Nostalgia: Re-witnessing ‘Home’

This chapter explores the phenomenon of return to an ancestral home in India and Pakistan by partition migrants, whose visits are almost universally accompanied by scenes of effusive welcome by the local population. Such demonstrations of Punjabi hospitality invoke the inter-community bonds that comprise an idealized vision of pre-partition life carried by migrants. Unlike most scholarly analyses that have viewed these visits as a form of “nostalgia,” this chapter argues that these cross-border visits should be read as another form of witnessing the loss that was partition.