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.

Abstract: This essay is based on my engagement with the Sindhi-speaking Hindu minority of Sindh that migrated to India in and around 1947, when the province of Sindh became a part of Pakistan. It privileges therefore a specific religious group and its response and negotiation to a specific moment. My current research on Sindhi-speaking Muslims along the border interrogates the classification of ‘Sindhis’ as a spatially fixed identity, and revisits the state-endorsed premises of irrevocability and border-formation.