Museum of Material Memory

In 1972, a family friend gifted this Nutrine box to my maternal uncle for his birthday, and originally it was filled with toffees. As it emptied, like the fate of most chocolate or biscuit tins in South Asian families, my grandmother filled it with sewing accessories – spools of thread brought by my great-grandfather from Singapore many years earlier in 1953.

August 25, 2025

Through His Lens: S.M Faruque’s Film camera

Heirlooms / Household

A camera sits on my bookshelf- heavy, leather-bound and silent for decades. Once owned by my great-grandfather, S.M Faruque- a man I never knew. Not his voice, nor his demeanor, nor the quiet rituals of his day. And yet, I have come to see fragments of the world as he once did; through the twin lenses of his Rolleiflex camera.

August 15, 2025

A Husband’s Independence Day Letter

Documents

I found this letter written by my grandather to my grandmother on the eve of India’s Independence in 1947. It was posted from Muzaffarnagar to Deoband.

August 4, 2025

The Dual-Toned Banarasi Saree

Textiles

The object that we discuss here is a saree: a luminous, dual-toned Banarasi, whose history takes us back to a time period of more than a hundred years ago. It belonged to Tapati Rani Devya, my mother’s great-grandmother. She is a figure so distant from me in lineage, that I know only fragments of information that allow me to paint an incomplete picture of what her life might have looked like