The conclusion summarizes the main findings of the book and explores the ambivalent nature of national identity in a transnational world. It argues that the burial dilemmas of minority communities offer a window into the complexities of belonging and membership in an international system that is ordered by nation-states. The death of an individual and the commemorative practices accompanying it make visible a dense web of attachments and allegiances to particular communities and places. Through burial practices, individuals signal who they are, what they value, and where they belong.

The fifth chapter, ‘Entangled Histories’, starts from the question of erasure. I examine how the memorialization of revolutionary pasts in India and Pakistan has erased a history of entanglements between the Left and other political and intellectual strands. Specifically, I take the case of Darshan Singh Pheruman, remembered today as a martyr who gave his life for the Sikh Panth. Through his life, I examine how the Akali movement, a Sikh socio-religious political movement in the 1920s, blended in with the communist movement in the Punjab. These intersections provide a reminder of how ideas did not observe strict ideological boundaries, boundaries that only seem unbridgeable in nationalist and communitarian erasures of revolutionary pasts. This chapter offers a portrait of the relative fluidity between ‘communist’, ‘communitarian’, and ‘nationalist’ politics of the interwar era. In doing so, it sketches an era of political possibilities that later gave way to a bitterly contested and fractured landscape with hardened political and ideological boundaries.