South Asian Histories of Citizenship, 1946–1970

Chatterji, Joya

doi:10.1017/s0018246x12000428

Cited by 80 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…These oral narratives broadly resonate with the story told by historians like Joya Chatterji (2007Chatterji ( , 2012 who have studied partition and migration on India's eastern border intensively. As I have discussed in the previous section, support was provided by the central and state governments, although it was chaotic and coloured by cynical political games that generally involved 'batting' refugees away as much as possible.…”

Section: Refugees and Immigrants In Coastal Odisha: A Brief History Omentioning

confidence: 63%

Nullification of citizenship: negotiating authority without identity documents in coastal Odisha, India

Chhotray

2017

Contemporary South Asia

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This paper discusses the case of a community of Bengali immigrant settlers along the coast of Odisha in India at the centre of a unique citizenship controversy. Families have arrived here gradually over the years since 1947, and have generally acquired a range of identity documents from Indian state agencies. These documents certify to a range of rights that signal social and political participation within India: land ownership, voting rights and the receipt of official welfare subsidies. With little warning, a 2005 order by the state government following a high court directive led to the production of a list of 1551 persons, declaring such persons as ‘infiltrators’. The list ostensibly comprises those who have entered India illegally after 1971 or born to parents who entered illegally. While no deportation, as originally intended, has taken place, the nullification of their various documents of citizenship has created a void in their lives. This paper examines the wider politics of the case, especially focusing on how those with nullified documents negotiate the authority of the local state and actors within their own society, and what this reveals about the ever contested nature of citizenship in post-partition India

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Section: Refugees and Immigrants In Coastal Odisha: A Brief History Omentioning

confidence: 63%

Nullification of citizenship: negotiating authority without identity documents in coastal Odisha, India

Chhotray

2017

Contemporary South Asia

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“…While the author is aware that there is a large body of recent work on citizenship, particularly in Asia, this article means to focus on citizenship in the context of social histories. For further reading on citizenship in Asia see Chatterji, “South Asian Histories of Citizenship, 1946‐70”; Ku and Pan, Remaking Citizenship in Hong Kong ; Jayal, Citizenship and Its Discontent ; Roy, Gendered Citizenship , 1‐43.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Building Burma: Constructing Rangoon's Urban Influence on Citizenship and Nationhood

Sugarman

2016

History Compass

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While Burma has often been discussed at the margins of South and Southeast Asian historiography, contemporary scholarship has begun to construct Burma as central to wider regional and inter‐Asian histories. This essay considers how notions of nationhood and citizenship relating to Rangoon's urban environment can begin to be understood in light of recent historical work on other Asian port cities. Looking at published work on Asian cities like Bombay, Hong Kong, and Singapore, this article constructs a contextual framework from which Rangoon's role in building a Burmese identity can be analysed. Nikhil Rao's House, But No Garden on Bombay offers a productive means through which a middle‐class and commercial Burmese identity could be constructed in Rangoon's pre‐war ‘suburbs’, while Alan Smart's The Shek Kip Mei Myth on Hong Kong and Loh Kah Seng's Squatters into Citizens on Singapore provide a way of understanding the role that disaster and crisis play on forming identities of belonging and citizenship among the poorest sections of Rangoon's war torn post‐war society. These cities, along with others across the Indian Ocean world – each with a long, continuous and often separate tradition of historical inquiry – can then help begin to build an understanding of citizenship and nationhood in Burma as it relates to the construction of Rangoon's urban environment.

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“…The movement of people and the drawing of boundaries suggest that we need to explore popular imaginaries of changing spaces of living and citizenship, not least because these often determined rights too. 38 In other respects, the documentary regime of each new state was formed around changing concepts of space. 39 Some of the most recent work on migration in South Asia also clearly suggests that we need to look again at movement and space around Partition by exploring concepts such as 'mobility capital' as a means of digging out the grass-roots drivers of population movement in the region.…”

Section: The Spatial Turn and Partitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spaces before Partition: An Introduction

Gould

Legg

2019

South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies

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This introduction frames a selection of papers that encourage a richer spatial understanding of the years before the Partition of India. The papers respond to two types of questions. One type is spatial (at what scale do we approach Partition? Through which spaces should we attempt to understand both micro and macro processes? Movements across what distances constituted Partition?). The second type is temporal (what timescales do we invoke when approaching Partition? Of what was it the endpoint? What sort of memories were invoked and made during India's multiple partitions?). This introduction establishes the main trends in Partition historiography, tracked through the last two decennial anniversaries. It sketches out spatial analyses of Partition to date, regarding territory and displacement especially, but shows that much of this geographical interpretation has been implicit rather than explicit, and that most have begun with Partition. Whilst framing many of their arguments in twentieth-century colonial practice, and occasionally straying into the post-colonial, the papers in this special issue mostly focus on the 1930s-1940s at a range of scales (from the international, through the nation-state, to cities, mohallas and courtrooms). Collectively they make the argument that if Partition has a history, then it also has an historical geography. We hope these papers will help people read these histories and geographies with a finer spatial eye.

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South Asian Histories of Citizenship, 1946–1970

Cited by 80 publications

References 14 publications

Nullification of citizenship: negotiating authority without identity documents in coastal Odisha, India

Nullification of citizenship: negotiating authority without identity documents in coastal Odisha, India

Building Burma: Constructing Rangoon's Urban Influence on Citizenship and Nationhood

Spaces before Partition: An Introduction

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