Imperial afterlives: citizenship and racial/caste fragility in Canada and India (original) (raw)
Related papers
Mitra Schottli Pauli 2019 Citizenship, Hybridity and the Post-Colonial State in India
Citizenship, Hybridity and the Post-Colonial State in India, 2019
Citizenship plays an essential role in the evolution of states. Concepts of citizenship have 'flown' from Roman and Greek antiquity to the modern, liberal and democratic European idea of citizenship. We analyse the dynamic nature of citizenship, both as an idea and in practice. We argue that stakeholders constantly reimagine and renegotiate citizenship. Memory, visualisation and social construction play an essential role. This perspective opens up space for a new theory of citizenship to emerge. One yielded not merely from the experience of the older, liberal democracies, but also that of younger, post-colonial states. The transcultural lens of hybridity extends the discussion beyond the narrow notion of the nation-state. We discuss and propose the notion of hybridity as a heuristic device. And we assess the following givens and problems in 'mainstream' political theories of citizenship. (1) The inherent linearity of the historical narrative underpinning the storyline of citizenship. (2) The implicit assumptions of methodological nationalism in framing the unit of analysis. (3) The challenge of incorporating differentiation and variation; into a concept that has been conceived as watertight and fixed. In our case study of citizenship in modern India, we draw attention to the entanglement between citizenship and endogenous ideas of self-hood. Citizenship is a crucial interface between the state and society. It is a fundamental building block of political order. Why was India more successful than other post-colonial states in providing the bases of citizenship? The political, legal as well as moral bases. We see India's success in turning subjects (and rebels) into citizens as a function of political institutions, processes and memory. These institutional arrangements draw both on the modern state and traditional society. In the process, they create a 'hybrid state'. The findings of a large-N survey on the perception of citizenship in India are presented. Our cumulative index of citizenship comprises measures for self-definition, perceived own empowerment, and an appraisal of citizen responsibilities. It highlights the role of gender, caste, and place of residence for citizenship. We argue that citizen-making is not a teleological process. But rather a strategy from which hybrid categories emerge. These must be socially meaningful and morally accessible to the individual if citizenship is to be resilient. We conclude with a discussion of hybridisation as a process and product. Hybridisation illuminates the strength of indigenous ideas suitable to a particular society. And their relation to national, regional and local values and power structures.
The Immigrant Policies of Canada an d Racism A Postcolonial Reading of the Indian Experience
India Migration Report 2024: Indians in Canada, 2024
This paper explores the intricate dynamics of immigration in Canada, particularly focusing on the Indian diaspora, which has emerged as one of the fastest-growing minority groups in the country. Despite Canada’s self-proclaimed image as an immigrant-friendly nation, the underlying colonial attitudes of the predominantly white population reveal a more complex narrative. By challenging the dichotomy between "Canadians" and "immigrants," this study argues that all Canadians, regardless of their racial background, have immigrant histories. The paper highlights how the colonial legacy has shaped contemporary perceptions and policies regarding immigration, particularly the racialization of migrants. While Canada aims to welcome over 460,000 new immigrants annually under its Immigration Levels Plan 2023–2025, this influx predominantly serves capitalist interests, reflecting a preference for skilled labor primarily from populous countries like India and China. Despite the multicultural ethos, systemic biases persist in the formulation of immigration policies, favoring white Europeans while marginalizing non-white communities. The historical context of these policies reveals a master-slave dichotomy, perpetuating a narrative that positions non-white immigrants as subordinate. Through a postcolonial lens, this study emphasizes the need to critically reassess Canada’s immigration narrative, acknowledging the contributions and struggles of all immigrant communities while confronting the ongoing realities of racism and discrimination within Canadian society.
Denationalisation and discrimination in postcolonial India
International Journal of Discrimination and the Law, 2022
With the recent National Register of Citizens updating process in Assam (a northeastern state in India) and the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA 2019), there have been significant changes to India’s citizenship laws and policies. This may create one of the world’s largest stateless populations in modern times. These changes manifest the government’s othering process of creating binaries of belonging and non-belongingness between the majority Hindus and minorities (especially followers of the Islamic faith). In this article, taking these recent changes to citizenship as a case study, I discuss how India’s colonial past, the experience of partition, and the henceforth nation-building contributed to perceiving the ‘citizen’ primarily along Hindu majoritarian lines. I argue that the nation-building process in India was based on retaining and simultaneously re-establishing the ‘others’, thereby reinforcing colonial legacies in the structure and functioning of the postcolonial state. Consequently, this article deals with two questions, first, how the adoption of discriminatory citizenship laws and the risk of statelessness in India is rooted in its complex history, the impact of British colonial expansion and the postcolonial realities and second, what role ‘law’ has played in the process.
Citizenship as a caste marker: How persons experience cross-national inequality
Current Sociology, 2021
Extrapolating a recent conceptualization of caste from India to the global level, I argue persons experience cross-national inequalities via their citizenship as a caste marker. Rather than imagine castes as features of the fixed premodern Hindu social order, I posit castes are variable modern ascriptive social hierarchies subject to contestation and change in which economic and social distinctions are maintained through physical and symbolic violence. I show how, globally, nation-states exert physical and symbolic violence to normalize cross-national inequalities instituting a global citizenship-based caste order. My approach recognizes the importance of both global material relations emphasized by world-systems approaches and of symbolic structures central to global institutionalist approaches. I also underscore persons’ positions and experiences confronting nation-states’ might. Power struggles concentrated on nation-states result in variability of global relations’ mutually reinforcing material and symbolic dimensions. I use caste features appearing “essential” (i.e. ascriptive social closure, “ethnic,” “religious,” and “purity” distinctions) as heuristics for identifying possible locations of caste construction and contestation. I identify citizenship rules, nation-states’ territorial nature, nationalism, and visa, border, and naturalization rituals as such caste development sites. Vulnerable groups (stateless persons, refugees, migrants) both challenge the citizenship caste order and experience viscerally its physical and symbolic violence.
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2020
While recent amendments to India's Citizenship Act are designed to exclude Muslims from claims to citizenship in India, this essay seeks to problematize the assumption that Hindu migrants who seek citizenship under the new Act are incorporated seamlessly and unproblematically into the nation. The constitutional grant of citizenship and social acceptance into everyday local worlds are not always congruent. My ethnographic examples are drawn from an earlier wave of migration of Hindu men from Sindh into western India. They illustrate both a feeling of love and anticipation at the prospect of Indian citizenship as well as an acute sense of betrayal that they did not get "anything else" apart from legal citizenship-which in this case is social dignity, honor, and acceptance into local Hindu caste society. While the state may read cross-border migration in the terms of broad religious categorizations that are then written into its citizenship laws, there is no good reason to assume that these legal documents translate into everyday life in the same manner. The grant of citizenship-even to the Hindus that the state is so eager to make into citizens-is not the end of the story of cross-border migration; often it is just the beginning of a long negotiation for migrants who need to learn a new language of belonging in order to integrate. That language-as this ethnographic example from Kutch shows us-has to do as much with caste equations as with the question of religion or nationality per se.
“Debates on Citizenship in Colonial South Asia and Global Political Thought (c. 1880–1950)”
The Routledge Handbook of the History of Colonialism in South Asia, ed. by Harald Fischer-Tiné and Maria Framke (Routledge, 2022), pp. 450–462.
In colonial India, liberal ideas featured prominently in the language and discourses of both the colonizer and the colonized. Despite providing imperialism with a moral justification, liberalism became significant in Indian discourses of political and civil rights given its abstract universal terminology. This chapter examines some of the liberal-underpinned debates on national visions and citizenship that animated the period under analysis and that remain meaningful today. While being better appreciated if inserted in a wider transnational frame, such debates also contribute to our understanding of Indian democracy and political trajectories as shaped by various, and often divergent, bodies of knowledge.
India’s Citizenship (Amendment) Act: A Throwback to Debates around the ‘Long Partition’
2021
My paper examines the prehistory of India's controversial new Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 ('CAA'), which expedites citizenship procedures for non-Muslim minorities from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Through looking at a longue durée examination of British India's Partition, I argue that the Partition's dislocation conflated the otherwise oppositional categories of 'citizen' and 'refugee' in the formative years of the Republic. Through examining Constituent Assembly and parliamentary debates, judicial precedents and archival files and file notings between 1947-65, I demonstrate how taking responsibility for non-Muslims in Pakistan went hand in hand with ring fencing Muslims at a point where the relationship between the state, citizenship and nationality was abruptly prised open. Rather than an aberration, therefore, the CAA is the culmination of a strand of ideas and decisions that have informed Indian citizenship since Independence, which perhaps a refugee law could go some way to ameliorate.
South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 2016
This article explores the three themes of civic nationalism, imperial identities and Punjabi migration by focusing on the life of Sundar Singh, a migrant to Canada who came to prominence in the early 1900s, through his speeches. Sundar Singh employed the idea of equal status of all British subjects in the British Empire to argue for the migration of Sikhs to Canada and other British settler societies and their being treated with respect and fairness on their arrival in their new homes. Although Singh's claim to Britishness was rejected in many sections of Canadian society, it was supported by some white Canadians. The article suggests that British identity of the Empire's Dominions could, in some circumstances, be a force for the inclusion of South Asians. The article also illustrates the way in which developments in India impacted upon those of the diaspora across the British Empire. This idea is developed by demonstrating the importance of the triangular relationship between India, the United Kingdom and Canada as highlighted by the issue of Punjabi migration within the British Empire.