"As the country waves flags and celebrates the 75th anniversary of India’s independence, it is also time to take stock. What did India’s founders and citizens dream of, how has India fared, what have been our challenges and successes?
The Wire’s reporters and contributors bring stories of the period, of the traumas but also the hopes of Indians, as seen in personal accounts, in culture, in the economy and in the sciences. How did the modern state of India come about, what does the flag represent? How did literature and cinema tackle the trauma of Partition?"
This paper revisits the violent annexation of the erstwhile princely state of Hyderabad by the Indian army in 1948 as an inaugural moment of dispossession to reconstruct Hyderabad's twentieth century past along the axes of Muslim belonging and memory. I argue that we must situate twentieth and twenty-first century Hyderabadi Muslim migration in relation to Partition-related displacements and attempts to overcome them through economic conditions provided by migration.
