PUNJAB: When Imtiaz Ali’s Window Seat Films recreated pre-Partition Sargodha for Main Vapas Aaunga, it turned to The 1947 Partition Archive, whose oral histories informed local customs and period costumes, underscoring how eyewitness testimony is shaping the way the past is reconstructed on screen.
That repository of memory owes its existence to a question that confronted physicist Dr Guneeta Singh Bhalla nearly two decades ago: what happens when the last eyewitness to one of history’s largest human migrations is gone?
Today, The 1947 Partition Archive is the world’s largest community-driven oral history initiative devoted to the Partition of the Indian subcontinent. It has documented more than 12,500 testimonies from witnesses and survivors across more than 5,000 cities and villages in 17 countries, recorded by more than 1,000 Citizen Historians and Story Scholars.
Alongside the interviews, the organisation has digitised and preserved over five million artefacts, including family photographs, handwritten letters, refugee documents, identity papers and objects that accompanied families as they crossed newly drawn borders.
Beyond academia, the archive has amassed more than one million followers across Facebook, X, Instagram and LinkedIn. Between 2014 and 2019, its stories were shared on Facebook up to 10 million times annually, bringing personal narratives of Partition into mainstream public discourse.
The archive began with one family’s memories. Bhalla was 10 when her family moved from India to the United States. She grew up listening to her paternal grandmother recount the events that uprooted the family from Lahore in August 1947.
Her grandparents lived in an eighteenth-century haveli opposite Anarkali Bazaar. On August 13, a trusted Muslim neighbour urged her grandmother to leave temporarily with her three children for Anandpur Sahib, believing the unrest would subside in the coming days. Bhalla’s grandfather stayed behind to protect the family home.
The separation proved permanent. The following day, police and military authorities ordered him to leave Lahore. Almost all of his belongings were seized before departure. He was allowed to leave with only his car and an ancient, handwritten Guru Granth Sahib.
Bhalla’s grandmother, meanwhile, was found in an Amritsar refugee camp by her brother, Sodhi Haravtar Singh, who brought her to her parental home in Anandpur Sahib. Bhalla’s grandfather, a doctor who had served with the British Military, spent months providing medical care to refugees before locating his family. Husband and wife were reunited after two years and eventually rebuilt their lives in Uttar Pradesh.
For years, those stories remained family memories. Their wider significance became clear only in 2008, when Bhalla travelled to Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum while pursuing doctoral research in Physics at the University of Tokyo. Watching survivors recount the atomic bombing convinced her that first-person testimony carried an authority no secondary account could match.
The experience also revealed an uncomfortable reality. While Holocaust survivors and Hiroshima survivors had found institutional spaces to record their memories, millions who had lived through the Partition of India had not. Their stories remained largely absent from school curricula, museums and public history institutions. Unless someone acted quickly, that generation would disappear without leaving behind its own account of history.
Bhalla recorded her first interview in Faridkot, Punjab, in 2009, using a tape-based hobby camcorder. Soon afterward, a personal loss shaped the archive’s future. She had planned to interview Haravtar Singh, the last surviving elder in her grandmother’s family and the man who had rescued her grandmother from the refugee camp.
Before she could reach him, he died. Missing that final opportunity convinced her that preserving Partition memories could not remain a personal project. “This was the moment I realised there were no stories left in my family, but there were millions of stories still in the survivor community at large. And that I could not do this work alone,’’ says Bhalla.
After joining the University of California, Berkeley as a postdoctoral researcher, Bhalla began approaching survivors in gurdwaras, mandirs, mosques and community gatherings across the San Francisco Bay Area. Survivors, many speaking publicly for the first time, readily volunteered their stories. Rather than relying on a conventional research model, Bhalla drew upon the emerging idea of crowdsourcing.
As a scientist, she recognised that a distributed network could accomplish what no single researcher could. Volunteers would be trained to interview survivors in their own languages, within their own communities, ensuring that no region, religion or social group was left out of the historical record.
That philosophy continues to shape the archive. Since 2010, more than 18,000 people have participated in its free bi-weekly online training workshops. An unsolicited donation cheque for $194.70 encouraged volunteers to formally register The 1947 Partition Archive as a California non-profit in 2011.
A year later, with support from Professor Balwant Singh Dhillon of Guru Nanak Dev University and the American India Foundation, the Story Scholars programme was launched to expand documentation in rural and underrepresented communities. The programme’s first scholar, Manleen Sandhu, worked across villages in Amritsar and the border district of Gurdaspur. By 2026, 240 Story Scholars had completed the programme.
The 1947 Partition Archive India Trust was established in Delhi in 2016, followed by The 1947 Partition Archive and Memorial in London in 2025. In partnership with Tata Trusts, it launched a research residency in 2019 supporting fresh scholarship on Partition.
Today, the collection encompasses not only the Partition but also India’s Independence and the Second World War as experienced across the subcontinent. It includes testimonies from distinguished public figures such as Khushwant Singh, whose Train to Pakistan became one of the defining literary works on Partition; novelist Bapsi Sidhwa, author of Cracking India; Olympian Milkha Singh; former Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah; former Member of Parliament Tarlochan Singh; and thousands of ordinary citizens whose names may never appear in history books but whose memories illuminate everyday life before, during and after Partition.
Among the archive’s most remarkable interviews are those with dozens of centenarians, including one man, estimated locally at 131 years old, who had already been a grandfather in 1947.
The organisation has also sought to reconnect lives fractured by Partition. During the Covid-19 pandemic, it launched Sunday Stories Live, bringing historians and practitioners together through weekly online conversations. It also created the 1947 Reconnect Facebook community, now numbering more than 11,500 members, where people search for ancestral villages, homes, childhood friends and relatives separated during the upheaval of 1947.
Bhalla has also co-edited 10,000 Memories: A Lived History of Partition, produced with six co-editors, 30 curators and six artists. Drawing upon testimonies from Afghanistan to Burma, the volume reflects the archive’s broader effort to place individual experience at the centre of historical understanding.
The next phase of the archive focuses on education and access. A dedicated streaming platform is being developed for university libraries, with five universities in the United States and the United Kingdom already signed on as early adopters.