William Gould

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.

Congress Radicals and Hindu Militancy: Sampurnanand and Purushottam Das Tandon in the Politics of the United Provinces, 1930–1947

A recent trend in the historiography of north India has involved analyses of ‘Hindu nationalist’ motifs and ideologies within both mainstream nationalist discourses and subaltern politics. A dense corpus of work has attempted to provide historical explanations for the rise of Hindutva in the subcontinent, and a great deal of debate has surrounded the implications of this development for the fate of secularism in India. Some of this research has examined the wider implications of Hindutva for the Indian state, democracy and civil society and in the process has highlighted, to some degree, the relationship between Hindu nationalism and ‘mainstream’ Indian nationalism. Necessarily, this has involved discussion of the ways in which the Congress, as the predominant vehicle of ‘secular nationalism’ in India, has attempted to contest or accommodate the forces of Hindu nationalist revival and Hindutva. By far the most interesting and illuminating aspect of this research has been the suggestion that Hindu nationalism, operating as an ideology, has manifested itself not only in the institutions of the right-wing Sangh Parivar but has been accommodated, often paradoxically, within political parties and civil institutions hitherto associated with the forces of secularism. An investigation of this phenomenon opens up new possibilities for research into the nature of Hindu nationalism itself, and presents new questions about the ambivalent place of religious politics in institutions such as the Indian National Congress.

Rethinking “Diaspora”: Bengal’s Muslims and hidden migrants

ABSTRACT This review essay explores the key themes of Chatterji, Alexander and Jallais’s Bengal Muslims in terms of how it develops new possibilities for thinking about diasporas more generally. The essay argues that the book potentially presents new ways of exploring the following: migrant agency, the relationship between different spatial and cultural forms of migration, and the importance of “mobility capital”. The essay suggests that some of these more nuanced approaches to movement do not easily encompass the “internal” and transnational forms of Bengali migration, but that there are many ways in which the book opens up new ways of thinking about the history of mobility, and the relationship between migration (and movement of ideas) in local and transnational spaces.

Paper, public works and politics: tracing archives of corruption in 1940s–1950s Uttar Pradesh, India

In moving away from older linear narratives around the costs and benefits of ‘corruption’ to development and democratic processes, social scientists have tended to downplay temporality in their work on the phenomenon in the global South. Historical research, however, offers a different kind of nuance around moments in which corruption becomes important in political and administrative discourse. Examining archives on corruption in detail and comparatively poses different questions about the operation of the everyday state. It also provides alternative means for exploring the nature of citizenship, national belonging in India and how the disempowered are often unevenly affected by corrupt acts. Using two case studies in the Public Works Department during state transition in the late 1940s and early 1950s, in India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, this article examines how archives convey multiple and contingent meanings to early postcolonial discourses of ‘corruption’. Such archives present the phenomenon as a vehicle or symbolic resource for larger political processes over the period. This potentially challenges our perspective on some of the larger questions surrounding the early postcolonial state, the nature of civil/political society in that period for India, ideas of national belonging and the relationship between India and Pakistan.

The U. P. Congress and ‘Hindu Unity’: Untouchables and the Minority Question in the 1930s

In a letter to Sir Samuel Hoare in September 1932, on the eve of his ‘fast unto the death’ against the principle of separate electorates for untouchables, Gandhi wrote:For me religion is one in essence, but it has many branches and if I, the Hindu branch, fail in my duty to the parent trunk, I am an unworthy follower of that one indivisible, visible religion…. My nationalism and my religion are not exclusive, but inclusive and they must be so consistently with the welfare of all life.

Contesting secularism in colonial and postcolonial north India between the 1930 and 1950s

Abstract This article re-positions debates about the apparent ‘crisis’ of Indian secularism in relation to political events in the important phase of state transformation between the 1930s and 1950s. By looking at how the meaning of secularism was contested by political actors themselves in Uttar Pradesh, it argues that the ideological ambiguity of Indian secularism was the product of political debates and conflicts in these critical years. It suggests further that, in the decades spanning Indian independence, the real scope and limits of secularism within the polity were determined in local and provincial contexts, as much as on the national stage. In these years, political leaders attempted to define the relationship between religious tradition and ‘scientific development’ by reference to specifically Indian, as well as European philosophies, traditions and histories. In particular, the many Uttar Pradesh Congress visions of Indian secularism, represented by a palimpsest of ideological positions, could not have been exclusively shaped by an overarching modernist nationalist ideology (as many scholars suggest). Much more important was the need for political leaderships to manage a rapidly changing political context, and an unprecedented expansion of demand for state power and resources in the new Indian democracy.