| Summary/Abstract |
This essay argues that diaspora is a useful analytical category for understanding certain migrant populations engendered by Partition, but not all Partition migrants can be designated as diasporas. Through a close reading of two novels—Intizar Husain's The Sea Lies Ahead (translated from the Urdu original Aage Samandar Hai by Rakhshanda Jalil) and Kamila Shamsie's Kartography—I show how Urdu-speaking migrants from India's Muslim minority provinces who migrated to the urban centres of Sindh have invented and preserved themselves as a diaspora in post-Partition Pakistan. Both novels enable us to see how Muhajirs have become a community based on a shared ideology of displacement that is kept alive in the group's memory.
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