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Beyond production: Following nomadic space in IR
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 September 2025
Abstract
The burgeoning critical scholarship on space in International Relations (IR) overwhelmingly recognises space as a socially produced set of performances, practices, and discourses, converging into meaningful organisations of located experience. Drawing on the writings of Deleuze and Guattari on the related concepts of nomadism and the war machine, I argue that this productive emphasis betrays a continued statist methodology that proceeds by binding, or partitioning, space into finished outcomes. I present a conceptual challenge to the normative emphasis on socially produced space by following nomadism, the immanent tendency to variation in the process of spatial becoming. Working with nomadic potentials brings to the fore smooth space, which includes the continuous possibilities and intensities existing unencumbered beneath concretised productions of organised space. I follow the spatial movement of violence in Punjab during the Indian Partition of 1947 as the emergence of a war machine which deployed the nomadism of smooth space to decompose and upend striations. My objectives are first, to argue for spatial possibilities beyond the normative positivity of produced space, and secondly, to register the fundamental methodological and analytical shifts that these possibilities demand. These shifts can in turn deepen ongoing disciplinary inquiries into indeterminacy.
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References
1 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
2 Doerthe Rosenow, ‘Nomadic life’s counter-attack: Moving beyond the subaltern’s voice’, Review of International Studies, 39:2 (2013), pp. 415–433 (p. 429).
3 R. B. J. Walker, ‘State sovereignty and the articulation of political space/time’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 20:3 (1991), pp. 445–61; John Agnew, ‘The territorial trap: The geographical assumptions of International Relations theory’, Review of International Political Economy, 1:1 (1994), pp. 53–80.
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8 See Harvey Starr, ‘On geopolitics: Spaces and places’, International Studies Quarterly, 57:3 (2013), pp. 433–9; Duncan Weaver, ‘Spatiality and world politics’, Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of International Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020) https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.562; Orit Gazit, ‘A Simmelian approach to space in world politics’, International Theory, 10:2 (2018), pp. 219–52; Jack L. Amoureux, ‘Is faster better? Political and ethical framings of pace and space’, International Theory, 12:2 (2020), pp. 163–88; David Lambach, ‘Space, scale, and global politics: Towards a critical approach to space in International Relations’, Review of International Studies, 48:2 (2022), pp. 282–300.
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11 Victoria Mason, ‘The “question of Palestine”: From liminality to emancipation’, Review of International Studies, 47:1 (2021), pp. 107–27.
12 Eva Lövbrand and Johannes Stripple, ‘The climate as political space: On the territorialisation of the global carbon cycle’, Review of International Studies, 32:2 (2006), pp. 217–35.
13 By ‘body’, I mean ‘what is capable of acting and being acted upon’. See Elizabeth Adams St Pierre, ‘Deleuze and Guattari’s language for new empirical inquiry’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 49:11 (2016), pp. 1080–89 (p. 1083). Bodies here are not finished forms of human and non-human matter but processual entities whose capacity to intra-act with other bodies in the environments they move in keeps the process of becoming ongoing. See also Erin Manning, Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009), p. 7.
14 Gazit, ‘A Simmelian approach to space in world politics’, pp. 240–1.
15 Sunil Purushottam, From Raj to Republic: Sovereignty, Violence, and Democracy in India (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021), p. 131.
16 Ian Talbot, ‘The 1947 Partition violence: Characteristics and interpretations’, in Radhika Mohanram and Anindya Raychaudhari (eds), Partitions and Their Afterlives (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), pp. 1–22 (p. 3).
17 With any systematic explanation of the brutality remaining impossible, the violence has been variously rationalised as a motivating force for populations to leave their homes and seek security elsewhere; see Ritu Menon and Kamala Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998), p. 38; as a symbolic manifestation of the pathologised discordance between communities in South Asia, see Sudhir Kakar, The Colours of Violence (New Delhi: Penguin Books 1995); as nationalist fratricide that tears asunder communities of common cultural heritage with competing national visions, see Jason Francisco, ‘In the heat of fratricide: The literature of India’s Partition burning freshly’, Annual of Urdu Studies, 11 (1996), pp. 227–50; as the violence of the processes of modern nation-state formation wherein sexualised bodies form the central political axis of the project, see Rani Neutill, ‘Bending bodies, borders and desires in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India and Deepa Mehta’s Earth’, South Asian Popular Culture, 8:1 (2010), pp. 73–87 (p. 74).
18 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 367.
19 Recognising partition as an ‘organising principle’ of modern social and political consolidations, Partition Studies has emerged as a vast cross-disciplinary field of studies. See Smita T. Jassal and Eyal Ben-Ari, ‘Listening for echoes: Partition in three contexts’, Economic and Political Weekly, 41:22 (2006), pp. 2213–20 (p. 2213). The field has attended to a host of questions including but not limited to identity and community construction; see Gyanendra Pandey, ‘Notions of community: Popular and subaltern’, Postcolonial Studies, 8:4 (2005), pp. 409–19; Veena Das, ‘Trauma and testimony: Implications for political community’, Anthropological Theory, 3:3 (2003), pp. 293–307; citizenship, migration, and displacement, see Neeti Nair, ‘Introduction to Special Issue: Citizenship, belonging, and the Partition of India’, Asian Affairs, 53:2 (2022), pp. 293–7; Uditi Sen, ‘The myths refugees live by: Memory and history in the making of Bengali refugee identity’, Modern Asian Studies, 48:1 (2013), pp. 37–76; Joya Chatterji, ‘South Asian histories of citizenship, 1946–1970’, Historical Journal, 55:4 (2012), pp. 1049–71; Ilyas Chattha, Partition and Locality: Violence, Migration and Development in Gujranwala and Sialkot 1947–1961 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Vazira F. Y. Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Papiya Ghosh, Partition and the South Asian Diaspora: Extending the Subcontinent (London: Routledge, 2007); political violence, see Shruti Kapila, Violent Fraternity: Indian Political Thought in the Global Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021), William Gould, ‘Hindu militarism and partition in 1940s United Provinces: Rethinking the politics of violence and scale’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 42:1 (2019), pp. 134–51; Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Gyanendra Pandey, Routine Violence (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2006); trauma, memory, and ordinary everyday experience, see Anjali Roy, Memories and Postmemories of the Partition of India (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020); Anna Castaing, ‘Poetics of pain: Writing the memory of Partition’, in Churnjeet Mahn and Anne Murphy (eds), Partition and the Practice of Memory (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2018), pp. 155–71; Urvashi Bhutalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (New Delhi: Penguin Random House, 1998); Menon and Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries. Transversally intersecting these lines of inquiry is the problem of the question of history and fact, and the impossibility of accuracy, which places indeterminacy at the heart of the event, its experience, and most importantly, in the processes of knowledge production that have emerged in its wake. See Gyanendra Pandey, ‘Long life of rumour’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 27: 2 (2002), pp. 165–91.
20 Prem Kumar Rajaram, ‘Disruptive writing and a critique of territoriality’, Review of International Studies, 30:2 (2004), pp. 201–228.
21 Laura Sjoberg, ‘Knock it down? Unmaking, deconstruction, and destruction as/in politics research’, Global Studies Quaterly, 3:1 (2024), pp. 1–12.
22 See, for instance, Julian Reid, ‘Deleuze’s war machine: Nomadism against the state’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 32:1 (2003), pp. 57–85; Julian Reid, ‘Of nomadic unities: Gilles Deleuze on the nature of sovereignty’, Journal of International Relations and Development, 13:4 (2010), pp. 405–28; Julian Reid and Brad Evans, Deleuze & Fascism: Security: War: Aesthetics (London: Routledge, 2013), Paul Lenco, Deleuze and World Politics: Alter-globalizations and Nomad Science (London: Routledge, 2011), Paul Lenco, (Re-)introducing Deleuze: New readings of Deleuze in International Studies’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 43:1 (2014), pp. 124–44, Rosenow, ‘Nomadic life’s counter-attack’.
23 This tendency is particularly rife in works that situate Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts within otherwise normative and constructionist analyses. For examples and critique of this tendency, see Lenco (2014), pp. 3-4; Rosenow, ‘Nomadic life’s counter-attack’, p. 428.
24 Yong-Soo Eun, ‘Calling for “IR as Becoming-Rhizomatic”’, Global Studies Quarterly, 1:2 (2021), pp. 1–12 (p. 7).
25 Rajaram, ‘Disruptive writing and a critique of territoriality’, p. 204.
26 Eun, ‘Calling for “IR as Becoming-Rhizomatic”’.
27 Walker, ‘State sovereignty and the articulation of political space/time’, p. 457.
28 Alexander B. Downes, ‘The Holy Land divided: Defending partition as a solution to ethnic wars’, Security Studies, 10:4 (2002), pp. 58–116 (p. 61).
29 Ranabir Samaddar, ‘The last hurrah that continues’, in Ghislaine Glasson Deschaumes and Rada Ivekovic (eds), Divided Countries, Separated Cities: The Modern Legacy of Partition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 21–35 (p. 21).
30 Yair Wallach, ‘The racial logic of Palestine’s partition’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 46:8 (2022), pp. 1576–98 (p. 1577).
31 Moran Brigg and Nicole George, ‘Emplacing the spatial turn in Peace and Conflict Studies’, Cooperation and Conflict, 55: 4 (2022), pp. 409–20 (p. 409).
32 Mark B. Salter, ‘Theory of the /: The suture and Critical Border Studies’, Geopolitics, 17:4 (2012), pp. 734–55 (p. 740).
33 Amoureux, ‘Is faster better?’, p. 3, emphasis in original.
34 Lambach, ‘Space, scale, and global politics’, p. 290, emphasis in original.
35 Barney Warf, ‘From surfaces to networks’, in Barney Warf and Santa Arias (eds), The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), pp. 59–76 (p. 61), emphasis added.
36 See, for instance, Ty Solomon and Brent J. Steele, ‘Micromoves in International Relations theory’, European Journal of International Relations, 3:2 (2017), pp. 000–000 (p. 209); Glück, ‘Piracy and the production of security space’, p. 645; Salter, ‘Theory of the /’, p. 740.
37 Louise Amoore, The Politics of Possibility: Risk and Security Beyond Probability (Durham: Durham University Press, 2013), p. 3.
38 Derek Denman, ‘On fortification: Military architecture, geometric power, and defensive design’, Security Dialogue, 51:2–3 (2020), pp. 231–47.
39 James Wesely Scott, ‘A networked space of meaning? Spatial politics as geostrategies of European integration’, Space and Polity, 6:2 (2002), pp. 147–67.
40 Esther Marijnen, ‘Eco-war tourism: Affective geographies, colonial durabilities and the militarization of conservation’, Security Dialogue, 53:6 (2022), pp. 550–66.
41 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 90.
42 Lövbrand and Stripple, ‘The climate as political space’, p. 233.
43 Rajaram, ‘Disruptive writing and a critique of territoriality’, p. 202.
44 Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), p. 152. There is a growing literature based on non-Western approaches to space that is similarly critiquing or seeking to displace the deep lodgings of Western metaphysics in the study of space. For instance, see Morgan Brigg, Nicole George, and Kate Higgins, ‘Making space for Indigenous approaches in the Southwest Pacific? The spatial politics of peace scholarship and practice’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 16:5 (2022), pp. 545–62; Morgan Brigg, ‘The spatial-relational challenge: Emplacing the spatial turn in Peace and Conflict Studies’, Cooperation and Conflict, 55:4 (2020), pp. 535–52; Chris Hesketh, ‘Indigenous resistance at the frontiers of accumulation: Challenging the coloniality of space in International Relations’, Review of International Studies, 51:1 (2025), pp. 64–83.
45 Nisha Shah, ‘The territorial trap of the territorial trap: Global transformation and the problem of the state’s two territories’, International Political Sociology, 6:1 (2012), pp. 57–76.
46 Shah, ‘The territorial trap of the territorial trap’, p. 58.
47 Solomon and Steele, ‘Micromoves in International Relations theory’, p. 271, emphasis in original. See also Weinert, who similarly ‘grounds’ spatiality as a ‘horizon of intelligibility’ through which practices in a purely physical space become meaningful. Matthew S. Weinert, ‘Grounding world society: Spatiality, cultural heritage, and our world as shared geographies’, Review of International Studies, 43:3 (2017), pp. 409–29.
48 Solomon and Steele, ‘Micromoves in International Relations theory’, p. 272, emphasis added.
49 Solomon and Steele, ‘Micromoves in International Relations theory’, p. 270.
50 Solomon and Steele, ‘Micromoves in International Relations theory’, p. 280.
51 Solomon and Steele, ‘Micromoves in International Relations theory’, p. 269.
52 Solomon and Steele, ‘Micromoves in International Relations theory’, p. 281.
53 Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Deleuze, theory, and space’, Log, Fall:1 (2003), pp. 77–86 (p. 82).
54 Solomon and Steele, ‘Micromoves in International Relations theory’, p. 277.
55 Hesketh, ‘Indigenous resistance at the frontiers of accumulation’.
56 Hesketh, ‘Indigenous resistance at the frontiers of accumulation’, p. 2.
57 Hesketh, ‘Indigenous resistance at the frontiers of accumulation’, pp. 15–19.
58 Corey Johnson, Reece Jones, Anssi Paasi, et al., ‘Interventions on rethinking “the border” in Border Studies’, Political Geography, 30:2 (2011), pp. 61–9 (p. 64).
59 Grosz, ‘Deleuze, theory, and space’, p. 81.
60 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 351–423.
61 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 362.
62 Grosz, ‘Deleuze, theory, and space’, p. 81.
63 Time in this framing is not a separable and measurable construct. The ongoingness of becoming takes shape in the passage of time through space. In the propelling forward of phenomena is the convergence of time and space, such that they are both created in the process of becoming, while making further becoming possible. Thus, in the experience of becoming space and time remain creatively, thickly entangled: ‘We move time relationally as we create space: we move space as we create time.’ Manning, Relationscapes, p. 17.
64 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 380–1, emphasis in original.
65 Grosz, ‘Deleuze, theory, and space’, p. 82.
66 See Srishti Malaviya, ‘Digitising the virtual: Movement and relations in drone warfare’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 49:1 (2020), pp. 80–104 (p. 86).
67 Grosz, ‘Deleuze, theory, and space’, p. 83.
68 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 371.
69 I would like to thank my colleague, artist Prashant Nawani, for highlighting this example.
70 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 380.
71 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 380.
72 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 386.
73 Reid, ‘Of nomadic unities’, p. 406.
74 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 382.
75 Massey, For Space, p. 151.
76 Grosz, ‘Deleuze, theory, and space’, p. 82.
77 Grosz, ‘Deleuze, theory, and space’, p. 83.
78 Rosi Bradoitti, ‘Posthuman, all too human towards a new process ontology’, Theory, Culture & Society, 23:7–8 (2006), pp. 197–208 (p. 205).
79 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 221.
80 Urvashi Bhutalia, ‘Community, state and gender: On women’s agency during Partition’, Economic and Political Review, 28:17 (1993), pp. 12–24 (p. 15).
81 Menon and Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries, p. 40. It is important to highlight here that meaningless is quite a common descriptor of the violence across all accounts of it, including witness testimonies, literary tellings, and scholarly investigations. Meaningless does not, however, mean devoid of causes, which itself is an extremely chequered, overlapping, and irresolvable category that partitions the event. Meaningless here indicates both the suspension of production of meaningful value and, more importantly, the wholesale investment of the social space into an ongoing decimation of established lines of meaning-making, by no one (identity, community, place, unit) in particular but the total movement of violence in general.
82 Menon and Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries, p. 38.
83 While I focus on the movement of violence in Punjab, this is not to suggest that the experience of Partition in other parts of the subcontinent was less than, or secondary to, the Punjab experience.
84 Purushottam, From Raj to Republic, p. 157.
85 Pandey, Routine Violence, p. 5.
86 Partition studies is indented by an intense debate on the characterisation of the violence. While the aberration model stands long discarded, there has been careful and extensive discussion on where the violence can be ‘placed along a continuum of overlapping categories that range from riots to pogroms, massacres to genocides.’ See Paul Brass, ‘The Partition of India and Retributive Genocide in Punjab, 1946-47: Means, Methods, and Purposes’, Journal of Genocide Research, 51:7 (2003), pp. 71-101 (p. 72). The debate on qualifying the nature of violence has been complicated by the involvement of competing factions and limbs of state and society along blurred lines of fire yielding to the now established understanding that the ‘violence… possessed both private and political purposes…was both spontaneous and politically purposeful.’ Talbot (2019), p. 15. Engaging with the vast literature on the typification of the violence and corresponding reasoning is beyond the scope of this paper.
87 Kapila, Violent Fraternity, p. 7.
88 Kapila, Violent Fraternity, p. 7.
89 Kapila, Violent Fraternity, p. 7.
90 Gould, ‘Hindu militarism and partition in 1940s United Provinces’, p. 148.
91 Brass, ‘The Partition of India and retributive genocide in Punjab, 1946–47’, p. 82.
92 Purushottam, From Raj to Republic, p. 131.
93 Brass, ‘The Partition of India and retributive genocide in Punjab, 1946–47’, p. 74.
94 Pandey, Routine Violence, p. 17.
95 Rosenow, ‘Nomadic life’s counter-attack’.
96 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 352.
97 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 360.
98 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.
99 Jawaharlal Nehru, ‘Punjab: “Situation under control”, says Pandit Nehru’, March 18, 1947 available at: {https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/digitised/page/indiandailymail19470318-1.1.1}.
100 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 357.
101 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 360.
102 Rosenow, ‘Nomadic life’s counter-attack’, p. 429.
103 Ajay Verghese, The Colonial Origins of Ethnic Violence in India (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016), p. 9.
104 Francisco, ‘In the heat of fratricide’, p. 231.
105 Gould, ‘Hindu militarism and partition in 1940s United Provinces’, p. 149.
106 Francisco, ‘In the heat of fratricide’, p. 231.
107 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 381.
108 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 386.
109 See Talbot, ‘The 1947 Partition violence’, pp. 9–14.
110 Brass, ‘The Partition of India and retributive genocide in Punjab, 1946–47’, p. 91.
111 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 378.
112 Brass, ‘The Partition of India and retributive genocide in Punjab, 1946–47’, p. 83, emphasis in original.
113 Brass, ‘The Partition of India and retributive genocide in Punjab, 1946–47’, p. 86.
114 Talbot, ‘The 1947 Partition violence’, p. 15.
115 Purushottam, From Raj to Republic, p. 130.
116 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 367.
117 Swarna Aiyar, ‘August anarchy: The Partition massacres in Punjab, 1947’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 18:s1 (1995), pp. 13–36 (p. 34).
118 Saumitra Jha and Steven Wilkinson, ‘Does combat experience foster organizational skill? Evidence from ethnic cleansing during the Partition of South Asia’, The American Political Science Review, 106:4 (2012), pp. 883–907 (p. 891).
119 Aiyar, ‘August anarchy’, p. 28.
120 Aiyar, ‘August anarchy’, p. 28.
121 Aiyar, ‘August anarchy’; Jha and Wilkinson, ‘Does combat experience foster organizational skill?’.
122 Jha and Wilkinson, ‘Does combat experience foster organizational skill?’, p. 884.
123 Talbot, ‘The 1947 Partition violence’, p. 4.
124 Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat, ‘Sovereignty revisited’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 35 (2006), pp. 295–315, quoted in Gould, ‘Hindu militarism and partition in 1940s United Provinces’, p. 149.
125 ‘Report Covering the First Half of 1939’, L/PJ/8/678, IOR, quoted in Gould, ‘Hindu militarism and partition in 1940s United Provinces’, p. 145.
126 Aiyar, ‘August anarchy’, p. 28.
127 Gould, ‘Hindu militarism and partition in 1940s United Provinces’, p. 150.
128 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.
129 ‘Origins of the riots’, Hindustan Times, September 7, 1947 available at: {https://dn790009.ca.archive.org/0/items/NewspapersPartitionofIndia1947/PDF.pdf}. Accessed July 30, 2024.
130 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 372.
131 Brass, ‘The Partition of India and retributive genocide in Punjab, 1946–47’, p. 86.
132 Aiyar, ‘August anarchy’, p. 29.
133 Aiyar, ‘August anarchy’, p. 30.
134 Menon and Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries, p. 45.
135 Bhutalia, ‘Community, state and gender’, p.15.
136 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 356.
137 Francisco, ‘In the heat of fratricide’, p. 232.
138 Brass, ‘The Partition of India and retributive genocide in Punjab, 1946–47’, p. 84.
139 Aiyar, ‘August anarchy’, p.21.
140 Aiyar, ‘August anarchy’, p. 21.
141 Navdip Kaur, ‘Violence and migration: A study of killing in the trains during the Partition of Punjab in 1947’, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 72:1 (2011), pp. 947-54 (p. 949).
142 Khushwant Singh, Train to Pakistan (Delhi: Lotus Roli, 2006) quoted in Kaur, ‘Violence and migration’, p. 949.
143 Aiyar, ‘August anarchy’, p. 25.
144 Kaur, ‘Violence and migration’, p. 950.
145 Aiyar, ‘August anarchy’, p. 25.
146 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 356.
147 Aiyar, ‘August anarchy’, p. 26.
148 Aiyar, ‘August anarchy’, p. 20.
149 Aiyar, ‘August anarchy’, p. 19.
150 I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for highlighting this point.
151 Matthew Hill and Nishank Motwani, ‘Language, identity and (in)security in India–Pakistan relations: The case of Kashmir’, South Asia, 40:1 (2017), pp. 123–45 (p. 128).
152 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 419. Other examples of interest here include the history of abducted women’s ‘retrieval’ and reabsorption into state-owned subjects in post-Partition India and Pakistan, and the conjoined histories of post-Partition urban space, nation-building, and reterritorialisation of migrants and refugees, particularly in the case of Delhi. See, for instance, Deepra Dandekar, ‘Women’s “retrieval” from Pakistan: “India’s Daughters” and the emotional history of Partition’, South Asia, 44:4 (2021), pp. 703–20; Anjali Bhardwaj Datta, ‘Genealogy of a Partition city: War, migration and urban space in Delhi’, South Asia, 42:1 (2019), pp. 152–69.