Sindh Is Not a Piece of Territory: Sindhi Belonging in India, 2019-2021

This article was published on the anniversary of India's Republic day in January 2021 for the well-known online publication The Leaflet's special issue on citizenship, for a non-academic audience. The article traces a history of the Sindhi refugee diaspora in India in the aftermath of the partition of India, the absence of a linguistic and ethnically defined territory to which they could claim belonging, and the implications of this for their resettlement in India. The article looks back at how religion, ethnicity, and caste intersected with a lack of territorial belonging to produce Sindhi citizenship in India and the refugees' own struggles to claim belonging in India.