Collecting Memory: The 1947 Berkeley Partition Archive

This chapter provides a critical analysis of the 1947 Partition Archive in Berkeley, which was created in 2010 with the goal of collecting and archiving 10,000 survivor testimonies with the help of citizen historians in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. As one of the first researchers to visit the archive, study its audio-visual recordings, and examine its methods, I explore the logic of “collecting” testimonies of historical traumas, how the collection enables a greater understanding of the partition for present generations, and the implication of its representation of multiple regions, ethnicities, classes, and cultural groups from South Asia.