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73 years later, partition victims find their way back in virtual reality
Rabin Dasgupta was only 16 years old when he moved from a quaint village in Jamalpur, to Kolkata, towards an uncertain future, in August of 1947. A student of painting-coming from an affluent family-Rabin would find himself hit hard by poverty in the years that followed and the painter would resort to selling hand-made dolls to support his family in a city that was not his own.
Seventy-three years later, Kolkata has made Rabin Dasgupta one of its own, but memories of his lost homeland still haunt him. “You could see the Brahmaputra river, and beyond that, you could see the Garo hills from faraway. Once we had crossed it, we didn’t realise it was too late to return.” he fondly recalls.
Rabin Dasgupta is one among the fourteen million people displaced in Punjab and Bengal during the partition of 1947. At the stroke of midnight on 14th August 1947, India would see itself divided along the Radcliffe line. And communal riots would push fourteen million to uproot their entire lives almost overnight and head for bleak futures in the newly created countries.
After seven decades, many of them are getting a chance to get a glimpse of their ancestral lands once again, thanks to a virtual reality project by a team of tech and history enthusiasts from Oxford University.
Project Dastaan
The idea for Project Dastaan was conceived in 2018, when two of its co-founders, Oxford go-er Sparsh Ahuja and Ameena Malak, sat down over a cup of coffee one fine day and exchanged their grandparents’ stories of partition.
They realised that their grandparents had travelled almost identical journeys but in the opposite direction. And they both yearned to go back home. But old age, political tension between countries and the traumatic experience of the past made it difficult for them to go back to their ancestral lands.
They brought in their friends, Sam Dalrymple and Saadia Gardezi, both experts on South Asian history and politics from Oxford, and thus began the flight of Project Dastaan.
Behind the scenes
Sam Dalrymple, Co-founder and Project Lead of Project Dastaan, gives us a glimpse of what really goes into recreating the experiences in VR.
“We begin by interviewing the partition witnesses. We then use our volunteer networks [in India and Pakistan] to track down these locations and try to find any areas which may have survived. 72 years later, a lot of these places have changed. Both countries have industrialised massively since 1947.
“We then edit it and turn it into a full 6 minutes [360 VR] experience of those places as they exist today.
Sparsh Ahuja, CEO and Founder, sheds light on how the project has evolved to focus more on outreach and education surrounding partition.
“In order to educate people, we can’t just show them these spaces; we got to contextualise the whole experience. So, we came up with Child of Empire. Child of Empire isn’t just a 360 experience of these places. Instead, it’s an interactive, animated journey through the partition as if you were a child actually migrating. So, you’re not just watching the experience of migration; you are the migrant. Any action you take along the journey will influence the narrative” he adds.
“In a second area of work, we explore the diversity of the experiences of 1947 Partition across India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh in a series of 5 animated episodes. In this exploration of communal and geographical diversity, we explore issues that are pertinent in 1947 and today, i.e. caste, class, religion, language, and gender. The series brings forth lesser-known stories from South Asia.
Partition is often misperceived as just something that concerns India and Pakistan, rather than a mass event that impacted everyone in the region. As an event, it is often thought as limited to the 1940s, but migrations continued into the 1960s and borders of India and Pakistan only became more solid in the 1960s.
The Bangladesh chapter
In Bangladesh, discourses regarding partition and its displaced communities from these part of the subcontinent are often painfully absent under the shadow of our liberation war in 1971.
“The first issue is that since the 1970s, Bangladeshi has not really attached its identity to 1947, and does not celebrate an anniversary of independence from the British Empire. Thus academic study, and literary works of the region, also don’t touch upon 1947 or comes to the topic as a secondary afterthought to 1971. Establishing the field of Partition studies in Bangladesh is secondary to understanding the “other Partition” of the country when it gained its independence/liberation from Pakistan in 1971.
The other issue is that of the intense violence that the partition of Punjab saw, leading to it becoming a greater part of the oral history of Partition, as well as constant tensions between India and Pakistan along the border over Kashmir.
The way back
“We are being driven by someone in power. We are like the pawns of a checkboard. Partition was forced onto us,” as Tarapada Dey puts it. Tarapada, now 87, is a retired Assistant Commissioner of Income Tax in Kolkata. He moved to Kolkata from Dhaka in 1947 with his family and was left without a permanent residence for almost a decade.
Like Tarapada, Manjari Dasgupta, who migrated to Kolkata from Jamalpur, also recounts the partition days. “We stayed by the temple for seven days, you know. So many houses were burnt. The thought still gives me goosebumps,” she says.
Project Dastaan’s VR experience might whisk Tarapada, Manjari and Rabin to their ancestral lands, but it can never give back what they lost. The memories, however, might be the only things left to salvage now.
See online for the extended story