scholarly journals AT THE NATION-STATE’S EDGE: CENTRE–PERIPHERY RELATIONS IN POST-1947 SOUTH ASIA

2016 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 509-539 ◽  
Author(s):  
ELISABETH LEAKE
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Central Government ◽  
Large Degree ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Political Autonomy ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Local Actors ◽  
History Of ◽  
Autonomy Movements

ABSTRACTThis article examines centre–periphery relations in post-colonial India and Pakistan, providing a specific comparative history of autonomy movements in Nagaland (1947–63) and Baluchistan (1973–7). It highlights the key role played by the central government – particularly by Jawaharlal Nehru and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto – in quelling both insurgencies and in taking further steps to integrate these regions. It argues that a shared colonial history of political autonomy shaped local actors’ resistance to integration into the independent nation-states of India and Pakistan. This article also reveals that Indian and Pakistani officials used their shared colonial past in very different ways to mould their borderlands policies. India's central government under Nehru agreed to a modified Naga State within the Indian Union that allowed the Nagas a large degree of autonomy, continuing a colonial method of semi-integration. In contrast, Bhutto's government actively sought to abandon long-standing Baluch political and social structures to reaffirm the sovereignty of the Pakistani state. The article explains this divergence in terms of the different governing exigencies facing each country at the time of the insurgencies. It ultimately calls for an expansion in local histories and subnational comparisons to extend understanding of post-1947 South Asia, and the decolonizing world more broadly.

Jumbos and Jumping Devils

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nisha P R
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Social History ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The Social ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of

Jumbos and Jumping Devils is an original and pioneering exploration of not only the social history of the subcontinent but also of performance and popular culture. The domain of analysis is entirely novel and opens up a bolder approach of laying a new field of historical enquiry of South Asia. Trawling through an extraordinary set of sources such as colonial and post-colonial records, newspaper reports, unpublished autobiographies, private papers, photographs, and oral interviews, the author brings out a fascinating account of the transnational landscape of physical cultures, human and animal performers, and the circus industry. This book should be of interest to a wide range of readers from history, sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies to analysts of history of performance and sports in the subcontinent.

Beyond Naxalbari: A Comparative Analysis of Maoist Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Independent India

2012 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 832-862 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Kennedy ◽  
Sunil Purushotham
Keyword(s):  
Large Degree ◽  
Economic Problem ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Political Autonomy ◽  
Market Expansion ◽  
Maoist Insurgency ◽  
History Of ◽  
State And Market ◽  
Typical Model

AbstractThis 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.

The History of Guinea

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohamed Saliou Camara
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Arable Land ◽  
Mineral Resources ◽  
French West Africa ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Nation States ◽  
History Of ◽  
Military Campaigns ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Civilian Leadership

Like most of post-colonial African nation-states, Guinea is the product of Europe’s colonial partition of the continent at the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885. France followed up on the Berlin arrangements with military campaigns against West African rulers and treaties with other European colonial powers (Britain and Portugal) vying for territories in the region and the Republic of Liberia. However, the ancient communities whose descendants inhabit the Republic of Guinea were part and parcel of some of the greatest kingdoms and empires that marked West Africa’s history between the 6th and 19th centuries (Ghana, Mali, Songhay, Batè, Wassolon, and Futa-Jallon). Islam, which was introduced into the region through trans-Saharan trade, scholarship, and wars involving Muslim North Africa and Islamized elites of the Bilad as-Sudan, gained prominence and ultimately became the dominant religion in Guinea. The Atlantic Slave Trade spearheaded by the Portuguese, and the succeeding legitimate trade opened West Africa to colonial conquest and occupation in the late 19th to early 20th centuries. Under French occupation, Guinea underwent major political, cultural, social, and economic mutations brought about by events and processes such as its integration into the French West Africa Federation and its multifaceted participation in the World Wars, as well as in France’s colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria. In the process, a nationalist anti-colonial consciousness evolved and crystallized, leading to the country’s advent to independence in 1958. As the sole French colony to reject Charles de Gaulle’s Franco-African Community, its modern history is in many ways unique. Since independence, Guinea has gone through a pro-Soviet single-party regime, military rule, and a shaky transition to the current civilian leadership, whose record of democratic governance has been checkered at best. Economic development has also been largely elusive, despite the abundance of arable land and mineral resources. This notable uniqueness notwithstanding, the history of Guinea does epitomize in some respects that of the African continent.

The Colonial Genealogies of Political Decay and Legitimation Crises: An Enquiry into the Predicament of State-construction in Post-colonial South Asia

2020 ◽  
Vol 76 (2) ◽  
pp. 276-293
Author(s):  
Sanjeev Kumar H. M.
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
Economic Reforms ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
After Effects ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
Legitimation Crisis ◽  
State Construction ◽  
History Of

This article is an attempt to conceptualise and theoretically explain the colonial genealogies of the processes of state-making and state-construction in post-colonial South Asia. In pursuit of this, the article seeks to theorise the colonial ways of providing a sense of fixity of political territoriality, held together by colonially crafted institutions of metropolitan governance, as an independent variable in determining the nature of the processes of state-making and state-construction in the region. On this count, an enquiry into the complex trajectory of these post-colonial political processes, which are the dependent variables for this article, is the fundamental problematic of analysis. This problematic would be decoded with the help of a dual conceptual framework, involving what Samuel Huntington designates as political decay and the legitimation crisis given by Jurgen Habermas. In the context of South Asia, the predicaments of political decay and legitimation crisis, according to this article, manifest as after-effects of engagement on the part of the region’s post-colonial polities with the imported values of colonial modernity and neoliberal economic reforms. By drawing instances from two countries of the Indian subcontinent, Pakistan and Bangladesh, the article tries to show how these after-effects have played out in the form of a tumultuous political history of the processes of state-making and state-construction. The article, in this way, is an attempt to theorise the inter-sectionalities between the colonial and post-colonial periods of South Asia. This has been done here by problematising such a historical inter-sectionality from the perspective of the two intervening variables—the received values of colonial metropolis and the morals of modernity—mediated through neoliberal economic reforms.

scholarly journals Creating Religious Identities: Buddhist Monuments in Colonial and Post-Colonial India

2008 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Himanshu Prabha Ray
Keyword(s):  
Archaeological Sites ◽  
Director General ◽  
Archaeological Survey ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Buddha ◽  
And Control

This paper draws on my work on the maritime history of early South and Southeast Asia and the use of sea-lanes of the Indian Ocean by pilgrims for visits to sites associated with the life of the Buddha. A second perspective is provided by the rediscovery of Buddhism in Europe coinciding with the development of new disciplines, including archaeology. These disciplines were introduced into India with the government-sponsored Archaeological Survey of India, founded in 1871. Alexander Cunningham, the first Director-General, brought Buddhism to the forefront and established its study as a separate sub-discipline. This had far-reaching implications for the demarcation and archaeological investigation of many of the monuments linked to Buddhism, especially Bodh Gaya and Sanchi. This paper addresses the issue of the manifestation of a Buddhist identity in colonial India. It is often suggested that this identity owed its origins to the formation of the Mahabodhi Society and the emergence of nationalism in Sri Lanka. This paper examines political developments in India in the context of the Navayana or the Neo-Buddhist path, forged by B.R. Ambedkar on the 2500th anniversary of Buddha’s parinirvana, or demise, in 1956. To what extent did this newly formed identity become interlinked with the identification and control of archaeological sites in India and their redefinition? How did the renegotiation of Buddhist identity affect India’s relationship with Thailand?

scholarly journals Rohingya Refugees in South Asia: An Exploration of Social Borders and the Margins

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-45
Author(s):  
Rachel Irene D'Silva
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Special Section ◽  
Border Studies ◽  
International Studies ◽  
State Legislation ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Marginalized Communities ◽  
Postcolonial State ◽  
History Of

By reviewing the case of the Rohingya, a marginalized community in the postcolonial state of Myanmar, this article (as part of a special section on South Asian border studies) explores the perspective of Rohingya refugees and conceptualizes social borders from the voices of the refugees. Juxtaposing postcolonial borders with narrations of Rohingya in India brings out the politics of the marginalized communities in the country’s borderlands. The article shows how borderscapes are shaped for refugees that articulate ideas of social justice and recognition. Building on international studies of the Rohingya, I conducted fieldwork into the situation of the Rohingya in India. The resulting interviews add to our understanding of Rohingya refugees and address a scarcity of literature on the Rohingya in border studies. Through the analysis, I discover the history of the Rohingya identity in Myanmar, which contextualizes their statelessness. Social borders and state legislation reinforce barriers to citizenship and sharpen the exclusion of migrants, refugees, and other stateless peoples in South Asia.  Keywords: South Asia, Refugees, Rohingya, post-colonial states, boundaries, borders, margins, Southeast Asia, marginal communities.

South Asia's Eugenic Past

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Hodges
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Birth Control ◽  
Reproductive Behavior ◽  
Contraceptive Use ◽  
Population Control ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Public Meetings ◽  
History Of

The strong continuities between colonial eugenics agendas and postcolonial population control efforts are striking elements in the history of eugenics in South Asia. This article discusses the role of different strands within colonial eugenics—particularly neo-Malthusianism—at different points in time and in the region's different postcolonial nations. It mentions that eugenics in a poverty-stricken colonial context provides a powerful and enduring template for connecting reproductive behavior to the task of revitalizing the nation as a whole. This article relates the history of eugenics in colonial India with the history of birth control advocacy. It discusses in detail the eugenics associations that held public meetings and advocated contraceptive use. It provides an understanding of the relative insignificance of heredity to Indian eugenics in light of the conditions for the development of eugenic science in India.

‘Useful’ and ‘Earning’ Citizens? Gender, state, and the market in post-colonial Delhi

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (06) ◽  
pp. 1924-1955
Author(s):  
ANJALI BHARDWAJ DATTA
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
The State ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Refugee Women ◽  
Point Of Entry ◽  
Indian State ◽  
History Of ◽  
National Disaster

AbstractThe Indian state treated the partition of Punjab as a ‘national disaster’ and training for refugee women was deemed essential to restore the social landscape; yet the kind of help it offered to refugee women rested on its clear assumptions and biases about the kind of work that was appropriate for them: women were offered training in embroidery, stitching, tailoring, and weaving, as these are associated with feminine and household-based skills. This article will reveal that the state rehabilitation enterprise was primarily masculine in focus. The state treated women refugees as secondary earners and as guardians of hearth, kith, and kin; it did not see them playing a definitive role in nation-building in post-colonial India. In the absence of state supportive policies, refugee women were compelled to take up informal jobs like petty trading, domestic service, and labouring work. This article suggests that refugee women were handicapped in the labour market at their very point of entry. It traces the history of women's informalities in Delhi. In doing so, it investigates the feminization and commercialization of urban space in twentieth-century Delhi. It urges that women made space in more than one way: identifying fragmentary livelihoods, producing small-scale capitalism, and creating informal markets.

From Protests to Policies: Actors, Spaces and Processes

2020 ◽  
Vol 69 (3) ◽  
pp. 368-384
Author(s):  
Niloshree Bhattacharya ◽  
Manish Thakur
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
The State ◽  
Think Tanks ◽  
Transnational Networks ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
History Of

This paper addresses a rather understudied aspect of the ways through which protests get translated into policies by focussing on the actors, spaces and processes. It further identifies key actors in the policy making formulation process, which we call ‘policy intermediaries’. It discusses the emergence of ‘policy intermediaries’ in relation to the history of social movements in post-colonial India. It situates the policy making processes in the country and the role of ‘policy intermediaries’ therein, in the overall context of changing configurations of relationships amongst the state, non-governmental organisations, think tanks and the emergent transnational networks and discourses. By implication, it maps out some of the attributes of middle class activism with illustrations from select social movements in India. The paper explores the multiple spaces in which ‘policy intermediaries’ function, the diverse roles they play and the networks in which they are wilfully or otherwise enmeshed.

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