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In 1947, between 10 to 20 million people were uprooted from their homes and everything that was familiar to them in what was known as the largest human displacement in history. The horrors of the India-Pakistan partition continue to have long-standing effects in the collective South-Asian memory today. Sizeable communities were reduced to mere minorities and millions fled to countries that did not belong to them in the hopes of restarting a new life.
70 years after the inexplicable horrors of this mass exodus, a social-impact project powered by the Catchlight Foundation called Project Dastaan is striving toward reducing the emotional and psychological implications of the migration. Through the use of filmmaking and VR technology, the project aims to reconnect the refugees to their childhood homes.
In an attempt to immortalise the memories of the partition generation while keeping records of the oral history that emerged in this period, Project Dastaan creates a unique technological intervention into traditional human emotions and storytelling in this unique social outreach project that now extends its initiatives to Bangladesh and other South-Asian countries affected by similar mass exoduses.
The Process
The team conducts in-depth interviews with partition refugees, their families and friends to get a sense of their story. Once this has been done, a team of filmmakers are assembled to revisit these spaces where their childhood homes are or once were to capture the essence of the space and recreate it via virtual reality. These videos were then screened to the refugees as a sense of offering them closure and nostalgia for the lives they once lived.
Project Dastaan also actively maintains a vast archive of blogs along with written, and animated stories as a method of preserving a relatively fresh part of history that is on the verge of erasure due to the conflict that surrounded it. In doing so, Dastaan has reached refugee communities living in different corners of the world and is actively building a powerful community of storytellers and stories that deserve to be seen and heard.
Follow Project Dastaan’s work here.
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