10,000 Memories
2024 book
- 1 min read
- 2 chapters
Related on Lably
Through Indian subcontinent, Partition of India and Afghanistan
Contents
10,000 Memories is printed as a double-sided "eastern" and "western" book: one cover opens in Kandahar, Afghanistan, while the reverse begins in Yangon, Myanmar, with the narratives meeting in the Deccan Plateau. More than 1,000 archival photographs accompany 400 condensed life-story summaries, each framed by contextual sidebars on military campaigns, refugee corridors and political negotiations. The editors emphasize regional diversity while linking local memories to larger theatres such as the China-Burma-India front and the Bengal famine.
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Reception
Critics greeted the volume as an accessible bridge between scholarship and family memory. Prasun Chaudhuri of The Telegraph characterized a pre-launch reading in Kolkata as "a reminder of how Partition shaped the electoral choices of a generation for their entire lifetime". Times of India highlighted the book's "pan-South Asian scope" and the inclusion of 400 first-person narratives.
An event at SOAS University of London praised the book for offering "a unique dimension and insight into the history of Partition ... unlike any previously written." The University of Florida International Center launch event hailed the work as "the first and largest pan-South Asian oral-history survey ever conducted."