After seventy years of independence, the partition of India and its wider ramifications continue to resonate and reverberate. This is particularly palpable in the region of Punjab, which bore the brunt of the associated partition violence, resulting in millions of people being forced to migrate, forever severed from their ancestral lands. The generation that witnessed this grand project in history, which informs and defines the region, is fading away in numbers, but the small numbers that survive still talk about the events as if it were a recent memory. Najum Latif migrated from Jullundur as a child in 1947. When I met him in 2013 he emotionally recited this poem by Ustad Daman to me in Punjabi, the language it was originally composed in. While reciting it, he had been transported back in time to the pre-partitioned Punjab. The sadness, the nostalgia and the loss were palpable:

The painful loss and the lack of closure continue to haunt many individuals like Latif. For poets like Daman, who lived unassumingly by Badshahi Masjid in Lahore, there was ample material in post-colonial Pakistan to lament about. The remnants of this bygone era are everywhere, from the often-crumbling buildings to the often-melancholic memories, and serve to remind us of a different age and time: the food, the language, the dress, the vibrant and hearty Punjabi and the plains of the Punjab that connected people are now divided by a hostile boundary. There is a constant reminder of these divided histories while travelling between the two Punjabs; one only needs to casually observe the place names of shops which are frequently located in the ‘other’ Punjab.