Aanchal Malhotra

Aanchal Malhotra (born 1990) is an Indian historian, author, and artist, known for her work on the 1947 Partition of India. Her research and writings focus on the oral histories of individuals affected by the Partition.

She is the author of the critically acclaimed books Remnants of a Separation and In the Language of Remembering.

Early life and education Aanchal Malhotra was born in New Delhi, India, in 1990, where she continues to live and work. She received a BFA degree in traditional printmaking and art history from OCAD University in Toronto, where she won the University Medal and the Sir Edmund Walker Award for Graduate Studies. She completed a MFA in Studio Art from Concordia University, Montréal. She belongs to the family of Bahrisons Booksellers, founded by her paternal grandfather, Balraj Bahri, in 1953 in New Delhi. It is a historical and anthropological attempt to revisit the Partition through personal and intimate objects that refugees carried with them across the border during their migration. It was named a Hindustan Times "India @ 70" book and shortlisted for the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar, Shakti Bhatt Prize First Book Award, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize, and Hindu Lit for Life Non-Fiction Prize. Aanchal Malhotra speaking at Emirates Airline Festival of Literature 2024. Outside the Indian subcontinent, it was published under the title Remnants of Partition: 21 Objects from a Continent Divided by Hurst Publishers in 2019. It was shortlisted by the British Academy for the 2019 Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding. In 2022, it won the United States Council for Museum Anthropology Book Prize, where the committee called it "a model for significant contributions to museum anthropology.”

To mark the 75th anniversary of Partition in 2022, Malhotra published a sequel titled, In the Language of Remembering: The Inheritance of Partition, which focused on the contemporary relevance of Partition in the everyday lives of Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis.

Her debut novel, The Book of Everlasting Things, was also published in 2022.

In addition to her books, she has been involved in several oral history projects and is an advisor the Project Dastaan peace initiative. In 2017, she co-founded the Museum of Material Memory, a crowdsourced digital repository tracing family history and social ethnography through heirlooms, collectibles, and objects of antiquity from the Indian subcontinent.

Books

Non-fiction

Remnants of a Separation: A History of Partition through Material Memory (2017) / Remnants of Partition: 21 Objects from a Continent Divided (2019) In the Language of Remembering: The Inheritance of Partition (2022) The Book of Dog (HarperCollins India, 2022)

Awards and honours

2017: Hindustan Times “India @70” book for Remnants of A Separation 2022: Council for Museum Anthropology Book Prize for Remnants of Partition 2022: GQ "Top 10 Indian non-fiction books of 2022" for In the Language of Remembering 2024: Chambre de Commerce et d'Industrie Franco-Indienne Literary Prize for Vestiges d’une Séparation