October, November, December 2021

Dear Reader,

Three research papers along with classroom activity ideas, developed from talks delivered as part of our Political Partitions: Human Stories series, hosted between September 2020 and February 2021.

Finally, a window into our recently completed pilot of the Ladakh-Bengal Education Exchange project, a collaboration with Achi Association, India that gave us the wonderful opportunity to work with themes of critical concern to the present social fabric, with students from Ladakh and Kolkata.

Registration details:

Open to all school teachers and teachers in-training.

Registration: Rs. 1000/-; for B.Ed students: Rs. 500/-

Last date for registration: 18 October 2021.

Note: Participants will receive a certificate on completing the 3-day course.

Founder of the Barefoot Philosophers initiative (www.barefootphilosophers.org), Sundar Sarukkai’s works primarily in the realm of philosophy of natural and social sciences. He is the author of Translating the World: Science and Language, Philosophy of Symmetry, Indian Philosophy and Philosophy of Science, What is Science? and two books co-authored with Gopal Guru – The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory and most recently Experience, Caste and the Everyday Social. His book titled JRD Tata and the Ethics of Philanthropy was published in July 2020.

Sundar Sarukkai is the Co-Chief Editor of the Springer Handbook of Logical Thought in India, the Series Editor for the Science and Technology Studies Series, Routledge, and editorial advisory member of Leonardo as well as Marg. Sarukkai was a professor of philosophy at the National Institute of Advanced Studies till 2019 and was the Founder-Director of the Manipal Centre for Philosophy and Humanities where he set up an innovative interdisciplinary postgraduate program. He has been actively taking philosophy to different communities and places, conducting philosophy workshops for children and bringing philosophy to the public through his writing in the media. His forthcoming book 'Philosophy for Children' will be published in English and other languages.

Small Comfort, Image Courtesy: Parasher Archive

Parasher's Partition Sketches are [ . . . ] that rare transitional item that flows directly from the immediacy of his experience in a transit camp in 1947 to our experience in 2021 trying to imagine hopelessness and despair, of the lives which have given us our own, of a time where everything which was dependable had been ruptured and nothing of the future could be imagined. The very fragility of these pieces—they are largely on scraps of available paper—is testament to the nearly impossible journey they have made from that moment to this one. Unlike written records, scant as those are, and unlike recreations such as film, these sketches are a constant, as real now as they were in the muddy, fly strewn and exhausted moments of their creation.

In February 2021, we had the wonderful fortune of hosting, as part of our Political Partitions: Human Stories series, an illustrated talk on the artist S.L. Parasher. Delivered by the artist's daughter Prajna Parasher—filmmaker, scholar and multimedia artist, the talk was followed by an insightful conversation between the speaker and her sister, historian Aloka Parasher-Sen. This evocative session gave us the foundation to develop a teaching/learning module based on these same fragile art pieces, towards bringing nuance to our understandings and memorialization of Partition.

Last year, History for Peace organized a series of talks on the theme of Political Partitions: Human Stories, with the intent to look at lived experiences of Partition and their expressions in literature and art, as well as to draw into the classroom those narratives of partition that are often excluded from the 1947-Punjab-focused perspective embodied in school syllabi across India.

We now bring to you the research along with classroom activity ideas developed by our wonderful team of interns, taking off from four talks from the Partitions series.

Some Facts and Perspectives on the Partition, Suchandra Bose

Amrita Pritam and the Pain of the Partition, Sanjukta Bose

Lost in Transition: Narratives of Non-Existence, Puja Bose

Partitioning Women in the World of Men: A Study of Qurratulain Hyder's Works, Diptarka Datta

We bring you a classroom module developed by Mayukhi Ghosh for History for Peace in collaboration with Alternative Law Forum. This classroom module has been drawn from an Alternative Law Forum resource, Preamble - A Brief Introduction, and offers you an interactive classroom-friendly framework to engage your students with the Preamble to the Indian Constitution closely and critically.

'The Constitution of India has become a popular tool in protests and is often introduced by enthusiastic dissidents in protest marches or by politicians to substantiate a point in fervent debates. This resurgence of interest in the Constitution is emblematic of a constitutional vision of the nation—the India our Constituent Assembly envisioned when drafting the Constitution. 

This resource is an introduction into ways of engaging with art, by actively thinking about how we look at art, and the ways in which we are meant to look at it. It was conceptualized keeping in mind the way art is limited to drawing realistically in classrooms, or as something that is inaccessible outside formal spaces of art like galleries. It introduces art through the discipline of Art History, and is meant to provoke multiple ways of teaching through art, and critically thinking about it. It includes activities, additional resources, and pointers for discussing the questions raised. 

This resource was preceded by and built on a short workshop series by the same name, facilitated by Angel Roy Thomas and hosted by History for Peace.

After over a year of far-too-many hours of digital classes, presentations, meetings and exams, surely we have all become quite the experts? While the internet has certainly widened the scope of the urban classroom in many ways, it comes with its own limitations, aside from issues of accessibility. Quite often, we found that simply trying to replicate the physical classroom online wasn't working as planned. Tested and trusted methods of engaging students' interest were being hindered by technological logistics as well as sorely lacking in the kind of intimacy peculiar to the classroom space. Here's a guide Euroclio developed specifically for teaching in the digital world we found that might be of use to you. Click here.

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The space of the Jallianwala Bagh arguably features in the imagination of many students in India to a greater or lesser degree, irrespective of what Board their school is affiliated to, whether they have ever stepped foot in Amritsar or through what popular medium they have received the 'tale' of Bhagat Singh and his revolutionary comrades. The recent drastic renovation of the Bagh and the volley of criticisms it has triggered, widely covered on news and social media, we think, provide an excellent inroad for students to reflect on and debate issues of collective memory, identity and belonging, state narratives and memorialization. To lead into this conversation, we highly recommend this arts-based resource by Heritage Lab on the history and legacy of the 1919 Massacre.

Also read here the commentary by the artists of Jallianwala: Repression and Retribution (the Singh Twins, 2019).

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With the annual festivities of Durga Pujo around the corner, here are two resources to share with your students that could perhaps add something new to their experience of 'pandal hopping' (Covid protocols in place of course), or even inspire those who are less inclined, to find something worth exploring in this yearly ritual:

The Ladakh Bengal Education Exchange Programme was a pilot project, run as a

collaboration between Achi Association and Seagull foundation for the Arts, where we worked with a group of 30 students—15 from each region. This created the space for opening up direct conversation between students from these two different regions with guided discussions and activities to tap into questions around heritage, conservation, identity, migration, diversity, and the evolving life of a city, among other things. Therefore, moving beyond the popular imagination of a space and its culture to explore the nuances in its making, and the lives of the people that it shapes therein.