Citizenship, Belonging, and the Partition of India

The authors of this volume ask how minorities have sought to belong, and trace how their sense of belonging has shifted with time. Working with “intercepted letters, pamphlets, and poetry”, novels and ethnographic fieldwork, each of the articles in this book foreground the voices of the “refugee” and the “minority”.

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This book revisits the aftermath of the partition of 1947, and the war of 1971, to examine some of the longer-term consequences of the redrawing of borders across South Asia. From the eastern frontier of Assam to the westernmost reaches of Gujarat and Sindh, the chapters in this volume study the “minority question” and show how it has manifested in different regional contexts. The authors ask how minorities have sought to belong, and trace how their sense of belonging has shifted with time. Working with “intercepted letters, pamphlets, and poetry”, novels and ethnographic fieldwork, each of these articles foreground the voices of the “refugee” and the “minority”. Taken together, the essays argue that a deep dive into how people have been affected by border-making and remaking in each of these frontier regions is integral to understanding the “big picture” that is South Asia.

By drawing upon current research in history, memory studies and literature, this book will interest students, researchers and scholars of modern Indian history, Partition studies, colonial history, postcolonial studies, politics, and South Asian studies.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Asian Affairs.