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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

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

Uditi Sen – The Nation and its Exclusions: The Repatriation of European Refugees from Independent India, 1947-49

The transition from subjects of the British Empire to citizens of India and Pakistan was a long process which held different meanings for different people in South Asia. However, not all who were living in India at her hour of emancipation were entitled to make this transition. During World War II, India had emerged as a safe haven for several thousand Jewish refugees and British subjects evacuated from the Baltic States, Greece and Malta. As the war progressed, they were joined by refugees from Burma, Malaya and Hong Kong. In 1947, India’s independence sounded the death knell for these hastily set up refugee camps. From a refuge for stranded British subjects, India turned into a reluctant host, unwilling to succour ‘foreigners’. The national government was quick to differentiate between Indian citizens and British subjects, and pushed for the latter’s early repatriation. In 1947, there were no legal provisions distinguishing subjects from citizens, in India or in Britain. Despite this, there was a high degree of co-operation between the newly independent Government of India and His Majesty’s Government in removing ‘foreigners’ from Indian soil. By analysing the administrative discourse surrounding the repatriation of European refugees from India between 1947 and 1949, this paper explores the shared meanings of belonging to the nation of India which made such co-operation possible. Secondly, it compares this administrative discourse of belonging with the aspirations and actions of European refugees and evacuees. It attempts to understand why and how far they were complicit in their exclusion from India as outsiders. It also explores how a minority challenged this dominant discourse by staying on. By looking at India’s transition to independence from the perspective of those who were disenfranchised as ‘foreigners’, this paper seeks to throw fresh light on the boundaries of belonging to independent India.

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Uditi Sen, University of Cambridge
Rehabilitation’s Residue: Recasting Refugee Women as ‘Permanent Liabilities’

This paper explores the position of refugee women within the regime of refugee rehabilitation in post-colonial India. In order to rehabilitate or restore to normalcy millions of partition refugees, the independent Indian state was forced to articulate its vision of a normative social order. The anxiety caused by the figure of the widowed or single refugee woman, who had no male guardian to protect and provide for her reveals the inherent gender bias in this state led project of social reconstruction. Identified as ‘unattached’ women, they were considered to be ‘unrehabilitable’. The state stepped forward to fill the shoes of the missing patriarch and guarantee perpetual relief to unattached women and their dependants by classifying them as ‘permanent liabilities’. This paper demonstrates how the apparent benevolence of the state towards ‘unattached’ refugee women masked their exclusion from rehabilitation. However, the essentialisation of women as economic dependants did not go unchallenged. It rankled with the prominent women of Nehruvian India; and as ministers, administrators and social workers who enjoyed the patronage of the Congress they advocated training ‘unattached women’ to achieve economic self-sufficiency. Vocational training for refugee women introduced a contradictory ideal of feminine self-sufficiency within a project geared towards replicating patriarchal social mores. But it failed to address the root cause of the marginalisation of refugee women- the stubborn refusal of the Indian nation-state to give unattached women access to the core benefits of rehabilitation – land (or loans to buy land) and the capital to set up trades or businesses. This paper will conclude with suggesting that the inability of independent Indian to imagine refugee women as autonomous entities anticipated its refusal to grant equal citizenship to women in general.

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