The Breakup of India and Palestine: The Causes and Legacies of Partition. Kattan Victor and Ranjan Amit (eds). Manchester University Press, Manchester, United Kingdom, 2023, pp. 312. ISBN 978-1-526-17030-9 (hbk). A Contemporary Archaeology of Post-Displacement Resettlement: Delhi's 1947 Partition Refugee Homescapes. Erin P., Riggs. Routledge, Oxon, United Kingdom, 2024, pp. 264. ISBN 978-1-032-16124-2 (pbk). Studies on displacement generally assume that it ends when people return, resettle, or achieve citizenship (Adey et al., 2020). However, this framing risks glossing over the enduring and often visceral experiences of being-displaced, which not only reveal the processual nature of displacement as an unfinished business (Boano et al., 2024) but also the multiscalar, multispatial imprints of a geopolitical event on the material realities and the self (Oslender, 2016; Saxena, 2022). Reading A Contemporary Archaeology of Post-Displacement Resettlement: Delhi's 1947 Partition Refugee Homescapes (Riggs, 2024) and The Breakup of India and Palestine: The Causes and Legacies of Partition (Kattan instead, it led to a complex re-territorialization that accommodated and, in turn, was shaped by its newly acquired citizens. The combined reading of Riggs with Kattan and Ranjan proves that to understand the long-term consequences of partition, both as a colonial inheritance and personal experience, we must examine how the political system of worth and resource allocation shapes acts of belonging in the Global South (Ferdoush, 2019). The enduring tension between the rigidity of state-making and the fluid reality of resettlement defines the contemporary spatial order in the postcolonies. This synthesis offers three critical contributions to the fields of political geography. First, it reframes displacement as an enduring, non-linear mode of being-in-place, urging scholars to study the meandering nature of displacement in all its eventfulness and banalities. This critique of time and linearity, inherent in displacement studies, is crucial for moving beyond teleological narratives and acknowledging the temporalities of waiting (Chattopadhaya & Tyner, 2020). Second, it provides a rigorous comparative framework for assessing the structural choices of successor states in managing populations, proving that inclusion, in particular, is a calculated political investment and not a humanitarian given. Finally, grounding Kattan and Ranjan's analysis in Riggs's material evidence also makes a case for future research to look beyond territorial frameworks and engage more closely with the lived and material ways in which people continually remake space, challenging the state's projects of ordering.
Chayanika Saxena (Mon,) studied this question.