Locality and partition: A comparative study of Lahore and Amritsar

Little has been written about partition and its aftermath with respect to the neighboring Punjabi cities of Lahore and Amritsar. Both were profoundly affected by the legacies of violence, mass migration and their emergence as new border towns. Lahore was eventually able to recover from the economic setbacks, but Amritsar faced long-standing problems. This paper seeks to bring a comparative approach to the understanding of the impact of partition on the two localities. It focuses on four major themes: first, the characteristics of the partition-related violence in the cities; secondly, the differential class and community experiences of violence, migration and resettlement; thirdly, the ways in which memory and national historical discourses impact upon each other with respect to the cities remembered past; finally, the extent to which Lahore and Amritsar became refugee-dominated cities and the degree to which migrants and locals competed and cooperated with each other in the aftermath of partition