Rock Paper Scissors by Priyanka Chhabra

Softcover, 10. 8 x 7.3, 232 pages
Full colour, English, Punjabi, Hindustani
Self-published - May 2024, Edition of 200
ISBN 978-93-340-5482-8

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 archive includes documents from the personal collection of Charan Dass Bangia, a partition refugee from Jaranwala Mandi (Lyallpur; now Faislabad, Punjab, Pakistan) who finally settled in Amritsar, Punjab, India. He was 18years old and a BA Final year student at Government College Lyallpur in 1947. Unknown to his family he saved every scrap of paper along his journey. The range and diversity of documents encountered in his archive are difficult to find publicly in museums or state archives and 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 silverfish metabolising the archive leaving gaps and memory holes in their tracks.

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

The project was supported by India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) with seed funding from the Generator Cooperative Art Production Fund.