Tickets for Kishwar Desai’s MMP lecture on the Partition of India are still ‘on sale’ (don’t worry: they’re free – you can book here) on the LSE website. Following the attention given to this turbulent event in the press, on TV and film this year, it will be fascinating to hear how the newly opened Partition Museum in Amritsar, India, has fared – and how the subject is being treated in the Indian and Pakistani media.
Lady Kishwar Desai – the chair of the Arts And Cultural Heritage Trust, which has set up the world’s first Partition Museum at Town Hall, Amritsar, Punjab – will be giving the MMP annual lecture at the LSE on Wednesday 22 November, on the subject of ‘Partition, 70 years on: what have we learnt from the division of India?’
On the Partition Museum’s website, Santosh Bali, one of the people whose oral history is available to listen to, comments that the present generation doesn’t know how the independent states of India and Pakistan came into being or ‘how we got this freedom’. Now in her 80s, she clearly feels that it’s a good thing that these stories are finally coming to public attention, even though the memory of those times still brings tears to her eyes. And Santosh, by her own admission, got off relatively lightly from the whole experience – her family only lost, in her words, all their belongings.
But it’s a funny thing, this kind of switch between ignorance and knowledge. If the younger generation in India and Pakistan knows little about the birth pangs of their countries, it is partly because the older generation held back from telling them. There is nothing in this that is particular to the Indian/Pakistani story. Holocaust survivors often went decades before talking of their experience, just as people who had fought in either of the World Wars of the last century found it impossible to talk about their experiences before their final years. It’s a phenomenon well known to psychologists (often called the 50-year rule) and brilliantly evoked in Richard Flanagan’s 2013 novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North:
Immediately after the war it was quickly like the war had never been, only occasionally rising up like a bad bump in the mattress in the middle of the night and bringing him to an unpleasant consciousness. [. . . ] Sometimes, it was hard to believe he had ever really been to war at all.
There came good years, grandchildren, then the slow decline, and the war came to him more and more and the other ninety years of his life slowly dissolved. In the end he thought and spoke of little else – because, he came to think, little else had ever happened.
If the limited knowledge a younger generation has of the previous generation is in part down to the lack of curiosity of one generation and the reticence of the other, there is another kind of ignorance (in the original sense of ‘lack of knowledge’) in terms of the stories and records that find their way into the public domain. A generation grew up in post-war Germany in largely blissful ignorance of its country’s role in the Second World War because there was no mention of it in the books they studied at school, and their parents and older relatives didn’t talk about it. Likewise, generations of young Japanese students grew up in a country where the 1941–45 conflict was a conspicuous blank in all schoolbooks. Who’s at fault for their ignorance?
Thanks to the TV programmes, films and features there have been this year in the press and wider media, the events of Partition are now part of the public domain in the UK in a way that they arguably were not before. My first awareness of Partition, though, was reading Freedom at Midnight (by Larry Collins and Dominique Pierre) in my 20s, a book that mapped the trauma of the period while allowing a (relatively) young British man to retain his faith in the Brits as the good guys. I don’t think I could hold on to that faith now, when so many other historical records provide a picture of the British imperial ‘adventure’ that is the polar opposite of the one I imbibed at school. I feel embarrassed about my ‘ignorance’ now, just as the young generation of the 1960s and 70s in Germany felt embarrassed, and then angry, about their ‘ignorance’ of their country’s past. But I’m not sure I blame myself for my ignorance, and I find it useful to remember that now when I am tempted to criticise others for their ‘ignorant’ views.
Knowledge is a burdensome thing but it is surely better than ignorance, and it can only be a good thing that the Partition Museum is shining its light on a period in the history of the Indian sub-continent that has for too long been shrouded in darkness. How important, too, if the 50-year rule mentioned above is true, for organisations such as the Partition Museum (and, in this country, the British Library and the Wiener Library, among others) to be gathering the oral testimony of a generation before it disappears.
Why not come along to the LSE on Wednesday 22 November and hear Lady Kishwar Desai reflect on the challenges of setting up this institution to collective remembering and on the differences it has made to the people involved, in one way or another, in the project?
Tickets for Kishwar Desai’s lecture, Partition, 70 years on: what have we learnt from the division of India?, are currently on sale. LSE students and staff are able to collect one ticket per person from the SU shop, located at Lincoln Chambers, 2–4 Portsmouth Street. Members of the public can ‘purchase’ tickets online via the event page on LSE’s website.
A number of county associations took part in the annual St Patrick’s Day march through Whitehall, and it was an established feature of London Irish life throughout the 1950s and ’60s. This image of the Corkmen’s Association was taken by Paddy Fahey, a newspaper photographer and himself an immigrant from Ireland, who frequently attended and photographed a variety of events within the Irish community in London. The Paddy Fahey collection of photographs of Irish life in London between the 1950s and 1970 is held at Brent Archives.
In the third of our series reflecting on the experience of running workshops with young people and schoolchildren, Sarah Crafter (The Open University) and Humera Iqbal (University College London) talk about a project that has as its focus young people and children who act as interpreters for their parents and families – and how this focus can enhance the empathetic understanding of pupils (the vast majority) who are not migrants themselves.
Animation and image by Alan Fentiman: http://bit.ly/2aVfHYw
‘When I was small and I moved in Milan, I used to live with my parents and uncles. I have really good memories with them until the age of 12. Unfortunately, I had to move to the UK, and they couldn’t come. This event changed me and the way I act.’ Safi, aged 15, (Bangladesh, Italy, UK)
Safi, aged 15, moved to Britain three years ago from Italy, having previously lived in Bangladesh. His childhood had been full of instances of resettlement. When young people, like Safi, migrate to a new country, they can often be left with a sense of loss: for people left behind and places they loved. At the same time, they can face new challenges in their new setting; getting to know new people, learning the language, culture, systems and structures in the new country.
We explored some of these themes at the workshop we ran in 2016 for the Migration Museum Project with a group of 65 local schoolchildren at their exhibition Call Me by My Name: Stories from Calais and Beyond. For quite some time we have been working with children and young people who have migrated with their families to a new setting in which they act as child language brokers – children and young people who interpret and translate for family and friends who can’t speak English. Over the years we have learnt that young people translate across lots of different situations and places like doctor’s surgeries, schools, banks, shops and workplaces. Sometimes they really enjoy being a young translator and take great pride in being able to help their families and friends. In other instances the conversations are difficult and people are not always very sympathetic. Many of the young people we speak to tell us, just as Safi did, how difficult it was to arrive in a new country and not be able to understand what people were saying. This sense of change and loss was also explored in the Call Me By My Name exhibition in relation to refugees, and we were able to identify many similarities between the exhibition and our research.
We built on some of these themes in the workshop. We asked the pupils to think about what it feels like to migrate, to be in a new place, to go into the unknown and to learn to communicate when there is no shared language. We started by showing a short animation from our research which features the voices of young people speaking about arriving in a new place and translating.
After watching the film, the young people gathered into groups to talk about some of the main themes that had arisen. This was quite a difficult task for some people, especially if they hadn’t experienced or thought about what it might mean to be a young translator or to migrate to a new country.
Yet, in truth, most of us can pinpoint a situation or feeling of being ‘out of place’ or alone, or unable to say what is in our minds. We wanted everyone to be able to capture that feeling and, to do that, we asked the pupils to put together a timeline map of their own experiences (working with timelines being something we have done in our research). We showed a timeline map made by a teenager called Kitty, who had migrated from Hong Kong to the UK with her family. It captured many markers of upheaval as well as instances of emotional change in different stages of Kitty’s life.
Using Kitty’s narrative as inspiration, the workshop pupils were asked to draw their own timeline, starting with the places they had lived or the places they had moved to (a house, a street, a country). The pupils then added people in their ‘migration timeline’ to get a sense of those who are always with us, those who come into our lives and those who fade out. Languages learnt and spoken were added. The pupils were encouraged to describe any ‘firsts’ they had experienced, such as the first time riding a bike, trying a particular food, reading something that made them cry.
This workshop was useful for the pupils because it enabled those who had never migrated to a new country, or learnt a new language, to gain a greater depth of empathy and understanding about how this must feel. In loading memories of newness, change, experience and important relationships, the pupils were encouraged to explore what their own feelings might be in moving to a new country and learning a new language. Our workshop also helped those pupils who had migrated, and who did speak a second language, to talk freely about their experience with their friends. We were impressed with how bravely they spoke to us, and their friends, about what that felt like for them. Teachers might also use similar exercises or prompts within school during citizenship and personal health and healthcare lessons, to explore issues of diversity.
You can find more information about our project here.
Dr Sarah Crafter is a senior lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the Open University in the UK. She has a PhD in Cultural Psychology and Human Development and is interested in cultural identity development and ‘non-normative’ childhoods. Her work with child language brokers grew out of broader interest in the constructions or representations of childhood in culturally diverse settings. Dr Humera Iqbal is a lecturer in psychology at the Department of Social Science at University College London. She is interested in identity and the migration experiences of families and young people, in particular how they engage with institutions in new settings. She is also interested in mental health and wellbeing in young people, particularly those from minority groups. Her research uses mixed methods as well as arts- and film-based methods.
In the second of three blogs on holding workshops with school pupils on the issues of migration, Umut Erel and Elizabeth Newcombe discuss an attempt to introduce pupils to the complexities of the language and the policy issues surrounding immigration, at a time of great global inequality and economic recession.
When holding a workshop for a school from Sussex at the Migration Museum Project’s Call Me By My Name exhibition in July 2017, it was striking to see school pupils becoming passionately engaged with issues of migration. The group of 15 pupils and their teachers arrived on one of the hottest days of the year, having already spent time wandering through London. Emily Miller, MMP’s head of learning and partnerships, started the workshop with an interactive game, using questions and movement in the space of the museum to break the ice and find out how everyone relates to migration. Some of the questions she asked were:
Do you know someone who has migrated?
Do you speak more than one language?
Has anyone in your family migrated?
If our answer to these questions was ‘yes’, we had to take a step forward; if the answer was ‘no’, we were asked to take a step backwards. Soon most of us were concentrated in a tight circle in the middle of the room, and it had become clear that there was a lot of experience of migration, whether personal or indirect.
Drawing by Laura Sorvala.
The workshop then moved on to look at some of the key terms in the migration debate. A young refugee told of his experiences of migration, finding his way around life in the UK and how he now works in arts and education organisations in which he initiates dialogues on the experiences of refugees and migrants. All of us were stunned to hear of the difficulties he had overcome on his journey to the UK in the early 2000s. Some of the pupils shared their personal experiences of the country he came from and the countries he had passed through, which gave the encounter added poignancy.
After this informative and emotionally charged part of the workshop, we changed gears slightly and introduced a more academic take on the issues. Starting with an interactive exercise on global inequalities of income, we began to question the term migrant, pointing out that, when we use the terms ‘migrant’ and ‘refugee’, this does not refer to a legal figure or a dataset, but to a political figure. We discussed how British people living abroad almost always think of themselves as ‘expats’ not ‘migrants’, while Black Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) people who were born and have lived all their lives in the UK are often called ‘second generation migrants’. So, the decision about who counts as a migrant is often framed by assumptions about race, class and nationality.
When discussing migration, we often hear about the need to protect the welfare state from outsiders, but how can we understand the welfare state against the backdrop of global inequalities? We are living at a time of the highest level of global inequality in human history, when the wealth of 67 people is the same as the combined total of the world’s 3.5 billion poorest people, and the poorest 50 per cent of the world have 6.6 per cent of total global income. There are issues with the methodology of these estimates, but it cannot be denied that the world has changed from the 19th century. Today, for most people in the world, what is key to your life chances is the country you live in. The fear for those living in wealthier states is that there are a lot of people who are hard up in the world and that, if you don’t have much, you need to hold on to it.
Migrant families’ exclusion from the welfare state was a topic in another research project – Participation Arts and Social Action in Research (PASAR) – we are currently running with our colleagues Erene Kaptani (Open University), Maggie O’Neill (University of York) and Tracey Reynolds (University of Greenwich). The PASAR project conducted participatory research with migrant mothers affected by the policy No Recourse to Public Funding (NRPF), which means migrants who are subject to immigration control are not allowed to access benefits, tax credits or housing assistance. This policy affects both migrants who have the right to remain in the UK and those who are undocumented. The policy pushes these migrant families – many of whom include young children, who are among the most vulnerable people – to the margins of society through poverty and racism. In a workshop with policy makers, practitioners and activists, we worked with a group of migrant mothers affected by NRPF to enable their collective voice to be heard. To do so, we showed a short theatre piece developed through the research.
At the schools’ workshop, we watched a short scene from this theatre piece about Elaine’s experience. Elaine had been working for many years for a large supermarket. She needed to take time off every two weeks to sign into the Immigration Reporting Centre, a requirement of the Home Office. Her manager used his knowledge of her vulnerability to bully her and change her onto an unfavourable night shift, even though she had just had a baby. Her union representative’s response was that as an immigrant she should be glad to have a job. She also experienced stigmatisation by fellow workers, who saw her as an ‘illegal’ immigrant. Eventually, she lost her job – unable to pay rent, Elaine, her husband and six-year-old son have for four years now been living in the houses of friends and acquaintances, surviving on their monetary support.
This example shows how racism, anti-immigration policies and austerity intersect. An increasingly hostile climate to immigration has made it more difficult for migrants to find formal and informal employment. As a consequence of increasingly stringent migration regulations, particularly since 2012, more and more migrant families are subject to migration control, prevented from accessing public funds and rendered unable to economically support themselves (Price and Spencer, 2015). In a situation of crisis – through the loss of jobs or accommodation, relationship breakdown or health problems – they cannot draw on the relative safety net of the welfare state to help them overcome these points of crisis and are pushed more and more to the margins of society.
Having watched a short video clip of these theatre scenes with the school pupils, we had an interesting discussion about some of the issues raised by Elaine’s story:
How can labels such as ‘illegal migrant’ be misleading and stigmatising?
Why are some people, and not others, allowed to draw on welfare services?
Should contributions through work be the criterion for deciding whether migrants can participate in the welfare state?
Should there be other criteria for inclusion into welfare, based on colonial and postcolonial ties?
Should there be criteria based on shared humanity?
It is hard to summarise the workshop, as it was rich and varied, but it seems to me that this variety of modes of engagement (personal testimony, interactive activities, and audio-visual material and information) has been fruitful in raising many questions, showing the complexity of issues of migration and welfare, and linking conceptual discussions to personal experiences of migration, which are often far richer than those portrayed in public debate. While teachers challenged us as academics to present information in accessible ways, especially for pupils who are still learning English, their feedback was heartening: ‘Our students learnt a lot from the experience both about migration at the human level but also the bigger picture of why these issues are so pressing for the UK at the present time. A great day well spent!’
Umut Erel is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the Open University. She is Principal Investigator of PASAR, an ESRC-funded research project investigating the opportunities and challenges of using participatory theatre and walking methods for social research.
Emma Newcombe is the Head of External Relations for COMPAS and the Global Exchange on Migration and Diversity. She oversees all COMPAS’s communications work, and also supports the development of the ESRC Urban Transformations project. She has an MA in Migration Studies from the University of Sussex and a BSc in Social Policy from the University of Bristol.
