Taylor C. Sherman

From ‘Grow More Food’ to ‘Miss a Meal’: Hunger, Development and the Limits of Post-Colonial Nationalism in India, 1947–1957

Charting the rise and fall of the Grow More Food programme in India, this article explores a set of tensions that characterised development policies in the first decade after Independence in India. The post-colonial Indian state staked its legitimacy on securing economic independence for India, and, in particular, on being able to feed its citizens without resorting to importing food. The transition to food independence, however, was fraught and contested. In particular, this piece argues, the plans to get the nation to ‘Grow More Food’ as part of this drive towards national self-sufficiency were marked by a conflict between the dream of providing the benefits of development to all Indians and the reality that independent Indias resources were extremely limited. In addition, this transition also involved a transformation in the nature of nationalism. The ruling Indian National Congress struggled to formulate a post-colonial nationalism because it was torn between using the state for development and urging the people to shape their own destiny outside of the state. It was also deeply ambivalent about rural citizens, who were viewed both as a burden and as a potentially limitless public resource. This article suggests that one of the defining features of post-colonial development was the tension between scientific and democratic development.

From subjects to citizens : society and the everyday state in India and Pakistan, 1947-1970

This special issue of Modern Asian Studies explores the shift from colonial rule to independence in India and Pakistan, with the aim of unravelling the explicit meanings and relevance of ‘independence’ for the new citizens of India and Pakistan during the two decades after 1947. While the study of postcolonial South Asia has blossomed in recent years, this volume addresses a number of imbalances in this dynamic and highly popular field. Firstly, the histories of India and Pakistan after 1947 have come to be conceived separately, with many scholars assuming that the two states developed along divergent paths after independence. Thus, the dominant historical paradigm has been to examine either India or Pakistan in relative isolation from one another. While a handful of very recent books on the partition of the subcontinent have begun to study the two states simultaneously, very few of these new histories reach beyond the immediate concerns of partition. Of course, both countries developed out of much the same set of historical experiences. Viewing the two states in the same frame not only allows the contributors to this issue to explore common themes, it also facilitates an exploration of the powerful continuities between the pre- and post-independence periods.

Migration, Citizenship and Belonging in Hyderabad (Deccan), 1946–1956

Whilst the history of the Indian diaspora after independence has been the subject of much scholarly attention, very little is known about non-Indian migrants in India. This paper traces the fate of Arabs, Afghans and other Muslim migrants after the forcible integration of the princely state of Hyderabad into the Indian Union in 1948. Because these non-Indian Muslims were doubly marked as outsiders by virtue of their foreign birth and their religious affiliation, the government of India wished to deport these men and their families. But the attempt to repatriate these people floundered on both political and legal shoals. In the process, many were left legally stateless. Nonetheless, migrants were able to creatively change the way they self-identified both to circumvent immigration controls and to secure greater privileges within India.

From Hell to Paradise? Voluntary Transfer of Convicts to the Andaman Islands, 1921-1940

The paper attempts to understand the challenges and opportunities which the penal settlement at Port Blair in the Andaman Islands presented to colonial governments in twentieth-century India. To this end, the paper examines a scheme drawn up in the 1920s which saw the introduction of a much more liberal regime for convicts in Port Blair. Under these plans, convicts were granted access to land and encouraged to bring their families from the mainland. This research reveals that the policies which determined the history of the settlement in this period were defined by two tensions. First, there was a constant battle between the central authorities and provincial governments over the shape and purposes of the settlement. Second, there was a contradiction between the penal objectives of the colony and the larger strategies which aimed to develop the islands for the greater British empire.

Education in early postcolonial India: expansion, experimentation and planned self-help

Abstract After independence India’s leaders committed the country to democracy with universal franchise and to pursuing a socialistic pattern of society. As part of these interlocking projects, it was widely recognised that India’s educational systems needed reform. However, with scarce resources, Indian policy-makers faced the dilemma of whether to improve the existing system, which served a narrow, urban elite, or expand it to the entire population, as the Constitution promised they would. This overview of education policy in the first two decades after 1947 finds that, at the centre, Indian planning did not monopolise control over education. Rather, India’s was a socialism of scarcity, which relied on self-help efforts by the people to build the institutions of the welfare state. However, by relying on communities to use their own resources to build local schools, this DIY socialism entrenched existing inequalities.

‘A new type of revolution’: socialist thought in India, 1940s–1960s

ABSTRACT Although it is often said that early postcolonial India was socialist, scholars have tended to take this term for granted. This article investigates how Indians defined socialism in the two decades after independence. It finds that there were six areas of agreement among Indian socialists: the centrality of the individual, the indispensability of work, the continued importance of private property, that the final goal was a more equal – but not flat – society, that this change had to be brought about without violence, and that the final goal of Indian socialism ought to be spiritual fulfilment. Understanding how Indians defined their version of socialism, it is argued, will help scholars re-evaluate the role of the first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, in defining the goals India pursued after independence. It will also re-orient our understanding of the expectations and limitations of the Indian state in this crucial period in Indian history.

A Gandhian answer to the threat of communism? Sarvodaya and postcolonial nationalism in India

It is an axiom of early postcolonial Indian history that Nehru and his statist conception of nationalism and of economic development dominated the political and economic life of India. As such, scholars have assumed, Gandhian ideas, especially radically non-statist answers to the problems of development, lost influence in this period. This article explores Gandhian economic thinking, in the form of the Bhoodan Movement and three of the thinkers on sarvodaya economics in the 1950s: Vinoba Bhave, K.G. Mashruwala and J.C. Kumarappa. It goes on to demonstrate the complex relationship that these men and their ideas had with Nehru and various levels of the Indian state. It argues that the non-statist ideas remained important in the development of the postcolonial Indian nationalism.