In March 1948, Mridula Sarabhai sent a report from Anandpur Sahib, Punjab, to India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, Rameshwari Nehru and Lady Mountbatten. Sarabhai discussed how a group of Sikh women ‘recovered’ following abduction during Hindu-Sikh-Muslim violence had been transferred into the care of the Pakistan military. Sarabhai, the daughter of a powerful industrialist family of Gujarat and a key figure in the women’s movement in India, had been tasked by the new Government of India to lead recovery operations for women abducted over the border during Partition violence. On three occasions, Sarabhai learned, this particular group of women had been ‘handed back’ to their ‘abductors’. This practice, she claimed, was going on in more than one place in the border areas, and it was also suggested that the Pakistan military were ‘making money through this scheme’.Footnote ¹

Partition – that is the division of British India into the separate states of India and Pakistan on 14/15 August 1947 – involved the massive transfer of people with perhaps as many as fourteen to sixteen million refugees eventually moving in opposite directions across the new border that was drawn up in the weeks leading up to Independence. The uncertainties, as illustrated by Sarabhai’s report, bound up in what was the twentieth century’s most significant exchange of populations (or alternatively forced migration) cannot, however, be easily explained as a simple narrative of victimhood. In the case of abducted women, many resisted the assumptions of the recovery operation based on its effect on their personal circumstances, with a number of first-hand accounts describing how women themselves refused to be ‘saved’, or to comply with the patriarchal assumptions of this particular population exchange.Footnote ² Their agency meant that in some notable instances women identified as ‘abductees’ evaded recovery. On 1 March 1948, to give one example, Sushila Nayar and Gurbachan Singh acting as social workers reported to Nehru from Patiala that around 175 Muslim women had shown reluctance to leave their new homes or to be moved on from camps back to their original families.Footnote ³ Reportedly, around a quarter of these women directly resisted ‘rescue’ by running away from the recovery camp in which they had been housed.Footnote ⁴

The often-forcible removal of people across newly drawn national boundaries highlights important dichotomies in the meaning of political independence in South Asia. On the one hand, there certainly existed a sense of powerlessness among many people who were directly subject to the vicissitudes of Partition. After all, the women of Anandpur Sahib and other places on both sides of the new border were ‘recovered’, whether they liked it or not, by the state authorities, both Indian and Pakistani, and so in many respects their individual freedom was denied. In the uncertain months and years that straddled British India’s division, it was unclear how the supposed agents of each state were expected to act, and where the limits of their responsibilities for recovering citizens lay. But the predicament of abducted women did not represent a simple contradiction between powerlessness and agency. In practice, there was little consensus as to how the emerging rights of each state’s new citizenry would be formed or framed in this period of significant political transition. The fate of India and Pakistan’s recently created citizens was often determined either by high-level processes of intergovernmental negotiation or more precariously by the frequently arbitrary decisions made by local administrations, police officers and other government servants. Meanwhile, there were opportunities thrown up by this uncertainty – chances for individuals to shape and exercise their rights in new ways, and to take advantage of the ambiguities created by Partition and its accompanying movement of peoples on an enormous scale.

The idea of the citizen in both India and Pakistan was put together hurriedly and subject to change, not least because the geopolitical shape of postcolonial South Asia itself was decided in a matter of weeks. As late as March 1947, there was no absolute certainty that Partition should or would result from the decolonization of British India. Within the gradually forming imagining of ‘India’ and ‘Pakistan’ that emerged out of discussions during and after the Second World War, there was always scope for alternative scenarios. In the fraught negotiations leading up to the transfer of power, and especially during the Cabinet Mission in the spring and summer of 1946, the separation of India and Pakistan was not regarded as inevitable. In fact, it is now well established that the ‘father’ of Pakistan – Muhammad Ali Jinnah – would have welcomed a solution short of absolute division, and that the Congress under Nehru accepted the prospect of Partition from March 1947, at least at the central level, as a lesser of many evils, and a means of preserving Congress’s political authority.Footnote ⁵ The constitutional frameworks of postcolonial South Asia were also in large part the legacy of the same structure of colonial governance and so retained much that was similar after 1947: the provisions of the 1935 Government of India Act that had envisaged a federal system within a greater India eventually formed the basis of India’s 1950 Constitution, and it similarly underpinned much of Pakistan’s 1956 Constitution. But in the decades since Independence, India and Pakistan have come to be seen as very different places. Their subsequent evolution has taken them in apparently diverging political directions, with India often held up as a postcolonial ‘success story’ in contrast to Pakistan’s reputation as a failing, if not failed, state. This oversimplification of their post-1947 histories has emphasized difference at the expense of recognizing commonalities at work across the region. This book is about how in the mutually interconnected social and political histories of these two new states we can find the messy realities of citizenship in each place. This is a history that includes the highest decisions of states as well as the politics of the streets, but it is a narrative that can only be complete if told in both places at once.

The historian of Germany Celia Applegate, in her exploration of regional histories in a European context, has argued persuasively for the need to ‘regard the specificity of places as the outcome of social and cultural processes interacting with physical environments’.Footnote ⁶ Likewise, for sociologist Alan Warde, ‘places are not automatic contexts for collective life but [are] created’, and so can be regarded as ‘resources to be manipulated in the creation, recreation and restructuring of the contexts in which people are made – or make themselves’.Footnote ⁷ Ignoring the spatial turn of the last couple of decades is no longer a realistic option for historians: to quote Doreen Massey, ‘places’ represent networks of complex associations that ‘have over time been constructed, laid down, interacted with one another, decayed, and renewed. Some of these relations will be, as it were, contained within the place; others will stretch beyond it, tying any particular locale into wider relationships and processes in which other places are implicated too’.Footnote ⁸ Moreover, because people ‘move and stop, settle, and move again … places are shifting and changing, always becoming through people’s engagements – material as well as discursive – in, through and with them’. ‘Place’, therefore, ‘is not where social relations simply take place, but an inherent ingredient of their modalities of actualization’.Footnote ⁹ In other words, rather than opposed to or disruptive of ‘place’, mobility – or movement – is an inherent part of how spaces are defined and operate,Footnote ¹⁰ and therefore central to the processes by which citizenship is also, imagined, constructed or contested.

Boundaries of Belonging responds to these conceptual insights regarding the significance of ‘place’ by centring its exploration of the impact of Independence on citizenship and rights in two specific localities – one Uttar Pradesh (UP), an Indian state after 1947, and the other Sindh, a province in Pakistan. Both were parts of British India that were less associated with the immediate upheavals of Partition as compared with the Punjab and Bengal, but which came to be hugely affected by its longer term consequences for Indian and Pakistani lives. Accordingly we use UP and Sindh – the focal points of our individual interests as historians of South Asia – as the common lens through which to investigate what ‘belonging’ came to mean more broadly in the recalibrated circumstances of the 1940s and 1950s. Crucially, our concentration on UP and Sindh allows us to explore the fallout from Independence and Partition from the perspective of two places that, on the one hand, were not physically divided, and, on the other, where the shifting status of local minority communities (which had become significant before 1947) proved to be critical to ideas about ‘India’ and ‘Pakistan’ moving forward.

UP and Sindh – the former occupying much of the Ganges basin in north India, the latter straddling the Indus River further to the west – may appear on first inspection to have been separated during the colonial period by more than simply geographical distance. In particular, UP’s location at the political heart of British India, for instance, contrasted markedly with Sindh’s relatively peripheral position under the Raj. But by the early twentieth century both places could boast key centres of imperial activity. In 1911, accompanied by great pomp and ceremony, the political capital of British India transferred from Calcutta to New Delhi, on the border of UP, and the province had become a political thermometer for much of the rest of the country with its vast population, key party political figures and important cities. Karachi’s rapid expansion meant that that by the First World War it was exporting more wheat than any other port in Britain’s global empire and hence challenging Calcutta and Bombay for business.Footnote ¹¹ There were also clear, if not necessarily acknowledged, parallels in terms of the communal patterns that existed in the two provinces. Both possessed influential minority communities, whose horizons (not simply political) had for a long time extended beyond the borders of their provinces.Footnote ¹² Moreover, by the time of the Second World War, UP arguably represented a microcosm of India as a whole: the proportion of Muslims to the total population in UP, combined with pockets of (urban) dominance, more or less mirrored the overall situation in India. But Paul Brass’s statement that UP Muslims (15 per cent of the population according to the 1931 Census) during the late colonial period ‘constituted a cultural and administrative elite’ with higher rates of change ‘in several respects, including urbanization, literacy and government employment’, could equally have been applied to Sindhi Hindus (c. 25 per cent), albeit with the addition of ‘commercial’ to their description.Footnote ¹³ With the rise of competing nationalist organizations over the course of the early twentieth century, and the emergence of religion as a source of conflict, these local communal realities endowed political developments taking place in both UP and Sindh with broader significance.

By the interwar period, UP’s leading role in all-India politics had become well-established.Footnote ¹⁴ The province was now home to key movements that spanned the nationalist spectrum, including the Indian National Congress (the Nehru family famously had its base there), Hindu nationalism (the re-organized Hindu Mahasabha in Banaras in 1923 was headed by the Allahabad politician, Madan Mohan Malaviya) and Muslim political leadership (closely associated with Muslims living in the small towns or qasbahs of the province). UP spanned the ‘Hindi’ heartland of India, and its educational institutions, periodical publications and intellectual life were central to the crucial language debates of the late colonial period. It was in UP where early support for the Muslim League emerged in towns such as Aligarh, and it was UP Muslims who helped to drive the eventual claim of League politicians to speak for Muslims at an all-India level.Footnote ¹⁵ Another decisive development with far-reaching all-India significance were the knock-on political consequences generated by the decision of UP Congress politicians not to form a coalition with Muslim Leaguers there following the provincial elections of 1937. This move directly helped to set the scene for the increasingly separatist strategies of the latter at the all-India level.Footnote ¹⁶

Meanwhile, as an outpost of Bombay Presidency, an increasing number of Sindhi Muslims during the early twentieth century grew more politically aware of their minority status within what they regarded as a Hindu-dominated administrative and political unit.Footnote ¹⁷ These concerns prompted discussion at the Round Table Conferences held in London in the early 1930s about whether Sindh should be removed from Bombay Presidency and turned into a separate province (which duly took place in 1936 in the wake of the 1935 Government of India Act). Supporters of Sindh’s separation from Bombay deployed arguments that hinged (at least in part) on the ‘logic’ of its possessing a local Muslim majority, rehearsing (and perhaps contributing to) the League’s later claims regarding Muslim-majority provinces en masse from 1940 onwards. Moreover, as Sindhis today still remind other Pakistanis, the first official resolution demanding the creation of ‘Pakistan’ was the one passed by the Sindh provincial assembly on 3 March 1943, its mover – G. M. Sayed (ironic in view of his later espousal of Sindhi nationalism) – arguing that Muslims in India were ‘justly entitled to the right as a single separate nation to have independent national states of their own, carved in the zones in which they are in majority in the subcontinent of India’.Footnote ¹⁸ By 1947 – thanks to developments such as these – majority and minority communities in UP and Sindh alike had become increasingly sensitized both about their local position and in relation to the need (from their perspective) to protect their interests as the broader South Asian political landscape changed.

After Independence, UP and Sindh continued to play significant but different roles in the life of the new states of India and Pakistan. UP – as India’s new ‘Hindi heartland’ and with the largest number of seats of any state in the Constituent Assembly, and later in the Lok Sabha – remained strategically placed at the hub of all-India politics and proximate to New Delhi as federal capital of the Indian Union. Its population, which was over 60 million according to the 1951 Census making UP by far and away India’s biggest new state, endowed it with colossal political clout in relation to the nation-building politics of the late 1940s and 1950s.Footnote ¹⁹ Sindh, with the federal capital on its doorstep (Karachi was officially detached from the province in 1948 and turned into a federal territory), was also located in close proximity to the centre of power in Pakistan, though in practice many Sindhis felt that their province remained marginalized in political terms. From a population perspective, with only circa six million inhabitants in 1951, Sindh lagged considerably behind both East Bengal (42 million) and the Punjab (22.5 million). Like Bengalis, however, many Sindhis railed against what they regarded as the unfair dominance of Punjabis and muhajirs (Urdu-speaking migrants from India) within key institutions of the state such as the bureaucracy and the military, and for them, again like Bengalis, language became a particular bone of contention. With the introduction of the One Unit scheme in 1955, which merged the existing provinces in West Pakistan as a counterbalance to East Pakistan’s numerical majority, the province’s sidelining was further compounded, as was a growing sense of injustice among more nationalistically inclined Sindhis.Footnote ²⁰ But these similarities and distinctions aside, what UP and Sindh most certainly did have in common after 1947 was the continuing presence of relatively sizeable religious minorities as well as considerable ongoing refugee traffic. Alongside members of minority communities who chose not to leave, UP became the destination of choice for large numbers of Sindhi Hindus, while Sindh (including Karachi) absorbed even greater quantities of migrants from UP. Sindh and UP, thus, found their own relationship transformed, thanks to these post–Partition demographic realities. As Vazira Zamindar has highlighted in her analysis of the content of contemporary cartoons in Karachi’s Urdu-language press, refugees from UP who had taken refuge in cities in Sindh followed developments in their former home very closely from across the border.Footnote ²¹

As one of the first multi-sited studies of its kind, Boundaries of Belonging also follows what Frederick Cooper has described for French Africa as a ‘federal moment’. In it we explore postcolonial developments in the context of a possible larger set of processes related to South Asia’s postcolonial history that are not based on ‘automatic’ assumptions of absolute separation after 1947.Footnote ²² As a consequence, our book deliberately refrains from revisiting developments in those former provinces of British India most usually associated with the traumatic end of empire in South Asia. Existing work on the main ‘boundary’ regions of the Punjab and Bengal, and later Kashmir, which were most obviously affected by Partition violence, have generated a picture of Independence as a moment of crisis, rehabilitation and border making. However, as we argue, some of the important ‘hinterlands’ of Partition were also affected by the impact of territorial division and population transfer, if less proximately, and so provide an effective context for examining broader meanings of Independence for Indian and Pakistani citizens. Moreover, the fact that UP and Sindh – entangled as they came to be with each another – cannot provide answers to every question about what being an Indian or Pakistani citizen meant during this period reinforces the necessity of looking beyond Partition’s immediate ‘hot spots’ when assessing its longer-term consequences. UP – the key point of origin for Muslim migration to Pakistan in the years under scrutiny here – and similarly Sindh – the point of origin for many Pakistani Hindus who migrated to India from early 1948 onwards – may not have been physically cut in two as happened in the Punjab and Bengal, but these two particular places came to be intimately connected thanks to the pattern of migration flows between them that dragged on well into the 1950s. Both were also located in close proximity to where central state power was exercised, the federal capitals of Delhi and Karachi.

This approach also allows us to draw attention to how the ‘state’ in its different spatial guises operated on both sides of the new border, as well as what being a ‘citizen’ could signify for ordinary Indians and Pakistanis during a period of continuing flux and uncertainty. We explore how ideas and forms of citizenship in India and Pakistan were created by contingent processes of interaction between ‘state’ – its representatives and institutions – and ‘society’ – its citizens-in-the-making – in the decade after 1947. Boundaries of Belonging, therefore, is not principally concerned with the powerlessness of India and Pakistan’s populations in the face of bureaucratic and police violence, but more with the ways that new or revised forms of citizenship and ideas about the rights of the citizen were articulated despite, or sometimes because of, violence and displacement. India and Pakistan today possess some of the world’s most vibrant and diverse citizens’ rights movements, which have emerged since the rise of political populism across the subcontinent in the 1970s. But many of their key themes and campaigns – work conditions, the cost of living, corruption, tribal and peasant rights – have deeper historical roots that relate directly to earlier moments in the definition of citizen rights in different parts of South Asia. At the same time, very often, these forms of activism have been obscured by larger, better-known or more accessible state-centred citizenship discourses. Such hierarchies are addressed by our exploration of the messy citizenship contexts of Partition, characterized by the struggles of relatively marginal communities to assert their rights.

This book accordingly sets out to move past explorations of ‘formal’ notions of the citizen that approach rights as something only ‘transmitted’ by law and constitutions.Footnote ²³ Instead, it deliberately engages with everyday meanings of both citizenship and citizenship rights as these crystallized and – crucially – were contested in the two neighbouring countries. As well as narrating the apparent ‘conferring’ of rights from above, it explores ways in which ideas about rights were publicly circulated and how far these had an effect on early forms of legal activism. The creation and evolution of formal state-centred citizenship, and the particular entitlements and responsibilities that this status embodied, often stood in sharp contrast to vernacular ideas about citizen rights. The complicated link between these two levels of citizenship politics, we contend, sheds valuable light on tensions between belonging and exclusion, which we regard as the unfinished business of earlier nationalist struggles.

As part of our examination of the contested nature of citizenship in postcolonial South Asia, Boundaries of Belonging draws attention to the struggles for more inclusive citizenship that took place in both states, as marginalized groups to varying degrees excluded from ‘citizenship in practice’ sought to secure rights that they believed were due to them after 1947. That their demands for entitlements were often articulated in the vernacular – whether that of language, religion, caste, ethnicity or tribe – is significant for understanding what citizenship meant for ordinary people. The vocabulary of gender also entered the contemporary political equation as women similarly questioned – and challenged – what citizenship had really brought for them. Alongside formal efforts to establish notions of citizenship that squared with state-formulated priorities, ‘hidden citizens’ in both states appropriated the language of entitlement and rights to challenge asymmetries of power and exclusion that operated on both sides of the border.

None of these movements for rights in the late 1940s and 1950s made sense without some kind of reference to the idea of the state. In his famous 1991 article, Timothy Mitchell proposed that the idea of a boundary between state and society is simply an ‘effect’, namely an idea bound up with techniques of any particular political order.Footnote ²⁴ Mitchell himself built on Philip Abrams’s insight that the ‘ideological’ qualities of the state needed to be taken seriously in themselves.Footnote ²⁵ These approaches to the state have a particular resonance for South Asia, and have been fruitfully explored by anthropologists for the contemporary period,Footnote ²⁶ but as yet somewhat less so for the phase of transition to political independence itself. Without doubt, such treatments of the state (because they integrate social understandings of a state effect) need to be carefully historicized, taking account of how the state has been ‘imagined’ and debated at different levels of intensity over time and space. More recently David Gellner, when discussing life in South Asia’s contentious northern borderlands, has drawn attention to the suggestion made by Abrams that students of the modern state should ‘dispense entirely with “the state” as a category of analysis’, but equally he cautions against wholeheartedly following this advice on the grounds that:

In Boundaries of Belonging, we make the case for a historicized view of these same processes, in particular that the state mattered for most Indians and Pakistanis over the late 1940 and early 1950s, and their views on it were directly conditioned by the ‘aftershocks’ of decolonization itself. This unstable situation generated for many contemporaries a very specific historical sensibility: a notion of thinking both backwards and forwards in time, on the one hand involving reflection on past forms of colonial state control or repression, and, on the other, a series of forward-looking expectations linked to ideas of political freedom and responsibility. For this reason, the idea of the state, while being about local experience and contact, was also about imagining something in the process of realization, with an emphasis on achievement or failure. These perceptions were also informed by a sense of emergence from crisis. Concentrating on the immediate impact and fallout of 1947 itself means also concentrating on those whose recovery as citizens was also part of a political order: refugees, the displaced, the aforementioned abducted women and children who were theoretically separated from a state that acted upon them – a state that was presented as an autonomous set of institutions. But this sense of autonomy, it could be argued, was always a fiction that was itself created out of the conditions of the late 1940s.

The state in early post-Independence India and Pakistan therefore was not a uniform entity despite often being represented as such. Rather, it was a complex arrangement that worked through informal agents and appeared in different guises to different constituencies. Networks of formal and informal power, alongside neighbourhood and class structures, interacted with the state’s various institutional levels and affected its appearance and its actions.Footnote ²⁸ It was subject to conflicts between often competing social interests, which meant that its sway could be similarly unstable and unpredictable. The secrecy, for instance, surrounding the activities of state agents in contemporary India and Pakistan (such as the use of police informants) was established as a means of upholding the ‘fiction’ of a homogenous state that was presumed to act according to rules and principles, but which was ultimately arbitrary.Footnote ²⁹ The division between what was explicit and what was hidden in this way developed out of a historically and spatially conditional set of variables in the exercise of power over the long-term transition to Independence.

Put another way, the very circumstances of Independence brought about certain forms of everyday state practices in the context of ‘new’ ideas about the public sphere and freedom, which together created a gulf between ideological state effect and its quotidian practices. Because this process evolved within a context of new ideas about rights, such rights were always imagined in relation to changing notions of space, across both conceptual and actual internal/external borders. The notion of an individual’s citizenship rights in relation to the idea of the state, it could be argued, only made sense in a relative way to what they were/had been/might be in a different jurisdictional space. What the state meant and how the rights of the citizen changed was shaped by the relational spaces of India and Pakistan, and epitomized by the close connections or movement between such regions as UP and Sindh in these early years.

But the concept of space is determined as much by social, conceptual and legal relationships as much as it is by physical ones.Footnote ³⁰ In some places, frontiers and boundaries between particular spaces, especially those that divided nations, are extended into certain ideological constructions of the state too, and connect to other forms of social boundaries and differences. For example, the idea of ‘Pakistan’ in the North Indian state of UP encompassed at one and the same time: a state beyond India; a loyalty associated with a particular minority; a ‘space of potential’, such as ‘potential’ migration (the idea of the ‘intending evacuee’); and a relational space that connected to the property and civic rights of individuals as well as to recent history itself. Across the border in what had become the Pakistani province of Sindh, ‘India’ similarly dominated the collective imagination. In turn, the relationship between these jurisdictional spaces (of ‘Pakistan’ in India and ‘India’ in Pakistan), being also imaginary, formed part of a public sphere of political commentary that had only recently emerged from forms of strong state censorship. The idea of a ‘public sphere’ has been taken up by historians of India in relation to new public forms of visual communication,Footnote ³¹ and perhaps most extensively language.Footnote ³² Our concept of the public, however, was strongly conditioned by the varied popular experiences of political freedom in India and Pakistan’s early postcolonial years, not least because new freedoms from 1947 included those of expression. Historians working on the notion of the ‘public sphere’ in the very different historical context of pre-Revolutionary France have established how public opinion, and political references to it, worked to subvert the established authorities as a result of being suppressed or limited.Footnote ³³ Early postcolonial Indian and Pakistani publics had only just emerged from colonial control and censorship, and so, from this perspective, the organs of the public – above all the print media – provided important opportunities for exploring changing views of the state, and the assertion of rights around it.

In Boundaries of Belonging, therefore, we maintain that new forms of public freedom in South Asia – though limited by the preoccupations of its successor governments with security in the late 1940s and early 1950s – created a vibrant public sphere of debate about the state, its responsibilities and what Indians and Pakistanis could expect of it. Again, this can be seen particularly vividly for this period in the press. Among the most important apparently autonomous state structures that these print media discuss are those of spatial borders on the one hand and those of the law on the other. Both are perceived as entities that contain a sum of many parts and yet appear to be abstract, formal frameworks. Overall, it was the process of negotiation of these structures, as well as the discussion of them, that ultimately created a sense of what the state was and where its power was located. This process of negotiation by India and Pakistan’s new citizens was clearly multi-local – taking in the relative experiences of living in different places, or the discussion/debate about such intersecting local lives. This was the case at moments of mass movement (or when mass movement needed to be accommodated).

But we are cautious about overemphasizing mobility and so in addition examine how citizens’ experiences can be very much situated in particular places, related to scales of jurisdiction and political power, from local, to regional, national and international. Here we take account of the work of Stephen Legg, who has suggested that ‘an emphasis on scale [can serve] as a useful corrective to an overly networked emphasis on mobility, flows and transit across space’.Footnote ³⁴ We also draw on Rajnarayan Chandavarkar’s insight that the history of urban spaces cannot be taken out of their larger regional, national and international context, not least because of habitual movements of workers.Footnote ³⁵ Everyday reflections on the state, although apparently related to the local context, are never in practice so simply located but are also linked to broader notions of belonging and exclusion. The leverage that South Asia’s citizens thought that they could exercise in the late 1940s and 1950s – for instance, with their local municipal corporation, or with an officer controlling a public utility in a particular mohalla (urban neighbourhood) – was both imagined and ‘performed’ across space and scale; and it was conceptualized in relation to other scales of the state, as well as to other spaces and places, both imagined and real.

Ted Svensson in his comparative study of the ‘production’ of postcolonial India and Pakistan has pointed to how, ‘in the nascent years of Independence, notions of time and space became firmly intertwined within the boundaries of the nation state’.Footnote ³⁶ The contours and agency of these two nation states in the making ‘became possible and assumed their distinct shape on the basis of a performative ‘naming’ [… and] spatial notions [were] elevated to a position of cardinal significance within nation building and state formation’.Footnote ³⁷ By profoundly altering ‘notions of space … and of time’, particular ‘representations of the state and identity markers, specific traits and behaviours gained legitimacy and authenticity at the expense of others’.Footnote ³⁸ As a result, the event of Partition itself remained ‘central to nation building and the delimiting of state identity in, as well as between, India and Pakistan’, with narratives – as others have shown – continuing to unfold around this episode in both places to the present day.Footnote ³⁹

Accordingly, India and Pakistan’s political cultures, though distinctive in key ways, have also exhibited entwined spaces of and for citizenship at moments of political transition. For us, these multi-local and multi-scalar everyday interactions played themselves out most obviously and directly in the context of post–Partition refugee rehabilitation, where negotiation with the state involved direct claims about properties and family histories in spaces that could now be on the other side of an international border. But this principle applied, to differing degrees, in a range of other negotiations, not least between citizens and the bureaucracy, something that is also reflected in contemporary practices around the everyday state.Footnote ⁴⁰ This phenomenon of interacting with the local state, and discussing that interaction in the media, was heightened in our period as a result of the mass movements, dislocations and changes that occurred around Independence. Consequently, this forms one of the central themes of Chapters 2 and 3, wherein we explore the broad trajectory of developments playing out in our two specific contexts or places, UP and Sindh.

Our notion of the recently created Indian and Pakistani states is that these were entities that, in many respects, were only symbolically separated out from the social groups that they apparently served. To put it another way, as anthropologists of the ‘everyday’ have noted, they were ‘porous’ entities and the assumed boundary between them and society was a chimera or illusion.Footnote ⁴¹ The actions of ordinary Indians and Pakistanis had (and continued to have) consequences for what the state ‘is’; and also what it ‘does’. By extension, this lived reality affected (and affects still) the limits and possibilities of citizenship rights, for Indians and Pakistanis alike. Joya Chatterji has shown how the formal right of Indians and Pakistanis to hold their respective passports in the early 1950s was determined largely by who moved where, and when they moved, with this mutability eventually enshrined in citizenship legislation, namely Pakistan’s Citizenship Act of 1951 (revised in 1952) and India’s slightly later 1955 Citizenship Act. In relation to the latter, Chatterji describes it as a change from jus soli to jus sanguinis that was closely connected to how the return of Muslims to India – many of them coming back to UP from Sindh – was controlled.Footnote ⁴² We seek to extend Chatterji’s argument here to consider how far the actions and movements of ordinary people not only affected how they claimed formal citizen’s rights as holders of Indian and Pakistani nationality but in addition the ways in which substantive rights were negotiated over time. Citizens in both states undertook this process of negotiation unevenly and hierarchically. Yet because citizens’ groups were, on the one hand, a material part of the state, and, on the other, embroiled in the process of its meaning and representation, the definitions and boundaries of rights could still be changed by ‘movements of rights’ as well as by the physical ‘movements of migration’.

Arising from these contingent processes in which the state could assume quite different meanings to different groups of South Asian communities, as they migrated between different jurisdictions, there came to exist new and differentiated forms of citizenship. A useful additional conjectural framework in this respect is the one presented by James Holston who has explored how far marginal urban communities in Brazil, excluded from formal civic frameworks, have innovated alternative citizenship strategies. Holston’s view of the Brazilian Constitution, which was based on the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, is that it has historically enshrined legal inequality.Footnote ⁴³ Unlike Brazil, such inequalities do not form part of India’s 1950 Constitution, although, as we will explore in Chapter 6, there were categories of ‘citizen’ whose ‘pariah’ status came to be legally defined. In contrast, India’s far-reaching ‘Fundamental Rights’ consciously sought to establish uniform and universal entitlements. Yet, these were in tension with other, historically structured levels of rights, derived from the colonial experience, which privileged particular community identities. India’s Constitution (and constitutional negotiations) from the outset set up differentiated group rights on the basis of affirmative action for certain categories of disadvantaged citizen, based on caste, that are contained within its ‘Directive Principles of State Policy’ and ‘Fundamental Rights’. Pakistan’s more fluid constitutional arrangements were in some respects very similar and in others quite different. Like India, it inherited the legal tensions of the colonial period. But, in addition from 1956 onwards, the Pakistani Constitution differentiated formally between citizens – between Muslims and non-Muslims and between women and men – in terms of who could be head of state (only a male Muslim). Dichotomies in both India’s and Pakistan’s formal constitutional rights, created spaces for the sorts of auto-constructed urban citizenship assertions that Holston explores for Brazil. We explore these forms of popular politics throughout Boundaries of Belonging, and especially in Chapters 4 to 6.

In both India and Pakistan, ‘liberal’ notions of citizenship, prioritizing the rights of individual citizens, existed as perhaps the most powerful overarching agenda.Footnote ⁴⁴ These played against differentiated rights set out for particular disadvantaged communities in some instances, and reinforced these in others. But they contained their own contradictions. Despite espousing the idea of ‘universal’ rights of the individual citizen, they were historically rooted in a racialized colonial past similar to that which had determined a modern politics of citizenship in states such as France and Britain.Footnote ⁴⁵ Originating in a markedly different – European – context, they were predicated on hierarchies that valorized teleological, political and social ‘development’. Their assumed universal applicability, in turn, was historically derived from the Eurocentrism that had sustained colonial power and presupposed the extension of northern hemisphere notions of secularism. In Boundaries of Belonging, we suggest that alternative, popular forms of citizenship assertion (sometimes communitarian) existed but that these did not always simply critique overarching liberal notions of the citizen. In fact, they more often evoked ideas of fundamental rights, while carving out particular spaces for further citizenship recognition. In this sense, as has been argued in works on colonial South Asia, alternative citizenship rights were not derived principally from extra-legal impulses.Footnote ⁴⁶ It remained the case, however, throughout the immediate post-Partition years that alternative citizenship forms could be subordinated to and often hidden by state-centred ‘universal’ frameworks. While evoking some of these principles of the universality, vernacular rights movements during these years often defined themselves in relation to this hierarchy of subordination.

We have chosen to organize the following discussion both chronologically and thematically. This is because our aim is to look at India and Pakistan – and UP and Sindh – together as far as possible, drawing the post-Independence histories of both places into a joint exploration of the region more broadly. While there are inevitably distinctions between the developments or stories that we trace – rights as we have argued in this Introduction being always historically produced and so highly contextual in nature – our purpose is not to pit one location against the other. Since the very concept of rights in the national units of Pakistan and India was mutually interdependent and often based upon hastily conceived notions of nation state delimitation, studying both contexts through the same lens reveals more than the sum of its two parts. Each of our chapters threads together material drawn from both places, paying attention to and acknowledging similarity and difference, as well as the fact that in neither India nor Pakistan has there been a single, all-encompassing narrative since 1947, whatever their official state ideologies may have wanted to communicate. Viewing them in the same frame not only allows common themes to be explored, it also facilitates what we identify here as powerful continuities between the pre- and post-Independence periods. Contemporary newspaper reports (‘the first draft of history’) represent a key set of primary sources underpinning our study, as are provincial-level archival records (though these are more straightforward to access for UP than in Sindh) and other official and non-official observations on the changing landscape of both places. As with any set of sources, whether primary or secondary, we have also faced the challenge of dealing with potential biases within our material, compounded by the mutual suspicions operating on both sides of the India-Pakistan border during these years. But we have sought to address this by acknowledging that it is contemporary perceptions, rather than necessarily ‘hard truths’, with which we are engaging. The same disclaimer applies to the fact that, unfortunately, the amount of ‘evidence’ relating to both case studies is uneven, with more gaps as far as developments in Sindh are concerned, as compared with what can be traced in UP. This reflects the unevenness of archival resources in different parts of South Asia, but we hope that we have found enough other ways to allow UP and Sindh to be explored alongside one another.

Chapter 1 begins by analyzing developments at the state level both before and after 1947, highlighting the figurative as well as the literal spaces and scales wherein relationships between state ceremony, power and the everyday were played out in the late 1940s and 1950s. By looking at the ways that state power was performed, the role of new and sometimes invented ceremonial traditions and the mundane but multifaceted interactions of ordinary citizens with their new states on different levels, the chapter explores how the Indian and Pakistani states projected themselves in the immediate post-Independence period, and their emphasis on patriotism and loyalty as criteria for belonging and citizenship.

Chapter 2 then explores how far the physical movement of people that was bound up in Partition shaped everyday meanings of ‘citizenship’ in places like Sindh and UP where huge competition for space and resources took place after 1947. From the outset, what we find is that ideas about citizenship in post-Independence India and Pakistan were intimately tied to the politics of movement. But this chapter also highlights that understandings of emerging citizenship were often shaped by the very material predicaments of migrants and minorities, which operated, and so often came to be viewed as, yardsticks of belonging and exclusion.

Chapter 3 extends this material perspective by focussing on urban centres in Sindh and UP and on key dynamics in the development of citizenship around the control of ‘public goods’ that emerged there. Following an exploration of the nature of urban politics in the late 1940s and early 1950s in our two regions, the chapter explores food and civil supply in relation to the politics of prices and price controls and to debates about food and civil supply administration. Supply and control of goods became a chief means in which ideas about citizens’ relationship to the state interacted with civil supply problems and other scandals to become a point of public criticism in the press in both India and Pakistan. This chapter then turns to the popular discourses surrounding government corruption that emerged from these mechanisms around supply of goods and its administration, setting out the new postcolonial structures and organizations of ‘anti-corruption’ as these mechanisms developed in both UP and Sindh. Its examination of popular views of corruption includes how particular scandals developed in the press, and their broader meaning for ideas about citizenship rights. The chapter concludes by considering cross-border smuggling of material goods as an anti-state activity that raised direct questions about loyalty and belonging.

Chapter 4 considers processes involved in constitution-building in both states, as well as early Indian and Pakistani experiments with democratic elections. It explores how far the concept of ‘citizen rights’ that were encapsulated within these chimed with what ordinary Indians and Pakistanis believed their constitutional rights to be. Rather than assuming that the two states in constitutional terms moved in opposite directions, similarities as well as differences between the two sets of engagement are highlighted, demonstrating the range of quotidian readings of constitutional rights that emerged alongside the formal expressions of citizenship entitlement. In contrast to dominant approaches that view constitutions as canonical documents at the heart of processes of attempted consensus, we emphasize that constitutions in both India and Pakistan represented a process of conflict and contestation, which implicated ordinary subject/citizens, their experiences of governance and their multiple imaginaries of rights. By looking at various forms of active citizenship engagement, this chapter highlights how quickly popular politics in both Sindh and UP as well as more broadly in post-1947 India and Pakistan, came to be shaped by civic circumstances, such as debates about accessing public goods and what people perceived to be their entitlements as ‘rights-bearing’ citizens.

Finally, Chapters 5 and 6 explore apparent contradictions bound up in Indian and Pakistani citizenship after 1947 in relation to marginalized groups living in UP and Sindh who, like their counterparts elsewhere, often found it difficult to fit into officially produced templates for citizenship. First Chapter 5 traces the efforts of women's groups to establish their equal rights as citizens at a time of constitution-making and legal flux, highlighting the arguments and strategies that they pursued to make their case for fairer treatment. Then Chapter 6 shifts the focus to (those whom we term) ‘hidden citizens’ – that is communities of people whose collective identities created problems in terms of acquiring the full benefits of citizenship. These included religious minorities (Muslims in India and non-Muslims in Pakistan), Dalits and the so-called criminal tribes (vimukta jatis), whose movement across national borders after 1947 raised repeated question marks with respect to ‘where’ and ‘how’ they belonged. These last two chapters do not assume that such minorities were necessarily denied citizenship rights in a formal sense, but instead investigate what could be the differentiated interpretation and administration of rights for them on the ground. It also examines different means by which they and other economically weak sections of local society sought to champion their ‘group’ rights, via legal activism, forms of political lobbying, the use of political mediation or acquiescence in official/formal means of extending constitutional guarantees.

By way of setting the scene for what follows in our chapters, we close our Introduction with the following extract from an article entitled ‘India and Pakistan To-day’, published in the British literary magazine The Nineteenth Century only a matter of months after Partition. Written by Sir Percival Griffiths, former colonial civil servant turned businessman,Footnote ⁴⁷ who had visited India and Pakistan earlier that same year, it provides an impression (that was by no means unbiased) of the emerging relationship between the two new states. In it, Griffiths highlighted the uncertainties and mutual suspicion that he believed characterized interactions between India and Pakistan at this time, and which, as Boundaries of Belonging underlines, helped directly to shape official state policy towards, as well as more popular citizen perceptions of, each another. All the same, to understand developments in one place – India/UP – it is necessary to appreciate what was happening in the other – Pakistan/Sindh – and vice versa. Partition may have produced two separate countries on 14/15 August 1947, but as our exploration of this key event’s aftermath in the context of two particular localities suggests, India and Pakistan remained intimately, and often uncomfortably, bound together by a shared history and common challenges as they made the transition from colonial rule to postcolonial statehood side by side in the years that followed.