Prof. Najma Akhtar (Padma Shri), Vice Chancellor, JMI inaugurated the Photo exhibition

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Photo Exhibition `A Remembrance Through Images’ at JMI to commemorate Partition Horror’s Remembrance Day

The Premchand Archives & Literary Centre (PALC), Jamia Millia Islamia (JMI) commemorated Partition Horror’s Remembrance Day on August 14^th, 2023 with an exhibition of photographs titled `A Remembrance Through Images’ featuring photographs of the Partition by Margaret Bourke White, Homai Vyarawalla (India’s first woman press photographer), Henri Cartier Bresson, Sunil Janah, P. N. Sharma and other anonymous photographers of the Press Information Bureau (PIB). The exhibition traces the history of the Partition violence through themes titled `The Decision’, `The Tumult’, `The Dislocation’ and `The Survivors’.

Prof. Najma Akhtar (Padma Shri), Vice Chancellor, JMI inaugurated the exhibition in the presence of Deans, Directors, senior faculty members and students. Prof. Sabiha Zaidi of the Premchand Archives welcomed the Vice Chancellor with flowers and Prof. Shohini Ghosh, Hony. Director welcomed the guests and introduced the exhibition. Prof. Ghosh said that the exhibition was modest in scale but rich in content because the photographs on display had shaped our visual imagination of the Partition.

Prof. Najma Akhtar saw the exhibition and stated that it has been rightly said that those who forget history are condemned to repeat it which is why remembering the past is so important. The `Partition Horror’s Remembrance Day’, she said, gives us an opportunity to revisit the large-scale human suffering that accompanied the mass migration of population during Partition. She said that the Remembrance of Partition’s Horrors is important so that another tragedy of such magnitude is never repeated. Prof. Akhtar talked about the role of photographs in the act of remembrance. “Words help us imagine but pictures bring alive for us those sights and images that we have not seen with our own eyes.”

The exhibition also had on view a short excerpt from the BBC film titled The British Empire in Colour which had been created from archives across the UK. The excerpt captured the scale and depth of human suffering through the use of digitally remastered colour archival footage.

The exhibition will be on display for students from August 16 – August 26, 2023.