In the hot Monsoon month of August, also the month of fasting, the refugees flooded towns and cities across the Punjab and Sindh, radically transforming the ethos of a nation which for decades was destined to host refugees from the entire region - including the influx of millions of Afghans during the 1980s. Newly-independent Pakistan was soon overtaken by the world's largest, and perhaps most painful, migration, which not only changed the demography of this young nation, but also reconfigured its socio-political composition. The volume also brings out the multi-polar relationship between Pakistan, India, the refugee leadership and the indigenous Sindhi elite, as the entire political and social spectrum underwent a dramatic transformation. Ansari's research pieces together the details of refugee settlement in urban and rural Sindh under the auspices of the newly-independent government of Pakistan, which, like the provincial government, was based in Karachi. The reader also acquires in-depth knowledge of the immense speed and volume of demographic diversification within Sindh a new province since its separation from Bombay Presidency in 1936. Here, an interesting and not-so-dissimilar interface between the new states can be detected as they faced similar issues. She finds interesting parallels with Punjab, where such moves led to greater dislocation amidst more bloodshed, yet the demographic transformation of Sindh following the outflow of Hindus and the influx of Muslim refugees, and the resulting, often less-regulated settlements, have left their lasting imprints on all sides.

In Life after Partition, she leaves her Sufis and Pirs aside and tries to come to grips with the state functionaries and policies dealing with the people, especially those who had been displaced or were voluntarily on the move in the wake of Partition.

Sarah Ansari's recent study is a continuation of her early work which focused on Sindh from its annexation by British India in 1843 to its inclusion in the state of Pakistan in 1947. Greater access to archives, the celebration of peoples over power and the evolution of newer paradigms involving tribes and peasants, within the context of acceptance of ideology, spawned a sustained multi-disciplinarity as well as scepticism about the hitherto so-called received truths. Demolishing the monopoly of the grand narratives of 'high history', long-neglected areas like gender and subalterns entered the debate. The 1960s saw fresher themes and hypotheses enriching South Asian historiography. The post-1947 reincarnations of South Asian historiography, such as the Cambridge School or neo-nationalist narratives, tried to hold their ground for a while, but the leftist and liberal challenges refused to go away instead, they continued to demand the inclusion of issues of class and people in a discourse which, to them, simply portrayed a new elite playing a pivotal and exclusive role in the political developments leading to independence. Accordingly, the masses were either imagined to be simple mobs or cheerleaders, lacking their own opinions and initiatives. Interestingly, both these grand narratives continued to focus on 'high history', where only a select few actors at the top were seen to be deciding these fateful events, affecting hundreds of millions, without any recourse to socio-political, religious or regional complexities. The evolution of a plural and expansive historiography of South Asia owes itself to the reductionism of the imperial versus nationalist schools, a binary approach which was found acutely wanting when it came to offering tangible explanations for momentous and complex thematic issues. The erstwhile broad and overarching categories of the imperial school and its nationalist counterpart (both in India and Pakistan) were soon found wanting in properly explaining issues of class, community formation, ideological fissures and cultural separatism, along with the stark absence of women, ordinary people, peasants, tribes and even the moffusil - rural/small town grassroots - from these two grand narratives. As far as South Asian historiography is concerned, 1947, or Partition as it is generally known, proved to be a threshold for the further diversification of an increasingly contested debate among historians. Not only do these events continue to dictate Indo-Pakistani relations even after six decades, they have also been feeding into a rather turbulent and complex interface among the plural communities in one of the most populous regions of the world.

The dissolution of the British Raj in the Subcontinent in 1947, and the accompanying mass migration across the new borders between the newly-independent states of India and Pakistan, are certainly among the most momentous developments in recent history.

Plural of strife