OUR STORIES

Project Dastaan is a homage to the legacy of the millions of refugees in the subcontinent who had their lives changed overnight.

Over the past 4 years, we have interviewed around 30 Partition survivors, managing to facilitate a virtual reconnection home for around half of these.  Many more were attempted, but locations from the past often do not remain. Some of our interviewees are featured below:

Our project is a reminder that it is ordinary people who are impacted the most when nationalities are created and torn apart. The important stories of migration are both those of the politics that dictate it, and the people it uproots.

These stories are but a snapshot of the countless individual journeys taken by refugees during the crisis. The Partition affected the entire subcontinent in different ways – the Project seeks to represent this scale by choosing stories across a wide range of cultures, ethnicities, linguistic groups and religious communities.

Women were on a whole disproportionately affected. We have tried to foreground their stories, which are often lost in the Partition discourse.