Delhi Reborn: Partition and Nation Building in India's Capital. Rotem Geva. Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, USA, 2022, pp xiii + 349. ISBN 978-1-503-63211-0 (pbk).

Legg, Stephen

Abstract

In this exceptional piece of historical scholarship, Rotem Geva walks the reader through a harrowing Indian landscape. The five substantive chapters take us from the dreams about, and campaigns for, independence in India’s colonial capital, to the violence that shattered many of these dreams in August 1947, when Pakistan was partitioned out of India and hundreds of thousands of refugees migrated to new countries, and cities. New arrivals in Delhi sparked riots and disturbances, but these sporadic acts were transmuted into longer standing geographies of violence through Muslims being forced out of their historic communities and into newly designated ‘Muslim zones’. Intended to protect these newly minoritized communities, they eventually became ghettos, and mixed areas became anomalies. Chapter Four shows us how the local Urdu language press reflected and commented on these divisions, providing fora not just for Muslims who stayed in Delhi but also for Hindu and Sikh migrants who also published in Urdu. The fifth chapter demonstrates how reluctant the new national government was to give up the authoritarian and surveillance mechanisms of the colonial state, although the influence of the Hindu right within the first Congress government meant that communists and socialists were more harshly policed than the militant Hindu RSS. This was even after the latter had been banned over its connections to the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in the city in January 1948.

Citation

Legg, S. (2023). Delhi Reborn: Partition and Nation Building in India's Capital. Rotem Geva. Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, USA, 2022, pp xiii + 349. ISBN 978-1-503-63211-0 (pbk). Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 44(2), 375-377. https://doi.org/10.1111/sjtg.12489

• Journal Article Type: Book Review
• Acceptance Date: Mar 15, 2023
• Online Publication Date: Apr 12, 2023
• Publication Date: 2023-05
• Deposit Date: Jun 1, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Apr 13, 2025
• Journal: Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography
• Print ISSN: 0129-7619
• Electronic ISSN: 1467-9493
• Publisher: Wiley
• Peer Reviewed: Not Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 44
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 375-377
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/sjtg.12489
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/18815545
• Publisher URL: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/sjtg.12489