Growing up, Guneeta Singh Bhalla heard her grandmother describe how she crossed into newly-independent India from Pakistan in 1947 with her young children, witnessing horrific scenes of carnage and violence that haunted her for the rest of her life.
Those stories were not in Singh Bhalla’s school textbooks, so she decided to create an online history – The 1947 Partition Archive, which contains about 10,500 oral histories, the biggest collection of partition memories in South Asia.
“I didn’t want my grandmother’s story to be forgotten, nor the stories of others who experienced partition,” said Singh Bhalla, who moved to the United States from India at age 10.
“With all its faults, Facebook is an incredibly powerful tool: the archive was built off of people finding us on Facebook and sharing our posts, which brought much more awareness,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
The partition of colonial India into two states, Hindu-majority India and mostly Muslim Pakistan, at the end of British rule triggered one of the biggest mass migrations in history.
About 15 million Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs swapped countries in the political upheaval, marred by violence and bloodshed that cost nearly two million lives.
India and Pakistan have fought three wars since then, and relations remain tense. They rarely grant visas to each other’s citizens, making visits nearly impossible – but social media has helped people on either side of the border connect.
There are dozens of groups on...
Read Full Story: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/8/12/75-years-of-india-partition-how-tech-is-opening-window-into-past
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