Partition Postmemory: “Someone Should Know”

“Someone should know, something should go on,” said my friend Nitin, when I asked him why partition should be remembered. However, he has not discussed his own partition heritage with his children, and even though they know it in fragments, he does not believe they have any interest in learning more. His own relationship to partition history did not really begin until the late age of forty-two when he learned from his uncle for the very first time about the traumatic flight of his father’s family from Pakistan to India and their narrow escape as partition violence was spreading in North India. Nitin’s feeling about his children’s distance from partition memory is, ironically, what most partition migrants feel about his and my generation—that we know very little about the partition, that our parents’ lives were too busy to allow them time and space to share their memories with us, and that these memories were too painful and difficult a topic of discussion.