Project Dastaan

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Project Dastaan

Project Dastaan seeks to use Virtual Reality technology to allow Partition witnesses to revisit their childhood.

04/30/2025

Project Dastaan is honoured to announce its first-ever U.S. tour, featuring screenings of Lost Migrations, a three-part animated series exploring the human cost of the 1947 Partition. These works retrace stories of displacement, resilience, and remembrance—revealing how letters, food, and fragments of memory can reconnect lives torn apart by the largest migration in recorded history.

Our New York dates:
May 8 | Bibliotheque NYC | 6:00 PM
May 9 | Maysles Documentary Centre | 6:30 PM

With support from the Ford Foundation’s JustFilms program.
Ticket and RSVP links in bio.

04/05/2025

Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art presents Project Dastaan, in person with co-founders Sparsh Ahuja and Sam Dalrymple

📅 Friday, April 11, 2025 | 7:00 pm–9:00 pm
📍 Freer Gallery of Art - Meyer Auditorium | 1050 Independence Ave SW, Washington DC

Free event, register at link (in bio): https://asia.si.edu/whats-on/events/search/event:181889426/

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In Lost Migrations, three animated short films recount the 1947 Partition of India through personal stories from communities normally excluded from the narrative. After the screening, discuss with the filmmakers and learn about their peace-building initiative, Project Dastaan.

Project Dastaan (داستان‎/दास्तान: “Story”) is a peace-building initiative reconnecting individuals displaced during the 1947 Partition with their ancestral villages through Virtual Reality. Dastaan has conducted, filmed, and edited interviews in five languages with Partition survivors across the UK, India, and Pakistan. Their work has been featured in outlets including Time, the BBC, Reuters, and Elle.

04/04/2025

MIT Open Doc Lab in conversation with Sparsh Ahuja from Project Dastaan

📅 Tuesday, April 8th | 12 - 1:30 PM ET | 20 Ames Street, Rm E15-319, Cambridge

🌐 Join us for a presentation of Project Dastaan, a digital humanities initiative that uses VR to reconnect 1947 Partition survivors with their ancestral homes. Through immersive documentary experiences and colorfully animated retellings of individual histories, Project Dastaan reveals the resilience of those who were uprooted and dispersed as a result of the events of the Partition. Their stories emphasize the power of letters, food, and other shared experiences to foster reunion and healing in the wake of the largest migration in recorded history.

Screening of short films, followed by talk and Q&A by founder Sparsh Ahuja.

04/01/2025

The India Caucus at HKS invites you to a Special Screening & Discussion with Project Dastaan

Join us for an immersive presentation and screening with Project Dastaan, an award-winning peace-building initiative that uses virtual reality and animation to reconnect Partition survivors with their lost homes and histories.

Date: April 10, 2024
Venue: Wexner 436, Harvard Kennedy School
Time: 4:30 PM

*What to Expect:*

1. A presentation by Sparsh Ahuja & Sam Dalrymple, co-founders of Project Dastaan
2. ⁠Screening of selected clips from Child of Empire (VR documentary) & Lost Migrations (animated series)
3. ⁠Discussion on memory, migration, and the role of storytelling in historical reconciliation
4. ⁠Interactive Q&A session

🔗 Learn more about Project Dastaan: projectdastaan.org
📌 RSVP Here: https://forms.gle/gtb3aS7vjw41LKQX9

03/17/2025

Shattered Lands is out for Preorder!

It’s happening. As some of you may know, for the past five years, has been writing a book on India’s many partitions, based on his work with Dastaan.

Preorders make a huge difference. They tell publishers there’s an audience, help get the book into bookstores, and ultimately determine how widely the story reaches.

If every single one of you reading this preordered a copy, Shattered Lands would have an automatic shot at hitting the preorder bestseller lists. That’s how books break through. It’s genuinely the easiest way to turn this into a bestseller, and it would mean the world to us!

Preorder link in Bio!

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79 JFK St
Cambridge, MA
02138

Website

http://www.projectdastaan.org/

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