ABSTRACT
Lucknow, the present capital of Uttar Pradesh and the erstwhile capital of the region known as Awadh or Oudh established in 1775 by Asafadullah, has been conspicuously absent in debates on South Asian cities. In the last two decades, Lucknow’s aristocrats, intellectuals, planners, and citizens have collaborated with state institutions to restore its paradigmatic heritage and cultural spaces with the objective of promoting heritage tourism. However, in making its claims to an Indian city, they have largely focused on its Hindu, Islamicate, or British history in choosing the stories that need to be preserved. Their choice of the city’s Hindu, Islamicate, or British legacy reflects the histories of the city privileged by Lucknow’s historians (Sharar, 1981, 2001; Talwar-Oldenburg, 1984, 2001; Llewellyn-Jones, 2001; Praveen, 2002; Freitag, 2014). In recovering the city’s “sense of place”, historians and geographers of Lucknow have largely focused on its mythical Hindu (Praveen, 2011), Islamicate (Dalrymple, 1998; Freitag, 2014), or British (Llewellyn-Jones, 2001) heritage erasing the informal city and môhollās produced by its migrants after independence. Punjabi and Sindhi refugees of the Partition of 1947 and the spaces produced by them in the nawabi or colonial city, in particular, remain conspicuously absent in the large body of literature on Lucknow that has emerged over the last few decades.
The communitas produced the Punjabi and Sindhi refugees dwelling in barely functional refugee colonies through their shared experiences of loss and suffering, tortuous journeys from homelands, community living in the camps, and the pleasure in homeownership can be best described as gu’āṇḍha, which can be captured in the idiomatic phrase dukh sukh de sanjhi (bonded through sorrow and joy). This chapter documents narratives of invisible residential and commercial neighbourhoods in which Punjabi and Sindhi refugees were resettled after 1947 to deconstruct the Punjabi neighbourhood concept of gu’āṇḍha and gali môhollā as an affective terrain produced through traumatic memories of Partition.
