Author Talk: “1000 Memories” with Dr. Guneeta Singh Bhalla

Hear from Dr. Guneeta Singh Bhalla, a trailblazing archivist and founder of the 1947 Partition Archive, on the importance of telling history from the ground up, empowering survivors, and raising the curtain on unheard voices.

“Our true collective history is diverse and made up of the lived experiences of everyone who has ever existed,” says Dr. Bhalla.

Since 2011, the 1947 Partition Archive has documented over 12,000 accounts from survivors of India and Pakistan’s 1947 Partition, recognized as the largest mass refugee crisis of the 20th century. Dr. Bhalla’s new book 10,000 Memories tells the story of Partition, World War II, and independence in the mid-20th century Indian subcontinent through hundreds of individual experiences.

Broader in scope than any previous publication on the subject, the inaugural volume of the 10,000 Memories series includes stories from Afghanistan in the west to Myanmar in the east, and Kashmir in the north to Kerala in the south, offering vivid insights into a defining moment in world history. 

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  About the Speaker

  Dr. Guneeta Singh Bhalla is the founder of the 1947 Partition Archive, an organization that documents oral histories from survivors of Partition. During that fateful rupture, her family was displaced from Lahore, where they had lived for centuries. Inspired by a visit to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial’s oral testimony archives and troubled by the imminent loss of a generation of eyewitnesses, Dr. Bhalla began interviewing Partition witnesses in 2008, which led to crowdsourcing oral histories of Partition. Previously, Dr. Bhalla was a visual artist and experimental condensed matter physicist, completing her tenure as a post-doctoral researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Department of Physics at the University of California at Berkeley.