Guneeta Singh Bhalla is founder of The 1947 Partition Archive Previously, she was an experimental condensed matter physicist who completed her tenure as a post-doctoral researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Department of Physics at the University of California at Berkeley. After a 2008 visit to the oral testimony archives at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial she was inspired and began interviewing Partition witnesses in 2009. It was a deeply enriching experience and she wanted to share it with everyone.
This led to the concept of crowdsourcing oral histories of Partition, thereby engaging the public in recording the people’s history of the world’s largest mass human displacement. She gathered a team and began recording oral histories in 2010. In 2011 The 1947 Partition Archive was born.