e-flux Architecture Positions 03/22 Families separated while crossing the borders were reunited in tents at Kingsway camp, Delhi, where refugees were housed when they could not be accommodated in the barracks at the ends of multiple rail lines. Photo courtesy of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. See also Sriya Rane, “A Refuge Called Hudson Lane,” DU Beat: An Independent Student Newspaper, June 20, 2019. become familiar through the archives of celebrated figures such as Michel Écochard, Constantinos A. Doxiadis, and Hassan Fathy—Doxiadis Associates proposing a Greater Karachi Resettlement Plan to the Pakistani government.12 Other urbanisms, however, of neighborhoods formed by refugee associations that had been turned into cooperative housing societies, such as Jamiyat Punjabi Saudagaran-e-Delhi (referring to those displaced from old Delhi), are absent in the architectural archive, voiding histories of ongoing struggles for democratic belonging and rights.13 On Partitions A normative rendering of the Partition of 1947 has been entrenched so deeply as an antagonism between one political, religious, or national constituency versus another that it is considered to be the unassailable historical narrative, based on “facts,” in which the violence of 1947 can be explained, rationalized, and periodized. Such a periodization allows for the years that follow to be simply declared as the period of “decolonization” that could unfold as if untainted, unaffected by the reproduction of a founding violence. Instead, we write of partitions in the plural, as a forceful concept that continues to divide and dispossess, and which endures in celebrated architecture and design projects to this day—for example, in a current international exhibition on modernist architecture in South Asia that uses the term “Decolonization” in its title.14 05

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