Asia Society India Centre spoke with Anam Zakaria, part of the Asia 21 Next Generation Class of 2018, about her experience as an oral historian, the nuances that define and differentiate modern South Asian identity narratives and organic paths to a writing career. Co-founder of Qissa, a platform to document the stories of immigrants, and previously the Director of the Citizens Archive of Pakistan, Anam is the author of The Footprints of Partition: Narratives of Four Generations of Pakistanis and Indians (2015), Between the Great Divide: A Journey into Pakistan-Administered Kashmir (2018) and 1971: A People's History from Bangladesh, Pakistan and India (2019).

Anam, could you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your work?  


I'm an oral historian and an author. I've also worked in the non-profit sector for the past fifteen years. I have a background in international development and anthropology and I’m an Asia 21 leader. In my work, I look at both state histories, state narratives, official histories, and people's memories, and the ways in which the two relate to each other, the ways in which the two influence each other and also resist and challenge each other.

My work began with interviewing survivors of the Partition of British India, looking at how narratives of Partition have shifted over generations. It then moved to the ongoing violence in Kashmir, particularly working with women, with children, with refugees near the Line of Control. And my most recent book was on the 1971 genocide in Bangladesh that led, eventually led to the birth of Bangladesh itself.

And since then, I've relocated. Now I'm in Canada. So, some of the work I'm doing right now centres around mob violence, and oral histories of people who've experienced that. And I also founded a small organisation over here by the name of Qissa, which translates as “storytelling”, and that serves as a platform for immigrant storytelling. Some of the work that I'm doing right now is looking at the larger Canadian narrative on immigrants and how many people’s experiences, especially those that are from the global South, from places like Pakistan and India, are often far more nuanced and challenging and difficult and varied.  

What motivates your work in cultural history and what difference do you hope to make?    

I was thinking about this question. I guess what motivated me when I began this work was really — for one, a personal kind of quest. None of my work has emerged out of an academic project or out of a PhD. They've all been very personal, self-funded projects. My desire and motivation is, I want to learn my own history through alternative means, beyond jingoistic state histories. I want to learn and I also want to unlearn.

This motivation comes from the oral history work that I got introduced to by chance at my first job at the Citizens Archive (of Pakistan), and I kind of realised how little I know and how much more complex our culture is, our politics are, our histories are. And wanting to learn because I really believe that history shapes our present.

So if I want to understand anything about contemporary South Asia, about my own heritage, about even my own family - this is both personal and political - I need to understand the past and through a varied, nuanced oral history below the history, like a history from below kind of lens. There is that, but I think there's also a political motivation behind my work. My work is very much political in the sense that I feel this urgency that as we lose people who lived through the events that continue to shape us; they have a far more kind of complex relationship to that history and complex experience of that history than the neatly packaged versions we now get. The digestible versions that we get.  The partitioned versions that we get. And because I worked not just with elders recording these oral histories, I've also worked with school children. I've worked with children in Pakistan and India, also a little bit in Bangladesh, I see that as that packaged linear kind of history makes its way to state textbooks and into schools, into mainstream discourse, into our media dialogue. It has a real impact in terms of how it's fuelling hate sentiment, hostility and otherisation.  A very narrow-minded way of thinking and constructing people that you may not have never have met. And that has real repercussions.

I think part of this work is also this urgency to document a slightly more punctuated history, a history that offers a different way of understanding our past and how that shapes our present. I think it's both. It's very personal, but it's also has a larger political meaning for me.


Considering the intricacies of South Asian culture and experience, there is a gap in available conventional wisdom and conversations surrounding leadership and problem-solving. It can be a challenge to adopt conventional ideas to work through situations that are in need of culturally specific solutions. As a leader, what has your experience been while addressing such complications?  

I think there's a more high-level answer to this, which I think we all are familiar with. I'm sure everybody else you might have posed this question to would talk about Eurocentric, top-down development models that get imposed and those lenses, how when they are used in different contexts where they don’t make sense, it can lead us to Orientalist practices and just missing the picture. So, there’s all of that, of course.

But when I think about it, like very specifically in terms of the challenges I’ve had in my work, I think this often gets missed, and I don't think I realised this until much later: there's also nuance that gets missed between Bangladesh, Pakistan, India. For example, when you look at Partition literature, Partition discourse, or really South Asian history, it is most often told through the lens of India, and then also through a particular lens within India. That is a state-sanctioned kind of lens, a lens that's dominated by certain regional histories. And this is true even within Pakistan, when we look at Partition, because Punjab tends to dominate. So there are also those kinds of nuances that, for example, when I first wrote my Partition book, I thought I kind of understood Partition, and then I finished writing it, and I realised I’ve only looked at it through Punjab’s lens. That’s what pushed me and motivated me to go to Kashmir.

When I looked at 1971 and Bangladesh, of course, I realised Bengal had a completely different experience of that, and then other regions have very different experiences too. I think some of this is coming forth in oral histories now, but what I often find is that within the region, there are some hegemonic narratives and certain narratives that have become the normative narratives. That does not allow us to see the full picture, essentially.

For example, Partition means something very different in Pakistan. It’s tied to nation-making. There's a sense of triumph, so the bloodshed kind of gets couched as sacrifice. In India, it’s had a different register. In Bangladesh, it means something very, very different. So sometimes when you miss this nuance also, you know, when we assume that Partition has the same meaning in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, it's not the case. When I looked at 1971, and I looked at it from Pakistan’s lens, from Bangladesh’s lens, from India’s lens, very different narratives emerged. Then within India, when I look at West Bengal or Assam, it has very different meanings.

I also feel like sometimes as scholars, we forget that difference, because we're looking at it as just the difference between Western approaches and a more culturally-rooted South Asian approach. But within South Asia, we've had very different political trajectories and histories, and I think that nuance is also really important to keep in mind.

The other thing that happens is because there's such lack of dialogue between these three countries - and because, as I mentioned earlier, there's often a selective way in how we interpret that history and how we want to tell that story - what also ends up happening is that work tends to get appropriated selectively. And I’ve experienced this in my own work. For instance, when I've written about Kashmir, and Pakistan's policies in Pakistan-administered Kashmir that violate people’s rights, that gets appropriated and repackaged in the Indian media to justify its own policies, on the other side of the Line of Control. I've had the same experience with my work on 1971. I also think about that: how not only is there like a cultural nuance within South Asia but also, how work gets weaponized and appropriated, depending on state agendas.


Especially given your work, I feel like this is a really important addition to the question and the response we've been getting, typically.

Yeah, and I'll add one more thing, just because I deal with this a lot. Even, for instance - and this is not just an India problem. Pakistan has also swallowed wholesome narratives - for instance, when we look at Partition, it becomes a Muslim League problem, and that's how it's seen. But it's far more complicated, because even if you look at the history in Bengal, at Congress's own history, there are other elements at play which create reality. But we selectively have censored history. And now today, we're left with very narrow perspectives on that past, and we keep re-perpetuating those. So that's the problem.  


What, according to you, makes a good leader?  


As I was thinking about this question, I was thinking about: who do I look up to? And I know this is one of your later questions as well. Because it's hard. I can say things like humility and all of those, but I was thinking about a specific person. And for me, that is an Asia 21 leader, actually: Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy. She happened to be my first boss. A lot of the work that I do today is kind of still shaped by my early years, working under her and learning from her. I think back to the leadership qualities she showed, and there are so many, but one is just her ability to be really approachable. And that is very much linked to humility.

Never did I feel I’m in this room with this really incredible, powerful woman, and I can’t ask a question. Creating and cultivating that space where it’s okay to learn, okay to ask. And one of the other things that she did, and I think it's so important, is to really create that space for the other person to grow, to create those opportunities. It's not just teaching, but sometimes it’s as simple as asking questions or instilling confidence. It's really those everyday conversations that you might have with somebody. It's those minute  moments rather than something really big that can really shape somebody's journey.

I still remember this one anecdote where I was hiring somebody in the office and I said, “But Sharmeen, they're just so much older and they'll be reporting to me.” And I just remember her saying, that's okay. Telling me that it’s okay to be confident in what I’m doing, and always encouraging me to bring new ideas to the table.

So I always think about that and I think about her when I think of who’s a good leader. And  it's all of those things: being approachable, being humble, creating open space, creating trust, creating safety, really trusting the other person, trusting people who are working on the ground that they may know the situation better than you do, even if you have all the intellectual insight. So, I think all those factors kind of come into what makes a good leader for me.


Yeah. I think I'm going to go to the last question now, because it fits in so well. Who are some Asia 21 fellows from your cohort and otherwise whose leadership and work consistently inspires you? You've obviously talked about Sharmeen.

Sure. So, there's Sharmeen, of course, because I would love to grow my career in terms of storytelling. She's such a brilliant storyteller and the stories she tells and the sensitivity with which she tells them. So, I continue to be really inspired by not just how she was as a boss to me, but in terms of her work. But then there are so many others.

I was thinking about Qasim Aslam and the History Project and juxtaposing India-Pakistan history and bringing in that lens. I think that that's been so critical to my work. I've learned so much from that. That's really close to home. And I know the power that I can have in helping children who are still shaping their perceptions, they're getting all of this jingoistic indoctrination and then they have some like a resource like that. So, I think it's such a simple but beautifully articulated and powerful idea.

I'm also thinking about the class that's just about to start and Mobeen Ansari from Pakistan. I've had a chance to meet with Mobeen and see some of his work and just the kind of storytelling he's doing through photography, just incredible, the kind of narratives he's bringing forth. That is really inspiring for me. I think Xyza Cruz Bacani from the cohort of 2018 and the work that she's been doing on immigrants, on folks who've had to leave the families behind, working as nannies. That work really speaks to me, particularly in relation to the work that I'm doing right now with immigrants and what that journey looks like. Immigration often gets reduced to statistics and bringing a human element to the stories and how we tell them is so important. Of course, there are so many more, but those are some top of mind, especially in relation to storytelling, which is something I love.  So, you've talked a little bit about mentors that you've had, but how do you think mentorship has contributed to your development as an emerging leader and how do you feel about mentoring other aspiring young leaders?  
I feel like mentorship over the last few years has become more formal. There are more formal opportunities for mentorship. It's also become more recognised and I think there's always this concept of mentorship, but in my earlier years, I did not know about a lot of opportunities where I could go and seek a mentor.

For me, a lot of the mentorship has happened informally through people like Sharmeen, through other people that I've met, through the literature, through the conversations, through one-on-one meetings if I've had the opportunity to have those and they've been so instrumental in shaping who I am and how I think because we need that.  We need to learn from other people's experiences. A really good mentor is humble enough to share that journey and the challenges that they've had because what we see at work is the end product. There's a lot that goes in the process and I think for young leaders, aspiring leaders, it can almost be intimidating to say, how can I ever get there? So, I think about all the people who've supported me when I'm having challenging moments or when I have questions, or just shared their journey and the challenges they've had, that they don't know all the answers. Even that can be so powerful.

It’s really impacted me in that way. In my own capacity though, I have been involved in providing more formal mentorship. One of the programs I was associated with for a few years was the Summer Institute Program at the University of Iowa, it's within their international program. It's ended now, but it was for three years, I think, that they were running this program for students from India, Pakistan, and the US. It was this cultural exchange and creative writing program. So, I got to meet really, really fantastic young, brilliant writers who wanted to use writing and narrative to create social change and I honestly - I don't know how many formal insights I've been able to give them or if I've had any impact, but I think just sometimes just creating that space to have that open dialogue and to be able to share my process and, you know, my vulnerability – because a lot of them had not been published and the question is, I feel so anxious about it. One of the things I always shared was that I've written three books, and every time I write a new article or a piece, I am overwhelmed with that anxiety. I always think this makes no sense, I should just delete this, this should never see the light of day, what is my editor going to think, this is never going to find a home.

I continue to go through that process. Even just sharing that with them and, you know, I've come to writing through a more informal organic journey. I never did my MFA, I did not train. For a lot of people that is the route and if that works out for you, that's fantastic. For other people, it's not possible for different reasons. It's also really expensive. So, I think sometimes young leaders have this tendency to shut down, well I can't do that, and one of the things I tell them, writing has never really made me money to be my sole career as much as I would like it to, but that doesn't mean you don't do it. If you're passionate about it, you come at it through your own ways, it doesn't have to follow a certain route.

I think that's when I think about mentorship more than like any kind of formal skill training – that can be part of it, but I think it's more the realness, the authenticity of just what it means to do this kind of work, the challenges you face, especially for writers, young aspiring writers who are doing political work in these very difficult times right now, between crackdowns and censorship. Finding a sense of community can sometimes be the most powerful thing you can do. I remember moments where I've had those challenges; I did not feel like I had that writing community at that time and I did not feel like I generally had that even political community at that time and not knowing what's the right decision, what's going to get me into trouble, how do I keep myself safe, how do I keep others around me safe? These are very real questions that are impacting young people today and I don't have the answers, but I think there's a lot of power - and I found power – when somebody has been willing to sit with me and share their journey and help me navigate those questions that I'm having. Those decisions can – I mean, I don't want to sound hyperbolic, but can be really life-changing. They can have really, really serious consequences for you and others around you. So to just create that sense of community through mentorship. Part of mentorship for me is also, it's not just one-on-one, it's then also connecting mentees with other resources, other people. Sometimes I don't have the answer, but I'm like, you know who would be amazing to speak to is this person or have you considered that resource. It's also about creating those connections and building capacity, essentially, to put it simply.  

Is there anything else you want to add which I haven't covered?  


No, just the power of this. I'm talking about the power of network and I think Asia 21 is doing something really special. I know a lot of times many of us are so busy, and not everybody may be connected the same way. But I think there's an art to how folks are brought together, and I think about that a lot. There's a particular curation that kind of goes into creating the right composition of leaders coming from very different backgrounds and areas of expertise, very different goals and in areas of work and what they want to do, but there's some kind of a shared drive - I'm not even going to say shared purpose, I think there's just a drive. To be connected with folks like that, to create a platform that, to create a platform that's very focused on Asia, we often don't have that as well, I think it's really powerful, so I just want to say I'm grateful to be part of this.