Delhi Reborn: Partition and Nation Building in India’s Capitol
By Rotem Geva
Delhi, one of the world's largest cities, has faced momentous challenges—mass migration, competing governing authorities, controversies over citizenship, and communal violence. To understand the contemporary plight of India's capital city, this book revisits one of the most dramatic episodes in its history, telling the story of how the city was remade by the twin events of partition and independence. Treating decolonization as a process that unfolded from the late 1930s into the mid-1950, Rotem Geva traces how India and Pakistan became increasingly territorialized in the imagination and practice of the city's residents, how violence and displacement were central to this process, and how tensions over belonging and citizenship lingered in the city and the nation. She also chronicles the struggle, after 1947, between the urge to democratize political life in the new republic and the authoritarian legacy of colonial rule, augmented by the imperative to maintain law and order in the face of the partition crisis.
- Delhi Reborn: Partition and Nation Building in India's Capital By Rotem Geva (Stanford University Press, AUGUST 2022, 368 PAGES, Hardcover ISBN: 9781503631199, Paperback ISBN: 97815036321