India Partition: After 75 years, tech opens a window into the past

The 1947 Partition Archive, which contains about 10,500 oral histories, is said to be the biggest collection of Partition memories in South Asia. — Courtesy of Project Dastaan

Growing up, Guneeta Singh Bhalla heard her grandmother describe how she crossed into newly-independent India from Pakistan in 1947 with her young children, witnessing horrific scenes of carnage and violence that haunted her for the rest of her life.

Those stories were not in Singh Bhalla’s school text books, so she decided to create an online history – The 1947 Partition Archive, which contains about 10,500 oral histories, the biggest collection of Partition memories in South Asia.