Across the Border, still at the Margins: Reading Space in Suraiya Qasim’s “Where Did She Belong?”

Abstract

Suraiya Qasim’s “Where Did She Belong?” interrogates Partition through Munni Bai’s movement from Lahore’s Hira Mandi to Delhi’s G.B. Road. This paper reads the brothel as a counter-space that exposes the contradictions of religious territorialisation, respectable domesticity and national belonging. Drawing selectively on Michel Foucault’s heterotopia and feminist Partition scholarship, it argues that the brothel unsettles communal boundaries without escaping patriarchal power. Munni’s abandonment between a mosque and a temple, her uncertain parentage and her clients’ competing religious claims reveal that identity is assigned through spatial and sexual relations rather than secured by ancestry alone.