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Abdul-Rehman Malik (VO): This episode of This Being Human contains discussion on the partition of India. It was a time marked by violence, displacement, and trauma. The topic, understandably, could evoke distress or discomfort. Please take care as you listen.

 

THEME MUSIC

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik (VO): Welcome to This Being Human. I’m your host Abdul-Rehman Malik. On this podcast I talk to extraordinary people from all over the world, whose life, ideas, and art are shaped by Muslim culture. 

 

Aanchal Malhotra: I just felt like the object transported him back to the past. Which objects do. They have the ability to be portals.

 

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Abdul-Rehman Malik (VO): Aanchal Malhotra is an author, oral historian, and artist whose work has given voice to the deeply personal and emotional legacies of the partition of India and Pakistan. Aanchal’s books, Remnants of Separation and In the Language of Remembering, are not just historical accounts; they are profound explorations of memory, identity, and the human spirit. In our conversation, I journey through the echoes of the past with Aanchal. We’ll hear about her unique artistic approach, how her background in art has influenced her work as a historian, and the deeply moving stories she has collected from elders who lived through the tumultuous events of partition. Aanchal shares with us the power of objects as portals to the past, transporting us to moments of joy, pain, and resilience. We hear about her meticulous process of documenting these histories, her challenges, and the incredible insights she’s gained along the way. Her stories aren’t just accounts of the past; they are vivid, living memories that connect us across time and space. Aanchal spoke to us from her home in the heart of Delhi—you’ll hear the sounds of the streets outside throughout the episode. Even still, our conversation was a heartfelt exploration of the pain, trauma, and healing that comes from understanding our shared histories. Aanchal’s work reminds us that history is not just about dates and events; it’s about people, emotions, and the legacies we carry within.

 

MUSIC RESOLVES

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik: I want to actually start with a little bit of a reflection and a reflection that comes from the cover of your first book, Remnants of Separation. And there’s a picture of someone who I would call a grandmother. I kind of was a bit arrested by it because the woman on the cover of Remnants of Separation reminded me of my Nani, and my Nani was in her late teens, maybe early 20s, you know, she had lived through the partition. She was with her in-laws, family in Jalandhar. And the word came one morning to evacuate the village and to join the convoy leaving Jalandhar District heading for what would become the frontier, the border between the Indian side of Punjab and what would become the Pakistan side of Punjab. But one of the things that remains with me about my late Nani’s experiences is she witnessed that convoy and along the route of that convoy, the remnants of such, such a deep violence. And it stayed with her her whole life. I’m certain of it now more than ever, that the trauma of the partition, experience of the convoy, of leaving her home, of crossing the border, of seeking a new home, definitely stayed with her. And I think now about you and about your work and about those of us who are the children and the grandchildren of partition and how differently we experience these histories than our parents and our grandparents did. And I kind of want to know, how did you experience the idea of partition growing up? 

 

Aanchal Malhotra: This is a good question. I experienced it through silence only, which, as you know, is sometimes the loudest language. The void that you don’t know anything about that seems to define someone’s life. And define their life in a way that you don’t even realize that it does, until you start to think about how all the habits and the perceptions of others have kind of been, you know, they draw themselves out from this one event. So when I was growing up in Delhi in the ‘90s, I didn’t know anything about partition. It is mentioned all the time, and I feel like this is a really interesting aspect growing up in South Asia. As a child, you may not know what it means, but you know the word itself is important. It holds a kind of weight. There is a vibration to the word “partition” because you know it’s something serious and meaningful. And you may not know the full extent of what it is, but you know that it’s important. So when I was young, I never asked about anything actually at all. Just like, being a child. In fact, even when we learned it in school, I was not inspired enough to come home and ask, oh, what was this partition? Did you see this partition? Were you there? So when I began seriously asking about partition, I was in my early 20s. So over two decades had passed without me really fully understanding that my origin, since all four of my grandparents belong to what is now Pakistan, lay on the other side. Right? And my view, you know, growing up in the ‘90s in the shadow of the Kargil war, you do have a kind of demented perception of what Pakistanis are or what Pakistan is. And the media does a very good job of demarcating that difference. So, as a result, when I came to study, to Canada, when I was 17, that’s when I first met Pakistanis. 

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik: That’s incredible. 

 

Aanchal Malhotra: Well, I feel like that’s…away from the subcontinent is the only place where we can meet each other without any kind of restrictions or preconceived notions, or even if there is preconceived notion, there is space for that preconceived notion to…to burst, to dissolve. So we were making the same jokes. We were speaking the same tongue. You know, what’s more is that we were the other to so many other people. To North American eyes, we were the other. And I learned very quickly to not take offense when people said, oh are you Pakistani? They were the same. They were mine. I was theirs. Which is, as you mentioned, a marked difference from how our grandparents would have seen things. People can perceive things in contradiction. People that lived through partition. So my grandmother, she was from the Frontier Province. She left there when she was 15 or 16. And this I’m saying at the end of her life, in her late 80s, if I asked her now, what is your home? She would say, it’s DI Khan.

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik: Wow. 

 

Aanchal Malhotra: But then, you see, there was still a perception of who the other is, and that was colored by partition. And there was a longing for what home was, but a belonging in the home that was chosen as well. So these kinds of contradictions can coexist. And they often do in conversations with elderly people. So I just want to leave that in our conversation because it’s a very complicated thing as a researcher speaking to so many people, trying to understand how different aspects of their identity contribute to the kind of person that they are. 

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik: You know, already in our conversation, there’s the acknowledgment, the shadow, the the hue of violence at the heart of this partition moment, and I don’t know if you’ve asked this question, Aanchal, but as the grandchild of partition, I’ve asked this question myself a lot. It’s that, why was there so much violence? Because after all, weren’t we neighbors? Weren’t Muslims and Hindus and Sikhs living side-by-side? Didn’t we worship at each other’s shrines? Didn’t our poetry find its way into the sacred texts of the other? Didn’t we share the same jokes and the food? And I keep coming back to this quagmire of violence. And I wonder, in your work and your exploration, if you’ve asked yourself that same question, why so much violence? Why? Why was violence at the very core of the partition experience? 

 

Aanchal Malhotra: All the time. I think…I was 23 when I started working on partition. It’s very young for anything. Which also means that you need to rise to the occasion and you need to build a kind of vocabulary of empathy for yourself, for events that you may not even witness in your own life. I hope I don’t. And, I mean, you know, there’s a big difference between sympathy and empathy. And so when someone is telling you their story, you’re not, you don’t want to be sympathetic to that. You don’t want to pity what they have lived through. You want to be understanding. You want to actually try and put yourself in their shoes. Now, violence will always be present in any conversation about partition, even if it’s a conversation that is hopeful. Even if it’s a conversation about love. It will always have the shadow of partition violence in it. And you know this for a fact, because everything is born from that violence. So I don’t think the memory of violence will ever leave people. And neither will the consequence of that violence, which results not just in, of course, being kind of embedded in everything you do, but also how you behave after that, whether that is sleeping with a meat cleaver under your pillow or having a suitcase packed just in case. Or telling someone not to interact with someone of this community, or not to eat food from someone of this community. I think it colors one’s life in a way that I can’t explain, but I also can’t avoid. It came up a lot. 

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik: Aanchal, you have a very unique sensibility as you approach partition. Your work feels like the work of an artist rather than a historian. And I want to say, you’re both. You are an artist and you are a historian. But there is an aesthetic sensibility in your writing, in your work, in your approach. I feel that there’s a search for beauty. There’s a very specific intentionality with which you are approaching your work. And so I’m left with that question, you know, are you, do you see yourself as an artist first? 

 

Aanchal Malhotra: I studied to be a metal engraver. That’s my only formal education. I have two degrees in it. I studied it for nine years. And so what do you do when you don’t have a studio practice anymore? When you’re working with your hands every day and suddenly you find yourself in another aspect of your life, doing another kind of art that has nothing to do with your hands. It has nothing to do with the ink that you learn to make from scratch, or the 13th century copper engravings that you slaved over. The acid bath. The water bath. You find a way to bring the studio to the piece of paper that you’re writing on. You find a way to bring image making into language. There are certain things that I’m very careful about when I conduct my oral history interview. Which I think, it’s only because I’m trained as an artist that I look out for these things. I will always look at the color of the room. I will look at the way the light changes. I will pay very close attention to the sound. When language changes. If there is a pause, why is there a pause? What takes place in that pause, if not language, what is happening? Oral history is a lot about what is said, of course, but it is equally about what remains unsaid. So, as I mentioned, I studied to be an engraver. What an engraver does is they chip away at a block, either of wood or metal, and it’s a very laborious process. When a cut is made, it cannot be unmade. And only when you print it with ink do you see what you have, your end result. The one thing that we learn as printmakers is to create light and shadow, to create depth. So you carve slowly, slowly, slowly. What you’re doing basically, is carving away your grays. You’re carving away your white. With each cut you make, you’re becoming lighter and lighter, deeper and deeper. As an oral historian, you don’t do anything that much different. You’re trying to be cavernous in your conversation with someone without being intrusive enough to make a cut that you can’t take back. When something is said you can’t unsay it. So you have to be very careful in that conversation because often these are also strangers. In my opinion, there is really no difference between creating a painting or a photograph and creating a textual work. A piece of writing is the same. That means that it needs the same kind of world building and image making. And I want to be able to describe it so that the person reading it says, oh my god, this is exactly how I imagined it. When I share a photograph of my interviewee, let’s say on social media, someone sees it and says, this is exactly how I imagined them to be when I was reading their chapter. That’s what I want. It means that we are sharing that world, right? And I want to do justice to that intimacy as well. How I am feeling being there, how the person is feeling, how we are imbued in that environment. And I know this sounds very silly, but the colors of the place, the light, the air. It makes a difference. 

 

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Abdul-Rehman Malik: I have a small favour to ask you. If you enjoy this show, there’s a really quick thing you can do to help us make it even better. Just take five minutes to fill out a short survey. This is the Aga Khan museum’s first-ever podcast and a little bit of feedback will help us measure our impact and reach more people with extraordinary stories from some of the most interesting artists, thinkers, and leaders on the kaleidoscope of Muslim experience. To participate, go to agakhanmuseum.org/tbhsurvey. That’s agakhanmusic.org/tbhsurvey.  The link is also in the show notes. Thanks for listening to This Being Human. Now, back to the interview.

 

MUSIC OUT

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik: One of the things that I feel in a way, your work has done is that, until I engaged with your work, your first book, partition almost seemed too big and is too big for any one of us to fathom. And yet, Aanchal, you found a way in. No one has the emotional capacity to deal with the entire trauma. You found these small, sometimes seemingly insignificant objects, like kitchen utensils, for instance, that become emblems of experience and memory. And like you’re telling the story of that object becomes like the flashlight in a dark room, and all of a sudden a part of it becomes super illuminated, and all of a sudden, in that inky darkness of all of this information and trauma and violence and feeling, all of a sudden you give us something, you give us a moment of clarity, of knowing. What brought you to these objects? 

 

Aanchal Malhotra: One of the things that artists do is obsess over things. I don’t know why that is. We have things. We keep things. We touch things. We smell things. We caress things. We make sounds from things, we make art from found things. I love things. And as I was doing this work, as I was writing Remnants, I was aware of how many times I was saying the word “things.” So when I was in grad school in Montreal, I took a sabbatical year because I was so burnt out. I went straight from undergrad to grad school. And I said, okay, I’m going to go home, I’m going to go to Delhi. So I come home to Delhi and I am introduced to these two objects. And they’re so mundane, they’re so ordinary. I felt like I could have walked by them almost like my whole life. They were a medium-sized vessel, a ghara, where lassi is made, in which lassi is made. And a yardstick. Which, in Punjabi, is called a gaz. And I was so, I don’t know, so uninformed, that my grandmother had to tell me how to measure from a gaz. And what a gaz was, you know. So I love that these two objects were what my mother’s family had carried from Lahore to Amritsar. And they carried them because they make lassi every day so lassi had to be made. And gaz because they worked cloth much in Anarkali bazaar. So it was occupation.

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik: Your family had a shop in an Anarkali bazaar. 

 

Aanchal Malhotra: Yeah. 

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik: Wow. And they came to Amritsar after that? And they established their business there?

 

Aanchal Malhotra: They did not establish a clothing business. No. 

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik: They didn’t. Okay.

 

Aanchal Malhotra: They became chartered accountants because why not? You did what you had to do. 

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik: It’s true. Aanchal, I just want to say that my family went from Amritsar to Lahore and then onward to Multan. My father became a chartered accountant, even though he really wanted to be an artist. And I think in many ways is an artist trapped in the body of a chartered accountant because he wanted to do right by his family. And there is this, there’s this kind of amazing switch, right? 

 

Aanchal Malhotra: Yeah, yeah. 

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik: Our families cross each other. 

 

Aanchal Malhotra: But this is what I mean. This is what I mean. Like, we grow up in perceived animity, when in fact, we’re actually mirror images of each other. It’s not the other. It’s kind of like one, actually. And I always find it really interesting that the event that draws us apart, which is partition, is actually the event that also binds us together. 

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik: Yes, that’s a fascinating paradox. That’s a very profound paradox, Aanchal. 

 

Aanchal Malhotra: I mean, we cannot extricate ourselves from each other. We can’t, even if we want to try, at least North India. South Indian, not so much. North Indians, we cannot. It’s too similar, too similar. And too mirrored. Anyway. So, the objects. Right. So, I am introduced to these objects, and they say that, yes, they’re from Lahore. And, you know, something happened in that living room that afternoon when my grandfather’s elder brother was born in Lahore in, you know, Chuna Mandi, in Lahore, where there is a very famous gurdwara as well, where I went this year in February. 

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik: Oh, wonderful. 

 

Aanchal Malhotra: He became like a young guy talking about the streets of Lahore, talking about how and when lassi was made, talking about the chilgoza in his pocket. I just felt like the object transported him back to the past. Which objects do. They have the ability to be portals. But it also transported him across this highly militarized, fortified border. And I didn’t know that was possible. How was he suddenly in Lahore? How had his mind, his dreams, his memories sort of coalesced to become this landscape that he could see and walk in? I didn’t know that that was possible. And I felt like it was such a powerful tool to return. And also powerful tools that tell stories of migration. So I don’t think anyone else in that room was as moved as I was, but it was my eureka moment. So what you’re actually doing, like, to these objects is you’re kind of recreating someone’s home. You know, you’re saying, okay, this is the object. Your notebook from college. Do you remember where you used to keep it in your room? What was your room like? What was the color of the walls? What kind of house did you live in? Okay. And did you share your room with somebody? You did? What kind of bed did you have? And did you get a newspaper in your house or did you listen to the radio? Okay. Is that where you heard the first news about partition on the radio? Yes, on the 8 o’clock news. Okay. Okay. And what language was that news? So what you’re actually trying to do is gauge all of these aspects of living. Everyday common life, and how that was fractured by a political event. 

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik: And you’re giving drama. And like you said, color, contour, topography to that life.

 

Aanchal Malhotra: You’re giving specificity as well.

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik: Yes, yes, specificity. It’s not a general thing. I was reading from your latest book this morning. And I think the thing that was coming up again, page on page, is you let the stories breathe. You allow them to go into, you know, side plots and little observations and then you bring it back to moments of life and partition and before and after. You honor the story by honoring the individual drama in the story. The emotion, the feeling, the sense of surprise, loss, joy, love, connection, disconnection that each of these stories brings up. There’s a certain patient sensibility that I get as I read this, that I feel like what I imagine you, Aanchal, listening to these oral histories. I feel like you’re you’re…you’re patient. But not patient in kind of like, okay, I got to hold on until I get to the good stuff. But patient in the sense of, this is all good stuff. This is all necessary and exciting. And I need to stay with it.

 

Aanchal Malhotra: 100%. Yeah. 

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik: Yeah. I mean, it feels like you’ve trained yourself in some ways to stay with it.

 

Aanchal Malhotra: When you’re young, you want to get to the point, right? Like, I was 23 and I was speaking to people. And I want to get to that point of partition. And you realize very quickly that that is an absolutely fallible move on your part, because it is the tributaries that are so interesting. A human being is not one dimensional. A human being has complications and facets and different colors and different aspects that come together to make who they are. And I feel like you do need to honor that. And so when I am, I know I am going to interview somebody. I don’t go in with that mindset that this is what I want to get out. I learned very quickly that that’s not going to work for me. I’m only setting myself up for disappointment. What I’m really interested in is how they make the pathway to the past. What tributaries are they connecting? Why are they picking those? Right? What are the stories that are important to them? What is remembered and what is forgotten? You know, I think no matter how much time you spend with somebody, no matter how much they tell you about their life, you will never really gather a complete history. There will always be things that are private for them that are unknown to you. And I think that those are the silences in the oral history interview. At the beginning of our conversation, I said that silence was the loudest language. So I feel like for all the stories that have been recorded, there are stories that remain unspoken. And stories that people don’t want to tell, and stories that will slip through the cracks of history, because they are stories that either don’t have vocabulary yet or did not find the listener. Both of those things are equally as important. If some. If someone does not know how to talk about something, then someone asking about that thing can draw out that story. But you cannot put the entire onus of silence on the silent generation. 

 

MUSIC

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik: One memorable story in your book is the story of Nazmuddin Khan. It’s an unusual story in your book because it’s not that he has any physical objects to share, but the story itself is so powerful and compelling. Like, you almost have to close the book after you read that story, because…it has an energy and power and consequence to it. Please, tell us how you met Nazmuddin Khan.

 

Aanchal Malhotra: One of the biggest, let’s say, cheerleaders, for finding people for my work is my aunt, my mother’s sister. She knows that I’m looking for people to interview. One day, she goes to get her hair cut. And her hairdresser is like, you know, they’re just having a conversation and so my aunt is like, yeah, my niece is doing this work, she’s looking. You know, she’s writing a book. She’s looking for people who’ve seen partition, and the hairdresser is like, oh, my uncle’s seen partition! And so, she’s like, oh, can she speak to him? And so here I am, calling a guy I’ve never met before saying, hi, can I speak to your uncle? And he says, well, my uncle doesn’t have a phone, so my father will take you to him, but you have to meet him at this point on this street at this hour, because my uncle is very old and he sleeps and everything at a certain time. So then I am in the middle of the street. It’s summertime in Delhi. I’m waiting for a man. I don’t know what he looks like, I’m calling him, going into a neighborhood I’ve never been before to meet this man who tells me this story that changes how I view my own city. Because he talked of violence being a shadow his whole life. And he also speaks about what it is like to be a minority community that chose not to leave India. You know, like the slogan, oh, go back to Pakistan. It’s very easy to say that. But Pakistan is not his home. Just because he is Muslim doesn’t make him Pakistani, he’s very much Indian. So a question I think about a lot as well is Muslims that were in India for generations, nine, ten, 11 generations. Suddenly had to choose at partition, and many of them chose to stay, and many of them chose to leave. But those who chose to stay then had to prove loyalty to the state. Because the neighboring country had a majority population of their religion. And so somehow, me, whose father is the first generation to be born in this country, so my tie to this land, India is one generation before me, somehow has more ownership over land than 10, 11 generations? It’s something I think about a lot. Maybe I haven’t articulated it as well as I want to, but his story made me think of things like that. 

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik: I want to read a section from that chapter in your book, which I have to say is, and we all feel it is so beautifully written, and it’s a testimony to your work. The passage goes, referring to Nazmuddin Khan sahib, “His family had taken nothing with them except clothes when they left their house. In a way, he had had no say in the matter. But seen another way, it was his choice to keep nothing that would serve as a reminder of what had happened to the country. He had hated the fact that Hindus and Muslims were no longer brothers, and didn’t need any physical evidence to remind him of that every day. Perhaps what had remained with him, though, was something entirely intangible. An abstract entity that cannot be held or touched or caressed as an heirloom or a treasure in order to revisit the time past. The remnant was an emotion of brotherhood and unity.”

 

Aanchal Malhotra: I remember feeling that as I was walking away from his house. I think when you’re confronted with ideas that are much, much vaster, larger, but also older than you. You really understand the smallness of your being. I also feel that when I’m around nature. You know, we are such small creatures in this earth. But when he spoke, he spoke with the wisdom of what he’d seen, and I felt it. And I inbibed it. And I know that his words have moved others. This is really the power of the voice. It doesn’t see borders. Human emotion doesn’t see borders. That’s why, you know, in the book, there’s a whole thing, in The Language of Remembering is categorized as by emotion. Because emotion has no nationality. 

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik: Yeah, it’s a beautiful organizing because because you you, in your latest book, you speak about your conversations through the lens of beginning, belonging, discovery, family, fear, friendship, grief, hope, identity, loss, love, memory, pain, regret, returning, silence, and so on. It’s kind of a beautiful way of organizing. And also speaks to Nazmuddin Khan sahib’s sentiment, isn’t it? It’s the feelings. It’s the emotions which are actually the connective tissue between us, regardless of what our experience was. And maybe that’s what you were talking about earlier, Aanchal, when you talked about our families and our experiencing being mirrors of each other. We didn’t know each other as we were crossing from Lahore to Amritsar and Amritsar to Lahore. Or my father was making a decision to become an accountant in Multan. And your family were making decisions to become accountants in Amritsar. They were both living with the same emotion. You know, no one ever went back. No one went back to the family home. No one went back to the masjid that my great grandfather built. No one went back to have the Kashmiri harissa, you know, near the Gol Masjid, you know, on a Friday. 

 

Aanchal Malhotra: I can go for you!

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik: I want you to! 

 

Aanchal Malhotra: You know, one of the things that I have become over the last few years is this person of soil. It started very innocently, where I was in Pakistan many years ago and I got a little bit of soil. And then I started interviewing more people and more people. And whenever I went to a city that they had come from in India, particularly Pakistan, let’s say someone had come from Jalandhar or someone has come from Gudiyana and I found myself in Gudiyana. I would say, [speaking Urdu]. I don’t know when I’ll see them again, but I have a fistful of soil from Gudiyana. Someone is from Calcutta, like Abhi. Two weeks ago, three weeks ago, I was in Calcutta. An interviewee of mine who eventually her family migrated to Canada, was from Calcutta, and her father said something. He said everything after Calcutta was temporary. So I felt that if this is such a formative place for him, I need to do something. I’m here. So I ask her, okay, where’s your family from? Exactly. Locate it on the Google map, and tell me. And so she did. And I went there and I took photos of everything. I walked the street, I collected the soil. So I have become this person of soil, which means that there is a small cupboard in my house. It’s full of these little jars, of soil for people whenever I see them again, from places that they are from that hold meaning to them. When I was in Pakistan in February, I think I carried something like four kilos of soil back or something from different places. Because it’s so meaningful, if you can’t, if you can’t go home. Then someone can bring home to you in a very small way. It is meaningful. And so I will eat your your whatever it is you want me to eat in Amritsar! [laughter]

 

MUSIC

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik: Aanchal, I wonder if you can tell me about a joy or a meanness that came to you recently as an unexpected visitor. 

 

Aanchal Malhotra: My grandmother died last year. The one on the cover of the book. That you had mentioned earlier. And a couple of months after, on one of her sweaters, I found a hair. A long white hair. And I tucked it into my wallet. I don’t know why. Why is the attachment to something so ridiculous? I’m sure there’s hair all over the place. All over her house. Anyway, I put it in my wallet and then a couple of weeks after that I was in the city called Nagpur for a lecture. And I was staying at the hotel and my wallet fell down on the ground. And the hair fell out of the wallet. And the floor was white. And the hair is white. There I was with a flashlight. On my phone. Who carries a flashlight? Searching for this geriatric hair. And when I found it, you know, how do you like, how do you hold a hair? You just kind of crumple it up in your little palm, you know? I felt this kind of relief. Oh. Oh, there she is. I have it. I tucked it back in my wallet. 

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik: Aanchal, it has been such a pleasure. I feel like this has been the beginning, and the first of many conversations that we’re going to have.

 

Aanchal Malhotra: I hope so as well.

 

MUSIC

 

Abdul-Rehman Malik (VO): To learn more about Aanchal’s work, you can visit museumofmaterialmemory.com and aanchalmalhotra.com. This Being Human is presented by the Aga Khan Museum. Through the arts, the Aga Khan Museum sparks wonder, curiosity, and understanding of Muslim cultures and their connection with other cultures. This Being Human is produced by Antica Productions in partnership with TVO. Our senior producer is Imran Ali Malik. Our associate producer is Emily Morantz. Our executive producers are Laura Regehr and Stuart Coxe. Mixing and sound design by Phil Wilson. Original music by Boombox Sound. Katie O’Connor is TVO’s Managing Editor of Digital Video and Podcasts. Laurie Few is the executive for digital at TVO.