Episode 3

Why was the psychological impact of the Partition of India overlooked?

Daljeet: This podcast contains themes that some listeners may find upsetting - listener discretion is advised. Hello and welcome to Spoken Truth to Power, funded by Arts Council England. I'm your host, Daljeet, and today I’ll be speaking with Professor of History, Sarah Ansari, who teaches at Royal Holloway University of London.

Sarah is a historian of south Asia's recent past, and her research interest is focused on the history of the province of Sindh and mega port of Karachi. She's also interested in exploring the lives of women in south Asia in her work. She has co-authored the book ‘Boundaries of Belonging: Localities, Citizenship and Rights in India and Pakistan’ with William Gould. Sarah is currently working to complete a concise history of Pakistan for Cambridge University Press, and she's also working on another project, which will explore the lives of Muslim women in different societies over the last 200 years.

We're talking today because Sarah has a deep academic interest in the 1947 partition of India. She’s been particularly interested in understanding the impact that the partition had on ordinary people's lives, both in the immediate aftermath and over the long-term. For Sarah, partition is British history, and she's actively involved in the campaign to teach partition in schools in the UK, which in many ways marked the beginning of the end of Britain's global empire.

Daljeet: Hello, Sarah.

Sarah: Hi, Daljeet.

Daljeet: How are you doing today? Thank you so much for taking the time out from your busy schedule to talk with me because I know you're doing online teaching and all of that. How’s that going?

Sarah: Well, it is busy, but I think we seem to have cracked it, my university, when it comes to online teaching. So it's not as bad as it seemed like it was going to be to start with! So, yes, I'm positive, I'm upbeat.

Daljeet: Fantastic. We're recording, we’ll just tell our listeners, we're recording still in the middle of the third lockdown. It's kind of mid-Feb. So you've been teaching for a long time, haven't you? So I'm hoping, we're all hoping, we're going to get out soon and start doing some things which we used to do. And for you, I think that will mean going back to campus to teach? Hopefully a little bit, at least.

Sarah: Yes, we're hoping, we're keeping our fingers very much crossed that in the summer term we’ll be back on campus.

Daljeet: Good luck. It's a beautiful campus, I went there a few years ago and it's just such a stunning campus. It's a shame it's not being used. I just wanted to share some more context about how Sarah and I know each other. In 2017 my company, Culture Studio, and Sarah both collaborated with a youth organization in Slough called Aik Saath to commemorate seventy years of India’s partition. We worked on an oral history project, which was funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, that captured the experience of women who had lived through partition and had subsequently settled in and around Slough. It was an important piece of work because women's memories have tended to be kept under wraps, thanks to enduring issues of shame and honor. If you would like to check out the project, it's still up at partitionwomenvoices.com, and you can check out the podcast website spokentruthpowerpodcast.com for links to other interesting partition related projects that Sarah has worked on.

Okay. Sarah and I will be talking today about the partition of India, which took place in 1947, and discussing basically how big historical events like that have shaped the collective psyche of people. So, how did that shape the collective psyche of south Asians across the world today? Obviously Sarah is not a psychologist, she's a historian. So we'll be talking about the history and the background of things and really discussing what was partition? What happened? What impact did that have on human beings?

Sarah has kindly introduced me to a fantastic book called ‘The Psychological Impact of the Partition of India’. It was published in 2018, it’s edited by Sanjeev Jain and Alok Sarin. I found it really helpful Sarah because at the moment in this fast paced social media, this age, especially because we're at home, I think a lot of people are getting a lot of our insight from these long Twitter threads. So it was nice to kind of sit and explore the subject of a partition using a good old fashioned book, so thank you so much for that. And we'll be using this book today and some of the themes which are raised in the book to kind of guide our discussion.

This book talks about the role of colonialism, empire, and its role in shaping the narrative about how we perceive partition related trauma. There's information here about European conscience versus the native mind - could you shed some more light on that?

Sarah: I think just to make one more point on that - yes, this is an old fashioned book, but I think it's a very pioneering book because I think, as we both appreciate, there isn't that much around that's actually written on, you know, the psychological impact of partition. And as you say this book, in its broader discussion, takes us back, I suppose, at different points to the colonial period. And is, I suppose again, looking to assess what the fallout from that was, in terms of how it shaped that narrative, European conscience versus native mind.

I suppose the way I would sum up my response to that is that we have to be aware that colonial rule, the process of colonial rule, the sort of the methods let's say deployed by colonial rulers, very often sought to make sense from their perspective of local people by stereotyping them, by fitting them into particular compartments, let's say, within society. I think there was certainly a tendency on the part of the colonial system to almost see the minds of so-called natives as being something distinct and different from the more individualized kind of European consciousness that people by the late 19th century were starting to recognize as part and parcel of what made up people as humans, as human beings.

Daljeet: Yeah, it's really interesting because I mean, the book does really talk in depth about how the therapists in India at the time, a lot of their reference points were from Germany, especially the Holocaust, when they were looking at trauma, but they weren't, no one was really talking about partition. They talk in the book about how when they've all got together and had meetings, they're all discussing their own individual experiences of partition and how their families are affected, yet the topic being discussed at the actual seminar was never partition itself. So, they've kind of raised that.

First of all, the partition of India, there are probably listeners who don't really know what happened around that time. Could you give us a brief description? What actually happened?

Sarah: I'll do my best. So independence does take place in British India in the summer of 1947, but woven into the decisions that were made was, by very late in the day, an agreement to divide that territory into two separate independent states. So India on the one hand, and this new idea of a Pakistan on the other, that was to be the so-called Homeland for Indian Muslims. Now this decision was the outcome of, you know, decades worth of developments that we don't have time to go into here. But essentially what we have to recognize is that at the moment when India achieved its freedom – and by India, I mean the whole of the British controlled south Asia - that freedom took the form of two separate states that, although they needn’t necessarily had been antagonistic, tended to be antagonistic. So partition is the kind of the flip side, let's call it, not the downside of independence, but it's certainly complicated, that story. What it meant was that key provinces in British India, so Punjab on the one hand and Bengal on the other, also ended up divided. I think listeners may well appreciate that there's Punjab in both India and Pakistan today, and there is Bengal split between two states. Because of this partitioning, this division of territory, the borders that were drawn on the map in 1947, and because of all the uncertainty associated with this process that had produced growing levels of violence between communities, communal violence, as it's known, the decision to partition the sub-continent triggered enormous upheaval, huge population displacement as millions of ordinary people move from one new country to the other.

So many Muslims moved from what was becoming independent India to Pakistan, and likewise, many Hindus and Sikhs moved from what was becoming Pakistan to India. So maybe as many as 14 million people moved over time, it didn't all happen literally overnight, maybe as many as 14 million people moved and together with that, there were casualties in the form of people dying, not necessarily just as a result of communal violence, but you know, when you get displacement on that scale, you get disease, you get other kinds of life-threatening developments. So, maybe as many as a million people died thanks to partition. It was a hugely disruptive and painful event in the recent history of south Asia and the map of south Asia today wouldn't be, or wouldn't look like it does, if partition hadn't taken place at the same time that independence did.

Daljeet: For me, I mean, partition, in terms of being discussed, I’ve only become aware of it in the last, I'd say five years. It's not taught in British history. I don't know how much it’s covered in Indian history books. I don't know the answer to that. So it was always about, you know, I have spent some time in India, it was always about celebrating independence.

And on the 14th we knew it was Pakistan’s independence, 14th of August, and 15th was India's independence. It's when the 70th anniversary came, that was the first time I realized actually we are celebrating independence, but we don't commemorate partition in the same way, you know, the Holocaust rightly so is commemorated, and it's remembered, and it's talked about. That was the first time I thought, ‘oh God’, I realised that there was a huge price to pay for independence and, why did I not know this before? And then when we worked with the women, I realized, you know, I sat with them before the interviews began and I spend time with them and it was really traumatic. It was really traumatic listening to their stories, and I know that partition effected my family, but no one ever spoke about partition. No-one still has, my grandmother, my paternal grandmother, has passed away. All of my grandparents have passed away, so I'm never going to hear it from them. We did move from the Pakistan side, my family originally into the India side, but I have not a single story being told. And yet we are the community where, South Asians where oral history, oral storytelling traditions are supposed to be really strong, and somehow these stories just didn't reach us. It wasn't until really important programs like Anita Rani’s programme on the BBC that people like me had their eyes opened up. I was very fortunate to, along with you and Aik Saath, to work on that project.

So I suppose it stayed with me, that kind of question of ‘what effect did it have?’, but it seems like there was two reasons why partition was framed the way it was. One was that colonial narrative of that native mind versus the European conscience, and the native Indian as part of a particular territory or a particular region and associated with a particular language. Whereas the European mind looked at a more independent entity in terms of the mind.

Sarah: Yes. I take the same points away as you do. I think what we have to, I suppose, acknowledge is that August 1947 marked lots of new beginnings for that part of the world. So it's, for me, not that surprising that there's a focus on those new starts. So, India celebrating its independence. For Pakistan, it's also a new beginning, isn't it? East Pakistan becomes Bangladesh – well, it’s a slightly different story there because, in view of later developments when Bangladesh itself becomes a separate state in 1971, there's probably a tendency to, not to gloss over but to focus more attention on the new beginning that is associated with the start of the 1970s.

So I think that that's something we have to, we have to factor in. So yes, this idea of the partitioning of minds, this lack of readiness to discuss the impact that partition had on those same minds, whether it's the ordinary families talking about their experiences, whether it's the, I suppose, the mental health discourse that emerges in different parts of south Asia after independence. Either way, yes, there seems to be this blind spot. I agree. I agree that there's an awful lot to unpick here and it's only just beginning. The problem is as you mentioned earlier, the people who directly lived through partition are becoming far fewer, just because of the passage of time, we're going to have to find ways of unpicking the past that can't necessarily turn to these individuals who were firsthand witnesses of what happened back in 1947.

Daljeet: Yeah, it’s so sad, isn't it? Like that’s my own family, anyone that could have directly told me what happened, never did. I don't even think my grandparents spoke to their own son, which was my Dad. So literally there's just a vacuum of information and I'm just now piecing it together. You know, I've very recently found out, I didn't even know we were from, originally from the Pakistan side, that's something I've literally found out last year and these snippets of information come out and you just, and it changes your whole concept of who you are and your identity and it's kind of mind-boggling. I mean, for me, I would like to go on that journey and explore and investigate, and I suppose the only way to do it, if people from that generation are passing away is to go on that journey, you know, ourselves within our own families and see what we can find because these are really important stories, aren't they?

And the other thing is, I mean, I'm quite interested in looking at - the book talks a lot about Holocaust and how it's commemorated in a correct way and how it actually shaped psychiatry in the West, and how partition obviously just didn't have that effect. No one spoke about it. No one wrote about it. I don't know if you know much about that? How did the Holocaust shape psychiatry in the West?

Sarah: As I understand it, it didn't happen overnight. At least to begin with, obviously the focus was on how to deal with this, you know, large numbers of people who'd lived through the trauma of, either directly or indirectly, being caught up in the Nazi policies towards Jews.

So thanks to maybe the way in which psychiatry had been evolving in Western contexts, there was a greater awareness of the impact of individual trauma. In the context of colonial India, psychiatry really meant, or the history of psychiatry there, really meant the history of mental hospitals. So it will be about institutions, you know, the institutionalization of people deemed to be mentally unwell. And so it could be argued that in the south Asian context, the majority of trained medical experts hadn't got the same level of training as maybe people in the West had received by the time that the Second World War had happened. There was this issue of how to aid the recovery, individual and collective, of the people that had been caught up in that trauma.

Daljeet: Yep, absolutely. I think there's another thing which I took away from the book where they talk about what happens when you don't deal with things, when you don't talk about them? Where does that psychological debris - I love that word - where does that psychological debris go? What happens to it? And then they've, because the books have been written in 2018, they have linked it back to rising nationalism in various countries, including India. So they've kind of brought up this issue, and a lot of the issues which we're seeing in modern society at the moment, a lot of these issues are linked to unresolved issues from the past. So, that's something which they've brought up really well in the book.

Sarah: Yes, I agree.

Daljeet: In some ways, I think it goes back to your point of, these people from that generation are passing away, so how do we piece together information?

Sarah: Yeah, I mean, I would say that if we think about today, how much Holocaust education draws on the testimonies of people who - they've been collected over time, those people may no longer still be alive - but draws on the testimonies of people who were affected by it directly, indirectly. And there is that idea that it's important to talk, it's important to share, it's part of a healing process as opposed to a finger-pointing process. And I think that's one of these issues in relation to partition because of the frictions that developed in south Asia after independence, between either states or in some communities, that's also made it harder to talk about this in a way that is healing. It just, as you suggested, gets drawn into nationalist rhetoric or reinforcing kind of continuing division within the region. So, I mean, the Holocaust relatively speaking could be thought of as a little more straightforward to talk about.

Daljeet: Yeah, I was going to say clearer, clearer kind of enemy perpetrator. Whereas in this case it was all, everyone was kind of-

Sarah: Implicated in a way?

Daljeet: Yes! And it says here in the book, it says it really well, it says there were so many victims, but no one was guilty.

Sarah: There’s been some hugely inspiring programmes on television when the last big anniversary came around, and a lot of focus on the sharing of experiences that tend to be from the perspective of either people who are not, well, they’re seeing things through a kind of victims’ eyes. You know, the people at the receiving end of violence. And it takes, I think, a lot more courage, for people to think about it the other way around - how difficult that is is something we have to acknowledge.

Daljeet: When I first set out to do the partition work, and I was kind of trying to find people to interview, I was told off by an elderly lady in the Sikh temple. She was very firm and she said, ‘why do you want to bring all that up again?’, and that was one of my first encounters to kind of just being interested in the subject. There was an unbelievable amount of pain in a lot of people and that was really sad. I think somewhere there is that issue of not wanting to talk about your family if there are bad stories of people being perpetrators, that's one issue. But the other issue is this - actually not talking about has meant that those barriers are there.

Sarah: I agree with what you're saying maybe within families, within communities. To be fair to historians and other scholars from linked disciplines, there has been an interest in what happened to people, what people's experiences were from probably the late eighties onward. So, roughly the last 30 years or so, but it’s how much that academic focus gets out there and comes into the public consciousness. Because we can think of a book by Urvashi Butalia, who is really a feminist activist in India, I mean, she has a social science background, but she also was a publisher of women's books, a really well-respected publisher.

So she, plus more academic historians, started bringing out from the early nineties, focused on the human experience, the dilemmas of people who are both victim and perpetrator almost at the same time. But it's getting that awareness out to a broader public, which I think is still ongoing really, it hasn’t fully happened.

Daljeet: If there is academic work, it's about bringing it to public consciousness. One of the really important reasons for me why I think we need to understand, one of the reasons is kind of, again, it's been brought up in the book, but they're right here that sectarian and communal violence since 1947 has often triggered as a result of unfinished business of the partition.

They referenced violence in India, whether it's 1984, whether it's 1992, 1993, 2002, and they say that this may be due to failures to adequately engage with the psychic debris left behind after 1947, at the societal or the imaginative level they've said. And I just think that captures so much, so it is about, of course, finding out your own history. However, for me, it's also about how, until the narrative shifts, until it does come out, and we discuss more broadly and openly, then we will not be able to see the sequences.

Sarah: Yes, and I think something that is also very relevant is that we're talking about people. I mean, somebody like yourself, for instance, or, you know, many others who are now part of British society, I mean, they're not sitting in India, they're not sitting in Pakistan or Bangladesh and sort of grappling with the past and the things that, in a sense, everybody in that region shared because it's a shared history. It’s become part of the challenges that also face communities in this country as well. How to work back to that other place when you're now in this place, I think is an additional challenge.

Daljeet: I mean, we can’t finish this interview and not talk about women - because women were disproportionately affected by the violence of partition. And again, I will mention the book again, it’s ‘The Psychological Impact of the Partition of India’ edited by Sanjeev Jain and Alok Sarin. They’ve written that the abduction of women, gendered violence, rape, and murder, were traumatic and symbolic brutalizations of the other. In this book it’s really interesting, they look at gender and the trauma on women through the work of social workers Kamlabai Patel, Anis Kidwai and Sarabhai, who rescued abducted women of partition. I want you to just spend a few minutes talking about the types of male perpetrators, the social workers encountered, who were involved in the abduction and trafficking of women during partition, as it's this microcosm of the patriarchal south Asian society at the time. I'm sure there are factors that are still, you know, there in that society, but I had no idea about this recovery operation.

Sarah: You're right. I mean, the female so-called ‘social workers’ - this was the label was given to them - really stepped up during this period to seek to recover women who had been separated from their families. And as you say, there were Muslim women on the Indian side of the new border and there were non-Muslim women on the other side. Where they could, they identified them and in effect, went into rescue them, supported with police or military support, to go in and recover these women.

Something that interests historians in this whole story is what agency women in this predicament were given, because it seems from the records that we have that these recovered women, the women who were recovered, had very little choice over what was to happen to them next. So they would usually be sent across the border to the country that was deemed to be appropriate for them, so if they were Muslim, they would be sent to Pakistan, and if they were not Muslim – Hindu, Sikh - they would be sent to India.

This then created long-term problems of how they would fit into those new societies because, being blunt about it, families didn't always want them back. If they had a child, you know, they’d been abducted and then in a sense, married to somebody, whether against their will or willingly as a process of survival almost. If they had children or if they’d had a child, what did that mean from their family, their birth family’s point of view?

So it's not a story that just stops when these women have been recovered. It's something that for decades afterwards could blight their lives, and in the process of being recovered and ‘returned’ to the correct country, they could often have to leave their children behind.

Daljeet: I mean, I take on your point about the women and how much agency they had because they do talk quite in-depth about, there were lots of women who were just like, ‘we don't want you to do any good for us, just leave us alone, you don't know how life is for us’. They didn't want to be dictated to about what the right course of action should be for their lives.

I just want you to share with the listeners the eight categories that the social workers – Kamlabai Patel, Anis Kidwai and Sarabhai - they came up with eight categories of men. There was the village town bully, the white slave dealer, procurers for brothels, communal political organizations, the type that claims to be a victim, professional go betweeners, the fanatic and the humanitarian. And so what they've said about each one is that, for example, what they've said is that the way the women were essentially distributed – a really bad word, but that's the kind of language they're using - amongst the top officials who would end up with, you know, because there's colorism in south Asia, the fairer, beautiful women. So they were given those women and the rest were distributed amongst their staff, and these women were continuously trafficked around. Especially because the officials, they didn’t ever want to be caught in case there was a search in their property.

And then top of the list is for them, the influential protectors who work against the recovery of the women who are with highly placed individuals or someone under their protection, it just shows the dynamics of what's going on in the society in terms of the way it’s being justified.

Sarah: Yes, I mean, humans are incredibly good at that, trying to justify the unjustifiable. But I think again, because this is something that hasn't been talked about a huge amount, although obviously it does get discussed in academic literature, what we don't appreciate is that some of the earliest negotiations between these two new countries, India and Pakistan, took place in relation to what to do about these abducted women.

So there was that inter-dominion agreement in September ‘47 that you mentioned, but then later on at the end of the year, there's another one. A lot of what was being talked about, alongside dividing up, was women. I mean, women were being talked about a lot, but it’s taken us a long time to realise.

Daljeet: Yeah. Yeah. The other thing that this raises for me in my mind is I did watch a play - it was a part of SOAS and Tamasha Theatre’s scheme of work and they, someone created an audio play, and they actually brought out one of these stories in their play. I will have to find the reference and put it for the listeners later.

Yeah, it was essentially, the story was about the granddaughter discovering that the grandmother was a victim of rape and the rapist was her granddad, and she kind of finds this out on the death bed because her grandmother leaves a recording about her life. What it makes me then think is there's a lot of healing to be done amongst women because a lot of women would have only told women and these issues have not been discussed.

Having spoken to Rima Lamba, she has mentioned that when she does work with women, south Asian women, one of the things which comes up is ancestral themes and how it's shaping the newer generation, you know, the younger generation. It's kind of taken root in their behavior of women and their relationships with their children or their relationships with their husbands. I'm just curious about that.

Sarah: When you say that you make me think of, I suppose, a kind of scenario where, you know, imagine a woman she's alone in this new, strange, frightening kind of environment. She's maybe married into a family but she has none of her own family available to talk to.

Is she going to talk to her mother-in-law about this? Is she going to talk to her sisters-in-law about this? Probably not if there is this backstory. So, maybe for women in that category, there just isn’t a place or anyone to talk to until, maybe they have their own children or they have, you know, they've established in a way their own family or female relatives that they can talk to. Because I can't imagine a scenario where if you are married in what you've just been describing earlier, women abducted and then married off, even if it's being done with so-called honorable intentions, can you really go to that new family that you’re now married into about this, when in a way what you'll be doing is talking about is the wrong that they've done to you?

Daljeet: Absolutely. And where does that suppression go? It can't be good. I mean, I'm not a psychologist, but it can't be good for you. Also, a point that you've just said, you're very likely to talk about it only to a female relatives and what's happening then is it’s creating this vacuum and this communication gap between men and women, south Asian men and women, where I know for a fact that none of the men in my family know, you know, they know things happened, but there's never been a discussion about how bad it was for women. Then what it does, from my point of view, having seen it in my family, is it means there's just a lack of empathy for what these women had endured, and then I think patriarchy just kind of carries on and on because there's been no reckoning, no reflection, no conversation.

Sarah: But I think there is something that your thought does trigger in me. You know, patriarchy is a very complex phenomenon and there is the sort of side to it, which is sort of to suppress almost, to dismiss, but there's also a side to patriarchy which is to defend that idea of family honor. And I think the two are not totally the same, but they get very tangled up with each other.

There's also this idea perhaps built into a kind of patriarchal view that, it's not just that you don't recognize, or you don't acknowledge, but you don't want that side of things to be talked about because of the shame it could bring on your family through more discussion of what happens to its women folk.

Daljeet: It really is. It’s such a complex and multifaceted kind of issue. And I think the other thing is in terms of patriarchy is that, I've seen it myself that the women also internalize that patriarchy. So the lady that told me off for venturing into this territory and telling me off for even asking questions about it, is a symbol of that really. That's what it is, because they've internalized those issues of shame and honor and protecting your community. I think then you just kind of go round and round in a vicious cycle and things don't get talked about.

Sarah: I mean, I will say that my own mother-in-law, who is not alive anymore, but lived as a youngish woman through partition, she had children by then, but she was probably in her thirties. When she got towards the end of her life she would look back and be very nostalgic about what had existed on the other side of partition. So she would talk about her friends, you know, that came from different communities and then she would reminisce about other things. So although she would have been very aware of, I'm sure, this very dark and negative side, she would also think back to her female friends.

Daljeet: Yeah. The memories, the fond memories and nostalgia. I did come across, to be fair, I suppose my brains processed – because I was quite traumatized by it – it’s processed it so that I’ve forgotten that part but, yes, now you’ve triggered in me the memories of people talking very fondly about how the Sikhs and the Muslims would live together. The women would meet up on the rooftops because that’s how it is, open terraces, and they would bring food to one another and they would all go to one another’s weddings. It was a community.

Right, I really do want to talk about the work that you're currently doing around teaching partition history in schools. You're doing some work around Partition Commemoration Day, and you're also involved in south Asian Heritage Month, if I'm correct, which is, I think, led by Binita Kane? All of this, according to me, and I'm sure, according to everyone that is interested in this, is important to shifting dominant and long held narratives. Could you tell the listeners a little bit more about, first of all, this partition history in schools project?

Sarah: Yes. Well, this goes back really to about 2014, 2015. So as the 70h anniversary of partition was coming around, various like-minded groups of people got together because we felt that, just as you’ve been saying, there was a definite silence when it came to the study of south Asian history in British schools. Maybe a little bit more is now being done than it used to, than used to be the case, but still most British school kids go through their time at school and don't really get to know anything about India or the sub-continent. And for us, south Asian history is very much part of Britain's history because of the close relationship, for good or bad, that Britain has had with India over many centuries.

So we felt that partition wouldn't be just what we want to see taught in British schools, but it would be a good starting point because it involves all communities, it involves Britain as well. Over time we've now moved on to a slightly different setup, we call ourselves the Partition Education Group and we are linked very much to south Asia Heritage Month.

One thing that has changed over the period of this time is that we're seeing many more teachers of south Asian heritage, history teachers that is, coming on board. I think there's been a really important shift in the recent past where we're seeing actually teachers of south Asian heritage in classrooms. And I think with their support and with the enthusiasm that they can bring, we may stand more chance of making a difference.

With the next anniversary coming around in 2022, I know my own university is trying to get a project going - there is material out there for teachers, and we know that teachers are so busy anyway that the thought of starting something totally from scratch is very daunting, but we want to follow that up. We've had a very successful project in the last few years that's looked at the idea of representation, freedom, etc., within Britain. We want to take that model and we want to apply it to partition history. But we don’t want, I should just emphasize, it only to be partition that’s taught in British schools. We’d like there to be a better, longer term understanding of south Asian history because I think it’s hugely rich.

Daljeet: So the Partition Commemoration Day, is there anything that people can do in the UK or beyond? Is there a campaign or something they can support? Something they can sign?

Sarah: I don't think there's anything that they can sign, we’re not in that phase, but what they can do is show their support by attending and being part of the events that are going to be again hopefully organized this year around that date, through the mechanism of the south Asian Heritage Month. If we can identify a groundswell of support, that makes it easier, relatively speaking, to try to win over the people with power, let’s say, who can make these things happen.

Daljeet: For listeners who want to learn a bit more about the south Asian Heritage Month, they can look at @SAHM_UK. So nice to talk to you! I really appreciate the time. Take care, thank you.

Sarah: Take care. You too.

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