ABSTRACT
This article engages with the messy streets of post-Partition Delhi. The author engages with a relatively understudied facet of the Partition: its impact on the everyday life of a city. Through physical sites which carried imprints of former inhabitants, to letters that refugees wrote to express their anxieties, the article constructs identities that were forged in the everyday life of Delhi. Questions of ownership, self-making, and governance help answer how the trauma of riots was negotiated in mundane paper trails. The essay is divided into two parts. The first half describes the emotional topography of the city, with an eye on the aspirations of the refugee. It describes the emotional city the refugee encountered. The second half addresses the way the refugee talks back and creates her own emotional landscape. The first master plan of the city enacted in 1962 provides the context for this conversation.
