Bathinda: As the bloodiest PARTITION As the world completes 75 years of existence, the survivors go back to their roots through technology. Documenting Stories on Partition, University oxford Researchers are taking immigrants back to their native homes through virtual reality (VR) and providing a 360-degree experience with headsets.
project story Came into existence in 2018 with the aim of connecting and connecting 75 survivors of Partition to their native places in India and Pakistan. However, the pandemic limited their plans to only 35 stories. In addition to documenting the suffering of survivors, tale It is also promoting peacebuilding initiatives.
Sparsh Ahuja, a noted documentary filmmaker, who graduated as a Fitzrandolph Scholar in PPE at the University of Oxford, started the project after finding out about his maternal grandfather Ishar Das Arora, who was a victim of Partition.
His grandfather, who was only seven years old when he had to come to India from Pakistan under painful circumstances, never forgets the trauma. It was a Muslim neighbor who came to his savior when he was being attacked.
Ahuja wanted his grandfather to return to his village Bela in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa but this was not possible. then with his friends Sam Dalrymple And Saadia GardzikThe thought of using technology to bring survivors back to their roots.
A team of 30 volunteers from five countries tracked survivors, interviewed them, tracked their locations in India and Pakistan, retrieved sequences of locations associated with survivors until Partition, and edited it into a six-minute experience. helped to do.
Although they couldn’t travel to document the stories during the pandemic, Dastaan came up with four animated films – ‘Child of Empires’, an interactive animated virtual reality documentary experience and ‘Lost Migration’, a three-part animated series that covers The Untold. Tells stories of partition.
The works and films of Project Dastan are on display at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery until 14 August as part of South Asian Heritage Month, marking the 75th anniversary of Partition. After that, it is proposed to exhibit the films in museums in India and Pakistan.
Sam Dalrymple told TOI, “When we couldn’t get the survivors back to where they belong, virtual reality came in as the perfect solution. The survivors were technically able to see the places that they are. It was once his.” Sam, the son of historian William Dalrymple and co-founder and head of operations of Dastaan, is also working on his upcoming book ‘Five Partitions: The Making of Modern Asia’.
Sadia Gardezi, co-founder and head of Pakistan, says it is painful to reach out to partition survivors and learn about their suffering and that Dastan was trying to make that pain public. Saadia, who is pursuing her doctorate at the University of Warwick after graduating from Oxford, says she is trying to tell the pathetic stories from the division that still haunts survivors, through new angles. and was working on the three-episode animation series ‘Lost Migration’. Started two years ago.
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