Partition- Stories of Separation is, for Sonam, an exploration through music,  of what the tumultuos  Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 meant to the people of both sides.

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As Sonam says, "Many of the stories we have heard from our grandparents will be lost with the passing of the older generation and they need to be preserved, honoured and to serve as lessons for generations to come. I hope that in revisiting these stories through music, we are able to empathise, ponder and realize the way forward. Hopefully, a way of peace and co-existence based on a shared grief, a shared loss, a shared history and a shared love.

The words of the Punjabi poet, Daman have resounded in my mind from the first time I read them. In many ways, these lines have been my stimulus for putting this project together.

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"Laali akhiyaan di dasdi hai
roye assi vi, roye tussi vi."

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~The redness in our eyes shows
that you have cried and so have we

Using the power of music, the voices of Manto, Ali Sardar Jafri, Daman, Faiz Ahmad Faiz and Amrita Pritam, as well as personal accounts of ordinary people who lived through this terrible ordeal, my effort was to weave together a retelling of this holocaust that tore our country apart, but to also look for a way forward with optimism. To honour the past, heal the scars and hope for peace. 

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It has been almost 75 years since the Partition and for many reasons, I wanted to explore what the partition meant, through music. Many of the stories we have heard from our grandparents will be lost with the passing of the older generation and they need to be preserved, honoured and to serve as lessons for generations to come. I hope that in revisiting these stories through music, we are able to empathise, ponder and realize the way forward. Hopefully, a way of peace and co-existence based on a shared grief, a shared loss, a shared history and a shared love. 

I spent many years  researching the works of poets and writers from both sides of the Indian and Pakistani borders and composed the music for this performance based on their poetry and inspired by their stories. I also collected oral histories from survivors of this holocaust and included them in video presentations during the performance. I also worked with a contemporary poet with whom I created two of the pieces- a song and some spoken word for this project .

In the future, I hope to travel with this performance piece and present it in other parts of India as well as at festivals and venues internationally. This message of starting a ‘dialogue’ was carried forward on social media as well and we collected over 2000 Postcards of Peace which I hope to carry to the other side one day. My desire is to enables a channel of communication, a bank of goodwill as it were,  where we can reach out to each other as people, neighbours and children of the same land."

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Sonam has performed this experiential performance to full houses and standing ovations in New Delhi, Mumbai, Jaipur, Muscat (Oman)and at a special commemoration by The London School Of Economics to mark 70 years since India and Pakistan were partitioned.