thehiatusproject

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self-portrait, 2010

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From my archives, a copper plate from 2010, etched with crackle ground. This image feels exhumed from another lifetime, but it was only because of my training as an artist that I could think as a writer. In my years at printmaking studios, I mostly focused on aquatint and mezzotint on copper, but the metal was too lush and malleable to not experiment with textures. You paint your plate - this is a sheet of roofing copper - with a ball ground of beeswax and after it is dry, brush it with talcum powder. Then placing the copper on a hot plate, you paint on a fine film of gum arabic solution. As it heats, it pulls the waxy ground apart, causing this naturally beautiful almost filigree earthy cracking texture to appear. After it cools, the water soluble gum is washed off, and a fine aquatint is sprayed on. The plate is etched in an acid bath so the open cracks become embedded into the metal. It is then cleaned, inked and rolled through a printing press, though I seem to have no photos of what it looked like once it was printed. This very meticulous, chemical art is what I spent much of my education perfecting. I know the final piece was the print, but I fell in love with the sculptural quality of my plates. Till date, I find no befitting substitute for the beauty and allure of hand-pulled prints; the gentle emboss of the plate on wet paper, the sound of tacky ink as it spreads evenly across a rubber roller, the delicacy of a deckled edge, the depth of an acid bite. There is real purpose and labour to this ancient art, which I would someday love to return to, given the appropriate project, if my muscles haven't forgotten this movement by then.

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Off to my editor finally goes this first draft - a book of conversations with South Asians on the inherited memory of the 1947 Partition. Several years in the making, hundreds of interviews later, multiple incidents of unlearning and relearning (mostly on my part!), of flattening out the border to imagine an undivided land, of respecting what the many divided parts have come to mean, in thinking about nationality, religion, ethnicity, language, gender, belonging, home, family, and realizing that so much more remains to be said about Partition, I offer ‘In the Language of Remembering’

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For this week's story for the Museum of Material Memory, Rajita Banerjee writes about the belongings of her ancestor, Deba Prasad Chatterjee, who was a divorce lawyer in the early 20th century. Who were the people getting divorced at the time, she cannot say, but in the items she was presented by her uncle, there lay a British-Indian Passport, issued for foreign travel. . . "The Passport (Entry into India) Act, 1920 required that a “person entering India shall be in possession of passports, and for all matters ancillary or incidental to that purpose.” It also established controls on the foreign travel of Indians, and foreigners travelling to and within the Presidencies and Provinces of British India. Though the British Indian Passport was based on a format agreed upon by the 1920 League of Nations International Conference on Passports, it had limited usage and was valid for travel only within areas governed by the British Empire, Italian Empire, Switzerland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Spain, Norway, Sweden and Dutch Empire. The text on the document was in English and French. A British Indian passport could be issued to persons who were British subjects by birth, or naturalisation, or the spouses or widows of such persons. Passport offices in the provincial governments could issue the document, which was valid for five years. Records show that the price of a new passport was raised from 1 rupee in 1922 to 3 rupees in 1933. Debaprasad Chatterjee’s British Indian passport was issued on 30th June, 1927 and the navy-blue booklet is 14.8 cm x 10.5 cm in size, with the Royal Coat of Arms of the United Kingdom embossed on top in golden. His national status is ‘British subject by birth’, and although the passport does not specify a space for ‘caste’, it is mentioned nevertheless as ‘Hindu-Brahmin’ – a detail no longer required in the modern-day passport, but issues related to casteism were far more rampant at the time. The document gave away other details that helped me visualize the ‘stature’ (pun-intended) of my great grandfather. Standing at 5’5, he seemed to be doing well professionally." . . Head over to the Museum of Material Memory to read more from ‘My Great-Grandfather: A British Subject by Birth' by Rajita Banerjee.

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the last few weeks 

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Some remnants from the years I was writing Remnants pt.2- My grandmother and her sister, Mayank and my granduncle Y.P Vij looking at the gaz for the first time at Vij Bhawan in October 2013, the initial setup of my writing desk in Delhi, the first map used to trace Partition migrations for my interviewees, the stacks of books in Pran Nevile sahib's home in Gurgaon, the calligrapher's bazar at the Wazir Khan Mosque in Lahore, the writer Kanza Javed in one of the temples of Katas Raj, Pakistan, being taken on a tour of Prof. Partha Mitter's ancestral home in Calcutta by his cousin, the only document of Hitkari that remained from Jhang while they were still selling cycles and had not yet ventured into pottery, the entrance to the ground floor at Vij Bhawan.

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In the last few years, each time I visited her, Mrs. Suneja told me a new story. She was our neighbour, had known my grandparents for decades, and her daughters grew up with my father and his siblings. It breaks my heart to learn that she passed away this weekend due to illness. I can see her clearly, sitting in her front garden, deftly weaving story after story, affirming that memory can be inexhaustible and cavernous. I have written about her on several occasions, in my book, in short stories, in essays about Independence. Her father, Amolak Ram Kapur, was one of the seven Indian lawyers who defended Bhagat Singh and 27 others charged in the Lahore Conspiracy Case in 1929. Their home, 4 Fane Road, Lahore was the first on the street to get a Godrej refrigerator. With pride, she would recall the akhara, the cows, the gardens and tanga. But the story that has always remained with me is how after Partition, she sat for the entrance exam for Delhi University on a curriculum she was unfamiliar with because of the upheaval that accompanied migration. She remembered that they had no books and she couldn’t study. “Paper dekh kar rona aa gaya tha.” She attempted every paper, but eventually broke down in the history exam, her pages were streaked with tears. And rather than writing answers she didn’t know, she wrote the story of their migration from Lahore. One month later, when her father told her to go check the results, she was afraid that’d failed, but was surprised to see her name on the list, in 3rd class. The examiner had sympathized. She tried to find out their name, but with no luck. Despite the fact that we talked almost exclusively about Partition, Mrs. Suneja’s every memory somehow bore a shade of positivity - of kindness, friendship, even bravery. This is what will always remain with me from her stories, that Partition wasn’t a monochrome, one dimensional event.

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Some remnants from the years I was writing Remnants pt.1- the family pothi at Haridwar, Sir Cyril Radcliffe’s signature on a document at the British Library in London, an old lock at Vij Bhawan, India’s Charter of Freedom framed at the Nehru Memorial in Delhi, stringing together mogra flowers, the Montreal apartment where I first began the research for Remnants, old radios in Jammu, after an interview in Chandigarh, plate engraved with my grandfather’s initials carried from Malakwal, Badshahi Mosque in Lahore

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the last week 

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A Plague Duty Commendation Certificate presented to Bidhi Chand, Deputy Inspector of Jhelum District (present day Pakistan), “for the satisfactory performance of his duties whilst employed on plague duty in the Jullundur and Hoshiarpur Districts from 2 March 1898 to 13 July 1898. This duty was of an exceedingly trying and delicate nature, and involved considerable hardship, exposure and personal risk." When my mother first found this certificate in 2020, we had only just begun to hear the word coronavirus. As I researched what it was that my ancestor did as a part of his Plague Duty in the late 1800s, I found it was not unlike the duty of officers under this current pandemic. I wrote about this in a detailed piece for Mint Lounge last year, but a short excerpt on his duties is below - “In Social History Of Epidemics In The Colonial Punjab, Prof. Sasha Tandon explains that to combat the disease at a local level, a framework was set in place, with infected areas being divided into divisions comprising 100 villages each, supervised by a deputy commissioner, assistant deputy commissioner, division officer, civil surgeon and medical officer. Bidhi Chand would have likely been part of this body. To assist the operation further, there were also tahsildars, kanungos, patwaris, hospital assistants, compounders, nurses, midwives and volunteers.” . This is from a short series of certificates belonging to my great-great grandfather, Bidhi Chand. Based on his records with the Indian Imperial Police — certificates from 1874 to 1904 — he rose with promotions in rank, from a Sergeant 2nd grade to a full Deputy Inspector.

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Certificate for Service in Census Operations in 1891 presented to Bidhi Chand, Deputy Inspector Police, Shahpur (present day Sargodha district, Pakistan). . This is from a short series of certificates belonging to my great-great grandfather, Bidhi Chand. Based on his records with the Indian Imperial Police — certificates from 1874 to 1904 — he rose with promotions in rank, from a Sergeant 2nd grade to a full Deputy Inspector.

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A Commendation Certificate addressed to Bidhi Chand, then serving as a Deputy Inspector in Kadirabad, Gujrat, present day Pakistan. In the 1890 case of "Queen Empress versus Fazal", he showed "intelligence and wit". . This is from a short series of certificates belonging to my great-great grandfather, Bidhi Chand. Based on his records with the Indian Imperial Police — certificates from 1874 to 1904 — he rose with promotions in rank, from a Sergeant 2nd grade to a full Deputy Inspector.

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the past few weeks 

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Eleven years ago, on a winter morning, Mayank and I explored the abandoned Walled City Museum, which he dubbed as 'Delhi's Saddest Museum.' Housed in the 1929 erected Shri Narayan Building at Lahore Gate chowk, it was supposed to be opened to the public in 2004 as a museum showcasing 35 years of the Walled City, but was quickly relegated to court cases, rendering it no use other than a storehouse. The walls and tiles were covered in dust, there were sacks of peanuts and rice inside the rooms. We walked up the staircase and looked out the window at the traffic on the street below and the pigeons in the sky above. There, I took this shot, my favourite of Mayank so far, at Delhi's Saddest Museum. . . You can find a more detailed piece on the Museum itself on Mayan’s website

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As I write about the demarcation of the no man's land between Attari and Wagah in October 1947, I think of Ustad Daman’s heart wrenching verses written immediately after Partition - “Akhiyan di lali dasdi hei, roye tussi wi ho, roye assi wi han” the redness of our eyes reveals that you have wept, and so have we.