Citizenship, Belonging, and the Partition of India

Citizenship, Belonging, and the Partition of India PDF Author: Neeti Nair
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040114253
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 167

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Book Description
This book revisits the aftermath of the partition of 1947, and the war of 1971, to examine some of the longer-term consequences of the redrawing of borders across South Asia. From the eastern frontier of Assam to the westernmost reaches of Gujarat and Sindh, the chapters in this volume study the “minority question” and show how it has manifested in different regional contexts. The authors ask how minorities have sought to belong, and trace how their sense of belonging has shifted with time. Working with “intercepted letters, pamphlets, and poetry”, novels and ethnographic fieldwork, each of these articles foreground the voices of the “refugee” and the “minority”. Taken together, the essays argue that a deep dive into how people have been affected by border-making and remaking in each of these frontier regions is integral to understanding the “big picture” that is South Asia. By drawing upon current research in history, memory studies and literature, this book will interest students, researchers and scholars of modern Indian history, Partition studies, colonial history, postcolonial studies, politics, and South Asian studies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Asian Affairs.

Citizenship, Belonging, and the Partition of India

Citizenship, Belonging, and the Partition of India PDF Author: Neeti Nair
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040114253
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 167

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book revisits the aftermath of the partition of 1947, and the war of 1971, to examine some of the longer-term consequences of the redrawing of borders across South Asia. From the eastern frontier of Assam to the westernmost reaches of Gujarat and Sindh, the chapters in this volume study the “minority question” and show how it has manifested in different regional contexts. The authors ask how minorities have sought to belong, and trace how their sense of belonging has shifted with time. Working with “intercepted letters, pamphlets, and poetry”, novels and ethnographic fieldwork, each of these articles foreground the voices of the “refugee” and the “minority”. Taken together, the essays argue that a deep dive into how people have been affected by border-making and remaking in each of these frontier regions is integral to understanding the “big picture” that is South Asia. By drawing upon current research in history, memory studies and literature, this book will interest students, researchers and scholars of modern Indian history, Partition studies, colonial history, postcolonial studies, politics, and South Asian studies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Asian Affairs.

Boundaries of Belonging

Boundaries of Belonging PDF Author: Sarah Ansari
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107196051
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
Explores citizenship, rights and belonging in post-Independence South Asia, examining the long-term impact of the 1947 Partition.

Delhi Reborn

Delhi Reborn PDF Author: Rotem Geva
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503632121
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
Delhi, one of the world's largest cities, has faced momentous challenges—mass migration, competing governing authorities, controversies over citizenship, and communal violence. To understand the contemporary plight of India's capital city, this book revisits one of the most dramatic episodes in its history, telling the story of how the city was remade by the twin events of partition and independence. Treating decolonization as a process that unfolded from the late 1930s into the mid-1950, Rotem Geva traces how India and Pakistan became increasingly territorialized in the imagination and practice of the city's residents, how violence and displacement were central to this process, and how tensions over belonging and citizenship lingered in the city and the nation. She also chronicles the struggle, after 1947, between the urge to democratize political life in the new republic and the authoritarian legacy of colonial rule, augmented by the imperative to maintain law and order in the face of the partition crisis. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Geva reveals the period from the late 1930s to the mid-1950s as a twilight time, combining features of imperial framework and independent republic. Geva places this liminality within the broader global context of the dissolution of multiethnic and multireligious empires into nation-states and argues for an understanding of state formation as a contest between various lines of power, charting the links between different levels of political struggle and mobilization during the churning early years of independence in Delhi.

Citizen Refugee

Citizen Refugee PDF Author: Uditi Sen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108425615
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Explores how refugees were used as agents of nation-building in India, leading to gendered and caste-ridden policies of rehabilitation.

Violent Belongings

Violent Belongings PDF Author: Kavita Daiya
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 159213744X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Violent Belongings examines transnational South Asian culture from 1947 onwards in order to offer a new, historical account of how gender and ethnicity came to determine who belonged, and how, in the postcolonial Indian nation.

The Refugee Woman

The Refugee Woman PDF Author: Paulomi Chakraborty
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199095396
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Book Description
The Refugee Woman examines the Partition of 1947 by engaging with the cultural imagination of the ‘refugee woman’ in West Bengal, particularly in three significant texts of the Partition of Bengal—Ritwik Ghatak’s film Meghe Dhaka Tara; and two novels, Jyotirmoyee Devi’s Epar Ganga, Opar Ganga and Sabitri Roy’s Swaralipi. It shows that the figure of the refugee woman, animated by the history of the political left and refugee movements, and shaped by powerful cultural narratives, can contest and reconstitute the very political imagination of ‘woman’ that emerged through the long history of dominant cultural nationalisms. The reading it offers elucidates some of the complexities of nationalist, communal, and communist gender-politics of a key period in post-independence Bengal.

Citizenship and Its Discontents

Citizenship and Its Discontents PDF Author: Niraja Gopal Jayal
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674070992
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 454

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Book Description
Breaking new ground in scholarship, Niraja Jayal writes the first history of citizenship in the largest democracy in the world—India. Unlike the mature democracies of the west, India began as a true republic of equals with a complex architecture of citizenship rights that was sensitive to the many hierarchies of Indian society. In this provocative biography of the defining aspiration of modern India, Jayal shows how the progressive civic ideals embodied in the constitution have been challenged by exclusions based on social and economic inequality, and sometimes also, paradoxically, undermined by its own policies of inclusion. Citizenship and Its Discontents explores a century of contestations over citizenship from the colonial period to the present, analyzing evolving conceptions of citizenship as legal status, as rights, and as identity. The early optimism that a new India could be fashioned out of an unequal and diverse society led to a formally inclusive legal membership, an impulse to social and economic rights, and group-differentiated citizenship. Today, these policies to create a civic community of equals are losing support in a climate of social intolerance and weak solidarity. Once seen by Western political scientists as an anomaly, India today is a site where every major theoretical debate about citizenship is being enacted in practice, and one that no global discussion of the subject can afford to ignore.

Memories and Postmemories of the Partition of India

Memories and Postmemories of the Partition of India PDF Author: Anjali Roy
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429017367
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
This book examines the afterlife of Partition as imprinted on the memories and postmemories of Hindu and Sikh survivors from West Punjab to foreground the intersection between history, memory and narrative. It shows how survivors script their life stories to reinscribe tragic tales of violence and abjection into triumphalist sagas of fortitude, resilience, industry, enterprise and success. At the same time, it reveals the silences, stutters and stammers that interrupt survivors’ narrations to bring attention to the untold stories repressed in their consensual narratives. By drawing upon current research in history, memory, narrative, violence, trauma, affect, home, nation, borders, refugees and citizenship, the book analyzes the traumatizing effects of both the tangible and intangible violence of Partition by tracing the survivors’ journey from refugees to citizens as they struggle to make new homes and lives in an unhomely land. Moreover, arguing that the event of Partition radically transformed the notions of home, belonging, self and community, it shows that individuals affected by Partition produce a new ethics and aesthetic of displacement and embody new ways of being in the world. An important contribution to the field of Partition studies, this book will be of interest to researchers on South Asian history, memory, partition and postcolonial studies.

Muslim Belonging in Secular India

Muslim Belonging in Secular India PDF Author: Taylor C. Sherman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107095077
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
Using the princely state of Hyderabad as a case study, Sherman surveys the experience of Muslim communities in postcolonial India.

Mapping Citizenship in India

Mapping Citizenship in India PDF Author: Anupama Roy
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199088209
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
Contributing to the ongoing debates on citizenship, this book traces the Citizenship Act of India, 1955 from its inception, through the various amendments in 1986, 2003, and 2005. It includes detailed studies of other significant laws and judgments including the Abducted Persons (Recovery and Rehabilitation) Act (1949), and the Illegal Migrants Determination by Tribunals Act (1983) to show how citizenship unfolded among differentially located individuals, communities, and groups. The book argues that the citizenship laws in India show a steady movement towards the affirmation of citizenship's relationship with blood-ties and descent. The volume identifies amendments in the Citizenship Act as transitions which are framed by major historical choices and decisions. It examines the liminal categories of citizenship produced in the period between the commencement of the Constitution and the enactment of the Citizenship Act, which continue to make citizenship fraught with uncertainties and exclusions. Through a discussion of laws and judgments, the work also brings out the relationship between citizenship and migration in independent India, in particular in the wake of migration from Bangladesh and distress migration because of the breakdown of rural economies.