Inheritors of partition

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 9 August 2022

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In homes across the UK, partition is not history but a live issue for its young descendants. Over the course of a year, Kavita Puri follows three people as they piece together parts of their complex family history and try to understand the legacy of partition and what it means to them today. She connects with a young man who goes to the Pakistani village where his Hindu grandfather was saved by Muslims; a woman who has always thought of herself as British Pakistani but a DNA test reveals she also has roots in India; a woman with Pakistani heritage and a man with Indian heritage plan their wedding and realise that their families actually originate from within an hour of each other in the Punjab.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm NAMMULANTA KOMBO and I'm so excited to tell you that my podcast,
0:04.8	Dear Dota from the BBC World Service, has won podcast of the year 2022
0:11.7	at the British Podcast Awards. Dear Dota is a collection of letters and stories
0:16.8	offering advice and wisdom for life. It's sometimes funny, it's sometimes sad,
0:22.4	but it's always insightful. Just search for Dear Dota wherever you found this podcast.
0:31.6	I'm Kavita Puri and this is Inheritors of Partition for the BBC World Service.
0:37.9	So even before I learned about the partition, even on the TV or if we were playing
0:42.8	like a board game and like something about Pakistan came up, it was just like a hush in the family, you know?
0:54.8	This is Sparsh, born in India and raised in Australia.
0:58.9	When we speak he's living in Britain. I just always knew that like my grandfather came from
1:04.2	Pakistan but like the extent to which the whole family had been displaced, that didn't really hit me.
1:11.6	Displaced because although his grandfather lived in India, he was born in a village in what became
1:18.6	Pakistan. So one evening over a game of chess, Sparsh began asking his grandfather about the country
1:27.0	of his childhood, that place, no one spoke of. And as those tentative conversations continued
1:35.7	about a land long fled that no one had returned to, Sparsh realized what he had to do.
1:42.8	Like I just knew straight away that I had to go. Go back to that village because
1:49.2	I don't know, I just didn't feel like our family story could be complete unless one of us went
1:53.2	back and saw the place again.
2:10.6	Five years ago I too started on a personal mission that changed my life.
2:16.4	I collected testimonies including my dads that those in Britain who'd lived through
2:21.5	the tumultuous events of partition in 1947. The division of British India along religious lines
2:29.5	into Hindu majority India and Muslim majority Pakistan resulted in the largest migration outside
	...

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