Her research and writings focus on the oral histories of individuals affected by the Partition, capturing their memories and the tangible remnants of that period.

[2] Malhotra's debut book Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory[3] 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.

[10] 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 .

In 2017, she co-founded the Museum of Material Memory,[15] a crowdsourced digital repository tracing family history and social ethnography through heirlooms, collectibles and objects of antiquity from the Indian subcontinent.