Although I make use of many government documents (bills, ordinances, treaties, political speeches), as well as other more “traditional” sources like newspaper articles and the like, this is ultimately a social history and thus calls for something more. Numbers and statistics are certainly useful quantitative sources of information, but these alone do not give us a full human history.

Personal testimonies, memoirs, and recorded interviews give a human voice to what has long been a political history of Indian Partition. They are invaluable in that they open up the dialogue to different perspectives on before unspoken narratives of history.

However, essential as these sources are to the social history of South Asia, one must be cautious in using personal testimonies for several reasons. For one, people are biased both in their story-telling and in their understanding of other’s stories. Further (in the case of Partition especially, but pertinent to all personal testimonies), memory is fickle and is even more so when decades separate the experience being shared and the telling of the memory. Because most Partition survivors, and even social worker’s memoirs, only shared their experiences years after they had actually taken place, their memory may be faulty. And even if people remember things “correctly,” they are not bound to tell the truth, or to tell every detail. The memories of this particular event are fraught with pain and even shame, and Partition survivors are particularly likely to retain certain silences or even lie in order to repress the memories of this appalling event.

There is also the issue of a language barrier. I do not speak any Indian dialects, and thus cannot go to India myself to interview Partition survivors. I relied on interviews that had been transcribed by Indian feminist scholars, which were incredibly useful, but added another layer between me and my source, and thus more possibility of bias.

Keeping these things in mind, however, I truly believe that such sources enrich the historical narrative as it currently stands, and brings forth questions that need answering before Partition can truly become an event of the past, and not a very present reality that continues to haunt South Asia.