The chapter summarises the various ways through which attachment to a particular geography - be a street or a nation - can be compromised. Memory, familiarity with customs and rules, and access to public space, as well as safety, personal and political freedoms are key constituents of belonging as is basic economic well-being.

The author reflects upon graveyards and physical memorials to the dead as place markers for individuals, families and communities. Syncretic Indian culture in medieval and modern times, has revolved around graves as Muslim Sufi saints were venerated by all communities, and their attitude to power influenced the masses. However, there is a new political discourse where graveyards are set against up cremation grounds, as if the two were incompatible, suggesting that Hindus and Muslims/Christians were incompatible. This chapter is about the divisive discourse and its impact on memory and attachment for communities who count upon a physical, emotional and spiritual attachment to the land

Travelling from Spanish to English to Urdu with its curlicue graces, that line waited to trip me up in my own language. I found it at a stall selling posters at a literary festival. It’s from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude: A person does not belong to a place until someone beloved is buried there.

Mumbai’s industrial character having faded, the city has turned more nativist. Religious riots in the 1990s caused rifts to deepen and Muslims found themselves confined to ghettos. Waes of aggression have also been directed at outsiders, particularly working class labourers from the north referred to as ‘bhaiyya’ or brother. This chapter examines internal migration and the author’s struggle to try and belong to the city as a woman and a female ‘brother’.

The author reflects upon Allahabad in this chapter. A town in north India that was known for its cultivation of intellectual life as well as being a major religious hub, it has now been renamed in an attempt to stamp out its Islamic history. The change is not merely a physical one but also reflected in its intellectual decline. The chapter juxtaposes the decline of the city’s tradition of synthesis and cultural confluence with the rise of an active anti-intellectualism along with an aggressive display of majoritarian religious symbolism, and the way it changes the texture of home

In this chapter, the author describes language as a location and the site of belonging, as well as a political tool for the empowering of one linguistic over another within a particular province and nation. It also describes the struggle to link Muslims with Urdu, thereby isolating both and deepening existing fractures in society, alongside attempts to privilege Sanskrit over all other ancient and modern languages.

Having grown up in an industrial township, the author reflects upon housing that was conditional and retractable, being linked to the job, as well as a means through which one’s socio-economic location was visibly reinforced. This chapter focuses on a cement factory, and the way businesses control a particular landscape, the mineral wealth and other natural resources, without having either historical or cultural roots in the land, and the relative powerlessness of indigenous communities that were the original inhabitants.

This chapter examines belonging from the prism of gender and marital dislocation. Women are overwhelmingly impacted by marriage induced migration and the assumptions of safety, tenure, and rights that are typically associated with home are affected through the uncertainties of the relationship itself, as well as social disapproval of women who refuse to migrate and adapt in these typical ways. The author reflects on the implications of being homely as well as the risks associated with a dislocation that cannot easily be undone

The chapter examines the reputation of the state of Uttar Pradesh, and especially that of the eastern districts, the region around Azamgarh and Mau, as being lawless and particularly linked to gangs and goons. It looks at potential causes of the tarnished reputation of the Purbia from the perspective of historic neglect, caste, feudalism and the inroads made by criminals into politics through being elected as representatives.

This chapter focuses on the Partition of India along religious lines, and on the shifting of the emotional locus of belonging from where one actually lives to Pakistan, which is seen as simultaneously hostile and territory that one is not prepared to surrender. The author reflects on the continuation of the Partition rhetoric through the aggressive and criminal sundering of couples who marry across community barriers.