Home, Uprooted

Home, Uprooted is a narrative exploration of the oral histories of three generations of refugees from India's Partition. The British partitioning of India in 1947 led to communal riots resulting in the death of an estimated one million Hindus and Muslims and the displacement of about 20 million persons on both sides of the border in India and Pakistan. This watershed socio-economic-geo-political event casts an enduring shadow on India's relationship with neighboring Pakistan, and continues to receive consistent attention from scholars across disciplines. Home, Uprooted joins Partition literature that addresses how ordinary persons and their descendants continue to experience this epochal event. The book focuses on the emergent conceptual nexus of home, travel, and identity in the stories of participants from ten Hindu and Sikh families in Delhi. The author argues that the ways in which her participants imagine, recollect, memorialize or "abandon" home in their everyday narratives gives us unique insights into how refugee identities, in this particular context, are constituted. These stories are one iteration of how migrations are enacted and what home - in its sense, absence, and presence - can mean for displaced populations. Writing in a style that mingles biography, autobiography, essay, and performative writing, the author privileges the minute everyday experiences of her participants. Folded into the field narratives and often generating from them are strenuous moments of reflexive storytelling about the author's own family history, shaped also by the Partition event and her self-propelled migration to North America. In contemplating and living their stories of home, she attempts to show how her own ancestral legacies of Partition displacement bear relief. Home, how we experience it and what it that says about the "selves" we come to occupy is a crucial question of our contemporary moment. Home, Uprooted delivers one perspective on this important question.