The Art of Listening

Aanchal was in her grandmother’s house in Delhi with a recorder turned on. When her grandmother spoke, Aanchal listened. As she unlocked a cupboard, Aanchal watched. And when her grandmother revealed a familiar yet spectacular piece of jewelry called a maang-tikka, Aanchal’s eyes widened. She tried it on. It was her grandmother’s mother’s, saved from Partition and then arrived in Aanchal‘s hands despite the “time, circumstances, and geography.”

Throughout the afternoon, her grandmother, Bhag Malhorta, shared the stories of their family’s past. A traumatic past. An unspoken and sometimes responseless past.

“I said nothing,” Aanchal wrote about her experience of listening to it. But Aanchal’s listening – saying nothing, that is – was not a passive exercise. Within the listening, Bhag Malhorta’s story of the past became a breathing body of now.

Ethnographies like this have become Aanchal Malhorta’s passion. Through her projects like Remnants of a Separation and The Museum of Material Memory, the stories of people like her grandparents surface through shawls, utensils, and other objects saved during the 1947 Partition of India, human history’s largest mass-migration. “It’s been too quiet for too long,” Aanchal told me. “It has spite attached to it. It has anger attached to it.” Partition forced the migration of 14 million people from India and newly created Pakistan, and left over a million dead.

In that same conversation with her grandmother about the maang-tikka: “I remember her [Bhag Malhorta’s mother] telling us how she had tied it within the folds of her clothes for fear of being robbed on the way to Delhi . . . this is the only thing that reminded her of that house in Muryali, of her in-laws, of the bonds of marriage. Though they rejected her, I don’t think she had the heart to sever those ties.”

For Aanchal, good listening is both a historical responsibility and a deep, emotional interpersonal practice. In a different interview with her grandfather, he brought forward a metal lassi tumbler. He shared heart-wrenching stories of a packed-train escape and long-term encampments, and that it journeyed with him. That night, Aanchal took the tumbler to her ear. She listened: “Like the sounds of the ocean, what kissed my ear was the full echo of air stuck in a vacuum . . . a ghostly reverberation . . . impossible to ignore.”

“It is such a gift when somebody is like ‘I think this is bigger than me and you. This is us.”

Good listening, while still objective, cannot not be personal. It must be an embodied experience.

I’m reminded of the kirtans I’ve go to on Thursdays at the Bhakti Center in the East Village. The kirtan is an energetic evening of call-and-response over instruments and rhythmic drumming. We sit on the floor in a space that is dark, intimate, and alive. While the leader sings, you listen. But not just with your ears; it requires all of the senses. All of your attention. For me, the magic of the kirtan takes place when I am full of song and empty of all else. When the listening leads me to a peace not previously had.

This past week at the kirtan, one of the hosts said something interesting that I had always felt but never thought about. There’s a moment in the evening, he said, sometimes an hour in, sometimes further, where it’s no longer about you and your voice, nor me and mine. The singing becomes a collective act. We come together with one voice, one sacred body. Listening leads us somewhere.

Aanchal’s work does something similar – uniting those who engage with it in surprising ways. “It is such a gift when somebody is like ‘I think this is bigger than me and you. This is us.’ My project has become our project so quickly over the past 3 or 4 years.”

There was a case when an ornate bowl, called a khaas-daans, began an unlikely conversation between an Indian and a Pakistani on Aanchal’s website. Used to serve paan, the khaas-daans was familiar in the family culture of both people. It became a sort of portal, sparking a conversation of shared memory. “An object can connect a person from a remote part of India to a remote part of Pakistan. And they can both have a conversation over my blog saying, ‘You have this thing in your house, and so do I!’ This is an Indian talking with a Pakistani. And for the first time there was no ‘you’re an Indian, you’re a Pakistani, you’re supposed to be like this, et cetera.’”

And while listening takes the knowing of a thing and creates a felt experience, it became important to me in my own listening of Aanchal, and in reading her book, and in writing this piece, that there are some things that we will still never grasp. Partition is complex. The stories from both sides of the division are textured with grief and layered with loss. There are, possibly, moments of lightness, but even those we may never truly get.

But as listeners, we can make space. And we can be open. Like Aanchal does – unsilencing the histories of her grandmother, grandfather, and others in their generation. To listen to a person is to open a door, sit steadily on one side, and say, I see you. And you’re safe to shed something here. Listening, without interjection, is a powerful form of validation, and in listening, there is the potential of union. It’s how we can hear and honor an individual past: viscous, irreparable and un-gettable as it might have been, and inch forward, even slightly, as a whole.

Photos taken by Aanchal Malhorta