Witness Panel and Oral History Workshop

11 AM–12:30 PM | Witness Panel

(Sign up outside the Koret Education Center starting at 10:45 AM)

Explore the untold history of Partition, told by those who experienced it. Dedicated to the “people’s history” of Partition, the 1947 Partition Archive is a community-based archive and public history organization based in Berkeley, CA, documenting and sharing crowdsourced accounts of Partition witnesses and survivors.

Panelists include:

Dr. Gurnam Brar A former physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, Dr. Brar was a young adult in 1947 and remembers Partition unfolding in his village in Punjab. His brother, who is now 101 and living in Oakland, fought in the first Indo-Pakistani war of 1948.

Mr. Ali Shan Formerly a local small business owner in the Bay Area and in Scotland, Mr. Shan was orphaned at the age of eight when his village was attacked by a mob. He continues to seek healing from that incident.

2–4 PM | Oral History Workshop

Discovering and preserving your family story

(Sign up outside the Koret Education Center starting at 1:45 PM)

Interested in creating your own oral history archive? Find out how witness accounts can be documented and preserved in this fun and dynamic workshop led by Guneeta Singh Bhalla, an oral historian from the 1947 Partition Archive.

Learn how to probe for the generational truths of your family through the art of oral history. Discover your family’s ancient and recent past — from online research sources, both free and paid, to offline sources such as courthouses, civic records, and genealogy libraries — and find the right techniques to preserve your discoveries for generations to come. Additionally, Guneeta discusses ethics, etiquette, audio visual recording techniques, building your story and an appropriate questionnaire, as well as the general philosophy of the oral history interview. Time permitting, this session also includes mock interviews.

After completing the workshop, those inclined to document oral histories of Partition will be matched to local Partition-era witnesses waiting to have their stories recorded.

Top image: Muslim refugees pack into an overcrowded train near New Delhi to flee India, September 1947. AP Photo.