This paper demonstrates that there have been three distinct waves of Maoist insurgency in India since 1947. We construct an ideal typical model of Maoist insurgency that is used to compare the roles played by local populations, insurgents, and state counterinsurgency measures across space and time. This allows us to demonstrate that the commonly accepted narrative of Indian Maoist insurgency must be fundamentally rethought. The Naxalbari outbreak in 1967 and the subsequent insurgency in West Bengal is generally agreed to be the central point in the history of Maoist insurgency in India. But our analysis demonstrates that it was comparatively short-lived and atypical. We instead trace the genealogy of Indian Maoism to Telengana in the late 1940s. The common feature linking all three waves is the persistence of insurgent activity among various tribal or adivasi communities in the central Indian “tribal belt.” Their overriding grievances are the historically iniquitous relationships produced by the processes of state and market expansion that have incorporated and subordinated adivasi populations who previously had a large degree of socioeconomic and political autonomy. The state's counterinsurgency strategy has consisted of violence combined with developmental and governance interventions. This has pushed Maoist insurgency to the margins of Indian political life but has been unable to eliminate insurgent activity or address the fundamental grievances of adivasis. We conclude by arguing that Maoist insurgency in India should not be considered as crime to be resolved by state violence, or as an economic problem requiring the intensification of developmental measures, but as a matter of politics.

A more or less stable territorial order in Europe emerged out of the unprecedented violence, mobility, and ethnic cleansing that characterized the Second World War and its immediate aftermath. 1 Similar transformations unfolded in the colonial territories of the European empires, and the 1947 advent of the nation-states of India and Pakistan was mediated through great violence, displacement, and victimization. The event known as partition was both a fratricidal civil war and a refugee crisis, which heralded novel political projects that were in many ways the vanguard of a trend of decolonization that defined global history in the decades after 1945. This article argues that the mid-century ruptures in the subcontinent were not incidental to or undermining of the nascent Indian nation-state project, but were instead constitutive events through which a new state and regime of sovereignty emerged. I will explore how the conversion and cooption of subaltern violence were central to generating consent for the nascent nation-state project, and suggest that the transformative potential of crisis and violence has been overlooked in our understanding of how new formations of political power developed in the subcontinent.The province of Punjab, divided between India and Pakistan, was the principal and most visible site of violence and dislocation in 1947. Through efforts to absorb violence, namely the processes of refugee relief and rehabilitation, expectations of the nation-state burgeoned and it was radically empowered to intervene in Indian society. 2 Violence was not confined to Punjab, and over the past two decades scholars have brought into partition narratives the Acknowledgments: I would like to thank Shruti Kapila for helping me develop the arguments presented here. Faisal Devji, Sunil Khilnani, Chris Bayly, Simon Layton, and Nasreen Rehman have all contributed valuable comments on earlier drafts. I also want to thank the anonymous reviewers for CSSH, and editors Andrew Shryock and David Akin, for their many helpful suggestions.

Jawaharlal Nehru was both a historian and a self-conscious agent of historical change. This essay explores his political thought by bringing these two perspectives together. I argue that his approaches to a number of issues, including the state project that has been his most significant legacy, shared a concern with linking together the past, present and future. My concern here is primarily with the post-1947 phase of Nehru's career, which was marked by key shifts in his political thought due to a perceived transformation of temporal experience and an altered relationship with history. By attending to the way his thought worked through notions of temporality and historicity, this article offers insights into Nehru's understanding of technological modernity, violence, socialism, the individual, the nation and the role of the state.

For nearly three decades prior to 1947 federation was the dominant and most plausible model for reforming Britain's Indian Empire. Federation offered a capacious framework for innovating upon the sovereign landscapes of empire, for imagining a wide array of nonnational futures, and for elaborating questions of rights and democracy. This essay examines official projects of federation in interwar India, efforts that culminated with the “Federation of India” envisioned by the 1935 Government of India Act. These projects sought to codify the Raj's uncodified, plural, and ambiguous imperial regime of sovereignty. As a result, the nearly six hundred “princely states” or “Indian States” had a major influence over the course of India's constitutional development. The 1935 Act inaugurated the most decisive phase in late colonial India's political and constitutional development by unleashing a competition over sovereignty in the subcontinent. It was in this context that a fully sovereign constituent assembly was adopted by the Indian National Congress as their fundamental demand. Federation played a decisive role in the development of republicanism in India.

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