Enemy property: violence, dispossession and citizenship in South Asia

This paper examines the role property plays in the displacement of people and their ongoing and future displaceability and citizenship. It engages with the Partition of the Indian subcontinent and the ways in which property was central to how people were rendered displaceable. Building on literature on property, we examine how categorisations of people based on specific attributes affected their rights to property both at the moment of displacement and later in exile, marking them as second-class citizens or the enemy. We examine state intervention and that of communities and societies in forcibly occupying the property of the ‘other’ and claiming it for themselves. Through these acts, people are rendered as part or outside of cultural communities and therefore displaceable and marginalisable. Excavating the social life of property and its importance in how people are rooted, we open up conversations on how geographies of displacement, citizenship and belonging are constituted.