A Husband's Independence Day Letter - Museum of Material Memory
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.| Museum of Material Memory
A camera sits on my bookshelf- heavy, leather-bound and silent for decades. Once owned by my great-grandfather, S.M Faruque- a man I never knew. Not his voice, nor his demeanor, nor the quiet rituals of his day. And yet, I have come to see fragments of the world as he once did; through the twin lenses of his Rolleiflex camera. The post Through His Lens: S.M Faruque’s Film camera appeared first on Museum of Material Memory.| Museum of Material Memory
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.| Museum of Material Memory
The Pears Cyclopaedia was first published in 1897. Sold for a shilling, it was originally referred to as “A Mass of Curious and Useful Information about Things that everyone Ought to know in Commerce, History, Science, Religion, Literature and other Topics of Ordinary Conversation.”| Museum of Material Memory
A crowdsourced digital repository of material culture of the Indian subcontinent, tracing family history and social ethnography through heirlooms, collectibles and objects of antiquity| Museum of Material Memory
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| Museum of Material Memory
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”.| Museum of Material Memory
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. The post Sweet Dreams: The short story of a tablecloth appeared first on Museum of Material Memory.| Museum of Material Memory
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| Museum of Material Memory
The Hasla is typically a torque-style necklace, thick and rigid, cast in silver and sitting close to the neck. It belonged to Ilm Kaur, my maternal great grandmother, who died sometime in the year 1949, succumbing to an unknown illness.| Museum of Material Memory
Look at how time flies, we are now headed to the hospital to bring Kasturi and her daughter back home, and the little one will use the bed her mother used. That’s the story of how the fourth generation of my family has begun putting this teak-wood cot to use.| Museum of Material Memory
It was during the unprecedented turmoil and unrest of Partition that Babaji came into the possession of this beautiful Quran. From stories passed down, we know that he was given this by someone whose identity has been lost to time. But what is certain is that it was a symbol of faith amidst the tragic loss of lives and the pain of separation from one’s homeland and family. The post A mini-Quran from Partition: My Jain family’s legacy appeared first on Museum of Material Memory.| Museum of Material Memory
The postcard is about 5.5" x 3.5" in dimensions. There's a round black seal beside the stamp which reads "26 Mar 49 , 8 AM , Comilla''. That means it was posted at 08:00 am, 26th March, 1949, from the post office in Comilla.| Museum of Material Memory
