A year ago, Sparsh and Ameena sat down over a coffee and exchanged their grandparents’ stories of Partition. Sparsh’s grandfather, Ishar Das Arora, was 7 years old at the time of Partition. He lived in a village called Bela, and eventually moved to Delhi, India after living in many refugee camps and escaping mass-scale communal violence. Ameena’s grandfather, Ahmed Rafiq, migrated an almost identical journeys in the opposite direction from Hoshiarpur to Lahore. Both their grandparents yearned to go back home. But due to wars, old age and trauma there were still too many barriers for either to return. 73 years on, India and Pakistan still do not operate a tourist agreement.They realised that even if their grandparents couldn’t go physically, they could still take them back using Virtual Reality.

Sam and Saadia came on board a few days later and the four friends together built Dastaan from a small student project to a larger peace-building venture. Both had personal connections to partition: Saadia had grown up with partition stories; her grandmother volunteered at refugee camps in Lahore, and her grandfather cannot forget the violence he saw as a young man. Sam’s grandfather, meanwhile, had been a British officer in India during the war and the twilight years of the Raj. So scarred was he by partition that he never visited Sam’s family in Delhi, after 30 years of them living there.

Projact Dastaan team