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Offers insights into how the new international boundary between India and Pakistan was made, subverted, and transformed.
List of contents
List of Maps and Photographs; List of Tables; List of Abbreviations; Glossary; Note on Transliteration; Preface and Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. Making of the Border; 2. Cross-Border Flows; 3. Illicit Cities: Contraband Trade between Lahore and Amritsar; 4. Illicit Global Gold Trade and Wagah - Attari Crossing; 5. The Making of Contraband Culture: People and Poetics; 6. The Regulation of Cross-Border Flows, and State Patronage; 7. Guns, Drugs, and the End of the 'Good Old Days'; Conclusion: Between Open and Closed Borders; Selected Bibliography; Index.
About the author
Ilyas Chattha teaches History at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), Pakistan. He was previously based at the Centre for Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies, University of Southampton, and has also been associated with the University of Warwick and SOAS, University of London. He is the author of Partition and Locality (Oxford University Press, 2012).
Summary
Studies how the new international boundary between India and Pakistan was shaped and offers an alternative history, problematising current conceptions of the international boundary between India and Pakistan. Contraband, consumption, clan, caste, class, and state-building weave together in this evolving socio-economic history of the borderland.
Foreword
Offers insights into how the new international boundary between India and Pakistan was made, subverted, and transformed.
Additional text
'This work is a pioneering study that adds to the growing understanding that linkages between the Pakistan and Indian Punjabis persisted long after the drawing of the Radcliffe boundary. Ilyas Chattha reveals how smuggling impacted on the local political economy of border areas. Drawing on access to previously unexplored local police records, he dispels the myths that the border was closed, even in the wake of the 1965 Indo-Pakistan War. His findings are highly significant not only for the history of the Punjab region, but for the understanding of the post-independence Pakistan state.' Ian Talbot, Professor in History of Modern South Asia at the University of Southampton
