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Author: Aanchal Malhotra

Aanchal Malhotra is a multidisciplinary artist, writer and oral historian living in New Delhi, India. She received a MFA in Studio Art from Concordia University, Montréal in 2015.

The Clock from Sindh

This clock became a witness for the life and times of the Malkani family when it was acquired by them in 1945. Its time-keeping began in Karachi, Sindh (present-day Pakistan) where my grandfather, Arjun Malkani, fifth among his ten siblings, lived.

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In praise of the everyday items

In those days, included in every dowry was a sewing machine, and this belonged to my great-grandmother. The sewing machine is a Singer, with gold embossed work and dates back to the early 1940s. Portable in nature, a standard 14 inches in size, it has a wooden cover with my great-grandfather’s initials P.S Hora (Prem Singh Hora) painted on it.

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From the Memory of Partition

The main driver behind the purchase of this weapon was prevention of danger. My grandfather would tell my father that after all he’d seen during the partition, very few things remained that scared him, death being the least of them all. During the violence of 1947, his family had eaten food while sitting next to dozens of dead bodies and pools of blood, and had witnessed unthinkable difficulty in trying to survive.

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Ode to my grandfather’s ancestry

Recently, I had a chance encounter with my grandfather’s box of documents and family history. I am twenty-two years old with a bare minimum knowledge of the history of the British Raj, and yet I am still able to comprehend the gravity of these heirlooms. A memoir preserved through decades by several generations.

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Aaji’s vintage crochet needle

This beautiful thing – I was told by aaji – was a crochet needle almost 90 years old! I could never have guessed it was a needle merely from the shape. I asked her where the hook was and she smiled and slid the oval silver mechanism to the top, pulling with it a hidden hook, extending its size to 12cm.

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About

The Museum of Material Memory is a digital repository of material culture of the Indian subcontinent, tracing family history and social ethnography through heirlooms, collectibles and objects of antiquity.

Through storytelling, each post on the Archive reveals not just a history of objects and the people they belong to, but also unfolds generational narratives about the tradition, culture, customs, conventions, habits, language, society, geography and history of the vast and diverse subcontinent.


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