W.H. Auden, “Partition,” 1966.
While comparing partitions has been an ongoing scholarly exercise, we build our argument alongside two curatorial projects in art and architecture, which have gone beyond comparison, to explore form across geographies. They are Iftikhar Dadi and Hammad Nasar, eds., Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space (London: Green Cardamom; Ithaca: Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, 2012) and more recently, The Getty Research Institute, “The Art and Architecture of Partition and Confederation, Pakistan and Beyond,” research project and workshop organized by Maristella Casciato, Zirwat Chowdhury, and Farhan Karim, October 15–16, 2018. See also Decolonizing Art Architecture Art Residency (DAAR), Alessandro Petti, Sandi Hilal, Eyal Weizman, with Nicola Perugini, “A Common Assembly,” in Architecture after Revolution (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013).
The number 3 million is based on two separate Harvard studies that have been the most substantive exercises in grappling with the numbers question in relation to Partition. Prashant Bharadwaj, Asim Khwaja, and Atif Mian calculate that 3.7 million people went “missing” during the violence and most of them could be counted as those who died, in "The Partition of India: Demographic Consequences," SSRN Electronic Journal (2009). Jennifer Leaning and colleagues estimate 2.3–3.2 million deaths in Punjab alone, in “The Demographic Impact of Partition in the Punjab in 1947,” Population Studies 62, no. 2 (2008): 155–170.
Reflections on incommensurability and the crisis of belonging follow from The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia (2007), and is also further explored in Vazira Zamindar, "Borderlanders: A Political Concept for Repair," in Repair: Sustainable Design Futures, ed. Markus Berger and Kate Irvin (Routledge, 2022). Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) remains the most important for interrogations of statelessness beyond the juridical, and for an engagement with Arendt's conception of statelessness for South Asia, see Vazira Zamindar, “Zarina’s Dark Roads: Exile, Statelessness and the Tenacity of Nostalgia,” Third Text Online, November 28, 2018, ➝.
Patrick French, “A New Way of Seeing Indian Independence and the Brutal ‘Great Migration’: Notes found in LIFE's archives lend new depths of meaning to Margaret Bourke-White's photos of the partition of India and Pakistan,” Time Magazine, August 14, 2016, ➝.
Vazira Zamindar, “Economies of Displacement,” in The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 79–157; Rotem Geva, “Scramble for Houses: Violence, A Fractionalized State, and Informal Economy in Post-Partition Delhi,” Modern Asian Studies 51, no. 3 (2017): 769–824. Ilyas Chattha, “Competitions for Resources: Partition’s Evacuee Property and the Sustenance of Corruption in Pakistan.” Modern Asian Studies 46, no. 5 (2012): 1182–1211.
Aamir Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Faisal Devji, Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2013).
Zamindar, The Long Partition, 29.
Quotations taken from Charles Correa, The New Landscape (Bombay: The Book Society of India, 1985), 15; “Manusha: Architecture as the measure of man,” in Vistāra: The Architecture of India, ed. Carmen Kagal (Bombay: The Festival of India, 1986), 30.
Mrinalini Rajagopalan, Building Histories: The Architectural and Affective Lives of Five Monuments in Modern Delhi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Aditi Chandra, “Potential of the ‘Un-Exchangeable Monument’: Delhi’s Purana Qila, in the time of Partition, c.1947–63,” International Journal of Islamic Architecture 2, no. 1 (2013): 101–123; Nayanjot Lahiri, “Partitioning the Past: India’s Archaeological Heritage after Independence,” in Appropriating the Past: Philosophical Perspectives on the Practice of Archaeology, ed. Geoffrey Scarre and Robin Coningham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012): 295–311.
Suneetha Dasappa Kacker, “The DDA and the Idea of Delhi,” in The Idea of Delhi, ed. Romi Khosla (Mumbai: Marg, 2005), 68–77; Ravinder Kaur, Since 1947: Partition Narratives among Punjabi Migrants of Delhi (Oxford University Press, 2007); on similarly "planning the nation" in West Bengal, see Uditi Sen, Citizen Refugee: Forging the Indian Nation After Partition, (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
Farhan Karim, “Between Self and Citizenship: Doxiadis Associates in Postcolonial Pakistan 1958–68,” International Journal of Islamic Architecture 5, no. 1: 135–161; Ijlal Muzaffar, “Boundary Games: Ecochard, Doxiadis, and the Refugee Housing Projects under Military Rule in Pakistan, 1953–1959,” in Governing by Design: Architecture, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century, ed. Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), 142–178. The authors are grateful to Balsam Abdul-Rahman of the Rare Books and Special Collections Library at the American University in Cairo and Giota Pavlidou of the Constantinos A. Doxiadis Archives for contributions of invaluable knowledge to this research.
An expanded imagination of the “architectural archive” is greatly needed so that the material history of worlds such as those of housing societies is not limited to that found in archives of development. Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, “Architecture as a Form of Knowledge,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 40, no. 3 (2021). To this point, Fathy’s written notes on the housing study drawing demonstrate a disconnection from the lives of the Korangi refugees, even as they articulate a poetic resistance to the architectural standardization of housing: “How I wish if the planners treated their houses as leaves in the wind & studied those patterns that the choreographer of Autumn Leaves gave to his dancing formations {the optimum configuration}… Autumn Leaves, a ballet I have seen danced by the troupe of Pavlova to a waltz by Chopin. Zephyr (a man dancer in the Greek costume of Zephyr of the Tower of the Winds) is chasing the leaves— women dancers—blowing the wind onto them, and they are running here and there in front of him and at times they lie in patterns on the ground when he leaves them for a while… Assertion by Chauncey Wright: If the successive leaves of the fundamental spiral be placed at the particular azimuth which divides the circle in the “setio aurea”, then no leaves will ever be superposed;—{Ruskin’s vacant space}—and thus we are said to have “the most thorough and rapid distribution of the leaves round the stem, each new or higher leaf falling over the angular space between the two older ones which are nearest in direction, so as to divide it in the same ratio”… The story is told that Rykku, the Japanese master of the tea ceremony, instructed his son to clean the garden before the arrival of guests. Inspecting the immaculately finished result, he said to the youth, “This is not the way,” and shook a tree so that leaves fell in a free pattern across a path. Thus the man-made street rural order of the garden was formed with the natural order of living forms.” See Viola Bertini, “Working with Constantinos Doxiadis,” in Hassan Fathy: Earth & Utopia (London: Laurence King, 2018): 102–107.
The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947–1985, Museum of Modern Art, 2022. For a restitutive approach to "decolonization," see Shanti Jayewardene-Pillai, Geoffrey Manning Bawa: Decolonizing Architecture (Colombo: The National Trust Sri Lanka, 2017). The problem of "partitions" in the plural and across geographies is being taken up, moreover, in emerging studies: for example, Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, “From Partitions,” in Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming 2023); Safia Aidid, “Pan-Somali Dreams: Ethiopia, Greater Somalia, and the Somali Nationalist Imagination,” Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 2020; Hollyamber Kennedy, “Infrastructures of ‘Legitimate Violence’: The Prussian Settlement Commission, Internal Colonization, and the Migrant Remainder,” Grey Room 76 (Summer 2019): 58–97.
Seema Mustafa, ed., Shaheen Bagh and the Idea of India: Writings on a Movement for Justice, Liberty and Equality (New Delhi: Speaking Tiger Books, 2020); Sarover Zaidi and Samprati Pani, “If on a winter’s night, azadi…” in Of Migration, ed. Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi and Rachel Lee (Canadian Centre for Architecture 2022), originally published on Chiragh Dilli (February 15, 2020); Chris Moffat, “#Afterlives: Shaheen Bagh and the Force of Foundation,” AllegraLab: Anthropology for Radical Optimism (May 2020).