 Thank you very much Ed and I'd also like to thank Sunil and Mustafa for putting together this fantastic conference that I've been a part of and as Ed mentioned the good the conference is about the relationship between Gujarat and Sindh and you know it's called the familiar stranger which the theme that I think quite nicely captures the essence of what I am going to talk to you about this evening. Now there are a variety of ways in which the relationship between Gujarat and Sindh could be and indeed have been talked about. One could talk of historic rivalries between ancient kingdoms of migratory roots of goddesses and people of kinship networks ecological histories shared cultural traditions. One could also speak of the legacy of the 1947 partition of India when many Sindhi Hindus moved into Western India. As we all know unlike Punjab and Bengal the territory of Sindh was not partitioned even if arguably the ways in which it is memorialized in India have taken different parts over the last 70 years. Post partition India had Sindhis in its whom it counted amongst its citizens the mention of Sindh in its national anthem but without the province that went by its name. While Sindh may be fondly recalled as a form of nostalgia for some of those who live on the other side of the border as I argued in my early work this is not the only mode in which Gujarat relates to Sindh today. There is also ambivalence a search for closure and the complex ways in which the story of the nation intertwines with family histories and legacies. I will suggest this evening that the war of 1971 that led once again to the redrawing of nation-state borders within South Asia is one site that enables us to examine the relationship between the two regions. For those who migrated into Kach from Thar Parkar in the shadow of the military conflict of 1971 their ties to Sindh are ambivalent. This ambivalence is not tied to religious conflict or communal relations as much as to the potential tensions between forms of identity and belonging that are demanded by the nation-state on the one hand and by the kinship or caste group on the other. In this talk I will describe one instance of this conflict that allows us a glimpse into one way into which the relationship between Gujarat and Sindh or here more specifically between Kach and Thar Parkar is articulated today. The overall context is provided by the 1971 war. Now in today's time this military conflict is being rescripted in India as a chapter within its larger nationalist history which is a story of a history of conflict between India and Pakistan. While the war is more universally known for the liberation of Bangladesh in its contemporary public memorialization in Gujarat there is no mention of Bangladesh or East Pakistan at all. In this way the specificities of both the war as well as its particular social and familial consequences are reordered into a broader nationalist narrative of wartime heroism and military success for India. Now the district of Kach in Gujarat shares a land and maritime border with southern Pakistan. This has made it more than an active bystander in the early wars fought between the two countries. The war in 1965 involved boundary disputes in the run of Kach and led to a period of greater militarization of this section of India's western border. It was after 1965 Gujarati's recall that the ease of mobility between Karachi and Bombay via the port of Mandvi was restricted. The overnight steamer between Mandvi and Karachi stopped after 1965. The political effects of 1947 had taken almost two decades to impact the regular flow of people and goods in this region. After 1965 it was only a matter of time before Indian and Pakistani forces would clash again. Recall those who witnessed the next conflict in 1971. Then the two sides exchanged bombs targeting keyboards and other military and strategic sites in the western sector. Middle-aged residents of Buj the administrative center of Kach are well acquainted with the affective experience of living through wartime. The deathly earthquake of January 2001 that had devastating consequences for the district with several thousands of people killed under the rubble of falling buildings was recalled by many survivors as a terrifying rumbling sound that made them run for cover and Ed will know this. Even before they had any idea of what was happening they had assumed that India and Pakistan were at war again and that the neighboring country had bombed them. The earth's reverberations as it shook that winter morning were viscerally inhabited through the memories of earlier bodily shocks and ear-splitting sounds when bombs had fallen on Buj in another winter back in 1971. The local intelligentsia and middle classes of Kach have long been aware of the trials and tribulations of living on a border between mutually hostile states. Ever since I began fieldwork in this region in the summer of 2002 I've been a part of lively discussions that underscored the need for a war memorial in Kach. In these circles there was a frequently expressed desire to publicly commemorate the contributions made by this border security by this border district I'm sorry to national security. It was in August 2015 then that finally a war memorial was inaugurated a few kilometers east of Buj town in front of the main entrance to the village of Madhapar. India's defense minister presided over its unveiling. Although the year marked the 50th anniversary of the 1965 war the memorial was not in fact dedicated to that war. Instead it was dedicated to Viranganas brave women who had participated in the 1971 war. This inauguration brought into the public eye the 300 or so Patidar women from Madhapar who had gathered together to repair an airstrip bombed during the war. There's is a fascinating story but not one that I'm going to tell you here. The memorial is large and visible as you can see located along the main eastern highway that links the district to Hemdabad and it's called the Viranganasmarak or the memorial to brave women and it's dedicated to the brave hearts of 1971. It's built as an installation with eight sculpted figures six of which are women engaged in the runway's repair above their models of three fighter aircraft. The memorial is prominently inscribed with the slogan Jai Javan Jai Kisan harking back to the 1960s emphasis on food security and national security joining the farmer and the soldiers twin pillars of the laboring body of the nation. While this installation makes no mention of it it is difficult to not draw comparisons here with Bangladesh where the term Virangana designates Bengali women raped by the West Pakistani army during this very war. Unlike the first sexual labor that the Virangana was called upon to perform during war the Kach Virangana is memorialized for the physical labor she performed during wartime. This spectacular rendition was only the first public memorial to 1971 in the region. The Rakshak one inaugurated in July 2018 is one of Kach's latest tourist attractions situated on the main driving route to the section of the run of Kach that is packaged and marketed to tourists as the white run. The Rakshak one makes a double reference to the idea of both ecological and military protection for it connotes both the idea of a protected forest or a one and a landscaped garden that is none other than a museum dedicated to the idea of an unequivocal Indian military in 1971. Again there is no mention of East Pakistan or Bangladesh. Once again the heroism of women repairing the runway in Bhuj is extolled in murals and the defeat of Pakistan is highlighted. Photographic details of India's missile carriers punctuate the formerly laid out leisure gardens that also include a model army bunker and photo stations that are cutouts of soldiers dressed in military fatigues. Interspersed with this war memorabilia and perhaps to justify the invocation of this landscape as a forest are sections detailing medicinal plants, medicinal herbs, plants, birds and animals of the region. At the far end sits a female figure bent over some embroidery. This completes the makeover of Kach. In previous decades Kach advertised itself primarily as a destination for handicraft and textiles. This is now superseded by its newfound role as a poster child for war and military tourism. Now apart from its appropriation as a genre of Indian war tourism, 1971 has a very specific local valence in Kach. The war referred to as Ikhotir or 71 is remarked upon for the migration into Kach of Hindus all of whom are generically referred to as Sodhas and I will come back to this later regardless of their caste identity in Tharparkar prior to my migration. The brief wartime occupation of Tharparkar by Indian forces which is referred to as the Kabza or the occupation during this war allowed for the migration of Hindus into Kach. While entire families took advantage of this brief window to negotiate migration and settlement into Western India both Rajasthan and Gujarat, some of these migrants were young single men who crossed into India just before or after the war. The occupation then becomes a key moment during the conflict that enabled Hindu men to renegotiate their relationship with state, nation and family. Today I'll focus on some of these men Sodha Rajputs who used war and occupation as a window to negotiate migration trajectories into India that was significant not only because they crossed borders. Traditional marriage practices among the Sodhas of Tharparkar were premised on cross-border migrations and connections. What makes the 1971 migration interesting is that this was a form of migration that was forged in opposition to traditional patrivery local marriage strategies. Even as these migrants turned their backs on traditional forms of honour and status that accrued through the patrilineage that was in Sindh, they allied themselves with what they believed were new forms of symbolic capital that would come to them with Indian citizenship. The Indian police and local administration aided these border crossings regardless of their formal legality, oftentimes granting permission for entry and residence that were at odds with explicit official orders they had received. Yet citizenship and acceptance into local social worlds were not the same thing. The latter had to be negotiated by these migrants through maternal rather than patrilineal kin, a stark inversion of the Rajput code of honour that was so central to Sodha's self-identification and key to how they distinguished themselves from others in their social world, especially Dalits and Muslims. Even though as Hindus these Pakistani men were welcomed into citizenship by a state eager to manage its border demographics, they did not always meet with a similarly effusive reception among the family for whom they often remained strangers. Despite the state's abundant patronage, the stigma of being from Pakistan or the erosion of trust due to suspicion of their having behaved like traitors or Desh Dhrohi to their ancestral land but also to their male kin, I will argue that it was much more difficult for these border crosses to be seamlessly accepted within the family or society at large. In colonial times, Kach was a princely state ruled by the Jadejas, a dynasty that traced its origins to Sindh. Marriage practices were tied up with the discourse of honour even in the colonial period. Traditionally, they married Sodha Rajput women from the Thar region with whom they could intermarry in the words of a 19th century visitor without offence to their pride of caste. The sodhas were remarked upon by colonial observers for marriage alliances that were a source of political and social capital that enabled them to maintain the ideology of caste superiority vis-a-vis others in the Thar region. The sodhas married their daughters into Rajput royal houses further east that were considered socially superior to them in order to maintain forms of honour associated with elite Rajput marriage. This discourse of honour was central to policing the traditional Rajput family, both in terms of managing its gender codes as well as its political ambitions. And of course political expediency dictated the shifting boundaries of the permissible and therefore honourable marriage alliance over time. As historian Ramya Srinivasan has argued, marriage practices define the changing boundaries of the elite Rajput family. Thus, unions between Rajput women and non-Rajputs, particularly Muslims, once accepted as politically expedient, gradually came to be redefined as dishonourable by the 19th century, reflecting altered political conditions of the time. Narrations about honour, argues Srinivasan, must therefore be seen as strategic, seeking to mobilise for their Rajput audience the norms of honourable conduct essential to the maintenance of this political and moral order. The recourse taken to honour in contemporary sodha narratives, I argue, must also be viewed in this light. Seen thus, status honour does not describe a pre-existing state of being, but is a strategic set of practices that responds to social and political contexts. And in this case, the discourse of honour becomes a means for the sodha to locate themselves within Sindh as the elite Hindus of Sindh, especially after the migration of mercantile Sindhi communities in an around 1947. The border between Tharparkar in Sindh and Kach was frequently traversed, as marriage alliances continued throughout the princely period and beyond. In contemporary times, the cross-border marriage strategies of the sodha are explained in terms of the dual constraints of clan exogamy and the need to maintain marriage alliances that would be considered honourable. Thus constrained by hypergamy and unable to marry unable for reasons of honour to marry within their close territories, they typically broadened their search for kin across the border between Tharparkar and Kach Rajasthan, where they had more, in their terms, marriageable clans to choose from. Ram Singh Sodha, a former member of the Sindh Legislative Assembly and currently a citizen in waiting in Kach, argues that while Tharparkar is home to some of the gentlest people on earth, it had become untenable to live there for reasons that were political. And here he mentioned the lack of security for minorities in Pakistan. But more importantly, the reasons were social. And this is when he talks about the marriage problem, what he refers to as the marriage problem, which he says is a unique problem faced by the Sodhas. Now, why is this so? In his words, the Sodhas are what he calls a supercaste. This superiority is measured socially and politically. Our government, we were the rulers, we were in power in Tharparkar. He added by way of explanation how and then to explain migration to India as a necessity rather than a choice, he goes on. How can an 80% marry a 20% cast on a must be maintained? We are not like the Dalits and the Muslims, he clarifies. They marry within their own community. Marriage partners for the Sodha could only be sought from those who were of equal or greater status. These were typically found across the border in India. As he said, the Jhala, the Jadeja, the Vaghela, the Chudasama and so on. We were just not able to marry our daughters in Pakistan. Such Poochhoto, if you ask the truth, this is the main reason we have decided to migrate to India, marriage and honor. So Gulab Singh, all names here on our pseudonyms, crossed the border to negotiate an honorable marriage for himself in March 1970 before the formal outbreak of war. In so doing, he left behind his male kin and patriline, central to constructions of honor in Rajputkinship. His father and brother remained in Chacharo, a town that came under Indian occupation in 1971. His maternal home acquired political significance as he re-crossed the border once traversed by his mother as a bride when she came from her natal home in Kutch to marry in Sindh. Gulab Singh was 25 years old. The atmosphere in Tharparkar was tense and uncertain. Every day life, he said, was driven with fear and suspicion. It felt he said like war would break out any time. He had retired when I first met him from a Gujarat government position a few years before I first met him and enjoyed spending time with his grandchildren in the house recently built with his retirement proceeds. His mother died when he was a young boy and his older brother and sister had already established kinship networks across the border from Sindh in Kutch. Each of them had negotiated these border crossings clandestinely during the late 1960s. Gulab Singh was thus already familiar in 1970 with the landscape of border crossing without passports and permits. There was a well-established network of agents on both side who worked closely with border guards on either end. Despite this, he said, it was highly risky even back when the political situation was less difficult than it is now. There was always a chance that a friendly agent was really an informer for the other side. The best laid plan sometimes fell through at the last minute or people developed cold feet. Crossing illegally once was bad enough, he emphasized. Imagine having to go through the process twice. Men who wanted to bring a wife back into Sindh had to undertake the risky crossing all over again on the return journey as his brother had done. Fully aware of the attendant risks, he came up with a plan. He would leave for India, find a wife in Kutch and stay on. He did not want to take the risk of returning to Sindh. Besides the atmosphere of suspicion had wreaked havoc on the daily life in Chachro. It was not easy, he confessed, being a Hindu in Sindh after 1965. I will tell you frankly, he said, we have no problems in Sindh. We all lived peacefully, Hindus and Muslims both. But after 65, things became more communalized. The military used to trouble us a lot. So he decided to cross over into India. He did not want to tell his father and brother of his plans because absolute secrecy was required. But he was also afraid they would deter him from his plans. In Chachro, a childhood friend helped him up to the border. This friend in turn had a school friend among the border guards whom he approached for help in this operation. Night time, while it promised darkness and cover for clandestine activity was not a good time to attempt the border crossing. The police posts were buzzing with activity and the border guards were very alert. In the late spring and early summer, the desert is known for its strong winds that whip up the desert sand during the day. The whirls of desert sand whipped up by strong winds provided perfect cover for Gulab Singh, who crossed over in the daytime, thus shielded by the hot sand. He crossed the border into Rajasthan's Barmer district and remembers that he celebrated holy the festival that commemorates the onset of summer in North India in Barmer in 1970. Once in Barmer, Gulab Singh decided to contact some of his relatives. Now that he was safely across the border, he also wanted to send a message to his father and brother informing them of his next steps. Generations of exorgamous marriages with various Rajputs east of Sindh meant that the entire region, primarily Sindh, Gujarat and Rajasthan, was dotted with kinship networks across various administrative borders. On the Indian side of the border, Gulab needed to enlist the support of his maternal kin. These were people he did not know personally, never having been on this side of the border, but they were not unknown either. Chacharo had brides from Barmer and some of its own daughters were married here. News and gifts travelled through well worn channels of border crossing over the generations. But to his surprise and disappointment, the trust and support of his relatives in Barmer was not a foregone conclusion. If Gulab Singh thought that crossing the border was his biggest challenge and once in India he would be welcomed by an extended family of maternal relatives, he was mistaken. In borderland communities where frequent connections of goods and people are made across the border, there's also a high degree of surveillance and suspicion. It's not easy to trust people, whether or not they are your kinsmen. The police and intelligence officers are constantly combing these border villages. You can never be sure of a visiting relative from the other side, posing as a bright seeker who may be a double agent reporting to the secret services. When Gulab Singh made initial contact with his extended family networks in Barmer, he was given a friendly enough but wary reception. While older women were excited to see him gathering around in anxious for firsthand news of their daughters and nieces in Chachro, they were also restrained from talking with him. Tea was offered but no further hospitality was encouraged. Gulab Singh was exhausted, hungry and emotionally spent. The desert sand had caused his eyes to itch and water. The past days had been a whirlwind of activity and tension. Now that he was safely across the border, the initial exhilaration subsided into a knot of disappointment at the base of his stomach. Why was he treated like a stranger? He explained to me that at the time perhaps he was young and impetuous. Hadn't the nature of his border crossing demonstrated this already? But back then he said he was also nasamaj, naive in the ways of the world. Soon enough he said he realized what the problem was. Given his age, gender and marital status, he was after all a young single man crossing the border. Everyone assumed that he was a bride shopper in some ways, that he was a temporary visitor in search of a bride from India, like his brother and countless others had been before. These temporary border crossers are a dangerous demographic for local residents to befriend. The Barmeer family preferred to not undertake the risks attendant upon helping out with these temporary border crossers. Once they became convinced of his intentions, of his neath, that he wanted permanent migration and that he was not there only temporarily in search of a wife, then their minds began to ease somewhat and some of them agreed to help him out. But it was not easy Gulab Singh maintained. He constantly felt under watch and felt that although they were his relatives, there was nothing stopping them from turning him over to the police. If I felt that the father was softening, he said the son began to have doubts on me. When I managed to convince the nephew, the uncle would put his foot down. Gulab Singh realized that there was only one way forward, to convince them that his migration was not temporary in nature and that he wanted to settle in India permanently. These are his words. He needed to make a firm statement. The only way to escape the suspicion of being a Desh Dhrohi or a traitor was to indicate that he was here to stay. This indication took the form of an application that he submitted to the collector in Barmer, outlining his intentions to stay in India and to apply for Indian citizenship. Although he had crossed the border at Barmer, his choice of final destination was catch because it was where his Nanihal was, the home of his mother. Within the month he relocated to Bhuj, got an allotment of land from the government, a job at a government agency and citizenship papers arrived from Delhi. By his own admission the process was smooth and easy and he did not have to suffer the indignities of camp life like those who started fleeing Tharparkar for India in larger numbers during the war. It had been so risky to initiate any contact with home, that is Chacharo, while his intentions were being evaluated by his Barmer, Kinsfolk and while he was trying his best to avoid the tag of traitor, thus he realized that he had not even once contacted his father or brother to tell him, to tell them he was safe. Once he settled down in Kutch where he was helped by his mamas, his mother's brothers, Gulab Singh decided to write to his father to let him know that he was well and that he had decided to move to India where he had now acquired legal citizenship. The following year in 71, he further cemented his ties with Kutch by becoming engaged to a woman from Kutch arranged for him by his mother's brothers. Gulab Singh never saw his father and brother again. The closest he allowed himself to go back to his childhood home was during the Indian occupation of Thad Parker during the war. He went up to the village boundary but then turned back and never returned to Pakistan after that. Perhaps it was not easy to contemplate the emotions that may have assailed him when faced with his father. The guilt of leaving his father behind had never quite gone away. Besides the tag of traitor was not an easy one to shake off even on the Indian side. Writing letters to family members left behind in Sindh was a risky operation in the period after 1965 with heightened suspicion on either side of the border. If you sent them letters from India, they were harassed by the Pakistani police. If they wrote to you, their letters were confiscated by the local post office, opened and screened before they were delivered to you. Sometimes they arrived in tatters and always weeks or months later. Trying to blend into the new environment was not easy for these migrants from Thad Parker. It was best to avoid suspicion amongst neighbours and co-workers and that's easier to shun all contact with Pakistan. For all migrants from Thad Parker, written language remained a huge problem, especially for the educated middle classes. Gulab Singh may have avoided the trauma of being in a refugee camp, but he struggled with his lack of ability to read the Hindi and Gujarati scripts. He had studied in Diplo where he learnt Sindhi and Urdu. In the Gujarat government job he was assigned to after his move to India, notices and circulars were frequently issued in Gujarati. Although he said he tried as much as possible to get by in English, he had to teach himself to read Gujarati through a daily reading of the local newspaper. Gulab Singh was grateful that he did not have to stay in any of the refugee camps that was set up during the war. His comfortable middle class life, matriculation degree and a helpful administration on the Indian side of the border enabled him to negotiate citizenship and a new life for himself. The connection with Pakistan and Sindh was now firmly in the past, interrupted only occasionally with glimpses of recognition embodied in linguistic scripts, but this was a form of recognition that sat uncomfortably with new forms of identity that were forged in Kutch as citizens of India, as Hindu citizens of India. Others were not so lucky, making the arduous trek across the Thar desert on foot or camelback during the war, stranded for days without food or water, including women and small children. While it was not logistically easy for Kutch to accommodate all refugees, these migrants had their ways of negotiating with the administration, which claimed to be left with no choice to let them in. Hari Bhai worked as an assistant in the office of the district collector in Bhoj and was personal assistant to the collector in the 1970s. During wartime, he recalled the frenetic pace of activity in the office. He was part of a team that was deputed on duty to chud bait during the 1965 war, and he traveled to many villages in Tharparkar during the occupation. In early 1972, he recalled, there were scores of Hindus fleeing their villages who wanted to cross the border into Kutch. They had crossed the border, he said, and we had set up a temporary camp for them at Dhrobana, near the famous Black Hills of Kutch. They had no papers, no permits. How could we let them in, he said. We were under strict instructions to keep them out. Hari Bhai describes his personal struggle, faced with a sea of humanity. We told the men to go back, he said, but we just could not handle the women who declared, according to him, kill our children first. Then we will turn back. They were so desperate, he said, they had been suffering so much in Pakistan, what could we do? So we had to let them in. He said he was haunted by the faces of women and children. He described how the officers relented in the face of what they saw as a moral code of gendered kinship and valor, in addition to the already internalized narrative of Hindu suffering in Pakistan. So these narratives of Hindu suffering allowed the state to flex its rules of entry and citizenship. However, it's important to note that memories of military excesses in Tharkarkar do not always distinguish between military forces of either side, each of which were brutal from the point of view of its residents and observers. Arif was a soldier in the Indian Army who found himself in Tharkarkar in 1971. As a member of the victorious force, he saw that people were terrified of the occupying Indian Army, which was able to instill deep fear in the local population. While he felt proud as a member of the Indian force, as a Muslim, he was also troubled by the attitude of his fellow troops. He saw them as perpetrators of crimes against Muslims in Tharkarkar, who lived in mortal fear of the invading Indian Army. Arif's daughter has preserved photographs of her father, taken at some of the grander mosques in the region that had fallen temporarily under Indian control. In his opinion, soldiers used to often behave quite badly, looting and plundering the houses they came across. Arif brought back with him small mementos like Qurans, which were lying scattered around in the melee of soldiers looted. Regardless of the narratives of military heavy-handedness on the civilian population of the Thar region, it was Hindus rather than Muslims who were permitted into Kutch in large numbers. Over time, a number of refugee camps sprang up across Kutch. Some of them lasted many years, such as the one in Jura village. It's still referred to as Jura camp. It's not always easy to talk to people about the migration from Sindh, despite the victorious mode in which India's role in 1971 has now begun to be memorialized in Kutch through public memorials, as you saw. The sodhas of 1971, as the 71 migrants are referred to locally, the Ekotterwara Soda, are still at pains to establish themselves locally, despite the long years they have been here and their strong kinship links across the region. While politically they are in favor today as Hindus who may yield demographic dividends to a state that is eager to pass a citizenship amendment law that legalizes non-Muslim migration from neighboring states. In fact, it was passed by the lower house of parliament only last week. Socially, they have to negotiate other hurdles. Gulab Singh had referred me to an elder of the community in Jura and it was a sunny December morning when I finally arrived in search of him. His wife and sister-in-law greeted me at the gate to the large compound that enclosed his home in Jura, Camp. We chatted about Soda marriage practices and their own respective natal villages. They were both born in Jadeja families of West and Kutch. There was some uncertainty over whether or not I should be invited in. It turned out that the patriarch whom I was in search of was busy that day organizing a village fundraising project for cow service, Gauseva. Drought had ravaged the available pastures and cows were dying out for lack of grazing. It turned out that I chose in a bad time and all night bhajan program was scheduled that evening. Its proceeds earmarked for cow protection. It was said that local political leaders affiliated to the Bharatiya Janta Party were also involved. Shyamji was in no mood to speak to strangers. When I spoke with him on the phone, standing at the entrance to his house, he was guarded. Where was I from? From Delhi? What did I want? He had nothing to say about the sodas and didn't want to speak to anyone from Delhi. The women in the family seemed unsure of the code of hospitality that should be followed. They asked me inside for a cup of tea, not very convincingly. At the far corner a younger woman was hanging out the laundry. A brief conference ended abruptly when she called out to the women asking what we were doing standing at the gate and who was I? Shyamji's wife says apologetically that they're not allowed to speak to strangers in the absence of their male relatives, adding especially in the case of her husband who was rather hot-headed in her words, Magaj Kharwai. Part of the overall suspicion that dogged the question of 1971, regardless of the certainty with which the state projects the war as an unequivocal instance of Indian military victory. Socially, the meanings attributed to 1971 are more complex. Within Kutch, there are competing claims to Soda identity. Between the 1971 migrants themselves and also between their kin who already lived in Kutch from before. Veer Singh recalls that he was in his 40s during the war. The collective terminology of Soda was an important one for him. While all migrants from Sindh are now called Soda in Kutch, telescoping under the term a host of Hindu migrants from Sindh. Veer Singh went out of his way to remind me that his family would count as Soda even in Sindh. We are the real Soda, he said. The idea of a Soda majority or a Bahumati in Tharparkar is an important aspect of community honor and status. Something Ram Singh had also stressed upon when he talked about the Hukumat of the Soda in Tharparkar. Like Gulab Singh, Kutch was the home of Veer Singh's maternal kin who assumed a new found political importance in the post-65 period as they, rather than the paternal side, became instrumental in the negotiation of marriage alliances and were passports to new forms of political belonging. Veer Singh had already planned that he would be part of a collective exercise to forcibly demolish the border check post in Sindh on the border and make a run across the border. As it happened, however, they did not need to execute this plan because in the interim war broke out. The Indian army took Kabza, as he said, of Tharparkar and under their protection, we were able to cross into Kutch. During the occupation, Veer Singh described how the collector of Kutch made frequent trips out into the Thar area. He recalls appealing to the collector for a passage into Kutch. In the following conversation with the collector, recounted by Veer Singh, one gets a sense of the kind of affective force that was attached to migrating into India. While they had never been to Kutch, it was the home of their maternal kin. This knowledge projects a certain emotional certainty to the decision to move. It glosses over the practical constraints of beginning life in a new land as potential refugees. The expectation is that kinship will triumph over the uncertainties of statecraft. In traditional patrivery local marriage, maternal kin are the source of emotional rather than political connection. The Nanihal, or the mother's home, is the space of love but not inheritance. In the 1971 migration from Tharparkar to Kutch or to Rajasthan, the traditional asymmetry between bride takers and bride givers, so integral to the maintenance of honor in marriage alliances, was reversed. It was the maternal kin, the home villages of their mothers and daughters in law, that became the natural choice for migrants, even though they had never been to these places. As they negotiated with administrators for passage, their hopes for the future betray this optimism, as in this conversation recalled four decades later by Vir Singh. Oops, sorry. So the collector says, do you want to go to India? Where will you live? Vir Singh says in Kutch, the collector says, have you ever been to Kutch? And he says, no, but our relations are there. The collector is said to have said, your cheeks are red like a tomato, you're healthy. In Kutch, they will become black like a stone. Kutch is also known for its black hill or the Kaladungar. Are you sure you want to go there? Vir Singh says, I don't mind. We will go to our kin. Here, the collector is perhaps warning Vir Singh of the travails that lie ahead of the uncertainty of life in refugee camps, pending the grant of full citizenship. No doubt, he's also thinking of official policy, which says, do not let in refugees. Although Vir Singh had envisioned settling down immediately with his relations in Kutch, like many others, he had to undergo a liminal phase in refugee camps, which was set up especially for Pakistani refugees. In some cases, their stay in camps lasted as long as 1977. In these camps, mobility was restricted. They did not have Indian citizenship, so they were monitored and surveilled as Pakistanis. They were not allowed to work in waged employment as they were not yet citizens. Vir Singh stayed with his extended family for three years in the Shivlakha camp, moving in 1974 to his new village allotment. In the camp, he recalled, they were huddled together under the permanent watch of the police. They were impatient. This was not what they had crossed into Kutch for. They wanted to go visit their relatives and begin to chart out new options, begin a new life. Summing up his migration experience after leaving the camp, he said to me, after coming here, we received Nagrikta citizenship, but nothing else. Five or 6,000 rupees for family, 10 acres of land, ration cards for everyone. That is all, bus. While it sounded like a not unreasonable settlement, he said that others were able to get much more and become arrogant or ghamandi in the process, a not-so-veiled reference to those lower caste groups who were able to lay claim to scheduled caste status and avail affirmative action under the Indian Constitution. So I've shared with you today some personal histories of border crossing that I suggest provide useful insights into the understanding that while citizenship and political belonging may be granted by states to people who are seen as possessing the correct political and demographic attributes, this does not automatically translate into social capital and acceptance by the local worlds that these citizens are also a part of. Astobias Kelly and Sharika Tirangama argue, states and loyal citizens never exist solely in the abstract but are grounded in the intimate relationships of kinship, ethnicity, religion and class. Claims of loyalty that earn citizenship status may in fact be premised on other kinds of betrayals to family, honour and home. Soda migration into India was presented in 1971 as a necessity, not as an aspirational move to a better life. This necessity is offered as a logical outcome of traditional marriage patterns that demanded honourable solutions. However, the honourable solution was also premised on a disavowal of paternal kin and a turning towards the maternal side which was not without its own shares of complications. The accusation of being a traitor, double agent, Pakistan sympathiser is more usually ascribed in India, in contemporary India, to Muslims and to suspected migrants from Bangladesh. Here, however, we see that this is an accusation that is also mapped sometimes onto the Hindu male border crosser who is crossing in an unfamiliar direction even if he is seeking the protection of the family. The direction is unfamiliar because these young men are leaving behind their male kin seeking to make their home amongst their maternal kin. Yet, as we see in Gulab Singh's case, he did not need the family to present his case to the state. The state was only too willing to grant him citizenship. It was a family that remained suspicious. The emphasis on honour in these narrations also allows us to think of Sindh as a variegated, heterogeneous space with its own sets of internal struggles and competing claims to status and power. The view from Gujarat often elides this question. What, after all, is Sindh and who are the Sindhis? Do we look to the merchants who came after 1947 and settled in Adipur and Gandhidam, a special township constructed for Sindhi partition migrants with their temples to Jhulelal and gradual assimilation into the Gujarati landscape or to the Megwals who also crossed the border in 1971 and acquired scheduled caste status in India or to the sodas who seek to distinguish themselves from the Dalits and Muslims of Tharpakar. In Kach, as I said earlier, the term soda is used as a caste suffix for all 1971 migrants. So when anyone can claim the title of soda, it becomes especially important for some of them to claim authentic soda status over others who are now deemed to be imposters. Post-71, some of them acquired Indian citizenship but it also came at the cost of turning the certainties of the old caste order into turmoil. As I waited to interview Ram Singh, I was ushered into a living room surrounded by photo portraits of Ram Singh, his father and his sons, a genealogical display of Rajput status. In their respective photographs, Ram Singh and his father are wearing signature traditional red headgear and have long twirled mustaches, standard sartorial references to Rajput or Shatria status. In the same vein, a small glass-fronted cabinet across the couch is filled with trophies and mementos inscribed in Gujarati script from the Kach Zilla Rajput Shatria Sangh, the Kach district Rajput Shatria Association. The room signaled elite Rajput caste identity in no uncertain terms. You will recall that this was an important theme in his conversations as well. As he settled the foals of his dhoti, he ordered tea for us and directed me to write down his full name and title and he dictated Ram Singh, Rana Singh, Sodha, Rajput, advocate XMLA Sindh. The loss of the past power and majority status in Thalparkar, which entailed their slide into minority status within Pakistan and also led to the loss of their caste privileges by moving to India is an important theme that structures Sodha interactions with others in Kach. They are aware of the contradictions of the move to India. It was the only way to live honorably and to reproduce the family line with purity, yet this move was premised on a shift away from the patriline, who now only remain as portraits on the wall resplendent in their sartorial magnificence. In conclusion, let me suggest that the view from Gujarat and Sindh makes a significant contribution to partition studies, not because they were inherently peaceful places or that Sindh Sufis protected Hindus and Muslims from the communal clashes that occurred elsewhere. But instead, this region perhaps addresses some of the silences in other studies of partition by addressing the question of caste. While the state may read cross-border migration in the terms of broad religious in terms of broad religious categorization, a good example of this is the Citizenship Amendment Bill. There's no good reason for academic scholarship to do the same. I have proposed here that the grant of citizenship is not the end of the story of cross-border migration. Often it's just the beginning of a long-negotiated bargain for migrants who need to learn a new language of belonging in order to integrate and that this language has to do as much with caste equations as with the question of religion or nationality per se. Thank you.