Syma Tariq is a radio journalist, writer and editor. She has long had an interest in sound and its relation to politics. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of the Arts, London, where her research refocuses the historical narratives of the 1947 Partition through the unstable act of listening.
The second of a three-part audio essay takes Partition as a sonic environment in which resistance and repetition reverberate, disputing ordinary notions of time and event. It follows the trajectories of the Urdu revolutionary poem Hum Dekhenge (‘We Shall Witness’) and Hindi protest-performance Hum Bharat Ke Log (‘We the People’).
Voices, as artefacts of the historical event of Partition, carry multiple worlds. This audio paper pivots personal testimony, archival footage and fable around the British destruction of colonial records in its former territories. In the first of three episodes, artist and researcher Syma Tariq explores the sonic protocols that come into play in the context of colonial erasure.