A Tale of Movement: Mapping the Spatial Evolution of Rural Punjab in Partition Narratives

Abstract

Unlike other states in northern India, Punjab was extensively afflicted by the 1947 Partition because of the British government’s decision to split the province down religious lines, devising two new spaces: East Punjab and West Punjab, or India and Pakistan. The carving of Punjab provoked a two-way crossing that drove villagers out of the farmlands onto unfamiliar routes leading to unfamiliar places, in turn disturbing Punjabi identities that were once emblematic of harmony and togetherness. I seek to complement fictional narrations of mobility with my grandfather’s lived experiences: his memories of his movements through his Sikh-Muslim village are testimonials to the destabilized spaces that have either persisted, reformed, or entirely disappeared as a result of Partition. For my grandfather, like other witnesses, this geopolitical event is remembered as a tale of movement—of involuntary journeys that confounded the Punjabi way of life. My project aims to reveal how the tremendous movement incited by Partition, as represented in literature and in my familial history, traces the changing spaces of villages as forces fracturing Punjabi identities. To contextualize my research findings, my presentation will include a number of cartographic maps, such as a Google Maps snapshot of my grandfather’s old village and a colonial map from 1947. I implement these visual aids to foreground the spaces of Punjabi villages that are often overlooked in Partition studies, and thus uncover the rural evolution witnessed by my grandfather and the characters by Khushwant Singh and Bapsi Sidhwa—two writers with firsthand experiences of Partition.