Recording History Digitally, Guneeta Bhalla Visits Khalsa College

Visits Library as She sets Target to Interview 5000 partition Survivors

Amritsar, February 17 (Punjab Post Bureau)- Having taken up mammoth task of recording `1947 partition of Indo-Pak history’ through digital technology, US based researcher Guneeta Singh Bhalla today visited historic Khalsa College campus. She spent times at Sikh History Research Library for relevant documents and inquired about the college’s vast campus which was converted into temporary shelter home for victims of partition in 1947.

            Bhalla who has travelled to Pakistan and Bangladesh in connection with collecting the stories and historical facts relating events of division of India and Pakistan, said that she has undertaken the first ever project of recording the `oral history’ of the partition. She has interviewed more than 3000 partition-survivors who were witness to the violence and carnage that followed during riots after Pakistan was carved out of India. She held meeting with Khalsa College Governing Council honourary secretary, Rajinder Mohan Singh Chhina, finance secretary Gunbir Singh and Principal Khalsa College Dr. Mehal Singh and they shared valuable information relating historical events. At Sikh History Research Library she met department head Dr. Inderjit Singh Gagoani and saw the documents and manuscripts.

            Bhalla is Executive Director at the US based `The 1947 Partition Archive’. She is basically physicist and completed her tenure as a post-doctoral researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of California at Berkeley in December 2012. “After a 2008 visit to the oral testimony archives at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial I was inspired and began interviewing Partition survivors in 2010’’, she said adding that then she got so much engrossed that she has undertaken this project to interview maximum people who were affected by partition to keep as records for the future generations.  She said her own family had migrated from Lahore to Amritsar on August 14, 1947 and she listened to the tales of riots, devastation and massacre of innocents from her father. Chhina appreciated the painstaking work being undertaken by her and offered every possible help to the completion of the project as she has targeted to interview 500 survivals of the partition era.