Memories of a land divided

… invisible suitcases, not the physical, perhaps cardboard, variety containing a few meaning-drained mementoes: we have come unstuck from more than land. We have floated upwards from history, from memory, from Time.

~ Salman Rushdie in Shame

Historian Peter Geyl famously stated that history is a never-ending argument. This is particularly true of oral history, where the historian examines the testimony of living people, and not just archival documents, in order to reconstruct and interpret a specific historical event or personality on the basis of memories and perceptions.

Since the 1980s, this methodology has been used increasingly in the study of the 1947 Partition of the Indian Subcontinent. Historians are beginning to put on "stouter boots" – as the English historian R H Tawney put it – entering the field to collect and document testimonies from eyewitnesses and survivors in order to understand the impact of Partition on the everyday lives of ordinary people from the Punjab, Bengal, and more recently, Sylhet. Given the dearth of published historical works on Sylhet, it is not entirely surprising that a large chunk of the current knowledge about Partition there should come from an array of oral sources. Like many oral history projects, the story of Sylhet's Patition is also evolving, emerging and incomplete. Some may ask: does this kind of memory have the ability to produce a narrative that is authentic, dependable and verifiable?