Women's lives in the Punjab, hitherto regulated by strictly set patriarchal norms, saw unexpected and almost drastic change as Partition set in. The motif of Partition has centred on the humiliation and trauma that women encountered and witnessed. While it is true that women were, in countless instances, Partition's ubiquitous victims, in very many ways the chaos and temporality of the post-Partition period allowed several of them to redefine themselves anew.

"This critical biography of Indu Mitha, a Pakistani dancer and choreographer, lays out an alternate, creative history of sixty-four years of post-Partition Pakistan. Her life and work enable choreographing an occluded space on stage and beyond, which I call space of hope --a space of alterity, a place where narratives countering the nation state boundaries enforced by the 1947 Partition of British India into the three independent states of Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh (1971). This space is not a post-colonial one, but is based on a longer shared historical specificity of South Asia.

Abstract: While communal violence has been an ongoing and unfortunate reality for post-colonial and post-partition India, there’s no sidestepping the fact that attacks and hate crime incidences against the country’s Muslim minority by members of the Hindu majority have occurred in greater frequency and ferocity in the years since Prime Minister Narendra Modi, leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), came to power in 2014 –on the back of a Hindu nationalist agenda, one in which anti-Muslim animus and discrimination features in mainstream political discourse and government policy.