ABSTRACT
Recently, the question of religion and its role in the public sphere has emerged at the forefront in public debates about citizenship, community, and belonging in Euro-American contexts (Butler et al. 2011). Yet, this question has long held much resonance in the postcolonial context, in which often, religious/ethnic violence has displaced large numbers of people, turning them into ethnically marked refugees (internal and external) stranded in a system of nation-states. In this chapter, the cultural representation of refugees in the aftermath of religio-ethnic confl ict in postcolonial literature
and cinema is examined. Focusing on the violence and mass migrations of the 1947 partition of India, I ask: How are Partition refugees represented in South Asian literature and fi lm? How do ethnicity, gender, disability, and class shape these aesthetic accounts of refugees, citizenship and secularism in post-Partition South Asia?
