2019/10/17 by Sarah Ansari, William B. Gould · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Anthropological Studies and Insights #Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies #Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East
paper · doi:10.1017/9781108164511.003
openalex publication_date 2019/10/17 · openalex created_date 2019/11/22 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
Chapter 1 explores how ideas, promises and agendas originating in the nationalist movements of the first half of the twentieth century shaped not only the policies of independent governments in South Asia, but also the kinds of demands that their new citizens made of them. It looks at the complex and contingent relationship between state ceremony, power and everyday understandings of citizenship and rights after 1947. On both sides of the new border, citizenship ideas in practice were made more ‘vernacular’, and shaped, if not necessarily reconfigured, by popular engagement with the idea of ‘citizenship’, whether this was propelled from below or directed from above. It also considers how far – for India and Pakistan during their early years – the process of ‘making citizens’ was also about consolidating the unitary state in ways that could often allow each country to emulate the other, despite contrasting contexts.