Memories Across the Border

The 1947 Partition of British India split Punjab in two, drawing a border through a region that had shared a language, a culture, and a history for centuries. Nearly eight decades later, the descendants of those who lived through that rupture are scattered across the globe, many of them young people who never witnessed Partition but inherited its memory through family stories, migration, and loss. Memories Across the Border explores how Indian and Pakistani Punjabis in the diaspora come together in online spaces to remember, debate, and reimagine a shared Punjabi past. The heart of this project lives in digital discourse: it draws on conversations from Punjabi communities on Reddit, where users trade family histories, old photographs, and arguments about identity, and reads them as a living archive of how a divided people talk to one another across national lines. By treating these threads and comment sections as primary sources, the project asks whether digital nostalgia for an undivided Punjab quietly resists the national divisions of India and Pakistan, or whether the very discourse that mourns the border ends up reinforcing it. Explore the timeline to follow the history behind these conversations.