Asian Research Thesis Index

Abstract

This dissertation attempts to contribute to the burgeoning scholarship on Partition of India. The study examines the locality of Lahore that how partition had interrupted and rearranged the internal frames in the city of Lahore. The study addresses questions such as how do violence and absolute abhorrence to the non-Muslims had accompanied the partition process in the city of Lahore. Followed by dismal affairs would be another phenomenal feature of post partition Lahore. How are they fraught with the localrefugees milieu in terms of influential actors in the locality of Lahore. Moreover, that particular transition had altered the economics of the industrial and financial situations in Lahore. In that particular backdrop, the main argument study the evolution of the lower middle class. It is obviously about the mob psychology, the dispersed crowd of Lahore had manifested during and after partition in Lahore. The sense of ownership of the city even after the departure of the non-Muslims shows the level of their socio-political desperation, which consequently assisted them to go for the filling up of that social space in multidimensional way. Those downtrodden class of Muslims of Lahore had capitalized that transition in order to acquire social space in the locality of Lahore. That resultant changes had come up with some parallel manifestations. Such as the emergence of the middle class in the next immediate period in the locality of Lahore. Many small-scale traders had a leap chance to move into large-scale industrialist within short time. That leap along with the perpetuation of the small-scale industrial worker-body was the major hallmark of the post partition complexion of Lahore. The ideological services of that class dispensed by the fresh rise of the Urdu print capitalism. Thus, the main thrust of our study is about the space acquiring in the city of Lahore by the local-refugee milieu. The reshaping due to that social space acquiring was not a sudden outcome owing to the transition; partition of India had brought out. Rather the much-rationalized reason behind that ultimate transformation imbibed in the long drawn out background of the communal and financial positioning in the city of Lahore throughout its colonial period.

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