Backdoor Broadcasting Company

Royal Holloway University of London Department of History
and The University of Leeds School of History

Event Date: 9 and 10 September 2010 
Royal Asiatic Society 14 Stephenson Way, London NW1

From Subjects to Citizens: Society and the Everyday State in India and Pakistan 1947 – 1964

This research, a three-year collaboration between the History departments at Royal Holloway and the University of Leeds, explores the shift from colonial rule to independence in three sites on the subcontinent – Uttar Pradesh (formerly theUnited Provinces), Sindh, and the Princely State of Hyderabad (Deccan) – withthe aim of unravelling the explicit meanings and relevance of ‘independence’ forthe new citizens of India and Pakistan in the two decades immediately following 1947.

The year 1947 has traditionally been viewed as a fundamental watershed, yet little work has hitherto looked at the development of popular, public cultures surrounding the state in South Asia at this time, and almost none has been comparative. There were powerful continuities as well as short-term and unanticipated developments operating at this time, which together set the terms for the foundation of both major states in their first generation after independence.

While the histories of India and Pakistan have come to be conceived separately and assumed to develop along divergent paths, they in fact both developed out of much the same set of historical experiences. In addition, the focus on the ‘high’ levels of politics and government in much historical writing on both countries both has arguably distracted attention away from the functioning of the state at the level of ‘everyday’ life – a level experienced by ordinary as well as extraordinary people.

This project thus sets out to correct these imbalances by contributing a (timely) empirical analysis of political developments in a part of the world in relation to which considerable debate is currently taking place both on the nature of the state in general, and on that of so called ‘failed states’ in particular.

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Royal Holloway University of London Department of History
and The University of Leeds School of History

Event Date: 9 and 10 September 2010 
Royal Asiatic Society 14 Stephenson Way, London NW1

Sarah Ansari - The Curious Case of Sir Gilbert Grace: Policing Karachi, 1947-1958

So-called ‘ethnic’, or provincial, tensions have been an endemic feature of Pakistani life since its earliest days. This paper, drawing on official records and contemporary newspaper reports, engages with this issue in the context of the challenges involved in policing the federal capital, Karachi, in the decade that followed independence. In particular, it highlights the intense rivalry that developed between the Karachi Police and the Special Police Establishment (set up under the Pakistan Special Police Establishment Ordinance of 1948), which eventually resulted in the ousting from his post of the British Inspector General of Police, Sir Gilbert Grace, in 1956 against a backdrop of mutual accusations of police corruption and malpractice. While the vast majority of Karachi’s non-Muslim officers had left for India by the beginning of the 1950s, a new power struggle had quickly emerged in the city between ‘refugee’ displaced police officers on the one hand and officers from elsewhere in what had become Pakistan on the other. In effect, this competition between the various police establishments located within the city mirrored the wider manoeuvring for power and influence that was taking place as Pakistan’s newly-established services sought to accommodate the different sets of interests that had come together since 1947. Equally importantly, it can also tell us a great deal about the role of the police in the everyday lives of the ordinary citizens who had made Karachi their home, demonstrating just how far people relied on possessing the right connections (or social capital) to protect their interests in the context of Pakistan’s early years.

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Research Network South Asia presents:

Date:  25 Feb 2010
Win 0-02

‘Pakistan: business as usual?

A round table event with David Taylor, Umar Khan, Daniel Haines, Sarah Ansari, Humayun Ansari, Markus Daechsel

Instead of reflecting on the over-used question of whether Pakistan can ‘survive’ the present crisis, we will be posing a slightly more relaxed and historically informed question: what is really new about the present crisis, and to what extent are we dealing only with a variation on problems that have had a long established place in Pakistani history? What can we – as historians or historically informed political scientists – say about long-term trends in Pakistan’s history?

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Sarah Ansari, Royal Holloway University of London
Children, citizenship and the state in 1950s Pakistan

This paper explores the position of children in 1950s Pakistan at the time when the new state was still in the process of working out its citizenship rules and responsibilities. It considers the evolution of Pakistan’s citizenship laws in the early 1950s; individual cases in the mid-1950s when the state intervened in children’s lives thanks to ambiguities concerning their status as Pakistani citizens; and the general uncertainty that existed during this period with respect to the state as ‘protector’ of children’s well-being and rights.

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