The 1947 Partition Archive

The organisation hosts a recurring event titled "Sunday Stories Live" held online every Sunday since May 31, 2020, and continuing to the present day. This weekly event invites participants to engage in live discussions on Facebook. It features prominent figures who are instrumental in reshaping our understanding of South Asian history, particularly in the context of colonialism and the pivotal year of 1947. Through these live sessions, it aims to foster a deeper appreciation and awareness of these historical perspectives among its audience.

The 1947 Partition Archive is a modern digital library with a goal to make recording history something everyone can participate in. It uses creative methods, like asking lots of people to help, to make sure that everyone's stories get told. This is especially important for people who might be left out of regular history books. Its innovative ways of doing this have inspired other projects to collect history digitally and also to ask people for information on topics like the humanities. The Archive encourages people to write down their own life stories. In a way, it's like a big online museum where anyone, from anywhere in the world, can share their history, and everyone works together to build it.

The 1947 Partition Archive has been diligently preserving memories of the Partition since 2010. Through a unique crowdsourcing approach involving Citizen Historians and trained scholars, it has amassed nearly 10,200 oral histories in digital video format, making it the most extensive documentation effort dedicated to the Partition. These oral histories have been collected from over 600 cities in 13 countries. The Archive's dedicated team, assisted by interns, supports the 200+ Story Scholars who have contributed these oral histories, along with the 750+ Citizen Historian volunteers who have collectively devoted approximately 200,000 hours to recording these stories. Additionally, the Archive digitizes and preserves both old and contemporary photographs, family portraits, and significant objects from the Partition era, safeguarding over 200,000 digital artifacts in this manner.

The 1947 Partition Archive actively engages in public education regarding the Partition. With a substantial online presence, including over 1,000,000 followers on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, it shares witness stories twice daily, resulting in tens of millions of shares and numerous reunions among families and friends. The organisation goes beyond social media by hosting "Voices of Partition" events worldwide, where witnesses share their stories, and by curating audio-visual travelling exhibits that blend stories with art and culture. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, it introduced "Sunday Stories Live," a web series streamed live on Facebook and YouTube every Sunday, furthering its commitment to sharing lived memories with the public.

The 1947 Partition Archive has been instrumental in altering public awareness and facilitating extensive documentation of the Partition. Through widespread sharing of firsthand memories on social media, it has fostered broad recognition of the human suffering resulting from the Partition, leading to a significant increase in public awareness. This shift in public consciousness is observable as Partition memories are increasingly embraced in mainstream culture and draw interest from filmmakers, media professionals, news outlets, and educators. This sincere examination of our historical past, under critical scrutiny, has the potential to steer us towards a more equitable and just future.