Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T05:51:57.610Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Histories of Indian Citizenship in the Age of Decolonisation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 March 2021

Kalyani Ramnath
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay discusses the important contributions of three new works on Indian citizenship by Ornit Shani, Uditi Sen, and Oliver Godsmark. Their books discuss the territorial partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan in 1947, the framing and inauguration of the Indian Constitution in 1950, the preparation of voter rolls and the first democratic elections, and linguistic reorganisation of Indian states in 1956, alongside questions of refugee rehabilitation, counterinsurgency measures and rising ethnonationalisms. The emphasis is not only on the legal regimes of national citizenship, but also how it is unevenly mapped and experienced. This emphasis on territoriality is an invitation to ask questions about continuity and change in the transition from empires to nation-states, as well as invented pasts and imagined futures that transcend national borders set up after the end of colonial rule.

Keywords

citizenshipmigrationdecolonisationlawpartition
Type
Review Essay
Information
Itinerario , Volume 45 , Issue 1 , April 2021 , pp. 152 - 173
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Research Institute for History, Leiden University

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

Kalyani Ramnath is a Prize Fellow in Economics, History, and Politics at the Center for History and Economics, Harvard University. She holds a PhD in history from Princeton University, and law degrees from the National Law School of India University and the Yale Law School.

References

Aiyar, Sana. “Anticolonial Homelands across the Indian Ocean: The Politics of the Indian Diaspora in Kenya, ca. 1930–1950.” American Historical Review 116:4 (2011): 987–1013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aiyar, Sana. Indians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alexander, Claire, Chatterji, Joya, and Jalais, Annu. The Bengal Diaspora: Rethinking Muslim Migration. New York: Routledge, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ampalavanar, Rajeswary. The Indian Minority and Political Change in Malaya, 1945–1957. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981.Google Scholar
Amrith, Sunil. “Struggles for Citizenship around the Bay of Bengal.” in The Postcolonial Moment in South and Southeast Asia, eds. Gyan Prakash, Nikhil Menon and Michael Laffan, 107–120. London: Bloomsbury, 2018.Google Scholar
Amrith, Sunil. “Indians Overseas? Governing Tamil Migration to Malaya 1870–1941.” Past and Present 208 (2010): 231–261.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Amrith, Sunil. Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015.Google Scholar
Ansari, Sarah. “Subjects or Citizens? India, Pakistan and the 1948 British Nationality Act.” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 41:2 (2013): 285–312.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ansari, Sarah, and Gould, William, Boundaries of Belonging: Localities, Citizenship and Rights in India and Pakistan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arasaratnam, Sinnappah. Indians in Malaysia and Singapore. London: Institute of Race Relations, 1970.Google Scholar
Baruah, Sanjib. In the Name of the Nation: India and Its Northeast. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2020.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bashford, Alison. “Immigration Restriction: Rethinking Period and Place from Settler Colonies to Postcolonial Nations.” Journal of Global History 9:1 (2014) 26–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bentley, Jerry H., Bridenthal, Renate, and Yang, Anand A., eds. Interactions: Transregional Perspectives on World History. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bhat, Mohsin Alam “Twilight Citizenship”, Seminar (May 2020), https://www.india-seminar.com/2020/729/729_m_mohsin_alam_bhat.htm.Google Scholar
Butalia, Urvashi. The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1998.Google Scholar
Carnell, F. G. “Malayan Citizenship Legislation.” International and Comparative Law Quarterly 1:4 (1952): 504–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cháirez-Garza, Jesús F. “B. R. Ambedkar, Partition and the Internationalisation of Untouchability, 1939–47.” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 42:1 (2019): 80–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chatterji, Joya. “Decolonization in South Asia.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire, ed. Thomas, Martin and Thompson, Andrew S., 251–75. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.Google Scholar
Chatterji, Joya. “Partition Studies: Prospects and Pitfalls.” Journal of Asian Studies 73:2 (2014): 309–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chatterji, Joya. “South Asian Histories of Citizenship, 1946–1970.” Modern Asian Studies 55:4 (2012): 1049–71.Google Scholar
Chatterji, Joya. The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947–1967. Cambridge Studies in Indian History and Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chawla, Swati, et al. , “Who Is a Citizen in Contemporary India?” Epicenter (blog), Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, February 11, 2020, https://epicenter.wcfia.harvard.edu/blog/who-citizen-contemporary-india.Google Scholar
Cons, Jason. Sensitive Space: Fragmented Territory at the India-Bangladesh Border. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016.Google Scholar
Cooper, Frederick. Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Das, Veena. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Datla, Kavita Saraswathi. “Sovereignty and the End of Empire: The Transition to Independence in Colonial Hyderabad.” Ab Imperio 2018:3 (2018): 63–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Datta, Antara. Refugees and Borders in South Asia: The Great Exodus of 1971. New York: Routledge, 2013.Google Scholar
De, Rohit. “Rebellion, dacoity, and equality: the emergence of the constitutional field in postcolonial India.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 34.2 (2014): 260–278.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De, Rohit. A People's Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic. Princeton University Press, 2018.Google Scholar
De, Rohit. ‘‘The Indian Constitution: Moments, epics and everyday lives.’’ International Journal of Constitutional Law 18:3 (October 2020): 1022–1030.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Deshpande, Prachi. “Caste as Maratha: Social Categories, Colonial Policy and Identity in Early Twentieth-Century Maharashtra.” Indian Economic & Social History Review 41:1 (2004): 7–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Devji, Faisal. Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea. London: Hurst & Company, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gilmartin, David. “Election Law and the ‘People’ in Colonial and Postcolonial India.” In From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition, ed. Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Majumdar, Rochona, and Sartori, Andrew, 55–82. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Getachew, Adom. Worldmaking after Empire: the Rise and Fall of Self-Determination. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019.Google Scholar
Goswami, Manu. “Imaginary Futures and Colonial Internationalisms.” American Historical Review 117:5 (2012): 1461–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gould, William, and Legg, Stephen. “Spaces before Partition: An Introduction.” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 42:1 (2019): 69–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gupta, Pamila. Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World: History and Ethnography. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.Google Scholar
Guyot-Réchard, Bérénice. Shadow States: India, China and the Himalayas, 1910–1962. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.Google Scholar
Hunter, Emma. Political Thought and the Public Sphere in Tanzania : Freedom, Democracy and Citizenship in the Era of Decolonization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hunter, Emma ed.. Citizenship, Belonging, and Political Community in Africa : Dialogues between Past and Present. Athens, OH.: Ohio University Press, 2016.Google Scholar
Jalais, Annu. “Dwelling on Morichjhanpi: When Tigers Became ‘Citizens,’ Refugees ‘Tiger-Food.’” Economic & Political Weekly 40:17 (2005): 1757–62.Google Scholar
Jalal, Ayesha. The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jayal, Niraja Gopal. Citizenship and Its Discontents: An Indian History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jayal, Niraja Gopal. “Reconfiguring Citizenship in Contemporary India.” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 42:1 (2019): 33–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kanapathipillai, Valli. Citizenship and Statelessness in Sri Lanka: The Case of the Tamil Estate Workers. London and New York: Anthem Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Kannabiran, Kalpana; “Constitution-As-Commons: Notes on Decolonizing Citizenship in India”. South Atlantic Quarterly 120:1 (1 January 2021): 232–241.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kapur, Manav. “Evacuee or Citizen? Minority Citizenship and Property Rights in 1950s India”, https://www.theleaflet.in/evacuee-or-citizen-minority-citizenship-and-property-rights-in-1950s-india/.Google Scholar
Kaul, Suvir. “Indian Empire (and the Case of Kashmir).” Economic & Political Weekly 46:13 (2011): 66–75.Google Scholar
Kaur, Ravinder. Since 1947: Partition Narratives among Punjabi Migrants of Delhi. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kudaisya, Gyanesh. “Divided Landscapes, Fragmented Identities: East Bengal Refugees and Their Rehabilitation in India 1947–79.” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 17:1 (1997): 24–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Laffan, Michael Francis, ed. Belonging across the Bay of Bengal: Religious Rites, Colonial Migrations, National Rights. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.Google Scholar
Leake, Elisabeth. The Defiant Border: The Afghan-Pakistan Borderlands in the Era of Decolonisation, 1936–65. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leake, Elisabeth, and Haines, Daniel. “Lines of (In)Convenience: Sovereignty and Border-Making in Postcolonial South Asia, 1947–1965.” Journal of Asian Studies 76:4 (2017): 963–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lewis, Su Lin, and Stolte, Carolien. “Other Bandungs: Afro-Asian Internationalisms in the Early Cold War.” Journal of World History 30:1 (2019): 1–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lipsky, Michael. Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Service. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2010 [1980].Google Scholar
Ludden, David. “The First Boundary of Bangladesh on Sylhet's Northern Frontiers.” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, Humanities 48:1 (2003): 1–54.Google Scholar
Ludden, David. “The Politics of Independence in Bangladesh.” Economic and Political Weekly 46:35 (2011): 79–85.Google Scholar
Mallick, Ross. “Refugee Resettlement in Forest Reserves: West Bengal Policy Reversal and the Marichjhapi Massacre.” Journal of Asian Studies 58:1 (1999): 104–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mantena, Karuna, and Mantena, Rama Sundari. “Introduction: Political Imaginaries at the End of Empire.” Ab Imperio 2018:3 (2018): 31–5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mawani, Renisa. Across Oceans of Law: The Komagata Maru and Jurisdiction in the Time of Empire. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2018.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Menon, K. P. Kesava. “Politics and Parties in Malaya” India Quarterly 6:1 (1950): 44–57.Google Scholar
Menon, Ritu, and Bhasin, Kamla. Borders & Boundaries: Women in India's Partition. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Mongia, Radhika. Indian Migration and Empire: A Colonial Genealogy of the Modern State. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2018.Google Scholar
Mongia, Radhika Viyas. “Race, Nationality, Mobility: A History of the Passport.” Public Culture 11:3 (1999): 527–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Namakkal, Jessica. “The Terror of Decolonization: Exploring French India's ‘Goonda Raj.’” Interventions 19:2 (2017): 338–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Namakkal, Jessica. “Transgressing the Boundaries of the Nation: Decolonization, Migration, and Identity in France/India, 1910–1972.” PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2013.Google Scholar
Newbigin, Eleanor. The Hindu Family and the Emergence of Modern India : Law, Citizenship and Community. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peebles, Patrick. The Plantation Tamils of Ceylon. New Historical Perspectives on Migration. London: Leicester University Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Prakash, Gyan, Menon, Nikhil, and Laffan, Michael, eds. The Postcolonial Moment in South and Southeast Asia. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Purushotham, Sunil. “Federating the Raj: Hyderabad, Sovereign Kingship, and Partition.” Modern Asian Studies 54:1 (2020): 157–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Purushotham, Sunil. From Raj to Republic: Sovereignty, Violence, and Democracy in India. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Raman, Bhavani. “Calling the Other Shore: Tamil Studies and Decolonization.” In Belonging across the Bay of Bengal: Religious Rites, Colonial Migrations, National Rights, ed. Laffan, Michael, 161–80. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.Google Scholar
Ramaswamy, Sumathi. Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891–1970. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Ramnath, Kalyani. “Boats in a Storm: Law, Politics, and Jurisdiction in Postwar South Asia.” PhD diss., Princeton University, 2018.Google Scholar
Ramnath, Kalyani. “Intertwined Itineraries: Debt, Decolonization, and International Law in Post-WWII South Asia.” Law and History Review 38:1 (2020): 1–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rao, Anupama. The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robinson, Cabeiri Debergh. “Too Much Nationality: Kashmiri Refugees, the South Asian Refugee Regime, and a Refugee State, 1947–1974.” Journal of Refugee Studies 25:3 (2012): 344–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robinson, Cabeiri deBergh. Body of Victim, Body of Warrior : Refugee Families and the Making of Kashmiri Jihadists. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roy, Anupama. Gendered Citizenship: Historical and Conceptual Explorations. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2013.Google Scholar
Roy, Anupama. Mapping Citizenship in India. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roy, Haimanti. Partitioned Lives: Migrants, Refugees, Citizens in India and Pakistan, 1947–65. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Sengupta, Debjani. “From Dandakaranya to Marichjhapi: Rehabilitation, Representation and the Partition of Bengal (1947).” Social Semiotics 21:1 (2011): 101–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sen, Uditi. Citizen Refugee: Forging the Indian Nation after Partition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sen, Uditi. “The Myths Refugees Live By: Memory and History in the Making of Bengali Refugee Identity.” Modern Asian Studies 48:1 (2013): 37–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shahani, Uttara. “Sindh is not a piece of territory: Sindhi Belonging in India”, https://www.theleaflet.in/sindh-is-not-a-piece-of-territory-sindhi-belonging-in-india/.Google Scholar
Shani, Ornit. How India Became Democratic: Citizenship and the Making of the Universal Franchise. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.Google Scholar
Sherman, Taylor C. Muslim Belonging in Secular India: Negotiating Citizenship in Postcolonial Hyderabad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sherman, Taylor C., Gould, William, and Ansari, Sarah, eds. From Subjects to Citizens: Society and the Everyday State in India and Pakistan, 1947–1970. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sinha, Mrinalini. “Premonitions of the Past.” Journal of Asian Studies 74:4 (2015): 821–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sundar, Nandini. “The rule of law and citizenship in central India: post-colonial dilemmas.” Citizenship Studies 15.3–4 (2011): 419–432.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sutton, Deborah. “Imagined Sovereignty and the Indian Subject: Partition and Politics beyond the Nation, 1948–1960.” Contemporary South Asia 19:4 (2011): 409–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tagliacozzo, Eric. “Jagged Landscapes: Conceptualizing Borders and Boundaries in the History of Human Societies.” Journal of Borderlands Studies 31:1 (2016): 1–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tejani, Shabnum. Indian Secularism : A Social and Intellectual History, 1890–1950. Indiana University Press, 2008Google Scholar
Van Schendel, Willem. The Bengal Borderland: Beyond State and Nation in South Asia. London: Anthem Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Waghmore, Suryakant. Civility against Caste: Dalit Politics and Citizenship in Western India. New Delhi: SAGE Publications India, 2013.Google Scholar
Walker, Lydia. “Decolonisation in the 1960s: On Legitimate and Illegitimate Nationalist Claims-Making.” Past & Present 242:1 (2019): 227–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zamindar, Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali. The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.Google Scholar