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Asif Currimbhoy’s play The Refugee presents a compelling examination of the challenges and internal conflicts faced by refugees, set against the backdrop of the Indo - Pakistan war of 1971 and the resulting partition. This narrative explores the tumultuous experiences of individuals who are forced to navigate the complexities of identity, belonging, and survival amidst geopolitical strife. The play delves into the psychological and emotional turmoil of refugees through its characters, portraying their struggles with loss, displacement, and the quest for a sense of home in an unfamiliar and often hostile environment. Through the journey of its characters, the play intricately details the multifaceted aspects of the refugee experience. The play serves as a poignant reminder of the enduring human spirit amidst adversity, offering deep insights into the challenges and internal conflicts of refugees through a rich tapestry of characters and settings that resonate with the complexities of real-world refugee experiences. The study focuses on the need for a humane approach to the refugee crisis, one that transcends bureaucratic and administrative measures and acknowledges the complex human emotions and needs at play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The footballing rivalry between East Bengal and Mohun Bagan in Kolkata, India, explicates important facets of the politics of nation-building and identity formation through sport. The sporting nationalism of the colonial era gave way to narrow parochialism in post-independent India where the cultural differences of Bangals (original Hindu residents of East Bengal in colonial India and Hindu migrants from East Bengal/East Pakistan in postcolonial India) and Ghotis (original residents of western parts of Bengal in colonial India and of West Bengal in postcolonial India) emerged as the key linchpin of expressing allegiance to their respective club football teams particularly in the aftermath of immigration of refugees which took place as a result of the partition of 1947 and the 1971 Bangladesh liberation war. However, the legislations pertaining to Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 and National Register of Citizens (NRC) have propelled fans of these clubs to forego their sub-cultural differences and act in unison to express their grievances against the new regulations of the Indian state. The anti-NRC protest by the fans hinges on the link between football and the debates pertaining to the idea of citizenship in contemporary Indian politics. The displaying of Tifos by the fans that exhibited significant social messages bears semblance with the Ultras of European football. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special section on micro partitions follows 'the reduction in scale' from macro in national to meso in regional and micro in micro-regional histories in the field of Partition studies through focusing on micro-narratives of Partition from Punjab, a region divided between India and Pakistan after the Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947. The focus of the essays is on affective memories of Partition in testimonies and cultural representations to examine the microhistories of displaced persons in micro-regions in West Punjab, including the North Western Frontier Province (Kohat, Bannu, Derajat), South Punjab (Multan, Bahawalpur) and the Mewat region in India, resettled in metro and non-metro cities and towns in India, Pakistan and the UK, through the lens of microhistory or microstoria and affect theories. The section hopes to examine the Partition's affective charge embodied in 'vernacular' languages and representational forms left out of print cultures,1 which include both traditional genres such as ritual theatre, folk-songs, folk music, folk-tales and proverbs as well as contemporary ones like popular music, ritual practices, festivals and pilgrimage sites through which communities from these micro-regions have represented Partition's collective trauma. It draws on the methods of microhistory to closely analyse narratives of small local events, communities and neighbourhoods in Punjab's micro-regions and subregions to connect the stories of these small places and 'little' people with the macro-narrative or grand narrative of Partition, so as to inquire what microhistory can bring to the understanding of Partition, as well as whether the micro-narratives relate to or throw new light on metanarratives.2 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with Partition refugees from Bannu who identified as Bannuwals and continue to do so. It aims to examine the microhistory of post-Partition Bannu refugees resettled across North India and focuses on their preservation of their Bannuwal identity. The role of language, proverbs and songs, cuisine and rituals in identity preservation by Bannuwals has been examined. Qualitative methodology using oral history interviews to record the memories and post-memories of Bannuwals has been used to identify a distinctive Bannuwal identity. Data for the qualitative research was collected through fieldwork in cities in India where the Bannu community is primarily resettled. Secondary sources such as books and essays on Bannu and the North-West Frontier Province and archival documents were consulted to obtain an informed perspective on Bannu's historical background. Seventeen people were interviewed using unstructured interviews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the symbolic and material power of Manifest Destiny inhered in the norms of documentary photography at Life magazine, particularly in preexisting shooting scripts. An analysis of visual re-takes and narrative fixity in the 1947 photo-essay on the Indian Partition, "The Great Migration," reveals how tropes of US settler colonialism were projected onto distressed refugees in South Asia. The norm of having photographed subjects enact script-image correlation was a revenue-minded colonial action; it absorbed a range of racial differences—South Asian, Black American, and Native American—into the fantasy of postwar US hegemony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Postmemory is an epigenetic study that investigates the transmission of the memory of the earlier generation to their descendants through the art the later generation created. Researchers have shown that the progeny of Partition refugees too inherit the traumatic memories and nostalgia for the lost land of their past generation in their study conducted on the second or third-generation refugees of the Partition of India. However, that transference of trauma seems to be largely absent in the case of the fourth-generation refugee- progeny as exhibited in Chotoder Border ( 'Border, As the Children Have Seen' in English) by Manjira Saha. It should be noted that they possess a soft corner for their ancestral homeland that their fore-generation had left behind despite being conscious of the pain, suffering, and sense of separation the fore-generation had gone through while leaving. Thus, Partition and border are different phenomena for the present generations of Partitioned refugees. The purpose of this research is to find out the reason behind this gradual diverse change in standpoints among the generations. For that, a deductive, analytical, and objective method is intended to be adopted within the thematic framework of the concept of postmemory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article attempts a comparative study of Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan and the select stories of Saadat Hasan Manto, written against the backdrop of the India-Pakistan partition of 1947 which traumatized and affected millions of people. The study looks into the fictitious nature of the brand-new identity taken up by people and the manner in which they acted under the influence of radical nationalism and extremism. It unravels the consequences of partition madness upon women and children as they became the easiest targets of the fanatics. It intends to identify the similarities and dissimilarities between both writers in respect of their portrayal of the refugee crisis, partition riots, communal madness as reflected in their works, and their reactions towards the religious division of India. The adopted method of this study is a comparative study in which textual analysis involving close reading of the select texts is utilized, taking postcolonialism and feminism into account. The analysis is further substantiated with the data taken from secondary sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the beginning of civilisation the Indian culture promoted, preached and practiced diversity; a land which has accommodated and embraced racial, cultural, linguistic and religious diversity. The doctrine of VasudhaivaKutumbakam 1 – the world is a family – is entrenched in Indian philosophy; it is one of the basic tenets of India's spiritual and cultural heritage. The intrinsic value of this philosophy is that it has no discrimination, does not play favourites and has no class or hierarchy. India has a great tradition of hosting people who were in the fear of being persecuted by their government much before the adoption of international legal framework for the protection of refugees. This paper examines the history of India's approach towards people seeking protection, by invoking doctrine of humanitarian consideration, despite the non-existence of a refugee policy at the time. Then, the paper proceeds to evaluate the massive inflow of the people into India upon partition of India and how effectively these new population were integrated and rehabilitated into our society, and how the practice has evolved to its current form. The study also carefully looks into the development of jurisprudence on refugees in India, by analyzing various judgments of the Supreme Court, Courts, and lower Courts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses how postmemory becomes a liminal space in itself, giving birth to hyphenated identities who oscillate within the realms of this liminality. Liminal spaces are situated in the transformative bisection of the before and the after. Studying the liminal space where true memory is forgotten and a new-fangled postmemory is generated gives an insight into the minds and patterns of the collective subject. Oftentimes, such an act of forgetfulness may be forced upon the collective subject. Governments alter memory narratives, completely erasing or exponentially disfiguring them to meet their agenda. Even the hyphenated collective subject itself indulges in self-imposed forgetfulness to nullify the traumatic experiences it faces, or once faced. It willingly otherizes that which it possesses, consequently romanticizing that which it lacks. During both the Indian partition and the Bangladeshi genocide, millions of refugees flooded into India. Their progenies who grew up in India were treated with promises and visions of a utopian land beyond the borders--a land from which they had had to flee. These second-generation immigrants faced "a dramatic loss of identity and meaning" because of the cultural trauma they encountered through postmemory narratives. Stuck within this chaotic liminal space, they were forced to acknowledge both the romanticized identity that was being imposed upon them and the lacking other that they formed a part of. Narratives of postmemory passed on by the original hyphenated collective subject therefore led to the formation of another hyphenated identity, those forever stuck in a sempiternal liminality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hence, it is crucial to analyze how media ignored the marginalized communities' voices and struggles in the Dandakaranya region during the COVID-19 pandemic. As COVID-19 cases surged in several blocks, the district faced a massive shortage of testing centers, COVID-19 hospitals, and suitable mechanisms to maintain social distancing and COVID-19 behavior. The deadly coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and the unprecedented rise in the number of infections and deaths, particularly during its second wave, exposed the vulnerabilities in India's public health infrastructure. Community movements and free flow of people from bordering states including migrant returnees (without COVID-19 testing and mandatory quarantine) raised the questions of community safety and increased the risk of infections. [Extracted from the article]

This article focuses on the Sealdah railway station in Calcutta, West Bengal, as a site of refugee 'settlement' in the aftermath of British India's partition. From 1946 to the late 1960s, the platforms of Sealdah remained crowded with Bengali Hindu refugees from East Pakistan. Some refugees stayed a few days, but many stayed for months, even years. Relying on newspaper reports, autobiographical accounts and official archives, this article elaborates how a busy railway station uniquely shaped the experiences of partition refugees. Despite severe infrastructural limitations, the railway platforms of Sealdah provided these refugee residents with certain opportunities. Many preferred to stay at Sealdah instead of moving to any government facility. However, even for the most long-term residents of Sealdah, it remained a temporary home, from where they were either shifted to government camps or themselves found accommodation in and around Calcutta. The article argues that by allowing the refugees to squat on a busy railway platform for months and years, the state recognised a unique right of these refugees, their right to wait, involving at least some agency in the process of resettling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Similarly, the Urdu-speaking Bihari Muslims who migrated from India to East Pakistan in 1947, due to their role in the 1971 liberation war when they supported the Pakistan Army and opposed the independence of Bangladesh, were also a very marginalized, even disliked community in Bangladesh. Besides, there are huge number of families in Bangladesh (East Bengal) who had benefitted materially from the creation of Pakistan, especially after the rich Hindus left East Bengal. This finally led to the liberation war of Bangladesh in 1971.In a nutshell, I can say that my experiences during my days in East Pakistan were filled with a sense of loss, deprivation and a profound sense of melancholy. And in December 1971, India fought a massive war against Pakistan on both her fronts, as a result of which Bangladesh emerged as an independent state. [Extracted from the article]

In his 2019 novel, I Gun Island i , Amitav Ghosh reflects upon the consequences of decades of international political inaction in relation to climate-related human movement. By comparing the present-day experience of climate refugees from the Sundarbans to those of refugees condemned to bare life at Morichjhãpi, I The Hungry Tide i laments that ill-managed climate migration might cyclically consign communities from a region still recovering from such horrors to further ordeal. In what follows, I will examine the ways in which I The Hungry Tide i and I Leila i offer concern through their respective imaginaries of displacement that a state of exception produced by ill-governed climate mobility might lead to the repetition of traumatic relations between refugees and the nation-state. As historians have described, refugees at Dandakaranya were detained like "prisoners of war".[48] I The Hungry Tide i picks up these carceral themes, describing the conditions of resettlement as akin to a 'concentration camp [...] [where] refugees were surrounded by security forces and forbidden to leave' despite poverty and disease being rife.[49] Ghosh's invocation of the concentration camp-like nature of Dandakaranya underlines the inversion between life and death in the resettlement programme - a condition central to a state of exception, as theorised by Agamben. [Extracted from the article]

This article outlines an agenda to relocate refugees to the centre of historical enquiry by recovering and analysing their voices, in the form of letters and petitions sent to authorities within the refugee regime. We adopt a comparative approach by using evidence from four distinct incarnations of the refugee regime: the League of Nations in interwar Europe; the early post-1945 era represented by the International Refugee Organization (IRO); the era of the newly established Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR); and the quarter century following Partition in India, specifically its impact in West Bengal. The article demonstrates how refugees' voices were shaped by the social, cultural and administrative contexts within which they wrote, and that understanding these contexts can help us see why refugees framed their claims in particular ways. The article suggests that Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of 'polyphony' provides a means of understanding how refugees understood their predicament and engaged with the refugee regime from often contradictory and ambiguous viewpoints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chatterji's understanding of decolonisation with its rushed transfer of power reinforces her earlier readings that it was Congress' pursuit of a downsized India without the Muslim-majority provinces that precipitated the cataclysmic events of 1947. Since the publication of Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism, and Partition 1932-1947 (1994) and The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947-1967 (2007), Joya Chatterji has emerged as one of the foremost historians working on the division of India. Similarly, it is difficult to see how the inter-state agreements between India and Pakistan to manage the refugee flows, especially in Bengal, conform with the broader processes of secularisation as claimed. [Extracted from the article]

This paper makes interventions in our understanding of the histories of Partition. Rather than treating 1947 as a moment of temporal rupture, it argues that processes that were set in motion during the two World Wars persisted into the post-colonial period and proved critical in determining the shape of contemporary Indian urbanism. While the post-Partition Indian state, obsessed with planning capital spaces, used rehabilitation as an instrument to gain control over the city, this paper argues that it was during the early 1940s, and particularly during World War II, that we can trace the genealogy of post-colonial urban governance. It will assess migration, urban planning, popular protest, war-time controls, and the political economy of land use during the 1940s in Delhi, which in many ways shaped how the city later responded to Partition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first half of the 20th century was one of the most turbulent periods in human history. Particularly with two of its major migrations: the population exchanges caused by the partition of India in 1947 and the exodus of Palestinians in 1948 after the formation of Israel (also referred to as the Nakba). Both of these events would go on to significantly shift the course of history in the 20th century. The Partition of India led to the creation of the Hindu-majority Republic of India and the Muslim-majority Republic of Pakistan, while the Nakba set the stage for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict which continues to this day. This paper seeks to introduce and analyze the massive exodus of refugees generated from both of these events. There is also an analysis and comparison of how the two cases dealt with their migrations and ethnic cleansing. This paper also seeks to introduce and analyze the issue of absentee property between the two cases. The primary time period that is being analyzed is between 1947-1951 though some of the material may extend a little further for greater context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Built from the ground up by three thousand Sikh and Hindu refugees in the aftermath of the Partition of India in 1947, the town of Nilokheri in East Punjab emerged as an unlikely centre of agricultural education and scientific exchange. With support from the Ford Foundation, Indian and American scientists and development planners worked through the 1950s to transform the refugee township into a model of agricultural innovation and community development. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru even cast Nilokheri as the first step on the ‘road to new India’ that would bring the nation to self-sufficiency in food production. Over the course of a decade, experimental farms, workshops, and agricultural training centres rose around the village. The bustling town rapidly became an internationally recognised centre for deploying new farming technologies, training farmers, and sharing scientific knowledge. Yet for all its initial promise, allegations of bureaucratic mismanagement dogged the project, floodwaters disrupted the site in 1957, and Ford’s interest shifted by the early 1960s. The Nilokheri experiment, however, set the stage for the scientific and social interventions of India’s Green Revolution, contributing to an international development paradigm that persists today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the absence of a linguistically defined region of their own, the migration of Sindhi Hindus to India was particularly painful and humiliating. It propelled the refugees to either embrace homogenisation or move into unknown territory. Mohan Kalpana'sJalavatniis a rare document in Partition literature. It brings to the literary archive of Partition a hard-hitting voice hitherto missing—the voice of rage at the hostility of the host nation rather than a gruesome account of violence, the struggle for home, the paucity of resources, and the rejection associated with identity. This paper introduces the reader to this untranslated and hence unknown story of amorphous citizenship and estrangement in the wake of Partition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What cultural, historical, institutional, and legal paradigms have the Greco- Turkish War and Population Exchange bequeathed to national and trans-national practices of border-making, border-crossing, and heritage-claiming over the past century, and how have subsequent experiences reshaped the original paradigm? We approach this question through four distinct categories: namely, the historical trajectory of refugee identity and its different political and cultural legacies in Greece and Turkey; the racialization of religion, which has helped to rewrite the boundaries of citizenship and belonging over the past century; the paradigm of peacekeeping by partition that the Population Exchange handed down to the international diplomatic norms of subsequent decades, along with the widespread regime of unseeing on which it depends; and, finally, memory practices that establish templates for remembering refugee pasts as well as making sense of contemporary crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After partition, minorities in South Asia emerged as a distinct legal category of citizens who were not fully protected by the states within which they lived. The power of South Asia's nation-states over their ‘minority-citizens’ far exceeds their sovereignty over ordinary citizens, and the capacity of ‘minority-citizens’ to resist this power was broken, this article will show, by a series of draconian executive actions. But ‘minority citizenship’ was not simply a product of ‘bureaucratic rationality’, as some have suggested, or even of ‘governmentality’. On the contrary, it was produced by complex, often violent, interactions between government and a range of non-state actors, who forced their own ideas of nationality, justice, and entitlement on to the statute books. Citizenship in South Asia thus proves to have a complex parenthood, with ‘civil’ and ‘political’ more entangled, and mutually constituted, than some theorists would have us believe. India and Pakistan continued to be bound together by migrants and migration even as their discursive claims seemed to pull them ever further apart. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the part that the redistribution of evacuee property—the property abandoned by departing Hindus and Sikhs during the mass migrations after Partition—played in the institutionalization of corruption in Pakistan. By drawing on hitherto unexplored sources, including Pakistan's Rehabilitation Department papers, local police files and court records, it highlights the schemes of illegal appropriation, misappropriation, and paints a wholly convincing portrait of the scramble for millions of rupees worth of abandoned property in the towns and countryside of West Punjab. It shows how politicians, bureaucrats, powerful local notables and enterprising refugee groups grabbed properties, mainly by bribing officers charged with allocating them to incoming refugees, or by utilizing their personal contacts. The paper argues that the fierce competition for resources and temptations for evacuee property encouraged the emergence of a ‘corruption’ discourse which not only contributed to an atmosphere that was detrimental to democratic consolidation in the early years of Pakistan's history, but also justified later military intervention. This not only adds to the empirical knowledge of Partition and its legacies, but also makes a significant contribution towards our understanding of the transitional state in Pakistan. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the aftermath of conflicts, refugees are often treated as helpless victims of trauma in need of international aid and intervention. Refugees can and do however move beyond the culture of dependency to create sustainable existences within their new environments. While much attention is given to the politics of displacement, humanitarian intervention and human rights of refugees, little is written about the ways in which refugees actually live, particularly those who have chosen to settle themselves rather than allow outside powers to intervene in their settlement choices. This article looks at how the refugee settlement process has taken place in Calcutta in the aftermath of the 1947 partition, and how that process has very much been influenced by the trauma of losing social position in their ancestral country and the desire to regain it and belong to a new land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use data from the 1931, 1941, and 1951 censuses of India and the 1951 census of Pakistan to examine the demographic consequences of Partition in the Punjab in 1947. Had growth rates for the period 1931-41 for the Punjab as a whole continued to 1951, the population of the Punjab would have been 2.9 million larger than that recorded in 1951. Population losses from migration and mortality above age 20 were approximately 2.7 million greater between 1941 and 1951 than would have been predicted by loss rates between 1931 and 1941. We estimate a net Partition-related population movement out of the combined Punjab of about 400,000. We conclude from several lines of analysis that Partition-related population losses in the Punjab, either from deaths or unrecorded migration, were in the range 2.3-3.2 million. Partition was also marked by a dramatic religious homogenization at the district level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how official representations of the violence and displacement of Partition organized the sovereign power of the post-independence Pakistani state. It addresses how Partition's chain of violence and displacement engendered the state as an entity capable of wielding the sovereign power to decide on life and death. Crucial to this process were practices of knowledge and power in which the refugee was produced ambivalently, as a figure of right and a biopolitical problem in need of resolution. Focusing on Pakistan's official response to the “refugee problem”, I analyze how the management of the potential and actual movement of populations relied upon, and informed implicit logics of official commensuration with the communal violence of the mass. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents an assessment of political development in the newly independent states of the South Asian subcontinent from 1947 to 1958. Number of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs that became refugees as a result of India's partition; Discussion of political parties and state building in India and Pakistan; Components of the nation-building process in South Asia; Failure of nation building in Sri Lanka.