Blood, Borders, and the Political Geography of Displacement: A Critical Review of Adnan Tariq’s Punjab, Blood and Borders

Abstract

Adnan Tariq’s Punjab, Blood and Borders: Understanding Partition Violence through Secret and Archival Records intervenes in one of the most consequential and contested fields of modern South Asian historiography by situating the 1947 Partition of Punjab within the global comparative history of forced migration. Drawing on secret intelligence reports, administrative correspondence, and archival records, Tariq argues that forced displacement was not merely an aftermath of communal violence but one of its central mechanisms, produced through the interaction of institutional fragmentation, policy failure, local organization, and territorial anticipation. This review situates the book’s principal theoretical claims within the wider historiography of Partition and of twentieth-century forced migration, examines its treatment of state power, contingency, regional differentiation, infrastructure, gender, and princely-state agency, and gives particular attention to three episodes the book uses to reconstruct the deep chronology of Partition violence: the eruption of violence in the Hazara belt, the destruction of Katra Jaimal Singh in Amritsar, and the Sikh political mobilization at the 27 July 1947 Nankana Sahib conference. The review concludes that the book’s most significant contribution is not a new classificatory label for the Punjab catastrophe, but its demonstration that forced migration, ethnic cleansing, mass violence, and state fragmentation describe interlocking dimensions of a single historical process.

Keywords: Partition of India, Punjab, forced migration, ethnic cleansing, state fragmentation, refugee studies, comparative genocide studies