| Established | 2011; 13 years ago (2011) |
|---|---|
| Type | Oral history initiative |
| Founder | Dr Guneeta Singh Bhalla |
| Website | https://in.1947partitionarchive.org/ |
The 1947 Partition Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit oral history organization in Berkeley, California, and a registered trust in Delhi, India, that collects, preserves, and shares first-hand accounts of the Partition of India in 1947.[1]
Given the sensitive relationship between Partition stories and Hindu–Muslim relations, only a small portion of the Archive's collection has been released to the public in edited form.[2] Currently, access to the stories is granted on a case-by-case basis to scholars for academic research.
In 2023, the Archive started to observe June 3 as the Partition Remembrance Day because it was on this day in 1947 that the viceroy declared the Mountbatten Plan to divide India.[3] It also announced to launch a book with 4000 oral testimonies and 1000 photographs illustrating the voices of the partition survivors spread across various countries in South Asia and elsewhere.[4]
The organization started in 2010 when Dr Guneeta Singh Bhalla[5][6] began recording video interviews with elder Partition witnesses throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and was formalized in 2011. The creation of the 1947 Partition Archive was inspired by the Hiroshima Peace Memorial and the work of various Holocaust memorials.[2]
The 1947 Partition Archive crowd-sources the collection of Partition witness interviews and conducts free classes, in the form of an online Oral History Workshop, to train volunteers in story-collection and interviewing techniques.[7] As of July 2023, over 10,200 interviews have been collected from more than 450 cities and villages in 14 countries including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel among others.[8][9][10] These interviews are documented in diverse languages and dialects. The Archive's website includes a Story Map that shows the migration patterns of each interviewee.[11]
The Archive's methods of crowd-sourcing story collection include Story Scholars, a fellowship program in which individuals are chosen based on academic merit and prior experience to conduct interviews in a selected region, and Citizen Historians, a program in which volunteers can contribute Partition stories to the organization's website.[12] Based on the Archive's digital media platforms, ordinary citizens across the globe are "invited to join free oral history webinar workshops to learn the basic techniques for documenting oral histories, as outlined by the Oral History Association and Baylor University’s open source online resources."[13] According to Dr Bhalla, "workshop attendees who successfully submit their first oral history interview, and it matches The Archive’s standards with its nine-point criteria, are certified as ‘Citizen Historian’ volunteers."[13]
The Archive also offers funding for a one-month immersive residency to university faculties and students to research on Partition, known as the Tata Trusts Partition Archive Research Grants, in association with the University of Delhi, Ashoka University, and Guru Nanak Dev University. The primary objective of the Archive is to collect the "vanishing history of Punjab and South Asia through crowdsourced lived memories."[14][15]
