Malhotra's debut book
Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory was published by
HarperCollins India in 2017, to mark the 70th anniversary of Indian independence. The project (under the same name) initially began as her MFA dissertation at Concordia University, Montréal, and included field research in India, Pakistan and England. It is an attempt to revisit the Partition through personal and intimate objects that refugees carried with them across the border during their migration. Written as a crossover between history and anthropology, it portrays a human history of Partition. It was named a
Hindustan Times "India @ 70" book and shortlisted for the Sahitya Akademi
Yuva Puraskar,
Shakti Bhatt Prize First Book Award,
Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize, and Hindu Lit for Life Non Fiction Prize. Outside the subcontinent, it was published under the title
Remnants of Partition: 21 Objects from a Continent Divided, by
Hurst Publishers in 2019. It was shortlisted by the
British Academy for the 2019 Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding. In 2022, it won the US-based Council for Museum Anthropology Book Prize, where the committee said “Malhotra’s concern for detail — such as languages spoken, family members present and their interactions during interviews, setting and mood (as well as her own responses to the stories) — creates a strong moral and ethical underpinning for this work . . . [It] is a model for significant contributions to museum anthropology.” To mark the 75th anniversary of Partition in 2022, Malhotra published a sequel titled,
In the Language of Remembering: The Inheritance of Partition, which focused on the contemporary relevance of Partition in the everyday lives of Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis. Her debut novel,
The Book of Everlasting Things, was also published in 2022. In addition to her books, she has been involved in several
oral history projects and is an advisor the
Project Dastaan peace initiative. In 2017, she co-founded the
Museum of Material Memory, a crowdsourced digital repository tracing family history and social ethnography through heirlooms, collectibles and objects of antiquity from the Indian subcontinent. . == Books ==