Reliving the traumas of partition

Last week, the Gurmani Centre for Languages and Literature at Lahore University of Management Studies hosted a screening of the forthcoming documentary film, Buhay Khulay Rakhi (Keep the doors open).

- UMAIR JAVED

Directed by Nida Mehboob and produced by historians Ali Usman Qasmi, Ilyas Chattha, and Ali Raza, the film centres on stories of trauma, identity, and belonging of those separated from their families during the partition of Punjab in 1947.

While scholars have chronicled the horrors of that upheaval across several decades, this new film draws attention to the children who were orphaned in the violence, adopted temporarily by others, and subsequently sent to Pakistan on the basis of their religion. With kin killed or displaced in Partition, and communities segregated on the basis of faith, the eventual status of many such children was as wards of a newly independent state.

The number of such cases is sizable. Their stories, however, have only recently come to light thanks to the remarkable work of chroniclers such as Khayyam Chohan. Mr Chohan, whose work features prominently in the aforementioned film, runs a YouTube channel called Desi Infotainer.

Among the vast quantities of tripe that passes for popular content on Pakistani YouTube, his is a rare outlet dedicated to a truly remarkable and educational cause: commemorating and recording people's personal narrations of Partition, with a special focus on reuniting (digitally and in some instances in real life) families and communities who now lie on either side of the border.