SOAS hosts one day festival to remember Partition
On Saturday 15 October, SOAS hosted a one-day festival celebrating South Asian culture through film, music, food and dance, in memory of the Partition of the Subcontinent 75 years ago.
The festival featured the album launch of Magpie Robin's Songbook, with a performance by celebrated Bengali and British artists and screening of a music video made with the Year 4 pupils from Manorfield Primary School, Tower Hamlets.
The festival included a deeply affecting exploration of personal family history through sound and spoken word by Jason Singh, the screening of ethnographic documentary Rising Silence, followed by a discussion with the film’s director Leesa Gazi as well as performances of ghazal, nazm, kathak and contemporary dance.
Georgie Pope and Somnath Batabyal, Co-directors of the festival said:
“The 1947 Partition of the Indian Subcontinent led to the largest mass migration in known history and to a collective trauma which has affected generations. With this festival, we wanted to reach out to the children of Partition across the globe through an act of remembering through film, music, dance and spoken word. And we felt it did just that!
We were delighted that the festival drew such a large and diverse audience, including SOAS staff and students, guests from London’s Bangladeshi community, pupils from Tower Hamlets who had been involved with a music project which was screened at the event, SOAS students and visitors to the Bloomsbury Festival.
Video recordings of the events are available on the SOAS YouTube channel, which means that the event is continuing to reach people across the world.”
Magpie Robin's Songbook will be released on 12th December under the new SOAS Record label, supported by the SOAS University of London Impact and Knowledge Exchange fund and the Global Music Academy.
The Remembering Partition festival was organised in collaboration with Bloomsbury Festival and supported by the Global Music Academy.
View the image gallery of the festival below.
