ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the stories of six refugee families who struggled to maintain ownership and navigate life in EPs (evacuee properties). EPs were problematic settings for resettlement both because of uncertainties about legal ownership and because they stood as persistent reminders of Delhi’s Muslim out-migrants and the city’s Indo-Islamic past. For this reason, refugee families have varied and complex relationships with EPs. For some, this association has contributed to feelings of discomfort and desires to erase material remnants of past occupants and markers of the home’s ‘Muslim-ness’. Such thinking has contributed to physical and visible deterioration of EP neighborhoods. While previously associated with grandeur, even the most exclusive pre-Partition EP neighborhoods are today commonly renarrativized as emblematic of the primitivism of Islamic lifeways as they have become congested and have fallen into disrepair. In an opposite sense, however, EPs also reminded many refugees of what they have in common with the Muslims who left during the Partition—namely Indo-Islamic culture and experiences of Partition loss and displacement. Many refugee residents have even connected with and formed cross-border friendships with their home’s previous owners.
