e-flux Architecture Positions 03/22 Partitions of territory are often ascribed to historically specific moments of accountability. While colonial partitions set the terms for politics and life in Bengal, Ireland, Somalia, Palestine, and elsewhere over the course of the twentieth century, the term “Partition” has become iconically associated with the division and inscription of nation-states in South Asia in 1947. The cartographic commitment of the jurist Cyril Radcliffe, “having never set eyes on the land he was called to partition,” as W.H. Auden memorialized it, turned a brief mission to India into a historically contained moment.1 The repetition and reinscription of that narrative occasions our argument to follow. To account for partitions in South Asia and elsewhere is to move beyond one moment, beyond the architecture of a line. It is to recognize and interrogate—beyond event, and towards concept—the political form within the spatial as partitions continue to drive the reorganization of lands and landscapes.2 Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi and Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar Partitions: Architectures of Statelessness The Partition of 1947, which for parts of South Asia accompanied freedom from British colonial rule and created the nation-states of India and Pakistan, was a catastrophe not just because more than three million people were killed and some twenty million people were displaced over the months and years that followed.3 While the threshold date and these ghastly numbers are a record of wrenching scale, “partition”—as a spatial reorganization of a landscape, of cities, and of neighborhoods—continues to unfold across South Asia, producing liminalities that ignite new kinds of policing and further violence. Instead of the provisional Radcliffe Line, let us begin with two considered floorplans of ancestral homes in Aligarh and Jaffna. The first, a woodblock print with metal-cut text in the portfolio Letters from Home (2004) by Zarina, defied loss and dispossession through an assertion of architecture, literary culture, and familial bond. In it, she notates a world her family was forced to evacuate, a decade after the Partition of India in 1947. Over a letter from her sister, she printed a floor plan of a home that she could no longer return to, which lay bereft, empty, in ruins in her memory. The second, a pencil on trace paper entry in The Incomplete Thombu (2012) by Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan, archives fracture and names the systematization of displacement in the 1980s during the war between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The house drawn in this plan and the land around it were occupied in 1987 by the Indian Peace Keeping Force and became a killing field. For the woman who sketched it, this floor plan holds the broken body of her son. These artworks inscribe into the firmament of lines the unspeakable grief of dispossession, the loss of homes and lives. Architectural history, drawn from archives of state officials, urban planners, and architects accounts for new national visions and designs, and yet often fails to address how these have been built 01