A review by samants
Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory by Aanchal Malhotra

informative reflective sad slow-paced

4.0

This book was very educational and taught me a lot about the Partition, which I had never even heard of before! It was a very interesting, personal history of how major world events affect individual people (hmm, wonder why I might be thinking about this now) and some of the stories were truly harrowing (the Mirpur story in particular has stuck with me). However, I wasn't necessarily a fan of the author's style of inserting herself into the stories and it felt like this book wasn't sure whether it wanted to be a personal memoir or collection of other people's stories. It also felt as though the other only spoke to wealthy or upper-caste people, without even a discussion of survival rates between castes or an acknowledgement of the experience of lower-caste people during Partition. The time period and stories were very interesting, though, and I'm definitely curious to know more about Partition and my own familial history (even though I am not South Asian).