e-flux Architecture Positions 03/22 Left: “Letter from Home III” (2004), a wood block and metal cut print by Zarina over a letter from her sister, notates a world her family was forced to evacuate, a decade after the Partition of India in 1947. © Zarina, courtesy of the artist. Right: A page from The Incomplete Thombu (2011) by Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan shows a floorplan of a house drawn by a mother whose son was killed when her home was occupied by the Indian Peace Keeping Force deployed in 1987 to end hostilities in Sri Lanka. Mechanical drawing in ink on trace paper over page with pencil sketch, Entry No. 35, commissioned and published by Raking Leaves (2012), courtesy of the artist. into and over the ruins and ravages of a founding violence, and the political forms this violence continues to generate. “Partition” is a concept that declares the historic plurality of lived worlds untenable, and sets about transforming differences into incommensurability. This process is never self-evident or voluntary. For people who have lived together over centuries, even in neighborly prejudice and conflict, only a state-induced rupture cleaves people apart. Even then, there are those who remain in-between, or indeterminate; those who refuse sides, or refuse to leave. Living together is a spatial and architectural formation. Severing people comes with a material reorganization of the old world through dispossession, destruction, and occupation, or the establishment of camps for the indeterminate and the undesirable. Through the spatial reorganization that “partition” demands, the formations of citizenship and statelessness go hand in hand.4 Ruins of Evacuation When the Partition of 1947 is remembered in terms of the genocidal bloodletting that took place in parts of northern India, when religion was made the basis of dividing populations, then mass displacements of people appear to be entirely a consequence of this violence. Monumental photographs of the train and foot convoys, such as LIFE magazine’s “Great Migration” photographs by Margaret Bourke-White, suggest that this population exchange was a “natural” flow of people.5 Yet, state interventions and planning shaped these displacements and reordered centuries of built worlds, then and to this day. Homes that people left behind and could no longer return to came to be governed by the Custodian of Evacuee Property. An adaptation of a wartime British institution used to usurp “enemy” property, it took over the homes and lands of those fleeing violence, and as it came to be extended to almost all of India and Pakistan, quickly became an instrument of partitioning along religious lines. 02