The Bengali sufferers of the tragic partition of India in 1947 have arguably failed to garner the political, policy, and discursive attention received by their West Pakistani or Punjabi counterparts. A case in point, Chittaranjan Park – a sub-urban neighborhood or colony of New Delhi granted as a ghetto to the Bengalis rendered rootless by the formation of East Pakistan – is rarely a muse for forays in partition studies or borderscaping.

Compared to Punjab and Bengal, Gujarat's experiences of the Partition of India in 1947 remain curiously under-researched even though the state has a long border with Pakistan and over a million people migrated to Gujarat, mostly from neighbouring Sindh. This paper seeks to fill this lacuna in Partition scholarship by examining the experiences of two Hindu groups, Sindhis and Gujarati Dalits, who left Sindh to settle in Ahmedabad.

How are migrant communities policed in cities of the Global South where racially securitized discourses and colonial institutional legacies shape contemporary police practice? Critical criminologists advise that postcolonial perspectives offer valuable insights on imperial legacies, while allowing us to expand conceptual and empirical analyses of crime, policing, justice, and social order.

This paper will examine poetic responses to the trauma of Partition, and will consider both poetry written at the time and since. I will examine works in Bengali, Urdu and English, by such poets as Agha Shahid Ali, Jibanananda Das, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and Achintya Kumar Sengupta. I will examine how poets deal with the memory of the violence and the resulting legacy of dislocation and alienation. I will examine the possibilities of poetic melancholy as a tool in order to respond to and negotiate the enforced and violent change in identities that Partition precipitated.

One of the characteristics of much of the existing scholarship about the India/Pakistan partition of 1947 is that it usually privileges the refugee experience as the quintessential partition experience. The voices that are heard most prominently are of those who migrated. As a consequence, an unacceptably large proportion of partition scholarship has reflected the hegemonic binary of a Hindu India, and an Islamic Pakistan. This chapter has been conceptualised as a response to this.

This is a Partition-Independence that we have not always faced up to in our history-writing and our public presentations of that moment of 'liberation'. A focus on the Muslims of a disturbed and high-profile place such as Delhi in 1947-48 allows us to recover something of the suppressed memories of Partition and Independence, at the same time as we ask something about the way in which the history of these events has been written up.