An artist and oral historian

Aanchal Malhotra is an artist, author and oral historian whose work explores memories of the 1947 Partition and their transmission between generations. The Museum of Material Memory identifies her as a co-founder and records a BFA in printmaking and art history from OCAD in Toronto and an MFA in studio art from Concordia University in Montréal. It lists her nonfiction books Remnants of a Separation and In the Language of Remembering as well as her novel The Book of Everlasting Things. The different forms of these works matter: a novel and an oral-history project make different uses of evidence and imagination.[1]

Remnants of a Separation

Malhotra’s project Remnants of a Separation began in 2013 as an MFA thesis. Her project page describes research in India, Pakistan and the United Kingdom, undertaken with the Citizens Archive of Pakistan, and an exhibition in Montréal in 2015. Published in South Asia in 2017, the book uses objects carried across the border as entry points into family histories of Partition. An international edition appeared under the title Remnants of Partition. Objects can prompt rich accounts of migration and belonging, but their meanings depend on the people who kept and interpreted them.[2]

A museum of family objects

In 2017 Aanchal Malhotra and Navdha Malhotra co-founded the Museum of Material Memory, a crowdsourced digital repository about material culture of the Indian subcontinent. The museum describes its use of family heirlooms and other objects to tell social and personal histories. Its submissions can open a route into stories that may not appear in state archives, including those relating to Punjab and migration. A family account and the object it describes are evidence with their own provenance: readers should consider who supplied the story, what is known about the object and which details remain uncertain.[3]

Sources & notes

Source records include access dates and, where known, limits on what was examined. Checks used AI assistance; independent human or specialist review has not been completed.

  1. Museum of Material Memory. Aanchal Malhotra ↗Written source · Source date: publication date not established · Locator: Education and publications. Accessed 2026-11-03.Institutional record, collection description, or interview inspected.Return to An artist and oral historian, paragraph 1 ↑
  2. Aanchal Malhotra. Remnants of a Separation ↗Written source · Source date: publication date not established · Locator: Project, research and editions. Accessed 2026-11-03.Institutional record, collection description, or interview inspected.Return to Remnants of a Separation, paragraph 1 ↑
  3. Museum of Material Memory. The Museum ↗Written source · Source date: publication date not established · Locator: Founders and collection. Accessed 2026-11-03.Institutional record, collection description, or interview inspected.Return to A museum of family objects, paragraph 1 ↑
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Record PH-PEO-0270 · English edition · human review not performed