A Husband’s Independence Day Letter
I found this letter written by my grandather to my grandmother on the eve of India’s Independence in 1947. It was posted from Muzaffarnagar to Deoband.
The Dual-Toned Banarasi Saree
The object that we discuss here is a saree: a luminous, dual-toned Banarasi, whose history takes us back to a time period of more than a hundred years ago. It belonged to Tapati Rani Devya, my mother’s great-grandmother. She is a figure so distant from me in lineage, that I know only fragments of information that allow me to paint an incomplete picture of what her life might have looked like
Morkha, Taqsim, Aziz – Dates, Division, and Dearness found in A Family Archive
This is my great-grandfather’s journal. He wrote in it over six decades, from the 1920s to the 1970s, and the book reflects that history. He wrote these entries “for remembrance, a brief description of how we live our lives”.
Sweet Dreams: The short story of a tablecloth
This is a poignant and bittersweet story of Uma Chatterjee (Mukherjee), who was my mother’s paternal aunt. One of her noteworthy and only remaining creations was a tablecloth, made for a school assignment around 1958 or 1959.
From the Musi River to the Bay of Bengal: the lasting ink of a wedding invitation card
There is a ruqqa, a wedding card tucked into the folds of a family album. It announces the union of my maternal grandparents – Ahmed Uddin and Rafi Unissa Begum, better known in our family as Pasha and Nafees, and dates back to February 12, 1961