BOUNDING NATIONS, MAKING CITIZENS: PARTITION, PROPERTY AND BELONGING IN POSTCOLONIAL SOUTH ASIA

Abstract

“Bounding Nations, Making Citizens: Partition, Property, and Citizenship in Post-colonial South Asia,” emphasizes the centrality of property regimes within Indian and Pakistani state formation in the wake of British India’s partition in 1947. Traversing the disciplines of law and history, my research explains how the migrations at partition restructured the material realities of property and citizenship. My dissertation examines the legal and bureaucratic architecture set up by India and Pakistan to police the lives and property of religious minorities they considered insufficiently loyal. I demonstrate how a singular logic—to link populations to territory—lay behind the evolution of two divergent mechanisms regarding the property that migrants left behind (termed “evacuee property”). On the western border, a custodian was appointed to manage evacuee property; and the property was “allotted” to in-migrants (“refugees”). On the eastern border, between India and modern-day Bangladesh, both governments collaborated to prevent mass migration by setting up “Evacuee Property Boards” and preventing refugee resettlement on evacuee property. I show how individuals affected by these laws imagined new possibilities to circumvent them. The law thus emerges as a site of resistance, not only of bureaucratic violence. Unlike the hard, impervious border between India and Pakistan that bureaucrats imagined, the actual border emerges as a fuzzy, permeable entity, allowing for the migration of people, ideas, and institutions. My dissertation project makes three contributions to extant scholarship on decolonization in South Asia. First, I highlight how legal norms of property ownership intersected with questions of nationality and loyalty to control and “minoritize” populations in South Asia. Second, I foreground the many instances of cooperation by which both states evolved similar legal and bureaucratic mechanisms to construct an idealized political subject with no extraterritorial loyalty of kinship or property ownership, even while this was at odds with the messiness and ambiguity of lived realities. Third, the history I write speaks to other midcentury partitions where national borders became sites for the contestation of territory, identity, and material relationships. I highlight, therefore, how models evolved by India and Pakistan circulated globally across borders as other states emulated their example.