”

The questions are an inquisition designed by white people to remind people from other parts of the world that they are and will always remain other. It ranges from “Do you like our culture?” to “How is your English so good?” to, the overused “Where are you from?” laced with the implication that you couldn’t possibly be from here. The questions are seemingly innocuous, crafted so that any discomfort makes you appear oversensitive. Yet they perform that crucial role of pushing the new immigrant towards a forked path where unbelonging and assimilation are the only two options.

This was not the America I had imagined while growing up in a society that fetishized the freedom and inclusiveness of the west. In my head, an American college campus would allow me to escape the mediocrity of the purported third world. Like so much of the urban upper-middle class youth in India, I had been exposed to the “west” primarily through Friends, Pretty Little Liars, and Gossip Girl. To us, America was a place where girls wore tank tops and drank and gave blowjobs when they were thirteen. The “west” was where doing these things was OK. It was where the crop of men who fueled our adolescent fantasies lived: Ian Somerhalder, Zac Efron, Chace Crawford. It was a space of freedom, of desire.

Growing up so socialized in this environment, I would spend hours trying to mimic the way people in the “west” dressed, ate, spoke. I refused steadfastly to wear Indian clothes unless I absolutely had to. I did my best to avoid speaking Hindi or Telugu or any of the languages I had grown up around.

And I wasn’t alone. Our societal obsession with whiteness and the western world was everywhere—in skin-whitening “fairness” creams, in posters in villages advertising hair salons using Jennifer Aniston’s face, in the aspiration of an Ivy League education. Since aspiration to whiteness was so normalized, I was completely blind to the pervasive othering that haunts international students on mostly white college campuses. I had an image of myself as part of a group of sexually liberated, artsy white hipsters, smoking, listening to edgy music, and spending hours doing nothing in gentrified coffee houses.

For most of my first semester, I lived in pursuit of this fantasy. I kept determinedly away from the other South Asians on campus, joined clubs that I had no interest in to “branch out,” went to almost exclusively white parties with lecherous men and cliquey women. Soon, I realized my biggest asset in assimilation was my exoticness and began to play up the glittery bits of being Indian—spices, weddings, elephants—while quashing anything that didn’t fit the narrative of Indianness that was deemed desirable.

This quickly became exhausting. Once the facade of multiculturalism advertised in brochures sent out by colleges pre-admission fell away, the world around me became much more hostile. White men at frats would frequently try to guess my ethnicity, and almost as frequently, guess it wrong. Girls in my dorm would act bewildered by my not wanting to watch Scandal or not knowing what guacamole was. It was as if they didn’t know what to say to someone whose points of reference didn’t align exactly with their own. I found myself having to explain my background in every conversation I had, to justify my presence on this campus.

Often, I hated myself. I hated how different I was from the norm. Then I hated that feeling of self-loathing. I started reading Fanon and Bhabha and Said’s writing on postcolonial inferiority complexes for classes and felt stupid for wanting to belong. But a lifetime of conditioning made it difficult to see myself as anything but white-adjacent. I found myself bouncing between worlds: the one I left to be somewhere “better,” and the one I was realizing was a lie constructed by glossy pop culture visuals. The disillusionment was alienating.

I began to play up the glittery bits of being Indian—spices, weddings, elephants—while quashing anything that didn’t fit the narrative of Indianness that was deemed desirable.

Sophomore spring, I made a Pakistani friend, Noor. We both ended up on a spring break trip that neither of us had intended to join. We were dragged together by a shared dislike of what constituted the rest of our group’s spring break. While the others went to nightclubs, she taught me how to cook eggs and I taught her how to use eyeshadow. We bonded over a shared lack of belonging and talked and talked like we’d never been heard before. Noor was assimilated enough to speak English with a slight American accent, but Pakistani enough to call herself out on it when she did.

She had a habit of categorizing things as desi. Eating frozen grapes was desi. Washing dishes in a bathroom sink was desi. Incessant laughter was desi. To be desi is, literally, to be “from the homeland.” It’s a term that South Asians use to create a sense of belonging on the cultural map. Desiness is difficult to define through existing terms or parallels. It isn’t charged with the resistance that animates Black or Latinx solidarity, but it has the same binding feature. It has no one defining symbol or quality, but South Asians, both in the motherland and the diaspora, can recognize it when they come in contact with another desi. When I met Noor, I recognized desiness.

Unlike me, Noor grew up on a diet of Urdu poetry and Pakistani pride. Her longing for markers of home was more explicit, more centered. She listened to songs by Pakistani bands and cooked anday aloo and daal and had desi clothes set aside for Diwali. Being with her gave me an identity. I started catching up on Bollywood films everyone had watched, started speaking Hindi on the phone with my parents. I began reading about Punjabi poets who documented the partition and felt an inexplicable pride when Priyanka Chopra “made it” abroad. I began to de-assimilate.

Desi identity is intimately connected to the trauma of partition, what Dominick La’Capra terms a “founding trauma.” Your proximity to the great wound in your people’s history defines how much you belong to the community. In the context of South Asia, this means that the more you know about partition, the more desi you feel.

All desis know the facts:

Partition was the single greatest migration in human history to date.

Partition was a cataclysmic outpouring of violence ushered in by the British’s arbitrary border creation in the division of undivided India into a Hindu and Muslim state.

Partition was burning trains and raped women and the death of over a million people in episodes of collective madness.

But there’s knowing partition and then there’s knowing partition.

It was at the museum that I realized that for all I had read, for all the facts I could spout, I had never really known partition. It wasn’t until I walked by an unremarkable black trunk that I realized why the intimacy of the space made me so uncomfortable.

Just an aluminum box, solid and dull, it was arguably one of the least interesting artifacts in the museum. Except that I recognized it from my grandparents’ living room, where for so long it had been used as a makeshift couch. It wasn’t the same make or even the same color, but it was about the same size, made of the same material, and had the same worn quality that takes you back to an era when bulkiness was in fashion.

The trunk was placed in an exhibit on the horrors of partition. A little TV nearby told the story of a Hindu girl who hid in a house in Pakistan for over a week before being found and transported to the other side. A brick wall on the other side featured a plaque documented the death of 200,000 to 2,000,000 people killed in communal violence in Punjab. These were stories I had read versions of over and over. Then there was the trunk.

Standing in front of it, something clicked. All the seemingly disparate stories blended into something coherent, tangible. I could see Dada and Dadi walking across the border, young and terrified. I could see them boarding a train, all their earthly possessions stuffed into one unwieldy aluminum box, with no idea whether they’d come out alive on the other side of the border.

So much of what I had taken for granted—my home, my family, my own life—started to feel deeply fragile, hanging on a thread that one misstep, one risky move, could have sliced in half. I spent the next hour at the museum openly sobbing for all that I now knew and for all that I would never know.

Before I visited the Partition Museum, I had a sense that all the years of self-erasure, years of refusing to speak Hindi, of distancing myself from my roots, could be undone if I just heard, watched, read enough. Now I’m beginning to rethink that strategy.

A lot of the museum told me things I already knew. But it was the little things, the copper pot, the undivided India currency, the trunk that could just as easily have been my grandparents’, that told me what I didn’t: that this wasn’t just a story, it was mine.

Walking through the museum reminded me that not only was this loss my loss, but that I also still have a massive cultural inheritance to connect me to my roots. It isn’t an inheritance that comes easily or one that is just handed down from birth, but it is one that embracing my desiness is slowly, painstakingly allowing me to reclaim.

A month after my trip to Amritsar, I signed up for a Farsi class to learn the Nastaliq script common to both Farsi and Urdu. Tracing the letters onto blank paper each weekend, I would marvel at how similar they were to the words in Dada’s poetry book.

Six months later, when I look at those letters, already so much less foreign than before, I feel like I’m writing myself into our shared history, reclaiming myself one scrawled alif at a time.