HOME1947 began with the memories of Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s grandparents. They remembered the homes they left behind during the Partition of British India: the smell of earth after rain, jasmine in spring, childhood friendships, mango trees and places they would never see again.
Those memories became the starting point for an immersive work about one of the largest migrations in modern history and about what happens when millions of individual lives are reduced to a date in a history book.
More than 10 million people were displaced in 1947 as British India was divided and the independent states of Pakistan and India were created. Rather than tell that history through politicians, borders and statistics, HOME1947 tells it through the people who lived it.
Commissioned by Manchester International Festival, the British Council and Super Slow Way, HOME1947 premiered in Manchester in 2017, seventy years after Partition.
HOME1947 brings together original documentary and narrative films, survivor testimonies, oral histories, photographs, archival material, objects, sound, virtual reality and scent. Audiences move through recreated rooms and corridors filled with the traces of lives interrupted — suitcases, family photographs, voices, empty spaces and the sensory memories of home.
The experience asks visitors not simply to learn what happened, but to imagine what it meant to leave.
What would you take? What would you remember? And what would remain with you decades later?
Although rooted in 1947, HOME1947 has always spoken to the present. It was created at a time when forced displacement and refugee crises were again reshaping lives around the world. By placing audiences inside the memories of people who became refugees more than seventy years ago, the work collapses the distance between historical migration and displacement today.
As the installation travelled, it continued to evolve. For its 2024 North American debut at Oklahoma Contemporary, Sharmeen expanded HOME1947 with two new films, additional oral histories and archival material, sound installations and virtual reality. Through VR, visitors could enter the rooms, stairways and open windows of homes left behind — transforming memory into a space that could be physically encountered.
Since its world premiere, HOME1947 has travelled across continents and contexts:
Each iteration has brought the memories of one generation into conversation with another. Because HOME1947 is ultimately not only about Partition. It is about what it means to lose a home, what we carry when we leave, and why the memory of home survives long after the place itself is gone.
