Ilyas Chattha's Partition and Locality focuses on the districts of Gujranwala and Sialkot as he tells his story of partition-related violence, the displacement and inflow of populations, and the destruction and slow renewal of local economies. These two border districts allow him not only to examine the searing experiences of refugees (which have prompted and supplied the raw materials of the “new” historiography of partition), but also to think about the impact of these new arrivals on “local established populations” (p. 6). These people did not move, but their lives changed entirely as they struggled to accommodate relatives, friends, and strangers, and often to contest the claims the new arrivals made on the scarce resources of the new nation of Pakistan. Chattha calls attention to their efforts, and those of the newcomers, to revive modes of livelihood that had virtually collapsed in the aftermath of partition, and makes available comparative data on a number of important industries before and after 1947. His book is thus of interest to economic historians, but it is much more than that, given Chattha's immersion in the issues recently debated by humanistic studies of partition.

There is, for instance, the question of violence: Chattha reminds us that partition violence was so overwhelming and so unprecedented in scale that analysts have struggled for terms adequate for the phenomenon. Partisans always claim that their side only responded to the egregious brutalities they faced; humanists retreat into the decidedly nonanalytical vocabularies of a “madness” sweeping the land, or of “spontaneous” and uncontrollable communal “riots.” At their most productive, historians have generated powerful historiographical and philosophical questions out of their encounters with the tattered archives of partition: if we cannot even tabulate the numbers of the dead accurately, what are we to say about individual or even collective deaths, except to point to the generalized culpability of administrators, politicians, community leaders, ordinary citizens, indeed everybody? Chattha's study takes a different tack: he reads police records and conducts oral interviews with survivors to name some individuals and communities who participated in or enabled murder, and he points out the material motivations for such directed violence. His point is simple: such violence was more orchestrated, more studied and prepared for, than prior analysts have had the confidence or desire to claim. Is the case he makes generalizable to all partition-related violence? Not really, for the evidence he has unearthed in the two districts he studies cannot be replicated in every violence-afflicted area, but he does provide useful examples of research that can, decades after the fact, specify agents and victims.

Chattha's study of Sialkot also illuminates the history of the “problem” of Jammu and Kashmir. Chattha traces the increase in attacks on Hindus and Sikhs in Rawalpindi and Sialkot, and shows convincingly that the perpetrators included the serving police, demobilized soldiers, and uniformed civilian groups (p. 156). As in Gujranwala, he argues that these attacks were systematic and designed to effect “what would now be termed the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the unwanted population” (p. 155). Perhaps even more importantly, in that such evidence has been largely lacking in discussions of the effects of partition, his research into Muslim refugee populations who moved into Sialkot from the neighboring province and city of Jammu makes clear the complicity of the Dogra Maharaja's troops in forcing them from their homes in order to convert Jammu into an overwhelmingly Hindu-majority area. Some of these Kashmiri Muslims joined the armed resistance against the maharaja, and then, once he acceded to India, became part of the continuing history of armed resistance to the Indian state.Footnote ³¹ Chattha also provides insights into another understudied area, which is the experience of “untouchable communities” and of Christians during partition. On some occasions the “neutrality” of these groups allowed them to escape violence and displacement, but not always: Chattha tracks the expulsion of large numbers of “Achhut” communities from Sialkot, for even their meager resources were coveted by their erstwhile neighbors or the newly arrived refugees.

Chattha's final chapters describe the renewal of the industries and economies of Gujranwala and Sialkot and remind us that the rehabilitation of Muslim refugees was predicated upon the filling of “economic niches” created by the departure of Hindus and Sikhs (p. 176). As we know from conflict zones the world over, the displacement of populations wrecks lives but also creates opportunities for others: in both these districts, Chattha shows, “demographic transformation certainly facilitated the upward mobility of economically-backward Muslims” (p. 260). Chattha's “locality-based approach” (p. 252) allows him to particularize events and changes in Gujranwala and Sialkot, but, as I have suggested above, the implications of his studies of violence, displacement, and renewal are of consequence for the larger discussion of partition and its aftermath in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India.