Postcolonial Indian State Research Articles

Constructing and Consuming the Periphery

In August 2021, Mahasweta Devi’s iconic short story “Draupadi” (1978), which brings alive the long tradition of adivasi/tribal resistance against systemic oppression and its brutal reprisal, was deleted from the English Honours syllabus of Delhi University on the grounds of “hurt” sentiments. Why would a story of tribal resistance ruffle postcolonial sentiments? Triggered by this excision, our essay attends to the context of “Draupadi” – the Naxalite movement (1967–1975), the armed uprising that contested the feudal-bourgeois hegemony of the postcolonial Indian state – and examines the representation of the restless periphery in contemporary fiction, Bengali and English, in terms of political and attendant aesthetic negotiations. The Naxalite movement inspired a specific genre of literature in Bengali, Naxal Sahitya, whose growth was contemporaneous with the movement itself. It explored the possibility of a new modernity and subjectivity, tangling with the inherited forms of narrative in both poetry and prose. Globally, which signifies still a western platform, the Naxal made an appearance in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland (2013) and Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others (2014). In both, the questions raised by movement, of land and of the tiller, are imaginatively resolved by the diasporic journey of select individuals to the United States of America. Our essay offers an intertextual reading of these two anglophone, global novels by Lahiri and Mukherjee with the Bengali, local narratives of Samaresh Majumdar’s Kalbela/Dark Times (1983) and Mahasweta Devi’s Operation? Bashai Tudu (1978/2003). We address the ways in which imaginative literature embeds a movement that challenged the hierarchies of a decolonized nation, the possibilities of the novel’s – a form hegemonically associated with the individual rather than the collective – investment in the construction of the periphery, the hierarchy of the local and the global, and the territoriality of the marketable consumptions of stories.

Exclusion of Pasmanda Muslims and Dalit Christians from the Scheduled Caste Quota

Based on a re-reading of the Indian Constituent Assembly Debates in light of subsequent developments, this article provides new insights about the extent to which the Indian constitution allows affirmative action for redressing historical disadvantages and empowering marginalised communities. Since the post-colonial Indian state introduced the criterion of religion in the lists of Scheduled Castes (SCs), this sparked suspicions of efforts to prevent conversions, further augmenting India’s Hindu majority. The article re-examines such claims in light of the Indian Constituent Assembly Debates and subsequent Government Orders for notifying/modifying SCs. It argues that the list of SCs was never envisioned as religion-neutral, so that the exclusion of Pasmanda Muslims and Dalit Christians from the SCs is not a communal afterthought, while religion has all along not been the only or main criterion for affirmative action policies.

Understanding layered dominance of political dynasties in India: A de-hyphenated reading of dynastic representation and dynasty-led parties

India has witnessed the dominance of a plethora of political dynasties, both at the national as well as the state level, since independence. The post-colonial Indian state adopted a liberal constitutional democracy premised upon modern representative institutions. However, the primordial principle of hereditary succession of power resiliently co-existed in the form of powerful political families that have continued to impact the nature of Indian democratic political discourse till today. The political parties are an instrumental driver of political life in all modern representative democracies including India. Hence, it is crucial to study how the Indian party system has consolidated the prominence of political dynasties especially from the 1970s onwards, in the realm of both party organisation and the representative institutions. In this context, the article attempts to problematise the nature of dynastic politics in India and offers a framework to analyse the causes of its dominance to understand how it impacts the right to equal political opportunity and electoral competitiveness. The article makes three arguments. First, to better understand the amorphous nature of dynastic politics, two elements – dynastic representation in elected institutions and dynasty-led parties – need to be studied distinctively, despite some commonalities. Second, dynastic representation is largely ubiquitous in most political parties (in both dynasty-led and non-dynasty-led parties) due to the party's preference for legacy candidates and their higher chances of electoral winnability. Third, the article offers two typologies of dynasty-led parties, explaining why the dynasties’ grip over their parties, particularly in recent times, appears to be mostly performance-immune and in what circumstances some dynasty-led parties not only perform better in electoral contests than others but also face tough competition for retaining their dynastic control over the party. Lastly, the article concludes with some reflections on how dynastic representation and dynasty-led parties impact the form and substance of the Indian party system and democratic politics.

Violent Histories of Indigeneity and International Relations: Tales from the Indian State

The discipline of International Relations (IR) has been complicit in its representation of indigenous populations, often producing teleological narratives underpinning the superiority of the West and legitimizing colonial domination. The historical lived experiences of the indigenous peoples and their knowledge have been silenced and sidelined enabling the anchoring of discussions on political subjectivity and development from the vantage point of western modernity. The crisis of understanding modern statist practices of development plays out in the domain of ‘onto politics’—the politics of being whereby current governing practices are merely reflective of the colonial past. The practice of finance and the use of capital during the colonial era contributed to the embedding and actualization of colonial enlightenment thought on the inferiority of non-Europeans, while corollaries of money (property, trade) helped to produce implement hierarchies even amongst the indigenous colonized communities. The article is exploring a double relationship between knowledge production and practice: the first is how enlightenment scholars provided the rubric for racial hierarchies, and the second is the way money reified and reproduced those racist classifications through practice by looking at the colonial and post-colonial Indian state. In doing so, it advances the case to examine the relationship between indigeneity and knowledge production as constitutive to the modern Indian state.

Special issue: Multiple worlds of the Adivasi. An introduction

On 6 December 1959, the image of Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru inaugurating the Damodar Valley Corporation dam project in Bihar with a 15-year-old Adivasi girl called Budhini Manjhiyan was flashed across the national newspapers. This was an iconic moment in the national debate around development and change which was to dominate modern India on whether lands, predominately rural and tribal, were to be flooded to benefit the nation. Years later, in 2016, when the newspapers caught up with Budhini, she had returned to Jharkhand and was struggling to make ends meet for herself and her children. Her story resonates with the ways in which, in recent times, Adivasis are becoming increasingly visible as subjects in debates around indigeneity, identity, conversion, development, and climate change. The post-colonial Indian state and its allies, with a developmentalist agenda uppermost in their minds, have made loss of land, displacement, migration, and forced resettlement a part of Adivasi experiences. Forces of globalization, often in tandem with the policies of the Indian state, are engulfing marginal spaces. The increasingly powerful majoritarian narrative of the state subsumes alternate voices with easy nonchalance. The foregrounding of planetary narratives on the fate of humanity in the era of the Anthropocene erases the importance of particular locales and specific communities that could offer an alternative to declensionist narratives. But amid this marginalization, there also lies a story of the assertion of Adivasi agency. Voices of Adivasis—although multiple and fractured—can be heard as they assert their identity, express their politics, and creatively negotiate with the state and its institutions. Scattered across India in geographically differentiated terrains, pursuing different occupations, and speaking different languages, the experiences of Adivasis are varied, as they inhabit many worlds. Their stories point to the multiplicity of cultures and myriad ways of thinking that must be accommodated within the ambit of the nation, and yet offer the possibilities of different ways of living and being on this earth.

The privilege of the Indian passport (1947–1967): Caste, class, and the afterlives of indenture in Indian diplomacy

AbstractThis article examines the postcolonial Indian state's 20-year-long discretionary passports policy until 1967, often in collaboration with the British government in its efforts to limit growing numbers of Indian immigrants. While a vast scholarship has shown the racialized limits to mobility perpetuated by the passport and visa system against ‘coloured immigrants’, this article considers the Indian state's own restrictions over the emigration of a particular category of its ‘undesirable’ citizens. This passport regime was based on Indian diplomatic notions of the ‘international’ realm as one shaped by the journeys of migrants and imbued with discourses of indenture qua caste. The Indian state sought to prevent the mobility of ‘lower’ caste and class migrants who were deemed to be legatees of the dreaded ‘coolie’ and therefore unworthy of travelling abroad as representatives of India. Such a reading of the postcolonial Indian passport as a document of caste and class privilege goes beyond the existing literature which largely focuses on its use in the context of partition. In so doing, this article posits the histories and afterlives of indenture as a constitutive element in the making of Indian diplomacy, demonstrating that a focus on indenture facilitates a much-needed recovery of the narratives and euphemisms of caste in Indian diplomacy.

Voices from the Ground Neo liberal statecraft and KMSS’s resistance movements in Assam

Over the years, people’s resistance movements in Assam have protested state policies and actions on the control, appropriation and ownerships of natural resources. Such movements are marked by an active ideological orientation from the time of colonial annexation of this northeastern region to that of the formation of the post-colonial independent Indian state and yet still continues. Resistance against power of the state occurred within a recognized public arena, which is well goes with what present days resistance movements are doing against the coercive role of the state in Assam. Voices are erupted from the grounds that have a direct connection with the neoliberal state policy of neo-extraction of resources by marginalizing local communities who are said to be the traditional right holders over it. Illustrative to this, the resistance movement spearheaded by a peasant-based organization called Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti (KMSS)in Assam at the grass root level not only mobilizes the voices which are usually unheard, but build a strong counter force against the state power. In its decade long existence, the organization is offering its resistance politics by launching a serious of movements to resist anti-farmer and anti-people policies pursued by the government in the post-liberalization phase and has emerged as a powerful platform for representing voices of the economically-excluded, who fall behind the curtain of the neo-liberal economic paradigm.

Contesting Hierarchies and Multiple Identities: Conflict and Development in Bodoland

The post-colonial Indian state, the colonial legacy of communalism and various exclusivist identity-related movements have been significant forces in the Assamese political arena. Consequently, the displacement of the Assamese population has been greatly influenced by their exertion at specific junctures. Ethnicity, which becomes a fundamental element in the identification of dichotomies and emergence of conflicts rests upon symbolic resources and affective ties. Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC) is one of the most ethnically disputed corridors of lower Assam. The region has attracted the attention of national and international media for one of the most large-scale ethnic displacements in post-colonial modern India. The question of being indigenous and the fear of becoming a minority in an area which was once dominated by Bodos, has led to the eruption of a movement which `later on became a violent conflict. In this paper, I shall try to address underlying issues leading to ethnic acrimony within the diverse Assamese society with reference to the historical and demographic backdrop of Bodoland. The paper seeks to de-construct the proposed models of development as a solution for conflicts. Thereby, the argument would be made for decentralization of decision-making authority and power-sharing strategy directed by local leadership. Furthermore, the paper acknowledges that the side-lining of non-dominant ethnic groups has led to the continuation of hostilities within the region. The last section highlights the significant role of civil society and the implementation of affirmative action which becomes critical for securing political rights for inadequately represented communities which may grant them political authority and social legitimacy.

External Definition or Self-assertion of Separateness: Understanding Muslim Identity in Post-colonial India

Muslim identity like any other identity is discretely constituted, defined by language, religion, caste, class, sect and numerous other diverse roles. Such an understanding largely seems to have eluded the public philosophy of the post-colonial Indian state and what seems to have remained central to it is their exclusive definition in religious terms and an exclusive emphasis on their religious engagements. This paper looks at this external religious definition of the community and identifies this definition in the ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ identity construction processes and interprets other important developments which have all compounded to shape a separate Muslim identity in India. It analyses the construction of Muslim identity and attempts to understand the separateness that they have exhibited in post-colonial India. The argument follows that Muslim identity in India has been externally defined with an emphasis on religious aspects and that their separateness remains a quintessential result of this external definition.

Jayaprakash Narayan and the politics of reconciliation for the postcolonial state and its imperial fragments

Jayaprakash (JP) Narayan was an activist, politician and political thinker who attempted to use peace negotiations on India’s borders to renegotiate the postcolonial Indian state. This article tracks JP’s efforts to find non-national vehicles for regional nationalist demands through his positions on the contentious political questions of a Nagaland in India, and a Tibet in China. It locates JP within the Anglophone international peace movement that transitioned from support of Indian independence to a critique of the state violence of the Indian government, and traces JP’s thinking and work in support of some degree of autonomy for Tibet and Nagaland. Finally, this article connects these projects to JP’s non-statist critique of Indian state sovereignty, arguing that through a more decentralised and inclusively organised India, JP sought to re-organise what decolonisation had wrought.

Japanese invasion, war preparation, relief, rehabilitation, compensation and ‘state-making’ in an imperial frontier (1939–1955)

ABSTRACTThis paper looks at the history of state-making in an entangled imperial frontier. The northeastern frontier of British India was a mosaic of princely states, administered and un-administered territories. The presence of the colonial state in the region was contentious, marked by violence on one hand and philanthropy on the other. The Japanese invasion of the region during World War Two had several unintended ramifications. Wartime and post-war developments produced institutions and social experiences which facilitated the process of state-making in the region. Relief and Rehabilitation project of the colonial state, and later distribution of monetary compensation was not merely governed by moral or legal obligations but was part of a larger project of imperialist reconquest in Asia after the surrender of the Japanese with Manipur and Naga Hills as the base. This project also provided the postcolonial Indian state with institutions to continue the process of state-making of its own.

Roads, tribes, and identity in Northeast India

ABSTRACTAlong with military expeditions and social and anthropological surveys, road-building projects were prominent strategies of the British in India when it came to dealing with tribes and territorialization of the frontier regions. Roads for territorial expansion and resource extraction were the core agenda of the colonial project in Northeast India. The post-colonial Indian state on the other hand built roads in the region for securing the borders, promoting national integration, and linking external markets. This article posits that road building has always been an act of power, which has at different times been aimed at smoothening relationships, securing borders, (dis)connecting people, enabling trade, creating spaces of contestation, or diluting boundaries between varied ethnic groups. The article analyzed the colonial state-making project through road construction and linked to the contemporary Indian state approach to infrastructure development in tribal-dominated areas of Northeast India.

Nation-building and the political impasse in India’s north-eastern region

ABSTRACTThis paper discusses the politics of India’s nationalising policies towards the ‘region’ called the ‘north-eastern region’ in general, and Manipur in particular, of the post-colonial Indian state. Such policies are informed by a two-pronged strategy, the first by militarism and the second by what I identify as developmentalism. This strategy stresses the unilateral nature of India’s nation-building projects, and how it has deliberately or inadvertently brought dissatisfaction among the native population when they have unmasked the disruptive substance of nation-building approach to this hinterland.

‘Our periodic table of hate’: The archive of 1984 Punjab in Jaspreet Singh’s Helium

ABSTRACTHighly critical of the Indian government's cover up of the 1984 Sikh pogroms, Indian-Canadian author Jaspreet Singh offers a scathing expose of the anti-Sikh violence in his 2013 novel Helium. Singh experienced first-hand the ‘holocaust’ of 1984 in Delhi, and as a diasporic Indian since 1990, he is also intimately familiar with the burdens of postmemory among Sikhs in the west, many of whom sought asylum abroad in the wake of 1984. Influenced by Primo Levi and W.G. Sebald, Singh constructs a multi-generic ‘archive’ of the crimes of 1984 in Helium, which articulates the lingering trauma of the Sikhs and challenges the image of a unified, multiculturalist, secular-humanist postcolonial Indian state. Drawing on exhaustive research, Helium is a hybrid of fiction, survivor and relief worker testimonials, photographs, drawings, documentary, thriller, and inter-textual narrative—because the horror of 1984 cannot be recounted through a single medium or genre or voice. In considering its archival form and political intent, my article establishes Helium as a bold, ethical attempt to record the anti-Sikh violence of 1984 in order to bring justice to both the dead and the survivors.

(Un)Modifying India: Nationalism, Sexual Violence and the Politics of Hindutva

The postcolonial Indian state has since its inception used sexual violence to keep resurgent rebellions in check within its formal territory, and has for long provided the means of the production of sexual violence to dominant sections of society. In this essay I suggest that with the rise of the Hindu right to political power at key levels of states and the centre over the last three decades, a new social and political dynamic has been unleashed. Sexual violence has come to constitute public and private lives in unprecedented ways that include a radical realignment of public and private spheres as well as the production of a rejuvenated masculinist state and society seeking to resignify tradition and modernity within the framework of Hindutva or Hindu supremacy. While this force signals a political defeat for liberal and secular feminism at some level, it also opens up new opportunities to reimagine the vocabularies of freedom and rights against the new political order.

Gender, tribe and development: a case study of the Reang tribal community in Tripura (Northeast India)

The article critically examines the gendered impacts of state-led development among the Reang tribal community in Tripura (Northeast India) and outlines causes of gender-based inequalities that affect Reang women’s ability to engage in livelihood, achieve financial independence and participate in political affairs of the state. The article outlines two interlinked arguments. First, gender-based inequalities are not adequately addressed by the postcolonial Indian state which tends to homogenise members of tribal communities through development policies by privileging ethnicity over gender. Second, gender-based inequalities are also not adequately addressed within the Reang community highlighting complex intra-tribal dynamics wherein differential notion of inequalities among the Reangs and position of certain influential actors within the community determines which issues are addressed and which are marginalised.

The Global Mental Health movement and its impact on traditional healing in India: A case study of the Balaji temple in Rajasthan.

This article considers the impact of the global mental health discourse on India's traditional healing systems. Folk mental health traditions, based in religious lifeways and etiologies of supernatural affliction, are overwhelmingly sought by Indians in times of mental ill-health. This is despite the fact that the postcolonial Indian state has historically considered the popularity of these indigenous treatments regressive, and claimed Western psychiatry as the only mental health system befitting the country's aspirations as a modern nation-state. In the last decade however, as global mental health concerns for scaling up psychiatric interventions and instituting bioethical practices in mental health services begin to shape India's mental health policy formulations, the state's disapproving stance towards traditional healing has turned to vehement condemnation. In present-day India, traditional treatments are denounced for being antithetical to global mental health tenets and harmful for the population, while biomedical psychiatry is espoused as the only legitimate form of mental health care. Based on ethnographic research in the Hindu healing temple of Balaji, Rajasthan, and analysis of India's mental health policy environment, I demonstrate how the tenor of the global mental health agenda is negatively impacting the functioning of the country's traditional healing sites. I argue that crucial changes in the therapeutic culture of the Balaji temple, including the disappearance of a number of key healing rituals, are consequences of global mental health-inspired policy in India which is reducing the plural mental health landscape.

Postcolonial penality: Liberty and repression in the shadow of independence, India c. 1947.

This article reports primary archival data on the colonial penal history of British India and its reconfiguration into the postcolonial Indian state. It introduces criminologists to frameworks through which postcolonial scholars have sought to make sense of the continuities and discontinuities of rule across the colonial/postcolonial divide. The article examines the postcolonial life of one example of colonial penal power, known as the criminal tribes policy, under which more than three million Indian subjects of British rule were restricted in their movements, subject to a host of administrative rules and sometimes severe punishments, sequestered in settlements and limited in access to legal redress. It illustrates how at the birth of the postcolonial Indian state, encompassing visions of a liberal, unfettered and free life guaranteed in a new Constitution and charter of Fundamental Rights, freedom for some was to prove as elusive as citizens as it had been as subjects.

Local Pasts

This article examines the salience of space and emotions in histories of Rampur, the last Muslim-ruled princely state in the colonial United Provinces in British India. It addresses, in particular, the categories of space and subjectivity by exploring place identity (Rāmpūr/Rampūrī) and the sentiment of belonging to Rampur (Rāmpūrīyat), which convey emotional attachment of the self to space. Emotional identification and sense of place also influence spatial practices. There is a shifting relationship between space and the way inhabitants relate it to their identity (or identities), which can be analyzed historically to understand how space and emotions are socially constructed and accrue further meanings. I examine a history of emotions by exploring a literary “space of imagination” where love of and attachment to Rampur are articulated and experienced. The paper focuses on local-history writing in Urdu to map the historical and emotional aspects of identifications with Rampur. Its local histories are marked by emotions of pride, love, nostalgia, and practices of memory, remembrance, and forgetting, all of which produce its “emotional geography.” Literariness, or a self-consciously literary sensibility, limns Rampur with meaning and qualities, particularly through descriptions of its geography and environment and the qualities of its inhabitants that connect the place with its people. The paper situates in history these shared emotions and their transformation, especially amid changes during the colonial period, the Partition of British India, and the integration of the princely state of Rampur into the post-colonial Indian nation state.

Political Aesthetics of the Nation

This essay argues that aesthetic approaches to studying politics can allow us to read politics in more nuanced ways. Through the study of murals and statues in the Indian parliament, it is suggested that the politics of art and the art of politics are conjoined. In particular, the essay examines the ways in which the postcolonial Indian state reproduces the discourse of nationalism and modernity through its production of a nationalist aesthetic and how the consumption of this aesthetics results in struggles over meaning-making and its legitimacy.