Project Dastaan is a peace-building initiative that reconnects displaced

refugee A refugee, conventionally speaking, is a displaced person who has crossed national borders and who cannot or is unwilling to return home due to well-founded fear of persecution.

s of the 1947 Partition of

India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area, the List of countries and dependencies by population, second-most populous ...

Pakistan Pakistan ( ur, ), officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan ( ur, , label=none), is a country in South Asia. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by population, fifth-most populous country, with a population of almost 24 ...

and

Bangladesh Bangladesh (}, ), officially the People's Republic of Bangladesh, is a country in South Asia. It is the eighth-most populous country in the world, with a population exceeding 165 million people in an area of . Bangladesh is among the mo ...

with their childhood communities and villages through bespoke 360-degree digital experiences. Dastaan means 'story' in several South Asian languages. The Project aimed to virtually reconnect 75 first-hand witnesses of the Partition to their ancestral homes by 2022; however, Covid-19 restrictions reduced this target to 30 virtual returns. The Project has 3 features "Child of Empire", an interactive VR piece to be installed in museums, a feature film titled "The Lost Migration" and another film titled "Where the Birds Live". Founded in 2018 by a group of four students at the University of Oxford, the venture is advised by high-profile historians, film-makers and advocates including

Malala Yousafzai Malala Yousafzai ( ur, , , pronunciation: ; born 12 July 1997), is a Pakistani female education activist and the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Awarded when she was 17, she is the world's youngest Nobel Prize laureate, and the second P ...

, Gabo Arora,

Suroosh Alvi Suroosh Alvi (; born ) is a Canadian journalist and filmmaker. He is the co-founder of Vice Media, a digital media and broadcasting brand that operates in more than 50 countries. Alvi is a travelled journalist and an executive producer of film, ...

, William Dalrymple and Aanchal Malhotra. Dastaan's Founding Director, Sparsh Ahuja, was a recipient of the San-Francisco based CatchLight Fellowship in 2018 in order to seed fund the project. The Project was also accepted onto Kaleidoscope VR's DevLab Accelerator in 2020 and is part of the UK-based National Partition Commemoration Project, which launched the 'South Asian Heritage Month' Campaign at British Parliament in 2018.

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* {{Authority control Organizations established in 2018 Peace organizations