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The history of all four of my grandparents can be traced back to what is now Pakistan. But the stories of their migrations to India due to the partition of British India in August 1947 or their rehabilitation in refugee camps thereafter have never been told. Like many of their generation, they practiced a determined silence, by choice or lack thereof, where I hardly remember hearing the word growing up. For the most part, the politics of partitioning a subcontinent and the colossal data of migration, displacement and death have largely overshadowed the individuality of the witness, their particular stories, their extraordinary losses.
In 2013, a conversation with my maternal ancestor drew me into this largely silent family history, as well as a new career. At the time, I was back in New Delhi on sabbatical from my graduation in Montreal, where I was studying to be a traditional printer. The conversation, driven by two objects of the age – a court and a yardstick – took us across the man-made border between India and Pakistan and back in time to the time of Partition. The items were transported by his family from Lahore to Amritsar and further to Delhi.
As he caressed their metal surfaces, he offered me memories of his childhood in Lahore, the lanes where he rode his bicycle, or the clothes shop his grandfather owned in the Anarkali bazaar, and admitted that sometimes in his dreams he might return to Lahore in a way that the realities and geopolitics of the current world may never allow. That birthplace, Lahore – now in Pakistan, the country across the border – had become a space of dreams.
Guided by our conversation, I embarked on what would become a decade-long research project in the subcontinent and its diaspora, interviewing multiple generations of families affected by partition, delving into an outdated trauma that had found ways to persist even decades later. late. This work culminated in the writing of two oral history books, Remains of a partition (2019) published in South Asia as Remnants of a breakup (2017), and In the language of remembering (2022), which together examine human history and the long-term, cross-border, multi-generational legacy of the Divide.
Listening to people’s stories is a privilege, but it can consume your life very quickly.
But even before the first book was published, I had started thinking about a novel that involved Separation. By then I had spent several intense years recording interviews, a process not without its difficulties, and gradually transformed myself from visual artist to oral historian. The studio was soon abandoned as, although not formally trained in the discipline, I embraced oral history, recording, transcribing, translating, interpreting as diverse an archive of testimonies as possible. I heard stories of unimaginable violence, but along with them were extraordinary stories of courage, sacrifice, endurance, hope, love, separation, reunion, recovery and longing.
Few historical novelists have the skills of a professional historian or access to primary material and archives. But for an event like Partition, where traditional means of storytelling failed to do justice to the depth of historical trauma, oral testimonies relying on human memory—with all their complexities, flaws, even contradictions—proved to be the richest archive.
Years of recording other people’s lives have made me an empathetic writer, but I’ve never considered myself an imaginative writer. How do you start a novel? Why was I drawn to the idea of fiction? What were the limitations of nonfiction, if any, that I felt could be met by fiction? What happens to language when it moves from non-fiction to fiction? These were the questions I asked as I continued to write non-fiction, but I began to draw a skeleton of what would become The Book of Eternal Things.
I wish there was another way to say this, but the sheer number of interviews, the wide-ranging experiences of trauma, and the accumulated sadness of others had also begun to weigh on me. There was a density of pain in these memories—many of which had been spoken for the first time since 1947—that imposed upon me the responsibility to do justice to each telling. Listening to people’s stories is a privilege, but it can consume your life very quickly. During these times, the novel became my respite.
There was something liberating about the fiction form—I could construct and reconstruct the stories of my characters, whereas in nonfiction I could only transcribe and interpret them, never changing the testimony I was receiving. I read somewhere that Hilary Mantel once said that she tries to make “fiction flexible so that it bends around the facts as we have them.” Maybe I was trying to do the opposite. A big part of my transition from historian to novelist was allowing myself to create space in the story, making it flexible enough and creating an opening to accommodate fictional characters, and in turn making them real enough to count as a natural part of this story.
The real problem, however, was whether I knew how to write a novel. I wasn’t interested in creating a world, and to be honest, I wasn’t that inventive. Even though the time period of my novel was the same as in non-fiction, the smallest things that served as obstacles were taken for granted during my interviews – the color of the walls, the shape of a room, the vastness of a field, and the cultures, that grow in it, the light falling on my interviewee, their clothes, what objects they hold, what language they speak and whether they will move between different languages, the stones in the yard, the patterns on their carpets or the type of ceiling fan in their homes.
I could invent the thoughts, dreams and inner desires of my characters, their personal politics and even the wider social landscape they occupied, but the details of how a scene was to be constructed that was always available to me or provided through interviews. were absent. And when it came to inserting these details through research, how much was too much? How accurate did every day, every incident, every newspaper headline, every radio broadcast have to be?
I don’t think I could have written this novel without the years I spent writing oral history.
Moreover, the structure of a nonfiction manuscript—at least the bones—doesn’t really change that much from start to finish, especially when the primary source material is oral testimony. I may move parts, but the essence of the book will remain determined by the interviews I was able to collect during field research. With fiction, however, it was hard to predict whether what I started with as an idea would even end up on the pages of my final novel.
Through the processes of drafting, writing, editing, thinking, dreaming, debating, doubting, rewriting, the characters claimed space, gained voice, gained agency, contradicted their own best interests—albeit all through my pen—in a way that which was a rare occurrence in the kind of narrative nonfiction I wrote.
But ultimately, I don’t think I could have written this novel without the years I spent writing oral history. When I read the manuscript of The Book of Eternal Things, I try to make sense of exactly how all the pieces fit together—for example, I remember which dialogue about falling in love was spoken when and where by which interviewee in real life, or how scenes of student protests against Partition were told to me by someone who was there, or how my characters’ home looked like my grandmother’s home, which burned down in the fire of 1947. This book could only have been written by diving into the subject of separation as deeply and intimately as I have.
My occupation as a writer, in whatever genre, has largely been about memory—writing it down and preserving it. It was silence that made me an oral historian, and sensory curiosity that made me a novelist. But in the end, I feel like it’s not that different to write about my fictional characters than it is to write about one of my interviewees. The care and investment in each of them is the same. Neither my research methodology nor my writing style are that different. What is different is the mindset – a change in the intent of why a story should be written. But fundamentally, both of my forms of writing feel like forms of extraction. A desire to place the individual and the personal within the framework of the collective or the political; they want to understand, introspect and experience the story from within.
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The Book of Eternal Things by Aanchal Malhotra is available from Flatiron Books, an imprint of Macmillan.
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