Widowhood and Motherhood in Cinematic Imagination in the Historical Context

This article engages with the question of how Hindi cinema sought to synergize and imagine the nation, community and land in independent India as the embodiment of widowhood. I suggest that this process of embodiment was the culmination of a long historical-political process. The focus of this chapter is a 1957 Hindi film by Mehboob Khan named Mother India. The film stands out as a powerful emotional drama. On the one hand, this film marked continuity with the Indian literature, painting, theatre and cinema of the colonial period,1 on the other, Mother India influenced the culture of a new Indian nation after 1947. Within a decade after India attained independence from Britain, the Indian cinema became an undisputed site where the cultural engineering of a new nation could be enacted.2

Love Jihad and the Governance of Gender and Intimacy in Hindu Nationalist Statecraft

What role does the Islamophobic theory of “love jihad” play in the politics of Hindu nationalist statecraft—the legal codification of Hindu nationalist ideology—in India today? In this article, we address this question through a critical analysis of how the idea of “love jihad” relate to both (a) a conservative politics of governing gender and intimacy in which women are constituted as subjects of protection and (b) an authoritarian populism grounded in a foundational opposition between true Indians and their anti-national enemies within. The article begins by exploring how “love jihad” has transformed from an idea that was used to legitimize extra-legal violence by Hindu nationalist vigilantes to the status of law, with a particular focus on the BJP-ruled state of Uttar Pradesh. We then situate the “love jihad” laws in relation to a regime of gender governance that constitutes women as subjects of protection - and specifically protection by state and nation—and discuss how this resonates with a pervasive patriarchal common sense in Indian society. Finally, we show how “love jihad” laws and the wider conservative politics of gender and intimacy within which it is embedded feeds into the authoritarian politics of the Modi regime, in which Muslims are consistently portrayed as enemies of the Indian nation, and reflect on what this entails for the country’s secular political order.

Locating the Tawa’if Courtesan-Dancer: Cinematic Constructions of Religion and Nation

The development of the Hindi/Urdu cinema is intimately connected to the history of artistic performance in India in two important ways. Not only did hereditary music and dance practitioners play key roles in building this cinema, representations of these performers and their practices have been, and continue to be, the subject of Indian film narratives, genres, and tropes. I begin with this history in order to explore the Muslim religio-cultural and artistic inheritance that informs Hindi/Urdu cinema, as well as examine how this heritage has been incorporated into the cinematic narratives that help construct distinct gendered, religious, and national identities. My specific focus is on the figure of the tawa’if dancer, often equated with North Indian culture and nautch dance performance. Analyzing the ways in which traces of the tawa’if appear in two recent films, Dedh Ishqiya and Begum Jaan, I show how this figure is placed in a larger representational regime that sustains nationalist formations of contemporary Indian identity. As I demonstrate, even in the most blatant attempts to define the Indian nation as “Hindu,” the “Muslimness” of the tawa’if—and by extension the cinema she informed in ways both real and representational—is far from relinquished.

Reappraising B. R. Ambedkar’s Thoughts of Inclusive Indian Nation

Dr B. R. Ambedkar, one of the makers of the Indian Constitution, is known best as the emancipator of the untouchables. Ambedkar’s effort to make India as a nation through ‘breaking the internal differences’ is much debated and not widely recognized as he has still been confined only to his identity as a ‘liberating leader of the Dalits’. Ambedkar’s ideas—caste annihilation, securing rights to the depressed class, representation of the oppressed in political affairs, egalitarian economic arrangement, women’s rights and thoughts on democracy—all have the potential to be linked with his ideas of a nation, which is inclusive in nature.

Ownership and Trust in Banks: Evidence from the First Bank in an American Indian Nation

In collaboration with an American Indian nation, we conducted a survey that is the first of its kind in Indian Country. The survey explored tribal members' financial experiences in the months before the first bank opened on their reservation. In this article, we connect respondents' reported ex ante trust in banks to their support for the new bank. Descriptively, respondents are highly supportive of the new bank whatever their ex ante trust in banks, but the relationship is nonlinear. Native ownership seems to be particularly silent to those in the middle or low end of the trust distribution.

On the Problem of Nation(alism): Persistence and Absence in the Indian Post-Colony

The search for an origin of the nation is destined to remain structured by an aporia that signals the productive irresolution of signification. In a sense, presence is always to arrive in the future, to be made anew. In post-colonial India the Muslim other embodies the ghostly trace of an undecidable figure that characterizes the aporia at the heart of the claim of Hindutva nationalism to a universal purchase on Mother India. The Muslim other then, as the ghost of the undecidable, becomes a metaphor for the fundamental fracture or split in the Hindutva nationalist imaginary, a specter which cannot be resolved and which indeed founds the very (im)possibility of the Hindutva Indian nation itself.

Histories of Indian Citizenship in the Age of Decolonisation - Oliver Godsmark. Citizenship, Community and Democracy in India: From Bombay to Maharashtra, c. 1930–1960. London: Routledge, 2018. 204 pages. ISBN: 9780815393627, HC $155. ISBN: 9780367892937, PB $ 47.95. - Uditi Sen. Citizen Refugee: Forging the Indian Nation after Partition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 300 pages. ISBN: 9781108425612, $99. - Ornit Shani. How India Became Democratic: Citizenship and the Making of the Universal Franchise. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 294 pages. ISBN: 9781107673540, $34.99.

This essay discusses the important contributions of three new works on Indian citizenship by Ornit Shani, Uditi Sen, and Oliver Godsmark. Their books discuss the territorial partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan in 1947, the framing and inauguration of the Indian Constitution in 1950, the preparation of voter rolls and the first democratic elections, and linguistic reorganisation of Indian states in 1956, alongside questions of refugee rehabilitation, counterinsurgency measures and rising ethnonationalisms. The emphasis is not only on the legal regimes of national citizenship, but also how it is unevenly mapped and experienced. This emphasis on territoriality is an invitation to ask questions about continuity and change in the transition from empires to nation-states, as well as invented pasts and imagined futures that transcend national borders set up after the end of colonial rule.