Aanchal Malhotra on her novel, The Book of Everlasting Things: "I'm tired of violence being the only way to look at Partition"
I spent an afternoon in Delhi talking with the author about her grandfather’s book shop, inheriting Partition history, and switching to fiction for her novel, The Book of Everlasting Things
So far this year I’ve travelled to both India and Pakistan; East Punjab and West Punjab; Ludhiana, with my dad, to the house in which he was born, and Lahore, with my wife, Yasmin, to her nani’s gravestone. I organised both trips for life, reconnection and healing, but they will also inform my next book, which I’ll be sharing about soon.
To close my time in India, I spent a few days writing in Delhi, where I met up with the historian and writer Aanchal Malhotra. I first discovered Aanchal’s work after the U.K. publication of her debut book, Remnants of Partition: 21 Objects from a Continent Divided.
Starting with members of her own family, the book’s chapters present conversations with elderly survivors of India’s Partition in 1947 — which saw millions displaced, harmed and killed as the states of Punjab and Bengal were sliced in two to create West and East Pakistan — about objects — jewellery, weaponry, kitchenware — carried across the new border during the upheaval.
Aanchal’s second book, In the Language of Remembering: The Inheritance of Partition, documents conversations with the descendants of Partition survivors, the children and grandchildren, about their inheritance of the stories and silence. Its chapters are organised into universal themes of human sentiment, like hope, grief and reunion.
Neither me nor Yasmin got to talk to our grandparents — mine Punjabi Hindus who could stay put in India, hers Punjabi Muslims who escaped the violence to become Pakistanis — about Partition before they passed. By the time we started asking questions about our shared, split roots, it was too late.
So, over the last few years, I’ve been investigating. I recently spoke to my dada’s youngest brother, who lives in Toronto, Canada, on the phone. He is senile and his hearing is poor. I asked him if he had any stories about our family’s interactions with departing Muslims in Ludhiana in 1947. He explained that his father, my great-grandfather, Mathra Dass Thapar, knocked a hole in his shop wall to receive and look after his Muslim neighbours’ goods before they escaped to Pakistan. He then arranged for the goods to be returned across the border when things died down. Arriving at this delicate narrative thread took me months of thinking, reading and probing.
The history is hidden. Aanchal’s work, alongside Kavita Puri’s Partition Voices (2019), Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar’s The Long Partition (2007) and Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence (2000), to name a few, provide sharp, sturdy tools to find it.
Published in India and America at the end of 2022, having made the switch from nonfiction to historical fiction — one canon of Partition literature to another — Aanchal’s third book is a novel called The Book of Everlasting Things.
Its pages tell a tale of two characters — Samir, a Hindu perfumer, and Firdaus, a Muslim calligrapher — falling in love among the ancient alleyways of the Walled City in pre-Partition Lahore. We get to know their families as they age and travel, navigating division, friendship and heartbreak across continents and generations, faced with both World Wars in Europe and Independence in the subcontinent.
An appreciation of nature and material culture appears throughout the book: the seasonal scent of rose petals and kite-carrying breeze in Lahore; the snow falling onto Gothic architecture in Paris; the crinkling of paper and trickle of ink. Characters and their dialogues are granted life carefully, inspired by deeper understandings of intergenerational trauma and inherited memory. The creative freedom of the author’s newfound literary medium ties it all together.
I managed to catch Aanchal days after she’d returned from Jaipur Literary Festival, before which she’d attended festivals in Calcutta and Udaipur. After we met, she would head to festivals in Kerala and Bangalore. It was a busy time.
We went for lunch in Khan Market. This is now one of the most expensive commercial spaces in the capital, but it started as a humble block of affordable business properties for refugees arriving from Pakistan in the years following Partition — including Aanchal’s grandfather, Balraj Bahri, who founded Bahrisons bookshop there in 1953.
After I bought my copy of The Book of Everlasting Things (it’s not yet available in the U.K.), we took an auto-rickshaw ride to Safdarjung Tomb and found a seat in its grounds. As birds squawked in the trees around us, I hit record on my dictaphone.
Ciaran Thapar: I just bought your new book from your family’s bookshop. Shall we start by talking about that?
Aanchal Malhotra: So many people come up to me and say, ‘Do you know how many books I’ve bought from your family’s shop? I’ve contributed towards your college education!’ It’s a Delhi institution. But that also means it’s much larger than me or my family. It’s a hub of intellect and culture.
How did growing up with the shop in your childhood play out?
I took it for granted because there were always books everywhere. People could come, and they could sit, and they could read for as long as they wanted to, and they didn’t have to buy any books, as long as they were there and they were sincerely in the company of books. So, as a result, you would have a lot of kids who would come in who couldn’t afford books, or couldn’t afford to pay in one go, so they would ask to pay in instalments. Or they’d steal books. I remember this this one guy coming to my grandfather as an adult and saying, ‘I’m really sorry, when I was young I stole a book and this is how much it cost.’ It’s not like any other business. It’s the world of books and knowledge. Books bring people closer and allow you to travel without actually going anywhere. Books are a doorway to the world, for many people, right? I felt very proud that my family was, and continues to be, providing this kind of nurturing.
What’s your grandfather’s story? He set up the bookshop when he arrived in Delhi after Partition, right?
It’s post-Partition entrepreneurship, yeah. Khan Market was a post-Partition economic initiative taken by the Delhi government to help refugees who had come from across the border. Khan Market was named after Khan Abdul Jabbar Khan [a pioneer of the Indian Independence Movement who helped many refugees from Pakistan to settle in Delhi]. My grandfather was living in a refugee camp when he arrived. He was doing all sorts of odd-jobs: selling coal at the railway station, selling fountain pens in Chandni Chowk. Then someone told him that he could buy a shop in this refugee market, and he said, ‘Well, I don’t have any money.’ So his mother sold some bangles to pay for the cost of the shop. And then when he had the shop, he was like, ‘What am I going to sell in it!?’ He didn’t have any business sense. But he knew how to make the best out of situations, because of everything they’d just been through. He knew a gentleman who had also lived through Partition who had a shop in Connaught Place — a book shop. He went to him and asked for help to set up a business. And the guy said, ‘I don’t know how to sell anything but books.’ So the story goes that my grandfather, who didn’t know anything about books, would sit in this empty shop every day with a pad and a pen. There was a sign that said ‘Bookseller’. People would come in and say, ‘Oh, do you have this book?’ And he’d say, ‘No, but I can have it for you by lunchtime.’ So he would go to the friend of his, get the book and sell it. And that’s how he built his collection, which is why there is such a strong relationship between the customer and the staff, because it was built by the recommendations and needs of people.
You grew up in Delhi then moved to Canada when you were 17. Why?
For college. I wanted to study art, and we didn’t have any good art schools at the time. Now that’s changed, but at the time there weren’t any that specialised in things I was interested in: sculpture, building, photography, printing. So I went to Canada.
What brought about your pivot from artist to oral historian?
It was when I was in grad school. I was studying to be a printer, then I went to grad school in Montreal, and it was there that I took a sabbatical after so many years of being a student. I had no ideas for my thesis. My mind was blank. I came home to Delhi and thought, well, if I’m going to get an idea, it’ll happen organically. And while I was here I discovered two objects that my family had carried from Lahore to Amritsar at Partition. And that changed everything, changed my life.
These objects gave you access to conversations.
They were a gentler way to enter into a landscape that otherwise was still traumatic for a lot of people. Partition is one of those rare events where, if you ask a survivor to tell you about their experience, they will ask you a question back. ‘Why do you want to know? What is it going to change?’ And I think there are many reasons for why people practise silence when it comes to traumatic memory. The first reason is that maybe nobody had asked them for so many years. The second is that maybe there is actually no vocabulary that the survivor has to offer these stories. How do you begin to talk about something? How would you offer it to your descendant? The third is that people will often say there is no need to talk about the past because it will not change what happened, which is what my grandparents kept saying. ‘It’s not like we’ll go back home once we tell you about it; it’s not like we can go back.’ And the last thing is that they didn’t want to resuscitate those memories, because then they’d just be in the present day, they’d be hovering, and I don’t think people want to be reminded of how violently they were evicted out of homes and lands, which they were hoping to see again, but it never happened. So the object was like a catalyst, a gentler way to enter into that landscape.
It’s an accessible way of conducting history, because everyone has attachments to objects.
An object is the most democratic way of preserving memory, of archiving the past. It’s a way to connect with people who are no longer there, to events that you never witnessed, a land you will never see. To tell a child that, ‘Oh, I came from this place called Lahore, and you may never see it,’ is very abstract. But to say that this earring is from across the border, from this place called Lahore, and this is what the jewellery was like at that time, and this is what we wore, it gives definition to a very lucid idea. So it was also about helping multiple generations begin to talk about the past.
If the first book is about objects, what’s the second book about?
The easier way to think about it is that the first one is about survivor memory. The second book is about descendant memory. What I’m interested in is the passage of memory from a generation who has lived through a historical trauma and the generation that has inherited either snippets of those memories or silence or stories in their entirety. Why are stories of Partition passed down? Are they passed down? How are they passed down? Are they offered with intention? Is there any need to talk about them? Do they coexist with us in our present day? Do they hinder how we feel about the present day? Are they exacerbated by political events in the present day? These are very large questions. And I think a lot of people are thinking about them. It’s very easy to exist in India without thinking about Partition on a daily basis, maybe less so now than before. In Pakistan, though, it is a constant reminder, because the country was based on that idea. Bangladesh has a very different relationship with it, because of [the country’s independence in] 1971. In India, where I live, what I’ve noticed is that if you don’t bring up Partition, no one really talks about it. But the moment you bring it up, and start to seriously and critically engage with it, it’s very hard to stop. Because you’re trying to belatedly, retroactively build a life and then take it apart and make sense of that falling apart. It’s hard to reimagine these things. So for people like you, who don’t have grandparents still alive, it’s hard to piece together things based on fragments of what you find. Cities, villages, whose names may have changed, documents you can’t read. How do you make sense of something that inherently doesn’t make sense? I think a lot of young people are grappling with this, with their identity. If you look at the diaspora, you have multi-hyphenate identities that you’re trying to make sense of. But even in India or Pakistan, the fact that you may originally come from the other side of the border takes a lot of mental renegotiation. You’ve agreed to a national allegiance, of sorts. To love Pakistan is to hate India, to hate Pakistan is to love India. But these countries are parallels, you know?
I guess in a similar way to how obstacles are democratic, emotions are, too.
That’s one way of looking at it. It’s quite elegant because it removes violence as a primary way to view Partition. I’m tired of violence being the only way to look at Partition. You remember how you said that story about your ancestor looking after their neighbours’ goods? Why don’t we hear those stories more? Why is that not the first story you hear? Why, when we think of the word Partition, do we imagine a train and bodies and a caravan of people, but it is never the man and the woman who got separated, or the two brothers who never saw one another again, or friends or business partners who promised they would meet? Why do we never hear about human relations, themes of love and sacrifice? So it was to find a new means to view the event of Partition.
You found two different ways of doing that, and now you’ve made the switch to fiction. Why?
I’ve been thinking about that since 2016. A long time. But how do you write a novel? I don’t know! I have no idea. I don’t know if I can do it again. Why do you write a novel? What is it about fiction and the language of fiction that you feel unsatiated with nonfiction? Why make this switch?
You tell me!
I don’t know. I am still trying to figure it out. You write a book and then you learn to talk about the book. When you’re recording people’s real stories, there is this moral obligation to do justice to those stories and have them as recorded truths that they have told you. You can’t play around with people’s lives. You can’t edit them. They’re not malleable. They’re real and they mean a lot to people. But when you write fiction, there is an unrestrained freedom that is so liberating. You’re in control of what the character is doing. I did not know that I could do that. I did not know that I could make a character do certain things. I did not know how unpredictable fiction is. It does things that you don’t expect. The story starts to write itself in a way that you have not intended. A character starts to do things beyond their best interest. This kind of freedom, when you work in so much structure for so long, this freedom is really welcome. It is liberating. I think also to be able to bring the nuance of Partition history into fiction…there are very few historical novelists who have also been professional historians. Partition was only part of the novel. But historical novelists hardly ever have the opportunity to go into official archives or sit at the primary source of things. The specificity of that time was something that became second nature to me. I was able to mould the history around families, rather than the other way around, I guess. And you realise that history is wide enough to create an opening into it, not change the way lives were lived, but insert fictional lives into them so they assimilate into that landscape. Why is it that the first way we usually learn about Partition history is not family history, but novels? Or movies? This is not to take away from any of the nonfiction work I’ve done, but I’ve come to understand that fact within a story stays with you longer. The actions of a character at a historical moment will stay with you. But I think I also wanted to use the novel to explore mediums of art that I had left behind, esoteric things like perfumery and calligraphy that are really dying arts, particularly in India. Ittar is dying; nobody is buying it, because everyone is spraying perfume. It’s a way to look at the slowness of life. It’s a slow novel; it allows you to sink into it. I think that’s important. Everything is very fast. I needed something that would slow me down, that would slow the reader down, that would make them observe things or stop and smell things. But the reasons for why I write fiction — I don’t know if I have an answer for that. And I don’t know if I can do it again.
Interview and photography by Ciaran Thapar