In this study, the relationship between armed conflict and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms was explored in a sample of young adults from Northern Kashmir in India. The sample included 797 college students. Exposure to conflict was assessed by the Exposure to Kashmir Conflict Checklist, made up of 16 different types of conflict-related events. PTSD symptoms were assessed through the PCL–C, a 17-item self-rating questionnaire typically used as a screening instrument. Nearly half of the respondents (49.81%) were found to be in the diagnosable range for PTSD.

This introduction frames a selection of papers that encourage a richer spatial understanding of the years before the Partition of India. The papers respond to two types of questions. One type is spatial (at what scale do we approach Partition? Through which spaces should we attempt to understand both micro and macro processes? Movements across what distances constituted Partition?). The second type is temporal (what timescales do we invoke when approaching Partition? Of what was it the endpoint? What sort of memories were invoked and made during India’s multiple partitions?).

The Enlightenment as the origin of modernity and as the foundation of moral universalism has been much invoked by social theory in recent years especially by writers influenced by Michel Foucault's essay on the subject. Postmodernism and cultural anthropology have made the question about Enlightenment universalism ever more pressing. At one level the issue is very simple.

Defining the relationship between displaced populations and the nation state is a fraught historical process. The Partition of India in 1947 provides a compelling example, yet markedly little attention has been paid to the refugee communities produced. Using the case of the displaced ‘Urdu-speaking minority’ in Bangladesh, this article considers what contemporary discourses of identity and integration reveal about the nature and boundaries of the nation state.

The political shockwaves from the partition of India and Pakistan were felt far beyond the local tragedies that followed in its wake – not least in British imperial politics, where the two new Dominions and the subsequent reorganisation of the Commonwealth drastically altered the character of the imperial machinery. This article covers the first decade of Pakistan’s and India’s independence through the activity of the Commonwealth journal The Round Table.

The 1947 Partition of India has recently re-emerged as a thematic concern of many South Asian films about nationalism in popular and parallel cinema. These films invoke the 1947 Partition in both productive and troubling ways: they connect it to the contemplation of the role of religion in the contemporary nation-state, and of the impact of religious ethnicity, terrorism and gender on the experience of citizenship in both India and Pakistan.

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.

This paper interrogates the reparative possibilities of representing subjugated voices in historical narratives. It examines, first, the onto-epistemic conditions under which this representation becomes possible. Further, it demonstrates that the possibility of representation is contingent upon the reproduction of the subjugated subject as a signifier of onto-epistemic difference. This form of representation fails to repair the harm underlying subjugation.

In this article, I examine the 1971 war (better known as the war for the liberation of Bangladesh) from a western Indian perspective. I argue that this war between India and Pakistan—while it focused overtly on the independence of East Pakistan—had some significant consequences for the western border between Kutch (in Gujarat state) and Sindh (in Pakistan).

The concern of Partition narratives has generally been with displacement, loss of identity, alienation, gender and violence, as well as the rehabilitation of refugees. What is elided in them is the tragedy of those villagers who lost their land and livelihood in order to make space for the thousands of refugees who were resettled in “refugee” colonies. This article explores a key aspect of the impact of the Partition of India; namely, the rapid transformation of rural spaces in the periphery of the capital city of Delhi, which saw a massive influx and resettlement of refugees.