2014/05/05 by Sukumar Muralidharan · 2 citations
Social Sciences · #Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East #Social and Economic Development in India #South Asian Studies and Conflicts #Scholarship #Accession #Context (archaeology) #History #Democracy #State (computer science) #Law #Memoir #Political science #Solidarity #Sociology #Politics #Archaeology #European union
paper · doi:10.1177/2230807514524091
published in History and Sociology of South Asia 8(2), 119-138 (SAGE Publishing)
openalex publication_date 2014/05/05 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
The past is never dead. It is not even past—William Faulkner This article reviews recent literature on the accession of the princely state of Hyderabad to the Indian union in 1948, in the context of events that have raised the temperature of communal confrontation in the region. Scholarship on nation formation has drawn attention to the role that the act of remembering only to forget, plays in cementing a sense of nationalist solidarity. By that criterion, the accession of Hyderabad presents a case of historical record that may have been abridged and in part effaced, without the consent of its more substantial minority group. This allows for historical tensions to emerge anew as fault-lines where modern democratic competition could spill over into communal antagonism. Recent efforts to restore the historical record, one by way of a memoir and the other, a work of archival scholarship, assume great importance in this regard.