Rock Paper Scissors by Priyanka Chhabra

Description

Rock Paper Scissors is both archive and a response to the archive. Using documents, drawings, text and photographs, the book experiments with and speculates on questions around history – What is history? Who does it belong to? Who writes history and for whom? How messy was the reality of the Partition of Punjab (1947)? Was the Partition a patriarchal act? How can its madness be told? What form and language can unpack its severe complications, regrets, unanswerable questions and the vast unknowns?

The documents in the book are taken from the personal archive of Charan Dass Bangia, a partition refugee from Jaranwala Mandi (Lyallpur, now Faislabad, Punjab, Pakistan) who finally settled in Amritsar, Punjab, India. The oldest document dates to 1931, the land deed for the house they left behind in Jaranwala. These documents are difficult to find in any public archive, museum or even among partition families.

The response to the archive includes an essay, dramatised dialogues, fabulated letters and poetic responses. They weave in and out of the dates, numbers and characters in the documents, much like the silverfish metabolising the archive leaving gaps and memory holes in their tracks.

Moving through the book, you encounter paper tears and trails, a multi lingual ghost, bureaucrats in Safari Suits and voices that are as brittle as the paper you write on.

The project was supported by IFA with seed funding from the Generator Cooperative Art Production Fund.