The cities of Lahore Pakistan and Amaritsar India suffered widespread destruction and demographic transformation in the wake of armed invasion and the later partition in 1951. Ten million Punjabis were uprooted. In all, around 13 million people were displaced by partition. Talbot examines the impact of partition on the cities and their inhabitants during the post-partition decade of 1947-1957

"The whole of South Asia is devoid of any standards and norms on any dimension of refugee reception, determination and protection. The fact that a quarter of the world's refugees find themselves in a non-standardized, if not hostile, refugee regime is a situation which does not augur well for either the mandate of UNHCR or for any civilized society. The South Asian nations have their own apprehensions, real or imaginary, about the utility of CSR 1951 to their situations.

The partition of India in 1947 was, and undoubtedly remains, the most turbulent episode in the recent history of the subcontinent. Of course, the reading of Partition history, be it through its humanitarian or political dimension, is anything but uniform. It is observable that a group narrative of Partition exists for each community directly affected by the event – that is to say, Hindu, Muslim and Sikh respectively.

This paper is a study of the Interim Government in British India, formed during the penultimate viceroyalty of Archibald Wavell, from September 1946 to March 1947. It tries to throw light on major and minor personalities and micro and macro processes at work in this improbable interlude and, thus, probes an overshadowed ministerial and bureaucratic set-up in the lead-up to Partition. This understudied set-up constituted yet another compelling ‘space before Partition’ which would continue to affect the Indian state after Partition.

Staged inside a shamiyana (tent-house), the video-installation Five Rivers: A Portrait of Partition, a documentary in cyclorama by Sheba Remy Kharbanda and William Charles ‘Chuck’ Moss narrates Amrik Singh’s personal account of the 1947 Partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan. The Partition Scholarship is largely divided into the narratives based on ‘high politics’ and ‘voices from below’.

This paper revisits the violent annexation of the erstwhile princely state of Hyderabad by the Indian army in 1948 as an inaugural moment of dispossession to reconstruct Hyderabad's twentieth century past along the axes of Muslim belonging and memory. I argue that we must situate twentieth and twenty-first century Hyderabadi Muslim migration in relation to Partition-related displacements and attempts to overcome them through economic conditions provided by migration.