“History does not give you leave to forget so easily”
-Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence
Love // Lost in Translation is an attempt to bridge generational gaps through material memory and poetry by exploring the way love has survived The Partition of 1947 in India.
Taking cue from Aanchal Malhotra’s Museum of Material Memory, I’ve documented objects that have been passed on through generations in a family of partition, and have explored the impact this tragic event had on art and culture.
The scrapbook created for this project is a small collection of writings (ghazals, poems, nazms and journal entries) on the experiences of love - loss, regret, romance, political turbulence and innocence. Designed as a keepsake, it is also a physical representation of the way I have inherited love - through relationships, music, literature and poetry.
As a tribute to all the relationships I have built over music and poetry in my life, this part of my project is a representation of all the pieces of people I have collected over the years. It is a physical culmination of all the love I have received and distributed to people around me in words, poems, and songs. Extending the concept of material memory into another form of art, I decided to create this book as a material memory for the future - something to remember the people around me by, the love I’ve felt and the appreciation for words that I’ve inherited.
I chose to create a scrapbook of all the poems, ghazals and shaayaris that have been passed on to me by my parents, grandparents and other people who have had a lasting impact. This idea of a hand-made scrapbook comes from an old habit I picked up from my mother and my grandmother - of releasing emotions and thoughts on paper. I’ve always seen my mom noting down her favorite lines of a poem, lyrics of a song or a shloka, important bits of an article or a book she was reading. It was their way of saving these in one place to look back at. As children do, I started copying her at a very young age, I’ve since then looked back at these “diaries” of mine and can now see my entire journey through them; they helped me understand who I was, what my values were and how I saw the world around me.
For this, I specifically approached people who I shared a bond with, people who I have memories with, as I wanted this book to be a representation of the love I’ve shared with them. The book contains some original pieces, some collectively loved pieces by the greats and some personal favorites that I have discovered and have resonated with me deeply.
