The 1947 Partition of India has recently re-emerged as a thematic concern of many South Asian films about nationalism in popular and parallel cinema. These films invoke the 1947 Partition in both productive and troubling ways: they connect it to the contemplation of the role of religion in the contemporary nation-state, and of the impact of religious ethnicity, terrorism and gender on the experience of citizenship in both India and Pakistan.

In this article, I examine the 1971 war (better known as the war for the liberation of Bangladesh) from a western Indian perspective. I argue that this war between India and Pakistan—while it focused overtly on the independence of East Pakistan—had some significant consequences for the western border between Kutch (in Gujarat state) and Sindh (in Pakistan).

The cities of Lahore Pakistan and Amaritsar India suffered widespread destruction and demographic transformation in the wake of armed invasion and the later partition in 1951. Ten million Punjabis were uprooted. In all, around 13 million people were displaced by partition. Talbot examines the impact of partition on the cities and their inhabitants during the post-partition decade of 1947-1957