Modern Asian Studies Volume 45 Part 1 January 2011

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TAYLOR C. S HERMAN , W ILLIAM G OULD AND S ARAH A NSARI : From Subjects to Citizens: Society and the Everyday State in India and Pakistan, 1947–1970 E LEANOR N EWBIGIN : Personal Law and Citizenship in India’s Transition to Independence W ILLIAM G OULD : From Subjects to Citizens? Rationing, refugees and the publicity of corruption over Independence in UP YASMIN K HAN : Performing Peace: Gandhi’s assassination as a critical moment in the consolidation of the Nehruvian state TAYLOR C. S HERMAN : Migration, Citizenship and Belonging in Hyderabad (Deccan), 1946–1956 I AN TALBOT: Punjabi Refugees’ Rehabilitation and the Indian State: Discourses, Denials and Dissonances M ARKUS D AECHSEL : Sovereignty, Governmentality and Development in Ayub’s Pakistan: the Case of Korangi Township S ARAH A NSARI : Everyday expectations of the state during Pakistan’s early years: Letters to the Editor, Dawn (Karachi), 1950–1953 D ANIEL H AINES : Concrete ‘progress’: irrigation, development and modernity in mid-twentieth century Sind C ATHERINE C OOMBS : Partition Narratives: Displaced trauma and culpability among British civil servants in 1940s Punjab

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Modern Asian Studies

Modern Asian Studies

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Cambridge Journals Online For further information about this journal please go to the journal website at:

journals.cambridge.org/ass

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VOLUME 45

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JANUARY 2011 ISSN 0026-749X

From Subjects to Citizens: Society and the Everyday State in India and Pakistan, 1947–1970 Guest Editors Taylor C. Sherman, William Gould and Sarah Ansari

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notes to contributors

editor: Joya Chatterji, University of Cambridge book review editor: Norbert Peabody, University of Cambridge execu tive commit tee Seema Alavi, University of Delhi Timothy Harper, University of Cambridge Caroline Humphrey, University of Cambridge

Charles Schencking, University of Hong Kong Hans Van de Ven, University of Cambridge David Washbrook, University of Cambridge

editorial board Shahid Amin, University of Delhi Sunil Amrith, University of London Christopher Bayly, University of Cambridge Sumantra Bose, The London School of Economics & Political Science Prasenjit Duara, National University of Singapore Wang Gungwu, National University of Singapore Farhat Hasan, University of Delhi Engseng Ho, Duke University Isabel Hofmeyr, University of Witwatersrand Indivar Kamtekar, Jawaharlal Nehru University Sunil Khilnani, The Johns Hopkins University Victor T. King, University of Leeds

Victor Lieberman, University of Michigan Claude Markovits, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris Magnus Marsden, University of London Rana Mitter, University of Oxford Tirthankar Roy, University of London James Scott, Yale University Samita Sen, Jadavpur University Ornit Shani, University of Haifa Eric Tagliacozzo, Cornell University Robert Travers, Cornell University C. J. W.-L. Wee, Nanyang Technological University Thongchai Winichakul, University of Wisconsin-Madison Tan Tai Yong, National University of Singapore Yangwen Zheng, University of Manchester

emeritus editor Gordon Johnson, University of Cambridge Modern Asian Studies (issn 0026‒749x) is published six times a year by Cambridge University Press, The Edinburgh Building, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge cb2 8ru, and 32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013–2473. The subscription (excluding VAT but including delivery by air where appropriate), plus electronic access to institutional subscribers, to volume 45, 2011 is £322 net (US $574 in the USA, Canada and Mexico) for institutions. Individuals who order direct from the publishers and certify that the journal is for their personal use may subscribe at a reduced rate of £65 (US $110 in the USA, Canada and Mexico). Single parts cost £56 (US $99 in the USA, Canada and Mexico). The electronic only price available to institutional subscribers is £288 ($510 in USA, Canada and Mexico). All orders must be accompanied by payment. EU subscribers (outside the UK) who are not registered for VAT should add VAT at their country’s rate. VAT registered subscribers should provide their VAT registration number. Japanese prices for institutions are available from Kinokuniya Company Ltd, P.O. Box 55, Chitose, Tokyo 156, Japan. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: send address changes in USA, Canada and Mexico to MODERN ASIAN STUDIES, Cambridge University Press, 100 Brook Hill Drive, West Nyack, New York 10994‒2133. Information on Modern Asian Studies and all other Cambridge journals can be accessed via www.journals.cambridge.org This journal issue has been printed on FSC-certified paper and cover board. FSC is an independent, non-governmental, not-for-profit organization established to promote the responsible management of the world’s forests. Please see www.fsc.org for information. © Cambridge University Press 2011 Printed in the United Kingdom by the University Press, Cambridge

Modern Asian Studies Modern Asian Studies promotes original, innovative and rigorous research on the history, sociology, anthropology and economics of modern Asia. Covering South Asia, South-East Asia, China, Japan and Korea, the journal is published in six parts each year. It welcomes articles which deploy inter-disciplinary and comparative research methods. Modern Asian Studies specialises in the publication of longer monographic essays based on path-breaking new research; it also carries substantial synoptic essays which illuminate the state of the broad field in fresh ways. Issues of the journal will occasionally contain a forum of articles on related themes. Responses to issues raised in the fora are welcomed by the Editor and will be subject to the usual review procedure. It contains a book review section which offers detailed analysis of important new publications in the field. Substantial review articles will be commissioned to discuss important new books. The Editor also welcomes proposals for such reviews. Unsolicited review articles will be accepted on the basis of peer review. Submissions Submission of an article will be taken to imply that it has not been previously published and that it is not on offer to any other publisher. Authors of articles published in the journal assign copyright to Cambridge University Press (with certain rights reserved) and will receive a copyright assignment form for signature on acceptance of their paper. Authors are responsible for obtaining permission to reproduce any material in which they do not own copyright, to be used in both print and electronic media, and for ensuring that the appropriate acknowledgements are included in their manuscript. The Editor welcomes expression of all shades of opinion, but responsibility for them rests with their author. The Editorial Board regrets that it is not able to relay reports for articles not accepted for publication. All correspondence should be addressed to: Dr Joya Chatterji at [email protected] Text and Manuscript Preparation All articles (text and footnotes) must be clearly typed in single spacing throughout, including footnotes. Submissions must be submitted as an email attachment in Word. The use of diacritical marks, italics and capital letters should be kept to a minimum. All sources or references should be incorporated as footnotes, cited in full in the first instance, within the body of the text. References repeated in the footnotes should be by author and short title. Spelling, dates, references and footnote numbers should be checked for accuracy. The title of the article, the author's name, affiliation, full postal address and corresponding email address, should be typed at the beginning of the article. An abstract of between 100 and 250 words summarising the contents of the article should be typed before the main text. Sub headings must be used for long articles. Do not use Roman Numerals to divide papers into sections. Tables should be clearly laid out and numbered consecutively. Vertical lines between columns should be omitted. All figures and totals should be checked for accuracy. Figures should be supplied final size as electronic files in either TIFF or EPS format, scanned at a minimum of 320dpi for black and white halftone, or colour artwork, at 1200 dpi for black and white line art, and at 800 dpi for combination artwork (line/halftone). They should be clearly numbered with an accompanying figure legend. Each figure should be cited at least once in the text. The spelling of place names should be consistent with that used in the text. When an article has been accepted for publication, the author must submit an electronic copy and should ensure that the final manuscript includes the following: • Full title and short title of no more than 40 characters, including spaces (for running header) • Author name, affiliation, full postal address and email address • Abstract of 100‒200 words • Sub section headings • All figures and tables (with captions and consecutively numbered) Proofs Authors should note that no substantive alterations or additions can be made to first proofs, so should ensure that their Word Document is thoroughly checked for accuracy before final submission. First proofs in electronic PDF format only will be sent to the author who will be asked to send a clear list of corrections by email, quoting the appropriate line numbers, or to mark the corrections on a printed version and return this to the Editor within fourteen days. Offprints Each author will receive a PDF file of his or her published article and a copy of the journal issue in which it appears.

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C Cambridge University Press 2010 Modern Asian Studies 45, 1 (2011) pp. 1–6.  doi:10.1017/S0026749X10000235 First published online 3 November 2010

From Subjects to Citizens: Society and the Everyday State in India and Pakistan, 1947–1970∗ TAYLOR C. SHERM AN Department of International History, London School of Economics, London WC2A 2AE, UK Email: [email protected] WILLIAM GOULD School of History, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK Email: [email protected] SARAH ANSARI Department of History, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, TW20 0PX, UK Email: [email protected]

Introduction This special issue of Modern Asian Studies explores the shift from colonial rule to independence in India and Pakistan, with the aim of unravelling the explicit meanings and relevance of ‘independence’ for the new citizens of India and Pakistan during the two decades after 1947. While the study of postcolonial South Asia has blossomed in recent years, this volume addresses a number of imbalances in this ∗ The papers in this volume were originally presented at a workshop, held on 4 September 2008, as part of a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) entitled, From Subjects to Citizens: Society and the Everyday State in India and Pakistan. The editors would like to thank the participants at that seminar for their lively discussion of these papers, and the AHRC for its generous support for this project.

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dynamic and highly popular field. Firstly, the histories of India and Pakistan after 1947 have come to be conceived separately, with many scholars assuming that the two states developed along divergent paths after independence. Thus, the dominant historical paradigm has been to examine either India or Pakistan in relative isolation from one another. While a handful of very recent books on the partition of the subcontinent have begun to study the two states simultaneously,1 very few of these new histories reach beyond the immediate concerns of partition.2 Of course, both countries developed out of much the same set of historical experiences. Viewing the two states in the same frame not only allows the contributors to this issue to explore common themes, it also facilitates an exploration of the powerful continuities between the pre- and post-independence periods. Secondly, the papers that follow pose new questions about the nature of the state in early postcolonial South Asia. A small number of recent historical works concerning India and Pakistan in the immediate aftermath of independence have begun to bridge the gap between the study of ‘high’ and ‘low’ politics in South Asia by examining low-level state programmes such as refugee rehabilitation and the recovery of abducted women.3 However, there has been very little historical work on the development of popular, public cultures surrounding the state in South Asia at this time. This special issue seeks to fill this gap by drawing on recent anthropological work on the ‘everyday state’.4 Thus, whilst remaining sensitive to the ambiguity and complexity of the boundaries between state and society, many of its papers focus on the functioning of the state in everyday life where it was actually experienced by ordinary people, with contributors exploring the interplay between the rhetorical, ideological platforms set out in New Delhi and Karachi and the interpretations of these agendas in 1 Tan Tai Yong and Gyanesh Kudaisya, The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia (London: Routledge, 2000); Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 2 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rochona Majumdar, and Andrew Sartori, (eds), From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007). 3 For example, Zamindar, The Long Partition, Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition (Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998). 4 C. J. Fuller, and Veronique Benei, (eds), The Everyday State and Society in Modern India (New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2000); Thomas Blom Hansen, and Finn Stepputat, (eds), States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).

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different localities. This framework significantly augments current understanding of postcolonial South Asia, without replicating the longstanding divide between histories of ‘high’ and ‘low’ politics in South Asia. This volume diverges from the existing historiographical discussions about the nature of the transition from the colonial to the postcolonial. Over the past decade, scholarship on the subject has become ensnared in a debate about whether or not 1947 marked a distinct break in the history of the subcontinent. The process of transition, however, was far too complex to be encapsulated in the dichotomy change/no change. As the papers here demonstrate, partition and the integration of the princely states often had a profound effect on the everyday lives of many of the new citizens of India and Pakistan. Moreover these events not only altered the geographical extent of the states of South Asia, but also expanded the states’ responsibilities and opened up opportunities for governments to pursue policies distinct from those of their colonial predecessors. At the same time, however, the papers indicate that, whilst the state in South Asia was subject to considerable adjustment in the transition to independence, the rhetorical underpinnings of the postcolonial states were often not so novel and, in many cases, the state’s modus operandi did not change during this period. Thus, discourses originating in development regimes, or the nationalist movements of the first half of the twentieth century, shaped not only the policies of independent governments, but also the demands that postcolonial citizens made of them. In addition, the rationing, requisition and recruitment policies introduced during the Second World War stretched state bureaucracies to their widest extent to date, and, simultaneously, revealed new weaknesses and opened up new opportunities for corruption that stretched into the postcolonial period. Until very recently it was also common to view the decades between 1947 and the present (2010) as a single period in the history of South Asia. Whilst lines of periodization are always perilous to draw, today’s most cutting-edge scholarship suggests that it does make some sense to regard the interval between the 1930s and the 1960s as a distinct stage in South Asian history. By the third decade after independence, the major tensions extant in the nation-building projects of both India and Pakistan could no longer be contained. As these tensions erupted, they began to disrupt the ordinary functioning of politics and to tear apart existing social bonds. This is not to suggest, however, that the time before 1970 was a golden age: quite the contrary. The propensity to study the first two decades of postcolonial rule

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alongside more recent decades has tended to overstate the coherence and stability of the former, especially with respect to India. India’s much-discussed ‘crisis of secularism’5 in the 1990s elicited many rose-tinted evaluations of the Nehruvian state’s secular credentials, but the contributions below by Gould, Newbigin, and Sherman highlight the extent to which this nostalgic view misjudges the early years of independence in India. Indeed, looking at this earlier era from a historical perspective, it becomes clear that the nature of the state and the content of citizenship were keenly contested at this time. It is in these contests, therefore, that one finds a distinct set of issues and themes that characterize this period. Amongst these issues, the significance of the performative aspect of state power on the subcontinent is stressed in many of the papers in this volume. Recently researchers have come to highlight the ways in which both colonial and early postcolonial rule were characterized by infrequent but spectacular displays of state power. From the use of exemplary force to maintain ‘law and order’ in the districts, to the drafting of grand schemes designed to awe or inspire the population, certain projects or actions of the state were imbued with extraordinary meaning and designed to send a message to the population at large. Both postcolonial India and Pakistan used ceremony to underscore the legitimacy of the state and to chart a vision of the nation after independence. Khan shows that Gandhi’s death rituals, including the distribution of his ashes to disparate locations in India, provided a medium through which the Congress party could try to unite a nation that had been deeply fractured by the experience of partition. In postcolonial Pakistan, as Haines and Daechsel demonstrate, large-scale development projects were often used to assert (frequently with an eye to impressing international audiences) the capacity of the state to shape not only the land and the built environment, but to discipline the people inhabiting these spaces. That these projects were essentially spectacular in nature was evident in governments’ frequent disregard for the practical consequences of such schemes for the population, and the subsequent failure of some of the most prominent of them. Coombs’ work also emphasizes the performative aspect of power as she traces the ways in which the disproportionate influence which British ICS officers often had over events in their districts dissipated when it became clear that the 5 See Anuradha Dingwaney Needham and Rajeshwary Sundar Rajan (eds), The Crisis of Secularism in India (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2007).

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British were leaving the subcontinent. Without the assurance that such displays of limited but spectacular power would be backed by the kind of favours that only the state could provide, the acts of British officers were unable to stem the violence of partition. This contributed to the popular sense that the state ‘disintegrated’ during partition. Indeed, the state has often been ‘written out’ of personal narratives of partition, whether from ICS men or from Punjabi refugees, as shown by both Coombs and Talbot. Partition’s effect on the state and the extraordinary pressures that the violent displacement of people put upon state resources is the second prominent theme in this period. The state had an ambiguous place in the years straddling partition: on the one hand, the struggles of partition coupled with the promises made by nationalist leaders raised expectations to unprecedented heights. Vulnerable refugees were often extremely reliant upon the state, and rehabilitation plans often brought populations that had had no previous contact with the state into its orbit. On the other hand, as Ansari’s work reveals, the early postcolonial period was no golden age for many citizens: their keen expectations that everyday life would improve dramatically after independence often met with bitter disappointment. Members of the population frequently voiced their resentment at the failures of their new government servants to live up to the expectation that citizens be given fair access to goods and services. Indeed, as Gould makes clear, access to services was often secured through kinship networks rather than through the functioning of impartial bureaucratic procedures. And the inadequacies of the state from poor planning to deficient implementation opened up opportunities for corruption to flourish. Indeed, as Ansari, Talbot and Gould note, citizens’ often lofty expectations were regularly coupled with a remarkable willingness on the part of individuals to use their own guile to manipulate those services which the state did provide to secure personal advantage. Indeed, the weakness of the postcolonial state in both India and Pakistan emerges as a surprising, but recurrent theme in this period. Of course, it is common to lament the ineptitude of the early Pakistani state, especially in comparison with that of India. But these papers reveal that the Indian state, whilst undoubtedly endowed with more resources than Pakistan, was often internally incoherent and its officers seem to have been perpetually subject to undue influence. Furthermore, as Gould and Sherman underline, it was often individual state actors who did most to circumvent state structures for their own ends. This fact, which helps explain the gulf

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between official rhetoric and the everyday experience of the state, suggests that historians ought to do more to problematize the very nature of the state during this period. Finally, these papers demonstrate that conceptions of citizenship were far from settled in this period, even in India where the constitution was drafted and enacted relatively quickly. Although citizenship was defined using the language of abstract rights, the situation was invariably far more complex than this. As they emerged out of partition, the religious identities of individuals assumed extraordinary importance in the new states of South Asia, not least for the displaced, whose access to privileges often was tied to the way in which the state identified them. Whilst partition was important, the ways in which ideas of citizenship were inscribed with religious and gender norms often had their origins in the colonial period. The fundamental rights written into the Indian constitution, according to Newbigin, were demarcated within colonial legal structures which ensured that these legal conceptions of citizenship were mediated by religious and gender norms. As a result, the rights contained in the Indian constitution were often most compatible with the interests of Hindu men. Citizenship was not only shaped at the constitutional level, quotidian conceptions of belonging were equally important. Local level understandings of who was worthy of citizenship were often coloured by the intense social polarisation which accompanied the partition of the subcontinent. In partition’s long wake, the loyalty of Muslims in India remained suspect long after the violence had subsided. According to Gould’s research, an individual’s Muslim identity could add force to allegations of corruption. Likewise, Sherman reveals the ways in which Muslims of non-Indian origin residing in Hyderabad (Deccan) were rendered suspect in the aftermath of the invasion of Hyderabad in 1948: many were deported or encouraged to leave not because their legal rights had changed, but because informal notions of belonging would have them excluded from India after 1947. Clearly, the first two decades following independence witnessed an intense contest over the meaning and responsibilities of citizenship, and over the purpose and scope of the postcolonial state. By viewing India and Pakistan in the same frame, and examining the state in its interactions with the population at the everyday level, this special issue offers a fresh look at the field of early postcolonial history.

C Cambridge University Press 2010 Modern Asian Studies 45, 1 (2011) pp. 7–32.  doi:10.1017/S0026749X10000338

Personal Law and Citizenship in India’s Transition to Independence ELEANOR NEWBIGIN School of Oriental and African Studies, Thornhaugh Street, London WC1H 0XG, UK Email: [email protected]

Abstract Studies of the post-colonial state have often presented it as a structure that has fallen under the control of self-interested sections of the Indian elite. In terms of citizenship, the failure of the state to do more to realize the egalitarian promise of the Fundamental Rights, set out in the Constitution of 1950, has often been attributed to interference by these powerful elite. Tracing the interplay between debates about Hindu property rights and popular support or tolerance for the notion of individual, liberal citizenship, this paper argues that the principles espoused in the Fundamental Rights were never neutral abstractions but, long before independence, were firmly embedded in the material world of late-colonial political relations. Thus, in certain key regards, the citizen-subject of the Indian Constitution was not the individual, freed from ascriptive categories of gender or religious identity, but firmly tied to the power structures of the community governed by Hindu law.

Introduction The inclusion of a list of Fundamental Rights in the Constitution of 1950 seemed to make real a long standing Congress promise: that independence from British rule would bring about a dramatic change in the lives of ordinary Indians. Modelling itself on documents such as the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the American Bill of Rights, the Indian Fundamental Rights set out a vision of the individual citizen-subject, unfettered by notions of gender, religion or caste. The Rights have been seen to mark a profound difference between the nation-state and its colonial predecessor.1 Underpinning the colonial administration and legal system was an understanding 1 Granville Austin, The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation (Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1999 edn, 1966), pp. 50–61.

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of Indian society as comprising not autonomous individuals but social collectives, defined by caste, gender and religious identity.2 Indians’ relationship with the colonial state was, in the main, mediated through this group identity—access to political office or the law was shaped by a subject’s sex and the religious or caste community to which he or she belonged. The passage of the Fundamental Rights suggested a radical reform of this state-society relationship; whereas colonial subjecthood was premised on difference and indirect contact with the state, citizenship suggested a direct relationship between the state and each and every individual Indian. Six decades after independence, it is clear that many Indians do not enjoy the citizenship rights set out in the constitution. Indians’ access to state influence and resources remains very much mediated by gender, class and religion. In trying to explain the post-colonial state’s failure to secure social equality, academics have often focused on the way in which the state applied citizenship and governance after independence, helping to reinforce a sense that 15 August, 1947 marks a clear watershed in the Indian populace’s relationship with the state. There has been little consideration of the historical evolution of Indian citizenship or of how this might have informed the development of a state-citizen nexus after independence.3 Rather, political and social inequality in contemporary India has been attributed to the dominance of self-interested sections of the Indian elite, who have captured state structures and resources.4 Supporting a notion that the current Indian state is in ‘crisis’, this argument implies that, were it not for this elite domination, the Indian state would be able to secure the equal citizenship written into its constitution in the abstract. The idea of the current crisis of the Indian state rests on the assumption that there exists a ‘correct’ model of state power and/or 2 D. A. Washbrook, ‘Law, State and Agrarian Society in Colonial India’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 15, no. 3, (1981), pp. 653–658; Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘Issues of Widowhood: Gender and Resistance in Colonial Western India’ in Douglas Haynes and Gyan Prakash (eds), Contesting Power: Resistance and Everyday Social Relations in South Asia (Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1991), pp. 62–108, especially pp. 77–79. 3 Recent exceptions are Mrinalini Sinha, Specters of Mother India: the Global Restructuring of an Empire (Duke, Durham & London, 2006); and Rajnarayan Chandavarkar ‘Customs of Governance: Colonialism and Democracy in Twentieth Century India’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 41, no. 3 (2007), pp. 441–470. 4 Pranap Bardhan, The Political Economy of Development in India (Blackwell, Oxford, 1984); Achin Vanaik, India’s Painful Transition: Bourgeois Democracy in India (Verso, London, 1990); Atul Kohli, Democracy and Discontent: India’s Growing Crisis of Governability (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991).

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citizenship rights that India should follow. Indeed, studies of postcolonial India have often been framed in response to questions about what did not happen, rather than why rights and political practices developed in the manner that they did. This paper seeks to break from this trend and to place the origins of debates about individual rights and citizenship within a wider historical context. That the Fundamental Rights could have secured a more secular and egalitarian state-society relationship rests on the assumption that the view of the individual citizen set out in their provisions has equal appeal and pertinence to all Indian citizens. By arguing that debates about reform of men’s property rights within the family were crucial in shaping the intellectual framework within which people were interested and willing to support the Fundamental Rights, this paper challenges this view. It shows how colonial understandings of the differences between Hindu and Muslim family law meant that the liberal framework of individual rights expounded in the Fundamental Rights held particular appeal for Hindu men in a way that it did not for Muslims and other social groups. Tracing the pressures and interests driving legislative debates about personal law, the first part of this paper shows that disputes about property rights, together with the development of new structures of political representation, helped to generate much discussion amongst Indian men about legal rights and reform. The particular emphasis placed on scriptural authority in colonial interpretations of Muslim law prompted Muslim lawyers to call for reform by challenging colonial interpretations of Muslim family practices. Similar arguments were later taken up by Hindu reformers seeking to change their own legal system. Yet, colonial perceptions of Hindu law as a product of social evolution more than scriptural authority meant that Hindu reformers framed their arguments in more secular terms than their Muslim counterparts. Turning in particular on the historical position of women in Hindu society vis-à-vis their place under European legal structures, the debates about Hindu law reform often suggested a close link between the individual of the Hindu law debates and that of western liberal political-thought, a claim that had much potency for those wishing to question the civilizing mission and political legitimacy of the colonial state. By the early twentieth century, a significant group of influential Hindu men appeared to be open to the development of a framework of rights influenced by secular, liberal ideals. On closer inspection, however, Hindu reformers were not calling for freedom and rights for everyone. Like the Muslim lawyers before them,

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Hindu legislators were interested not only in undermining the legal structures that had developed under colonial rule, but also in imposing new ones that strengthened their own power. As a result, in certain key regards, the citizen-subject that emerged in this period was not the free individual in touch with the state, but firmly tied to the power structures of the community governed by Hindu law. Exploring the debates that shaped the Fundamental Rights, the aim of this paper is not simply to challenge the accepted periodization of twentieth-century Indian history. It also seeks to question the degree to which we can divide and treat as separate categories the notion of colonial subject and independent citizenship in India. The preindependence debates about personal law reform demonstrate clearly the significance of colonial legal structures in shaping post-colonial citizenship and Indians’ attitudes towards the independent state.

Rights and the individual under colonial family law The particular structure of the Anglo-Indian legal system had longterm implications for debates about rights in India. From the outset of British rule, officials distinguished between a public legal sphere, governing relations in the market place, and the private or personal realm of the family, which was administered according to subjects’ own religious customs and traditions.5 As many scholars have highlighted, the ways in which officials ‘protected’ indigenous customs served in fact to rigidify these practices in a manner that often benefited the power relationships on which colonial governance depended.6 British assumptions about the importance of scriptural legal sources and religious traditions shaped the ways in which officials ‘discovered’ Indian traditions and recorded them under different categories of Hindu and Muslim practices, a distinction that was to grow more rigid over the course of colonial rule.7 Under Mughal rule, religious 5

Washbrook, ‘Law, State and Agrarian Society’, pp. 653–655. David Gilmartin, ‘Kinship, Women and Politics’ in G. Minault (ed.), The Extended Family: Women and Political Participation in India and Pakistan (Chanakya Publications, Delhi, 1981), pp. 151–170; Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: the Debate on Sati in Colonial India (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1998), Veena Talwar Oldenberg, Dowry Murder: the Imperial Origins of a Cultural Crime (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002). 7 Bernard Cohn, ‘Law and the Colonial State in India’ in Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: the British in India (Chichester, Princeton, 1996), pp. 57–75. 6

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scripture had played a crucial role in legal governance. Precedent was given to interpretive practice, so that legal scholars, or qadis, applied the principles of the Qur’an and other Islamic legal texts to a particular situation, rather than a literal reading of their precepts. The desire of British officials to establish definite knowledge of their new subjects led them to emphasize these texts as definite sources in and of themselves, eroding the place of legal interpretation and the more flexible, socially-conditional nature of the legal system. Legal scholars of the Hanafi school had been particularly productive under Mughal rule and these texts were given precedence in colonial interpretations of Muslim law over other schools of legal thought.8 Thus, in focusing on text as the main source of religious law, British administrators glossed over not only divisions between Sunni and Shi’a Muslims but also many of the different schools of legal scholarship that had evolved under Mughal rule. Certain customary practices were retained but, by the mid-nineteenth century, Muslim personal law had emerged as a clearly defined, text-based legal structure that could be easily applied and hard to dispute.9 British interpretations of Islamic succession law rested on a reading of the al-Sirajiyya, another Hanafi text.10 Prescribing the division of a man’s property between all his children, rather than a system of primogeniture, these practices were regarded as far more equitable than English succession law.11 In spite of this, officials were somewhat selective in the way in which they applied the principles of the al-Sirajiyya. Directives to include daughters in the division of a father’s estate were, in many parts of India, ignored in favour of customary 8 Charles Hamilton’s four volume translation of the Hidaya—a collection of Hanafi legal opinions—was published in 1791 and for much of colonial rule, the main English translation of this Islamic text. The Hidaya did not include any discussion of inheritance practices, and British knowledge of Indian Muslim inheritance law developed on the basis of William Jones’ translation of another Islamic text, alSirajiyya, which appeared the following year in 1792. Michael Anderson, ‘Islamic Law and the Colonial Encounter’ in David Arnold and Peter Robb (eds) Ideologies and Institutions: A SOAS South Asia Reader (Curzon, Richmond, 1995) pp. 171–178, especially pp. 174–175. 9 Scott Alan Kugle, ‘Framed, Blamed and Renamed: the Recasting of Islamic Jurisprudence in Colonial South Asia’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 35, no. 2 (2001), pp. 257–313, especially pp. 300–301. 10 Gregory C. Kozlowski, Muslim Endowments and Society in British India (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1985), pp. 128–131. 11 David S. Powers, ‘Orientalism, Colonialism and Legal History: the Attack on Muslim Family Endowments in Algeria and India’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 31, no. 3, (July, 1989), p. 556.

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practices, which sidelined women heirs and limited a woman’s hold over property to her lifetime only. The colonial courts upheld customary practices in a rather erratic manner, exempting some Muslim families and clans from a strict application of Islamic law.12 These cases aside, British jurists’ emphasis on religious scripture often served to strengthen Muslim women’s claims to property. This was particularly true in terms of Muslim women’s right to mehr, the property promised to a Muslim bride as part of the marriage contract, the payment of which, unlike a dowry, is often deferred.13 In a number of prominent cases, the colonial courts ruled in favour of a Muslim woman’s right to mehr, granting her control over part of her husband’s estate until this was paid.14 Though it did not always translate into secure legal rights in terms of women’s day-to-day life, in principle, colonial Muslim law acknowledged the legal personhood and property-owning capacity of Muslim women. Indeed, this became one of the central features defining Muslim family practices against those of Hindus: Muslim families were considered to comprise propertyowning individuals, whereas the natural condition of a Hindu family was assumed to be ‘joint’.15 Although the focus on religious scripture seemed to give greater outline to a system of Muslim law, the same could not be said in terms of Hindu law. The plethora of Hindu religious texts and wide differences in regional practices meant that Hindu law was more open to interpretation by colonial scholars. The ideas of one British legal scholar were particularly important in reshaping Hindu law in this period. Henry Sumner Maine, an eminent scholar of civil and Roman law, in 1861 published his Ancient Law: its connection with the early history of society, and its relation to modern ideas, in which he argued

12 Ayesha Jalal, Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam Since 1850 (Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2001), pp. 150–153; Bina Agarwal, A Field of One’s Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994), pp. 118–119, 288–289; Agriculturalist Muslims in Punjab were governed according to an entirely separate regional system of customary law, see, N. Hancock Prenter, ‘Custom in the Punjab’ Parts I and II in Journal of Comparative Legislation and International Law, 3rd Ser. 6, no. 1 (1924), pp. 67–80; and Ibid. 6, no. 4 (1924), pp. 223–237. 13 Bina Agarwal, A Field of One’s Own, pp. 227–230. 14 G. C. Kozlowski, ‘Muslim Women and the Control of Property in North India’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 24 (1987), pp. 163–181. 15 Lucy Carroll ‘Daughter’s Rights of Inheritance in India: a Perspective on the Problem of Dowry’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 25, no. 4 (Oct 1991), pp. 791–809, especially p. 794.

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that contemporary Hindu law operated in a similar way as had ancient Roman law. Ancient Roman law was, according to Maine, organized around the principle of Patria potestas, meaning that the head of the family held power to the complete negation of the claims of individual members. Within this system younger men had some authority as potential family heads but a woman remained, for the duration of her lifetime, the powerless dependent, first of her father and then the head of her husband’s family. This status was known as ‘perpetual tutelage’. While western society had long advanced from this state of affairs, Maine argued, such ‘progress’ had never taken place in India so that this legal system, ‘survives in absolute completeness’.16 The thesis won Maine much public attention and in 1862 he took up the post of legal member of the Viceroy’s Council. In the law reforms over which he presided, the idea of the joint family became the one legal structure that was seen to underpin regionally diverse systems of Hindu law. While the joint family was common amongst Hindus and Muslims as a sociological unit—i.e. a family of multiple generations sharing a single home—under Maine’s reforms the joint family came to be seen as the primary legal unit of Hindu society. Under both Mitakshara and Dayabhaga, the two dominant schools of Hindu law, a Hindu man was entitled to hold self-acquired properties individually.17 The family estate, however, was held as a collective. The nature of the collective varied between the two schools. Under Dayabhaga law, governing Hindus in Bengal and parts of Assam, the ‘joint family’ was understood as something like a compact between property owning individuals. Members held a fixed share of the estate that, on their death, passed to close family relatives, including widows. Under Mitakshara law which governed Hindus almost everywhere else in India,18 the joint family unit was considered a single entity within which there were no 16 Maine, Ancient Law (1906) pp. 157–158, cited in D. N. Mitter, The Position of Women in Hindu Law, (Inter-India Publications, Calcutta, 1913; reprinted New Delhi, 1989), pp. 122–123. Maine’s thesis owed much to ideas of Social Darwinism shaping intellectual thought at this time. See Leigh Denault, ‘Partition and the Joint Family in Nineteenth-century North India’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 46, no. 1 (2009) especially pp. 32–40. 17 For a fuller description of succession practices and rights under the schools of Hindu law see Bina Agarwal, A Field of One’s Own, pp. 85–91. 18 One important exception to this is the matrilineal schools of law in operation in Southern India. However, even these were organized around a joint family system, known as a tarwad, which operated much like the coparcenary system, except that property passed along the maternal line. N. R. Raghavachariar, Hindu Law:

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individual shares—much like in the ancient Roman family. Known as a ‘coparcenary’, this unit comprised up to four generations of male relatives whose share in the family estate shrank with a new birth and grew with a coparcenary member’s death. Yet, the coparcenary was not open to all family members. The principles governing the devolution of property varied between the two schools of Hindu law, Mitakshara operating on the basis of propinquity, or blood relationship, and Dayabhaga on the basis of a relative’s ability to perform certain oblations and ceremonies that would bestow virtue upon the dead. Both concepts operated in a manner that gave preference to sons and male relatives and barred women from membership of the joint estate.19 Even within the Mitakshara family, coparceners’ shared property rights did not translate into equal access to and influence over the family estate. The coparcenary was managed, on behalf of others, by the eldest member, usually the father, who was known as a karta. While no decision could be made without the full consent of all coparceners, the karta enjoyed a stronger influence over the family estate. Thus, the capacity of younger men to exercise their right to a share of the joint family property was limited by the very hierarchical structure of power within the family. Individual rights and legal powers were largely absent from AngloHindu marriage law also. The reformed Hindu personal law endorsed the claims that had long been advanced by upper caste Hindu leaders that ‘true’ Hindu marriage was a sacrament and not, as was the case under British and Muslim personal law, a contract.20 Just as the coparcenary transcended the individuals which it comprised, so marriage transformed the couple into an inseparable unit. While in principle conjugal partners were equal, Hindu property law meant that, by virtue of his greater economic powers, a husband could dominate his wife. Barred from entering her natal coparcenary, a woman had little legal claim to parental support following marriage, when she became the dependent not simply of her husband but of his coparcenary. In this way the sacramental marital unit worked in Principles and Precedents, Vol. II (Madras Law Journal Office, Madras, 1935, 1980 edn), pp. 703–704; Bina Agarwal, A Field of One’s Own, pp. 109–120. 19 Bina Agarwal, A Field of One’s Own, pp. 88–89. 20 See Aishika Chakrabarti, ‘Widowhood in Colonial Bengal 1850–1930’, Unpublished thesis, University of Calcutta (2004); Samita Sen, ‘Offences Against Marriage: Negotiating Custom in Colonial Bengal’, in Mary E. John and Janaki Nair (eds), A Question of Silence? The Sexual Economies of Modern India (Kali for Women, New Delhi, 1998), pp. 77–110.

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tandem with the coparcenary system to support a very hierarchical system of patriarchal legal authority.

Contesting colonial law: religious tradition versus legal modernization Administrative streamlining and legal reforms in the 1860s further consolidated and codified colonial interpretations of personal law. These changes did not bring about sweeping changes in domestic practices or serve to ‘reinvent’ Indian family life, but rather set the framework within which family disputes would be judged and mediated by the colonial courts.21 Wide ranging social and economic changes in the second half of the nineteenth century served to make such disputes increasingly likely.22 It was not only the legal system that underwent comprehensive reform in this period. The transition to Crown rule was accompanied by the extensive restructuring and expansion of the colonial administration, creating new employment and education possibilities for Indians.23 This was also a period of economic transformation as the Indian economy emerged from a state of agrarian stagnation to become a major provider in global trading networks.24 Together these developments helped to drive urban expansion, a process that drew people to cities and created new ties between urban areas and their rural hinterlands, both in terms of patterns of exchange and, with the railway networks, in terms of physical contact.25 21 Eleanor Newbigin, Leigh Denault and Rohit De, ‘Personal Law, Identity Politics and Civil Society in Colonial South Asia’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 46, no. 1 (2009), pp. 1–4. 22 Mytheli Sreenivas has shown that, in Madras, litigation rates for cases involving Hindu family property grew considerably in this period; disputes grew in Madras from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards. Mytheli Sreenivas, ‘Conjugality and Capital: Gender, Families, and Property under Colonial Law in India’, Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 63, no. 4 (2004), pp. 937–960, especially p. 944. fn 11. 23 B. B. Misra, The Indian Middle Classes (Oxford University Press, London, 1961), pp. 308–324. 24 Washbrook, ‘Law, Sate and Agrarian Society’, pp. 669–673. 25 C. J. Baker, An Indian Rural Economy 1880–1955: The Tamilnad Countryside (Clarendon, Oxford, 1984), especially pp. 241–249 and 414–420; Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation (Permanent Black, New Delhi, 2001), pp. 8–16; Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay 1900–1940 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994), pp. 23–67.

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The way in which Indians experienced these expanding opportunities was deeply informed by the structures of property law. Wealthy Muslim families found that the colonial state’s interpretation of Islamic succession laws made it difficult for them to build up their wealth and to protect their estates against fragmentation and profligate relatives in the future.26 In other Muslim countries, in the Middle East in particular, Muslims used waqf law, a system of endowment similar to trust in English common law, as a means of circumventing the Islamic legal prescriptions about dividing an estate between family members. Derived from the Arabic waqafa meaning to stop or hold, a waqf estate was one that could not be affected by succession practices, by sale or by seizure.27 A waqf was most commonly made to endow a religious or community institution, for example a madrassah or hospital. But, it also allowed families to manage the transmission of considerable wealth from one generation to the next, creating something like a trust-fund for future generations that was protected against interference by non-family members.28 In India, however, the focus on text rather than custom led officials to conclude that private waqf had no basis in Islamic law and that the only legal use of waqf law was to endow public institutions.29 In the rapidly changing social and economic context of the late nineteenth century, Muslim lawyers and landholders expressed great frustration at this interpretation of waqf law. Amongst wealthy Hindus, however, it was colonial jurists’ emphasis on joint, rather then individual, rights that created difficulties. The 1860 law reforms enforced the joint family at precisely the moment when wider trends were placing this structure under pressure. 26 Muslims governed by customary legal systems, especially those in Punjab and Bengal, were not affected by this reading of waqf law in quite the same way. Powers, ‘Orientalism, Colonialism, and Legal History’, pp. 554–560. See also Kozlowski, Muslim Endowments, pp. 71–72 and footnote 10 above. 27 Kozlowski, Muslim Endowments, pp. 1–3. 28 Ibid, pp. 10–14; The use of waqf law in this developed in the Ottoman Empire during the eighteenth century in response to the state’s fiscal policies but became an even more popular way of protecting a family’s hold over land in the nineteenth century, with the expansion of colonial power in this region. Powers, ‘Orientalism, Colonialism and Legal History’, pp. 537–538. 29 Kugle, ‘Framed, Blamed and Renamed’, pp. 286–294. Debates about the public and private character of the waqf were paralleled by debates about private trusts governed by Hindu law. On the emergence of this notion of public economic space and its impact on Hindu personal legal structures see Ritu Birla, Stages of Capital: Law, Culture and Market Governance in Late Colonial India (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009).

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Increasing land sales in certain areas raised questions about the operation of the coparcenary system vis-à-vis contractual rights. The ‘unfixed’ nature of the shares in the coparcenary and the need to take into account the possibility of future, unborn coparceners created confusion about the ability of a karta to enter into contractual arrangements concerning the joint estate.30 Social changes in this period also created tension within the joint family unit. Urban migration divided larger families geographically, creating new households with their own demands for resources. The increase in salaried employment was also a source of confusion. There was much legal debate about whether salary was the property of the earner or his family, particularly if the former had been the recipient of a specialist or expensive education.31 Family disputes about such questions began to spill out of the home and into the courts, and the late nineteenth century saw a rapid increase in the number of cases involving coparcenary rights.32 Later political reforms and the expansion of political representation for Indians meant that these discussions also began to enter the legislatures. While British officials cited the policy of religious neutrality to distance themselves from these debates, many Indian legislators were only too keen to use their newfound power to improve their own economic interests. Differences in the ways in which religious personal law had been interpreted under British rule affected the ways in which Hindu and Muslim representatives called for reform. In terms of Muslim law, the colonial state’s emphasis on textual authority in Islamic law meant that to oppose existing waqf regulations on the grounds that they were out of date or inappropriate for contemporary Indian society raised questions about the relationship between scripture and modern Muslim society in general. Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, an eminent thinker and reformer, campaigned vigorously to highlight the economic and social difficulties suffered by Muslim families under 30 Alan Gledhill, ‘The Influence of Common Law and Equity on Hindu Law Since 1800’, The International and Comparative Law Quarterly, vol. 3, no. 4 (1954) pp. 581–587; Rachel Sturman, ‘Property and Attachments: Defining Autonomy and the Claims of Family in Nineteenth-century Western India’, Comparative Studies in Society and History vol. 47, no. 3 (2005), pp. 611–637. 31 Note by J. A. Baines, on special duty for the purpose of Income Tax Act, 17 August, 1886, National Archives of India, New Delhi (hereafter NAI), GOI Finance Department, Separate Revenue—A Proceedings, January 1887, nos. 37–46. 32 For a summary of Privy Council rulings on this matter see the Statement of Objects and Reasons to Hari Singh Gour’s Bill to define the liability of a Hindu coparcener, (NAI) GOI Home Department, Judicial F. 407/1924.

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existing legal arrangements. He faced much opposition from other Muslim representatives, however, and in 1879, was forced to withdraw legislative proposals to reform waqf law following criticism that they contravened the textual basis of Islamic law.33 Hindu reformers experienced similar problems. In 1891, a year before the Indian Councils Act was passed, Vembakkam Bhashyam Iyengar introduced to the Madras Legislature a Gains of Learning Bill that sought to confirm a Hindu man’s salaried earnings as his individual property rather than part of the coparcenary estate. While the Bill won the support of ‘professional groups’, opponents argued that it attacked the family unit that formed the foundation of Hindu society and religion.34 Cautious of provoking civil unrest, British officials vetoed the measure on the grounds that it marked a departure from Hindu tradition. Muslim lawyers played a pivotal role in reframing the terms of the debate about personal law reform away from the deadlock between arguments about tradition and innovation. Turning the Privy Council’s own defence of Islamic legal tradition on its head, lawyers such as Amir Ali argued that a waqf made to benefit a family had always been permitted under Muslim law. Far from upholding ancient practice, colonial waqf law was itself a ‘modern’ innovation or corruption of ‘true’ religious practice. The assertion of Muslim autonomy to decide correct religious tradition won support from many religious leaders and ulama who were not so closely tied to the government. Thus, although these arguments were made to defend the economic interests of social groups traditionally allied to the colonial state, they helped to construct an image of Islamic unity. Maintaining this ‘communal unity’ was particularly important to Mohammad Ali Jinnah. The successful Bombay lawyer had, by the early twentieth century, become well known for his political activity and involvement with the Indian National Congress. While he supported co-operation between Hindu and Muslim politicians, he also believed firmly in the distinct interests, needs and identities of the two religious groups and, from 1913, was a member of both Congress and the Muslim League.35 Jinnah’s legal practices became increasingly

33

Kozlowski, Muslim Endowments, pp. 159–162. Sreenivas, ‘Conjugality and Capital’ pp. 944–945. 35 Jinnah abandoned the Congress following its Nagpur session in 1920, Matlubul Hasan Saiyid Mohammad Ali Jinnah: A Political Study (Sh. Muhammad Ashraf, Lahore, 1945; 1953 edn), pp. 125–135. 34

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bound up with his political ambitions; in the same year that he joined the League, Jinnah helped to secure the passage of the Mussalman Wakf Validating Act, which made a ‘family waqf’ legitimate on the grounds that this represented a more authentic interpretation of Islamic legal tradition.36 The act did not bring an immediate end to debates about Muslim family property; problems with retrospective application and administration of the new rights prompted a flurry of further bills over the next decade.37 But it did succeed in bringing waqf law in line with the needs and interests of wealthy Muslims without challenging the specifically religious identity of Muslim law. Its passage marked out waqf law particularly, and Muslim law more generally, as a domain best administered by learned Muslims than by colonial jurists. Hindu reformers were quick to follow this lead. Moving the emphasis in their arguments away from criticism of actual religious traditions focused instead on the way they had been interpreted by British judges. One of the key works to take on the issue of Hindu law reform in this way was Dwarka Nath Mitter’s The Position of Women under Hindu Law.38 Published the year that the Wakf Validating Act was passed, Mitter’s comprehensive history of Hindu women’s rights seemed to draw much inspiration from Muslim lawyers’ criticism of colonial understandings of traditional practices. Mitter refuted Maine’s claim that Hindu law reflected a perfect continuation of Roman law, particularly with regards to Patria potestas. Prior to British rule, Mitter argued, Hindu law had been a very fluid and dynamic legal system. Contemporary legal difficulties were not a result of social stagnation but of colonial officials’ limited linguistic skills and misunderstanding of the role of Pandit counsel. Drawing on his own translations of the Rig Veda, one of the oldest Vedic texts, Mitter argued that Maine and his colleagues had misunderstood the real meaning of women’s dependency in the ancient Hindu texts. A Hindu woman was brought under the legal authority of her family to preserve her chastity and protect her from vice. But this was not a state 36 While waqf is now the common spelling used for this term, the 1913 Act used this older construction. I cite the formal title of the act, rather than amending it in line with modern usage. Kozlowski, Muslim endowments, pp. 177–191. 37 Indeed, reform of waqf law also continued after independence, though it was much more concerned with waqf management than with family entitlement. Khalid Rashid, Wakf administration in India (Vikas, New Delhi, 1978), pp. 23–35. 38 Mitter, The Position of Women under Hindu Law (Calcutta, 1913; reprinted New Delhi, 1989).

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of ‘perpetual tutelage’ or a denial of legal personhood: a Hindu woman ‘was not prevented by reason of her dependence from performing any juristic act (e.g. contract of sale or loan) without the concurrent auctoritas of the guardian’.39 Far from being fossilized, Mitter argued, these practices and rights had been whittled away over time to become the corrupted and inauthentic legal system administered by the colonial courts. In this way, his book subverted Maine’s argument about the social evolution of Hindu society, while also challenging more long standing colonial claims about the relationship between the status of women and a society’s fitness for self-rule. While there were many similarities between the arguments about religious tradition and colonial interpretation put forward by Mitter and the Muslim lawyers involved in the debates about waqf, there was one important difference. Responding to the heavy emphasis placed on doctrinal teaching in colonial interpretations of Muslim law, Jinnah and his colleagues had framed their arguments in terms of religion: the current legal system needed to be reformed because it subverted ‘true’ Islamic practice by applying an incorrect reading of Muslim family law. The absence, in colonial interpretations of Hindu law, of a scriptural bases equivalent to that of colonial Islamic law meant that Mitter’s argument was framed in ‘secular’ terms. Engaging with debates about Roman civil law and notions of social progress, Mitter cited history, rather than religious doctrine, to support personal law reform. In so doing, his thesis sought to bring together a sense of Hindu nationhood based on a glorious, ancient past, with concern about women’s status in contemporary Indian society. While couched in terms of concern for women’s interests, this critique of Anglo-Hindu law also offered certain advantages to Hindu men. The principle of Patria potestas did not simply underpin the exclusion of women from the family estate; granting power to the eldest male in the family, the karta, it was the cornerstone of male subordination within the family. As with Muslim lawyers’ arguments about waqf, Mitter’s account of the historical development of Hindu law intersected with a drive to improve men’s property rights under the current legal system. The emphasis on social evolution in colonial accounts of the development of Hindu law meant that, while Muslim lawyers focused on religious text, Mitter’s argument focused on women’s rights and more secular arguments about social progress.

39

Ibid., p. 124.

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His argument was not evidence of more liberal attitudes amongst Hindu lawyers, but a reflection of the structures of colonial personal law.

Devolution and personal law reform in the 1920s Devolution under the 1919 Government of India Act allowed debates about personal law reform to be drawn into the Indian legislatures. The early 1920s saw the introduction of several private members bills that, if they did not attack the Hindu coparcenary structure directly, sought to grant greater legitimacy to alternative family setups within which individual rights received greater acknowledgement. Most of these proposals came from lawyers in the Presidency regions.40 The bills were framed largely in the language of women’s rights, proposing reforms that would secure a widow’s access to her husband’s share in coparcenary property, either directly or through maintenance claims.41 Government officials remained neutral towards these measures. This meant that most proposals failed to even make it onto the floor of the Assembly, having been given very low placing on a legislative ballot list that prioritized government business. Outside the legislatures, the bills were accompanied by attempts to raise popular interest in the subject of women’s rights and law reforms. These campaigns were also dominated by politically ambitious members of the legal profession. In 1923, Mukund Ramrao Jayakar, a lawyer from Bombay city, and later a legislative representative for that region, founded the Hindu Law Research and Reform Association (HLRRA). One of the primary aims of the HLRRA was to uncover the ‘principles underlying the system of Hindu Law. . .[and]. . .propose legislation with a view to rectify errors in the administration of Hindu Law, arising from departure from the true spirit of the Hindu Code. . .’ under British rule.42 Anxious to avoid the label of ‘radical modernizer’, Jayakar’s view of pre-colonial Hindu law echoed Mitter’s views: British 40 These included R. R. Kale, a lawyer from Maharashtra and Sambanda Mudaliar, a lawyer from Georgetown in the Madras Presidency. See Eleanor Newbigin, ‘The Hindu Code Bill and the Making of the Modern Indian State’, Unpublished thesis, University of Cambridge (2008). 41 Eleanor Newbigin, ‘A Post-Colonial Patriarchy? Representing the Family in the Indian Nation-State’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 44, no. 1, (2010), pp. 133–137. 42 Undated pamphlet setting out the Aims and Objectives of the All-India Hindu Law Research and Reform Association (NAI), M. R. Jayakar Papers F.4.

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rulers had, as a result of linguistic limitations and ignorance of Hindu life, misinterpreted Sanskrit legal texts to establish a rigid system of law that served neither Hindu traditions nor the interests of the community.43 These ideas were further elaborated through public meetings and printed pamphlets put out by the Association’s regional groups.44 The debates about Hindu law reform were important in shaping male legislators’ attitudes towards the claims and programmes of the all-India women’s groups founded at this time. In the decade following World War I three all-India women’s organizations were set up.45 Women members of these organizations were interested in a broad range of issues, including legal reform and women’s position and rights within the home. The emergence of these groups has typically been seen as a moment in which Indian women refused to be the subjects of reform but became interested in shaping and changing their lives and social status themselves. While this was undoubtedly an important transition, the success of women’s organizations’ campaigns and their growing prominence in Indian political life owed much to the constellation of male interests around the issue of women’s rights in the context of personal law reform. The three all-India women’s organizations strongly eschewed religious alignment, their leaders often arguing that women’s politics formed a vital foundation for cross-communal unity.46 Yet, the particular significance of arguments about women’s rights for Hindu property law meant that, at times, the women’s movement seemed to enjoy a stronger relationship with Hindu legislators than with their Muslim counterparts.47 By the late 1920s, therefore, ideas about women’s rights had seemed to gain 43 Letter from Jayakar to Law Minister, N. N. Sircar, 16th August, 1936, (NAI) M. R. Jayakar Papers F.4. 44 The HLRRA had branches in Bengal, Allahabad and Nagpur. A collection of their written material and minutes is available in (NAI) M. R. Jayakar Papers F. 4. 45 These were the Women’s Indian Association (WIA), founded in 1917, the National Council of Women in India (NCWI), established in 1925 and the All India Women’s Conference (AIWC), which met for the first time in 1927 to discuss women’s education but rapidly grew into a more permanent organization. Geraldine Forbes, Women in Modern India (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996), pp. 72–91; Catherine Candy ‘Competing Transnational Representations of the 1930s Indian Franchise Question’, in Ian Christopher Fletcher, et al. (eds), Women’s Suffrage in the British Empire (Routledge, London, 2000), pp. 191–206. A. Basu and B. Ray Women’s Struggle: a History of the All-India Women’s Conference 1927–1990 (Manohar, Delhi, 1990). 46 Basu and Ray, Women’s Struggle, pp. 19–21, 28–29. 47 M. R. Jayakar of the HLRRA was very involved with and regularly contacted for advice and to lend public support to the campaigns of the All-India Women’s

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considerable acceptance and support from Hindu male representatives and spokesmen in particular. This relationship was to prove significant with regard to the most celebrated personal law reform project of this period—the Child Marriage Restraint Act. Mrinalini Sinha has shown how political devolution within India, together with shifts in global imperial politics, created a brief window within which it was possible to pass this groundbreaking act—the only family law measure to cut across the religious-based personal laws that has ever been passed in India.48 Yet, support for the act was also much informed by the longer running discussions about law reform amongst Hindu and Muslim legislators. The publication of Katherine Mayo’s inflammatory Mother India in 1927 served to place the issue of women’s rights at the forefront of debates about further constitutional reforms and therefore to imbue this issue with even greater significance in relation to arguments about Indians’ fitness for self-rule. Passed in response to Mayo’s claims, Sinha has shown how the Child Marriage Restraint Act undercut the colonial state’s paternalist claims. Introduced initially as a private member’s bill, this act was heralded as evidence of the fact that Indians, and not British officials, were the primary agents of social reform. As such, the act served to further affirm the earlier claims of Jinnah and Mitter that Indians, rather than British officials, possessed the greatest power to effect social and legal change. Focused on the right of the child bride to claim protection from the state, and not simply her family, the Child Marriage Restraint Act was undoubtedly a groundbreaking measure. Its passage served to place issues of women’s rights squarely at the centre of the ongoing debates about religious authority and personal law. Yet, the act was not different enough from the claims made in these debates to create a real or permanent rupture in the boundaries of masculine autonomy and religious identity that informed these discussions. Male reformers continued to call for law reform in a manner that seemed to address concerns about women’s rights but which remained wholly in keeping with their own propertied and political interests. Muslim reformers did this by further invoking the religious identity of their legal system. For Hindus, however, the issues raised by the Mother India episode forced reformers to call for greater legislative intervention in Hindu Conference as well as more local Bombay Women’s Organisations, such as the Bombay Presidency Women’s Council. See (NAI) M. R. Jayakar Papers F.215, 217, 523. 48 Mrinalini Sinha, Specters of Mother India.

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law. While this created specific problems from Hindu legislators, it also allowed them to associate their demands with the radical, ‘modernizing’ drive of the Child Marriage Restraint Act in a way that their Muslim colleagues could not.49

Reinforcing the religious/liberal divide: law reform in the 1930s Debates about personal law reform in the 1930s were marked by a strengthening, rather than weakening, of the religious divide. When they came to take their seats in 1937, newly-elected members of the central legislature found themselves facing a long list of social reform proposals which had been put on hold during the constitutional debates of the late 1920s and early 1930s. This included two highly publicized measures, Dr G. V. Deshmukh’s Hindu Women’s Right to Property Bill and Mr H. M. Abdullah’s Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Bill, which proposed comprehensive reform of the Hindu and Muslim personal legal structures respectively. In the wake of the Mayocontroversy, both were framed as measures to reform the legal and social status of Indian women, though, once again, Hindu and Muslim reformers used quite different arguments to promote their proposals. In early 1935, H. M. Abdullah sought government permission to introduce what was to become known as the Shariat Application Bill. This bill was virtually a replica of a measure proposed, but never formally introduced, by Mian Abdul Haye, an urban representative of the Punjab Unionist Party, in 1929, at the height of the agitation against Mother India.50 Both Haye and Abdullah presented the bill as an attempt to improve the condition of Muslim women. Yet, their argument as to how the bill would do this had much in common with the criticism of colonial interpretation of religious practices raised in the waqf debates. As already discussed, colonial readings of Muslim law had drawn heavily on textual sources but continued to uphold certain customary practices. This meant that the legal 49 On the relationship between modernity and the Child Marriage Restraint Act see, Mrinalini Sinha, ‘The Lineage of the “Indian” Modern: Rhetoric, Agency and the Sarda Act in Late Colonial India’ in A. Burton (ed.), Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities (Routledge: London, 1999), pp. 207–220. 50 Haye went on to become Minister for Education in UP, see Ian Talbot, Khizr Tiwana, the Punjab Unionist Party and the Partition of India (Curzon, Richmond, 1996), p. 90, and Chapter 5, fn 42.

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system governing Indian Muslims’ families varied according to region and ‘tribal’ community. Though the colonial courts had often upheld Muslim women’s claims to mehr, in other areas of life, customary practices were cited as a means of preventing Muslim women from exercising the property rights set out in text-based Islamic law. This was certainly the case in Mian Abdul Haye’s homeland of Punjab where Muslim agriculturalists were governed by a customary legal system.51 In the wake of the Mayo controversy, the argument for eradicating regional differences in Muslim law went hand in hand with arguments about women’s rights. Introducing the bill, H. M. Abdullah explained that he wished to replace the degraded and unjust colonial legal system with a more authentic interpretation of Muslim law that was far more socially progressive. The state of Muslim Women under customary law is simply disgraceful. The Muslim women’s organisations have condemned customary law as it adversely affects their rights and have demanded that the Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) should be made applicable to them. The introduction of the Muslim Personal Law will automatically raise them to the position to which they are naturally entitled.52

In this way, the bill sought to reinforce the claim made about the Child Marriage Restraint Act, that the primary agent of social reform was not the colonial state but Indians, or in the case of the Shariat Bill, Indian Muslims. At the same time, the bill appealed to Muslim opponents of the Child Marriage Restraint Act; the original wording of early drafts of the bill proposed that Shariat law replace all other laws currently governing Indian Muslims, opening up a possibility for Muslims to exempt themselves from Act XIX of 1929.53 Both supporters and opponents of the bill referred to the fact that its provisions presented Muslim law as distinctly religious in nature. Responding to a government request for opinions on the bill, the Deputy Commissioner of Akola, Central Provinces, questioned the wisdom of a measure that enforced the Shariat as an immutable 51

David Gilmartin, ‘Kinship, Women and Politics’, see also footnote 12, above. From the Statement of Objects and Reasons in support of the Shariat Application Act 1937, cited in Janaki Nair, Women and Law in Colonial India: a Social History (Kali for Women, Delhi, 1996), p. 193. 53 The Government of India insisted that this reference to ‘law’ be altered before the bill was enacted, so that, in the end, the measure affected only customary practice and not statute. See extract from Legislative Assembly Debates, Vol. V., no. 11, 16 September, 1937, pp. 9–13. (NAI) GOI Home Department F.28/34/1938— Judicial. 52

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legal system that could not be adapted and developed by legislative intervention. ‘However excellent a law the Shariat might have been in the past and however excellent it might be even today’, he argued, ‘it cannot be said that nothing superior to it, or nothing more satisfactory than it, can be evolved in the march of human progress’. Yet for many other Muslim officials and lawyers interviewed by the government, this was one of the key reasons to support the bill. Mr K. M. Akram, a district and session pleader from the Central Provinces, supported the proposed changes to Muslim women’s rights, but also praised the manner in which the Bill reaffirmed the distinctly religious boundaries of Muslim law and its autonomy from secular statute.54 The Muslim Chambers of Commerce in Calcutta echoed this view, arguing that it would improve women’s rights and would also consolidate Muslim, rather than colonial, authority over property, including waqf trusts.55 Framed in terms of religion, the bill also triggered debate about the position of minority and convert Muslim communities, such as the Memons and Mappilas, who were still governed according to custom and more ‘Hindu-like’ legal systems.56 Mr M. J. Merchant, a joint subjudge in Dhulia in the Bombay Presidency, agreed with the supporters of the bill that ‘A true Moslem must follow Shariat in all his actions’. But went on to argue that, all Moslems are not true Moslems. Some of them accept only vital principles of Islam yet are Moslems. Why should they be forced by an enactment to accept other principles which they are not prepared to follow and which are not among the fundamental principles which a person has to accept to become a Moslem?

He was supported in this view by his colleague, an unnamed district judge from West Kandesh, also in Dhulia, who called for a distinction to be made between Islam as religion and Islam as a legal system. ‘It is possible to have one without the other’, he argued, ‘as is demonstrated by many communities in India which profess Islam’.57 Muslim supporters of the bill strongly refuted these arguments about 54 Précis of opinions on the Moslem Personal Law (Shariat) Application Bill— Paper I (NAI) GOI Home Department F.28/34/1938—Judicial. 55 See also views of Mohamad A. D. Arshad, Revenue Assistant in D. G. Khan District, Punjab, Précis of opinions on the Moslem Personal Law (Shariat) Application Bill—Paper III; Ibid. 56 See the opinion of the Commissioner, Northern Division, Dhulia, Bombay Presidency, in Précis of opinions on the Moslem Personal Law (Shariat) Application Bill—Paper II, Ibid. 57 Paper II, Ibid.

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difference amongst India’s Muslims. Indeed, the Anjuman Sabile Islamia of Gauhati, Assam, charged colonial courts with dividing the Muslim community by ‘enforcing’ custom upon certain groups and strongly supported the unifying element of the bill.58 The successful enactment of the bill owed much to the intervention of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who only entered the debate during its final stages. While the select committee that considered it over the summer of 1937 resolved problems of wording, confusion remained about the way in which the measures would be implemented. Seeking to assert their own legislative autonomy, the Congress-dominated provincial assemblies put pressure on the Government of India to allow provinces to opt into the provisions set out by the bill. Keen to prevent this attempt to build a single Muslim community from becoming a measure that would augment regional difference between Indian Muslims, Jinnah stepped in. In September 1937 he proposed to make it compulsory for all Indian Muslims to be governed by Shariat law in terms of marriage, mehr, intestate succession and waqf law only. Muslims could continue to adhere to customary law in relation to intestate succession if they wished, but section 3 of the bill permitted them to sign a declaration that committed themselves and future generations to following the Shariat in this area of law also.59 The other aspect of succession law to be left outside the purview of the bill was access to agricultural land, reflecting the separation of federal and provincial subjects under the 1935 Government of India Act. This constitutional necessity made it much easier for powerful landowners in Bengal and Punjab to accept the Shariat Bill, the passage of which seemed to reinforce a notion of a single, coherent Muslim community in India which, in favouring women’s rights, was progressive in its outlook, but was fundamentally underpinned by religious identity and scriptural authority. Deshmukh’s Hindu Rights to Property Bill seemed to mirror the Shariat Application Act in that it set out to provide a comprehensive, codified set of property laws for Hindu women, that would bring into greater alignment regional customs and the practices of different schools of Hindu law. As with the private members bills discussed in the 1920s, at the heart of Deshmukh’s Bill was a notion of family based 58

Paper I, Ibid. Explanatory summary by Robert F. Mudie, Government of India, Home department, 11 September, 1937, (NAI) GOI Home Department, Judicial F.36/17/1935. 59

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on the conjugal unit and power of the husband, not the coparcenary and the karta. The most radical reform introduced under the Bill was the inclusion of a man’s widow and daughter in the list of heirs to succeed to his property, including his share in the family coparcenary.60 It also rendered a woman’s share in this property absolute, rather than for the duration of her lifetime. While there was much general support for the main principles of Deshmukh’s Bill, many legislators objected to certain aspects of its provisions. Officials in northern India felt that the proposals went too far in destroying the structure of the joint family, leaving women in a better financial position than Hindu men.61 Similar objections were raised in the discussions of the select committee and the bill was quite radically redrafted as a result. New clauses were added highlighting differences between the Mitakshara and Dayabhaga schools of law and any reference to the rights of the daughter was removed. The bill was finally enacted, in this redrafted form, in April 1937. Differences in the regional High Courts’ interpretations of the provisions of Deshmukh’s Act created further complication. The Shariat Act had been worded in such a way as to avoid this kind of confusion. There was no definition or detail of what constituted Shariat law in the provisions of the Shariat Application Act. Indeed, its supporters shied away from any reference to or engagement with the different schools or system of Muslim law, presenting Shariat law as a coherent system, the acceptance of which was understood to be closely bound up with good Islamic practice.62 The act simply listed the areas of law to which Indian Muslims were to be subject, giving Muslim jurists considerable power and autonomy to interpret what this in fact entailed. Rather than resolve or eradicate different opinions between Muslim jurists and scholars, in presenting Shariat law as a clear and 60 This would result in the gradual phasing out of the all-male coparcenary and a move to a situation in which property remained in the hands of a more nuclear family structure. Many representatives questioned this when the bill was circulated for opinion, some of them wondering whether this was a result of poor wording of the bill’s provisions. See for example the opinions of the Governor of Bombay and Mr Justice Munroe of Punjab ‘Précis of opinions on the Hindu Women’s Rights to Property Bill’. (NAI) GOI Home Department, Judicial F.28/25/1938. 61 Note from the Government of the United Provinces to the Secretary of the Government of India, Legislative Department, 15 January, 1935. (NAI) GOI Home Department, Judicial F.28/25/1938. 62 This point was raised by Khan Bahadur M. Sehamnad Sahib Bahadur, MLC of Madras in Précis of opinions on the Moslem Personal Law (Shariat) Application Bill—Paper I (NAI) GOI Home Department—Judicial F.28/34/1938.

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religious code of law, the act moved discussions of these differences from the public sphere to a more discrete field of inter-community dialogue. Hindu law had no comparable code or legal system on which Deshmukh could draw. His proposal was framed in terms of statute not religious precepts and, as such, was more open to dispute and legal revision within the legislature. Indeed, the act was amended in 1938 in order to set out more clearly the order of succession.63 But discussions about Hindu widows’ rights and Deshmukh’s measures continued nonetheless. Whereas the Shariat Act had provided a means of removing intraMuslim debate about family and religious practice from the legislature and projecting an image of community solidarity, Deshmukh’s Act seemed to open up new divisions and differences between Hindu representatives. Though Deshmukh and his supporters argued that their proposals did not radically alter Hindu law and were in consonance with ‘Hindu ideas and sentiments’,64 many of their opponents disagreed.65 Unable to refer to a clear and coherent religious code, like the view of Shariat law presented in the Shariat Act, supporters of Deshmukh’s Act framed their arguments more in relation to social justice and improving the position of women rather than to religious tradition. These arguments also generated opposition, even between those who supported reform; Bengali representatives argued that they should be exempt from some social reform measures because of the more progressive nature of Dayabhaga law, which did not follow the coparcenary system.66 By the end of 1939 a Hindu Law of Inheritance (Amendment) Bill, a Hindu Women’s Property Bill, a Hindu Women’s Estate Bill and a Hindu Married Women’s Right to Separate Residence and Maintenance Bill along 63 The Hindu Women’s Rights to Property (Amendment) Act, (Act XI of 1938). (NAI) GOI Home Department F.364/1937—Judicial. 64 Statement of object of reasons from a Bill to amend the Hindu Women’s Right to Property Act, 1937, introduced by Mr G. S. Motilal in July 1938. (NAI) GOI Home Department—Judicial F.28/13/1938. 65 In a summary of official opinion on G. S. Motilal’s 1938 bill to amend the Hindu Women’s Right to Property Act, a member of the Government of India explained that the main criticism of the measure was that, ‘The Bill is fundamentally opposed to the principles of Hindu Law’. Note by Secretary to the Government of India, Home Department, 22 February, 1939. (NAI) GOI Home Department—Judicial, F.28/13/1938. 66 Monmayee Basu, Hindu Women and Marriage Law (Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2004), pp. 127–133.

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with three proposed revisions to the amended 1938 Hindu Women’s Property Act were awaiting discussion in the central legislature.67 It was this backlog of time-consuming legislation that prompted the Government of India to form a Hindu Law Committee. Established in January 1941, the Committee was ordered to look into and resolve the complications surrounding Hindu women’s property rights in the proposed bills. After six months of consultation, the Committee concluded that it was legislators’ piecemeal approach to law reform that was the major source of legal confusion and called on the government to back a more comprehensive project to codify and reform the wider body of Hindu law68 —a Hindu answer to the Shariat Act. The Government consented to this proposal and, over the next six years, the Hindu Law Committee worked to draw up a Hindu Code Bill that was introduced to the central legislature on 11 April, 1947, only months before independence. Strong support for the Code Bill project, from legislators, but particularly from within the Nehru government,69 meant that the measure was revived soon after the transfer of power, before the new constitution had even been drawn up. With political and regional factions vying for dominance in the new nation-state, the rifts and differences regarding the direction in which Hindu law reform should proceed did not simply disappear with independence. Rather, the Code Bill was drawn into much wider debates about citizenship and the framing of constitutional rights. For Muslim representatives, independence and partition made the protection of a coherent Muslim identity and autonomy from the Hindu dominated state an even more pressing concern. As debates about Hindu law were drawn into wider discussions about state-building, Indian Muslim leaders sought assurances that their community would be allowed to follow their ‘religious’ practices,

67 Hindu Law Committee ‘Report of the Hindu Law Committee’ (June, 1941), Appendix VI. (IOR) V/26/100/16. 68 Ibid, p. 10. 69 The revival of the Hindu Code Bill after 1947 has been seen as the result of Jawaharlal Nehru and B. R. Ambedkar’s personal commitment to social reform. Lotika Sarkar, ‘Jawaharlal Nehru and the Hindu Code Bill’ in B. R. Nanda (ed.), Indian Women: from Purdah to Modernity (Vikas, New Delhi, 1990), pp. 87–98; Reba Som, ‘Jawaharlal Nehru and the Hindu Code Bill: a Victory of Symbol over Substance’, Modern Asian Studies vol. 28, no. 1, (1994), pp. 165–195; Madhu Kishwar, ‘Codified Hindu Law: Myth and reality’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. XXIX, no. 33, (13 August, 1994), pp. 2145–2161, especially pp. 2145–2146.

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including their very recently acquired ‘traditional’ system of law.70 In agreeing to uphold the autonomy of the Muslim community the new Indian government was not creating new differences between Hindu and Muslim citizens’ relationship to civil legal structures, but were cementing a difference that had been developing for several decades prior to 1947.

Conclusion Though they were framed in secular, universal terms, the Fundamental Rights enacted as part of the 1950 Constitution, held very different appeal for Hindu and Muslim Indians. Colonial jurists’ conviction that the joint family formed the mainstay of Hindu domestic and legal life meant that the liberal language of rights employed in the constitution appealed to the interests of propertied Hindu representatives in a way that it did not to their Muslim counterparts. This is not to argue that Indian Muslims could not accept or relate to notions of individual rights or the kind of rights framework espoused by Hindu legislators. The notion of the rights-bearing individual formed the basis of colonial Muslim law. Indeed, for many influential Muslim men it was the emphasis placed on individual rights in colonial courts that was problematic. The social and economic, and from 1919 onwards, political pressures shaping late-colonial life in India meant that many Muslim reformers were interested in claims about collective identity and religious practice. This difference in the stance of Hindu and Muslim reformers towards claims about religion reflected colonial constructions of religious personal law. The more secular, universalizing language of Hindu legislators’ calls for property law reform was not the result of cultural factors—these legislators showed no sign of being more tolerant in favouring secularization than their Muslim counterparts.71 In framing their arguments in terms of religious authenticity, Muslim reformers were responding to colonial jurists’ preoccupation with 70 Jawaharlal Nehru to Mohammad Ismail Khan, Muslim League representative in the Constituent Assembly, 30 December, 1948, Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, (2nd series), Vol. 9, S. Gopal (ed.) (Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund: Oxford University Press, New Delhi, circa. 1990), pp. 317–318. 71 Eleanor Newbigin, ‘The Codification of Personal Law and Secular Citizenship: Revisiting the History of Law Reform in Late Colonial India’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 46, no. 1 (2009), pp. 83–104.

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textual sources and the primacy of scriptural authority over custom. The more nebulous textual basis of the colonial Hindu legal system meant that Hindu reformers lacked recourse to similar arguments about ‘correct’ religious practice. As a result, Hindu reformers critiqued colonial accounts of social evolution and the historical development of Hindu law, arguments which necessarily drew on a more secular discursive framework. Contesting colonial narratives about the historical development of Indian society, Hindu reformers’ arguments often appeared to be sympathetic to liberal notions of individual rights. For Muslims, however, the emphasis on religious identity and legal autonomy in law reform debates was much less compatible with a liberal individualism, freed from all other ascriptive identities. Against the backdrop of constitutional reform and devolution, these discursive differences had important implications for the relationship between the state and Hindu and Muslim representatives. The more ‘secular’ basis of Hindu reformers’ claims made them more dependent on, and therefore brought them into closer alliance with, the structures of civil power and apparatus of the state. For Muslims, however, law reforms granted greater power and autonomy to extra-state authorities—to Muslim religious clerics and jurists. This division was greatly exacerbated, though not created, by the communal politics of partition, which gave Indian Hindus a large popular majority and dominance over the independent state structure. Muslim citizenship in post-colonial India has come increasingly to be defined by this tension between claims to religious autonomy and civil rights. Though the debates about personal law reform were by no means the only intellectual well-spring for Indian notions of liberal rights, it seems that they hold an important legacy for understanding the operation of citizenship in post-colonial India. Post-colonial governance has been crucial in shaping the ‘application’ and reality of the citizenship set out in the Fundamental Rights. But, in focusing too heavily on application, academics have failed to question assumptions about the supposed neutrality, or secularity, of this type of liberal citizenship. This is not to argue that the liberal-secular project was, or is, destined to fail in India. Rather it is a plea, to academics and policymakers alike, to acknowledge that 15 August, 1947 did not mark a tabula rasa in Indians’ relationship with the state, but that people’s views of and relationship to notions of citizenship were deeply shaped by pre-existing debates and social structures.

C Cambridge University Press 2010 Modern Asian Studies 45, 1 (2011) pp. 33–56.  doi:10.1017/S0026749X10000302

From Subjects to Citizens? Rationing, refugees and the publicity of corruption over Independence in UP WILLIAM GOULD School of History, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK Email: [email protected] Abstract Building on recent work on the ‘everyday state’ and citizenship in 1947–1948, this paper examines changing practices and representations of ‘corruption’ in Uttar Pradesh, India over independence. The management and publicity of ‘corruption’, particularly in the food supply and rationing bureaucracy from the mid-1940s to the 1960s captures changing discussions about public expectations of government and narrates everyday urban experiences of the local state. Representations of administrative corruption within UP government ‘anticorruption’ planning, around the late 1930s to early 1940s, reflected changing ideas about the public and citizenship in UP in general—from a colonial stress on administrative authoritarianism, where corruption was presented as a regrettable but unavoidable facet of local power, to a sense of public accountability. By the 1940s, with war-time commodity controls accompanying rapid political change, opportunities for nefarious gain widened, and administrative rules and functions quickly became much more complex. ‘Corruption’, as a symbolic political weapon, was publicized in a way which now connected national, state and local level discussions of independence, citizenship and state authority. Specifically, the very nature of different types of corruption in the crucial sphere of controls and rationing brought about more developed forms of political protection and backing for the corrupt administrator and encouraged new clientelist networks across the political spectrum.

Introduction Changing public and governmental ideas about ‘corruption’ in India, as elsewhere, have for a long time been seen as a key interpretive interface for popular local perceptions of the everyday state.1 Yet very few writers have attempted to historicize this popular perception 1 One of the groundbreaking and most thought provoking studies that sparked off a new academic interest in the phenomenon of corruption in South Asia has been Akhil

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to look at how, for example, notions of citizenship and the state in India, transformed in relation to discourses of ‘corruption’ over critical periods of governmental change, between the early 1940s and 1960s. Whenever a paper on ‘corruption’ is presented to an academic conference, or taken as a theme in a newspaper leader, there is strong tendency for writers and listeners alike to throw up their arms: What can be done or said about a phenomenon that is apparently so ubiquitous, pervasive, or politically entrenched? Unfortunately the suggestion that ‘corruption is everywhere’, or ‘inevitable’, does not help us to explain why political reactions to it have been uneven over time. Nor does it help to untangle the real ways in which ideas about permissible and non-permissible forms of public behaviour fundamentally alter, disturb or reinforce social and political hierarchies, particularly in relation to government.2 If ‘corruption’ is an inevitable product of human organization, then we are faced with the question of how far its effects can be tolerated according to the ordinary workings of an organizational rules system, such as a public administration. At what point do the inevitabilities of corrupt behaviour, really mean ‘corruption’; at what point do those outside, or more loosely linked to transactions involving rule-bending, begin to label and critique such activities? Furthermore, if most are agreed that corruption is ‘inevitable’, the real issue is one not of ending corruption, but one of how far mechanisms for controlling or regulating it are effective.3 These questions are particularly urgent in relation to everyday forms of interaction between state

Gupta’s, ‘Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State’, American Ethnologist, Vol. 22, No. 2 (May 1995), pp. 375–402; also significant in pushing this kind of study forward is Jonathan Parry, ‘“The Crisis of Corruption” and “The Idea of India”: A Worm’s Eye View’ in I. Pardo (ed.), The Morals of Legitimacy (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2000), pp. 27–55. 2 The ways in which corruption is bound up in the production of class, religious and gender inequalities has been looked at for contemporary India by Craig Jeffrey, Barbara Harriss-White and Stuart Corbridge. In this work, it appears that corruption can become a deliberate choice, made to further particular sectional interests. Craig Jeffrey, ‘“A Fist is Stronger than Five Fingers”: Caste and Dominance in Rural North India’ Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, vol. 25, no. 2 (2001), pp. 1– 30; Barbara Harriss-White, India Working: Essays on Society and Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 72–103, 239–247; S. Corbridge and S. Kumar, ‘Community, Corruption, Landscape: Tales from the Tee Trade’, Political Geography vol. 21 no. 6 (2002), pp. 765–788. 3 Vincent Fitzsimons, ‘The institutional structure of corruption: firm competition and the choice of institutional strategy’, Paper presented at Institute for Development Policy and Management and Global Poverty Research Group conference, University of Manchester, UK, Friday 25 November, 2005.

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and citizen—perhaps the realm of ‘petty corruption’—since, on the one hand, most Indian citizens experience the state through lower level government servants, and on the other, representations of corruption are consumed through organs of popular culture and dissemination. The relationships between big business and powerful financial interests and government agencies are an important part of these representations (and easily identified everywhere),4 but much less is known of how general views of government corruption percolate down to the street. Building on recent work on the ambiguous nature of the ‘everyday state’ and citizenship in 1947–1948,5 this paper will examine changing practices and representations of ‘corruption’ in Uttar Pradesh (UP), India, over independence, and look at how they affected notions of citizenship. It will look at the management and publicity of ‘corruption’, particularly in the food supply and rationing bureaucracy from the mid-1940s to the 1960s. The latter captures changing discussions about public expectations of government and narrates everyday urban experiences of the local state. In particular, the aim is to examine how the management and publicity of corruption was an essential outgrowth of very specific pressures of colonial transition. The first argument will be that there was a significant shift in representations of administrative corruption within UP government ‘anti-corruption’ planning around the late 1930s to early 1940s, which introduced a new sense of public accountability and responsibility for corruption control. This partly reflected changing ideas about the public and citizenship in UP in general—from a colonial stress on administrative authoritarianism, where corruption was presented as a regrettable but unavoidable facet of local power, to a sense of 4 For more discussion of this level of ‘corruption’, see Gurharpal Singh, ‘Corruption in Contemporary Indian Politics’, in Paul Heywood (ed.), Political Corruption (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 210–222. 5 The most complete range of discussions of this idea can be found in C. J. Fuller and V. Bénéï (eds), The Everyday State and Society in Modern India (London: C. Hurst and Co., 2001), and René Véron, Stuart Corbridge, Glyn Williams, Manoj Srivastava, ‘The Everyday State and Political Society in Eastern India: Structuring Access to the Employment Assurance Scheme’, The Journal of Development Studies, Vol. 39, No. 5, (June 2003), pp. 1–28. More recently, interest has grown in the ambiguities too, surrounding the idea of citizenship in relation to the late 1940s and early 1950s. Here, I refer particularly to the work of Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar (footnote 7), Joya Chatterji (footnote 55), Paul Brass and Partha Chatterjee—the latter in relation to contemporary India and discussions surrounding the politics of the dispossessed; Paul Brass, The Politics of Northern India: 1937 to 2007 (forthcoming, 2011); Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

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public accountability. At a basic level this was about the changing sense of culpability of the bribe-giver, compared with the bribetaker. Whereas in both phases, the contacts between local power brokers and the local state were seen as inevitably leading to ‘corrupt’ transactions, for administrators of the earlier phase this could be tolerated to some extent by representing such transactions as ‘customary’. By the late 1940s and 1950s, governments elected on a popular, albeit limited mandate, began to envisage administrative corruption in terms of the practices of the colonial past. Citizens’ organizations were promoted by local governments and by dissatisfied or dispossessed subjects/citizens as a bulwark against what they saw as the inherited tendencies of police and administrative excess; anticorruption ‘committees’ were established, and the press became a new kind of public mouthpiece for the exposure of scandals. By the 1940s, too, with war time commodity controls accompanying rapid political change, opportunities for nefarious gain widened, and administrative rules and functions quickly became much more complex. ‘Corruption’, as a symbolic political weapon, was publicized in a way which now connected national, state and local level discussions of independence, citizenship and state authority. The changing meanings surrounding corruption cannot, however, simply be explained by the rhetoric of newly independent democratic states regarding governmental accountability. More significant were the specific reactions to local state structures that colonialism in UP enabled, as ambiguous layers of local state power where the nexus of authority and influence was uncertain. The combination of these factors—the specific pressures of the 1940s political transitions, and the on-going but now more complicated pockets of colonial administrative fiefdoms—eventually allowed ‘corruption’ to become a normalized part of everyday approaches to the state in the midtwentieth century. Specifically, we will look at how the very nature of different types of corruption in the crucial sphere of controls and rationing brought about more developed forms of political protection and backing for the corrupt administrator—in particular, new types of clientelist networks in supplies and rationing which, in turn, encouraged new kinds of administrative/political networks, as shown by Kochanek for the 1960s.6 6 Stanley Kochanek, Business and Politics in India (New York: University of California Press, 1974), pp. 214–239; Stanley Kochanek, The Congress Party of India: the Dynamics of One-Party Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968).

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The final section will look at how the dynamic meanings and publicity of corruption were complicated by ambiguities surrounding citizenship and citizen rights in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Full rights of citizenship were not guaranteed in the period of transition, particularly for those suspected of holding links with Pakistan, but also in an informal sense for a wide range of other dispossessed subject-citizens.7 Shifting representations and practices of corruption over the mid-1940s and 1950s were critical in defining and redefining the permissible rights and responsibilities of such quasi-citizens on the one hand, and officers that came into contact with them on the other. Corruption became a discourse for representing the injustices and disqualifications of a range of communities pushed to the periphery of India’s dominant national narrative, be they displaced refugees or urban poor. But also, from the point of view of governments, the policing and control of the dispossessed created the notion of social chaos, around which the idea of local corruption could be naturalised. Here, too, the issue of licenses for commodities and rations in the transitional years of the Second World War was crucial. In connecting these three areas of argument—changing state representation, practices of corruption, and implications for the rights of ‘citizens’—it becomes clear that there was a duality in thinking about corruption among officialdom and in popular political discourse over the late 1940s and 1950s. This included a broad sense of its colonial roots, but also a kind of recognition that at a quotidian level it was something not easily reformed. This was because the very mechanisms of corruption allowed politicians, by the early 1950s, to protect themselves and their interests at lower levels of the state. In other words, there was a gulf between the upper level notion of how corruption related to colonial practices, and a developing use by political leaders of bureaucratic structures for their own careers and financial interests. But as we will see in the final section of the paper, this too was affected by the peculiar circumstances of post partition migration and the citizenship rights of Muslim minorities in UP.

7 For a richly researched and original account of this situation in the immediate aftermath of India’s independence, see Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2007).

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The changing publicity of ‘corruption’ In 1938, the Congress government in UP, elected under the new rules of the 1935 Government of India Act, decided (following the resolution of Bishambhar Dayal Tripathi) to set up a committee to report on measures which would counter corruption within government services. The timing and scope of this report were significant. It was the first major official provincial-level effort to investigate, define and publicly expose corruption, before the Santhanam Committee of 1964. It was also the product of a unique situation—a popular government in waiting, still operating in a colonial context. In this sense, it appeared on the cusp of changing official attitudes towards administrative responsibility in relation to what the government saw as the UP public. The 1938 report did indeed devise recommendations which presaged a changed view of public responsibility in relation to government, when compared with the phase of dyarchy in the 1920s. Its recommendations included the establishment of local anti-corruption committees involving non-officials as well as officials; measures to ease the process of prosecution of charged officials in the courts—most controversially, requesting that the standard of proof on corruption cases be lowered; and a raft of more minor suggestions, such as a petition of complaints boxes in offices—a measure that was generally thought to be ‘too corruptible’ to work.8 Although the 1938 report-writers, nodding to colonial ideas of esprit de corps, acknowledged that administrative corruption was ‘far less prevalent among gazetted officers than among the non-gazetted of clerical or menial staffs’, this new emphasis on corruption brought with it a serious commitment to public interaction in attempting to overcome or manage the problem. In this sense, the setting up of anti-corruption committees, with representatives from different walks of life, was a key proposal. The causes of corruption set out by the report also reflected this set of priorities. They included: the reluctance of the bribe giver, who has received his quid pro quo, to give evidence against the receiver; the comparative absence of a strong public opinion, especially against minor forms of corruption; the difficulty of securing adequate evidence of definite charges, partly through fear of consequences from the 8 ‘Government of the United Provinces, General Administration Department, 11 May, 1938, Notification, Report of the Anti-Corruption Committee’, Uttar Pradesh State Archives (hereafter UPSA), General Administration Department (hereafter GAD), Box 594, File 70/1938, Pt. III of file.

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officer concerned and his external political sympathizers; and the existence of a large number of poorly-paid persons in the lower ranks of government service.9 The last two of these points captured changing government approaches to corruption, and its centrality to public notions of citizenship and public responsibility. Firstly, the issue of retribution and ‘sympathizers’ linked to corrupt officers, described corruption as a complex network, involving a web of beneficiaries, many of whom might be linked to the officer around a range of different political, familial or business functions. Secondly, the mention of large numbers of poorly paid persons in government service pointed to the emerging problem of a huge, burgeoning state in which a good proportion of Indian families either had a direct connection through a family member, or aspired to have such a connection. From the early 1940s, the effects of the colonial war economy on UP society and the local state changed the nature of publicity surrounding corruption again. This was not just the product of either official committees, as in 1938, or even new political freedoms although looking at the English and Hindi press over the period, a sense of political change was important. Of perhaps equal significance were the series of crises of the 1940s, the effects of the war on UP society (and the economic controls that went with it), in weakening the legitimacy and working of the state at all levels, and in creating uncertainty and opportunity in a phase of political flux. The central administrative function here surrounded rationing and licenses. This local state activity directly involved large sections of the UP population, at least in urban areas, via the town and district level supply and rationing officers who operated the Food and Civil Supply policies of the UP government between 1942 and the 1960s. By the end of 1946, there were 49 rationed towns in UP, with a total population of 56 lakhs, and a further 340 smaller towns with a population of 23 lakhs were being considered for rationing.10 In its early stages in 1942–1943, in response to price increases, the food provisioning and rationing schemes, contained in the United Provinces Food grains Control Order 1943 aimed to keep food prices at a controlled level, and to support only the poorer 40 per cent of the urban population. The Food grains

9 ‘Report of the Anti-Corruption Committee’, UPSA, GAD, Box 594, File 70/1938, Pt. III of file. 10 ‘UP Foodgrains Provisioning Order’, UPSA, Food and Civil Supply, Box 40, File 167/1946.

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Control Order was accompanied by a whole host of other enactments for other commodities and orders controlling movement of goods.11 These were not statutory controls on prices, but an attempt to keep prices down by issuing licenses to specific dealers and controlling movement of commodities. The control policy was severely constrained by the inability of the colonial state to monitor and control trade with its limited resources. From the outset, formal total rationing was ruled out, since it was believed that large sections of the population would continue to bypass it by buying direct from the countryside. Rationing and controls were therefore concentrated in the so-called ‘regulated large towns’ of the province—Lucknow, Kanpur, Allahabad, Benares and Agra, and 20 other big towns, while subsidiary schemes were set up in a further 39 towns. The idea was to slightly undersell the open market, to bring down prices. Nevertheless, it was still recognized from the outset that if controls were in violent opposition to economic forces, it would lead to abuses, black-marketing, and hoarding, again, leading to a lack of confidence. Such abuses were almost immediately recognized, even by officialdom, in the three most significant towns— Allahabad, Kanpur and Lucknow, as well as in Eastern UP generally, where there were sharp increases in prices during 1943, despite the control policies. With India’s political future uncertain in the mid-1940s, spiralling violence, and lack of manpower to run the byzantine food control bureaucracy, Food and Civil Supply was therefore easily open to abuse. Both policy-making and administration of Food and Civil Supply necessitated constant contacts between the local administration and the public at large, in a way that remained remarkably consistent during the move towards independence.12 In 1942–1943, district magistrates were asked to set up advisory committees in every large town with representatives of various interests. They were to gather 11 ‘Foodgrains CO, 1943’; ‘Flour, Rice and Dal Mills CO 1943’; ‘Foodgrains (Movement) CO, 1943’; ‘Foodgrains Supplementary (Movement) CO, 1943’; ‘Poultry (Movement) CO, 1943’; ‘Sheep, Goats and Pigs (Movement) CO, 1943’; ‘Ghee (Movement) CO, 1944’; ‘Fish (Movement) CO, 1944’; ‘Fruit CO, 1944’; ‘Vegetable (Movement) CO, 1944’; ‘Cattle, Sheep and Goats (Slaughter) CO, 1943’; ‘Regulation of Local Purchase CO, 1944’; ‘Gur CO, 1943’; ‘Food grains Distribution Order, 1943’; ‘Starch Manufacturing CO, 1943’; ‘Restriction of Food grains Purchase Order, 1944’. 12 For a general discussion of changes in the popular perceptions of state power in India as a whole, see Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘On State, Society and Discourse in India’ in James Manor (ed.), Rethinking Third World Politics (London: Longman, 1991), pp. 72–99.

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public opinion together against abuses, evasions, and hoarding and to remain aloof from party politics—something which turned out to be an extremely naïve hope. The UP government was throughout the period of controls fighting a losing battle in some obvious areas, for example the selling off of poor-quality grain: ‘In the hurry of early buying, we seem to have bought a good deal of earth’, wrote one official commentator about the mid-1940s food policy.13 Other basic overarching abuses of the rationing system were more serious. Rationing was organized through the distribution of identity cards. In 1944, one officer in Kanpur reported that industrial workers took advantage of the ignorance and lack of resources of the management and secured rations for a large number of imaginary units and a large number of persons got rations on several different cards for the same person. One of the Town Rationing Officers for Kanpur in 1944 pointed out that ‘figures of population for Cawnpore went up from the 1941 census figure of 4,41,000 to over 8,00,000’.14 A similar case of fictitious ration cards prepared by rationing staff were unearthed elsewhere too, for example, in Etawah.15 The civic guards used to police the queues were reported, in Gorakhpur, to be seizing the opportunity to make extra money.16 And the movement of goods provided rich pickings for policemen, of course, who around Bara Banki extorted regular levies on cartmen transporting grain.17 Because controls and rationing involved such a large section of the population,18 and were so emotive (being related for example to the issue of refugees and to the problems of price rises), they connected nearly all levels of governance and political activity in urban areas. Some prominent UP Congress leaders were drawn into it: P. D. Tandon was involved at high levels in the advocacy of Hindu 13 ‘Commissioner’s Conference at Government House to discuss the supply situation’ UPSA, Food and Civil Supply, Box 37, File 974/43. 14 ‘Note AGS, 3 August, 1944’, ‘Supply of Food grains to Ordnance depots’, UPSA, Food and Civil Supply, Box 36, File 178/48. 15 ‘One more rationing employee suspended’, The National Herald (Lucknow), 7 January, 1948. 16 ‘Inspection note of Commissioner, Gorakhpur Division, 29 January, 1944’. UPSA, Food and Civil Supply, Box 37, File 974/43, ‘Commissioner’s Conference at Government House to discuss the supply situation’. 17 ‘Alleged extortion from cartmen’, The National Herald (Lucknow), 13 January, 1948, p. 4. 18 See also ‘Food grains Decontrol’, The National Herald (Lucknow), 9 January, 1948, p.4. This leading article discussed the question of an acceptable minimum wage at which a working family should be allowed to continue to receive ration cards after de-rationing.

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Sindhi complaints against Muslim rationing officers at local levels. One of the first UP Food and Civil Supplies Ministers, C. B. Gupta, was embroiled in corruption scandals which linked high-level business deals with the complaints of men and women on the UP streets. The issue was a central one for all governments. For the period 1949– 1951, the procurement and rationing of food grains was costing the UP Government the huge sum of about Rs. 2 crores every year and public debates were common around the issue of whether production could be best enhanced under a policy of control or decontrol.19 Nehru considered the food situation, and the corruption associated with it, to be a general problem of grave proportions that linked in his mind to problems of law and order—creating a ‘spectre of famine and starvation’.20 While touring UP in early February 1952 he found that people in Allahabad ‘generally were against the Sarpanchas and the Mukhias who, it was said, did not distribute the cloth properly and made money out of black-marketing’.21 The rationing/trade licensing of food, cloth and building materials involved controversies that reached from the state government down into the locality. And it was in this area that the publicity surrounding corruption linked UP’s urban poor and middle classes to higher levels of governance. As will be seen in more detail below, this meant that proactive citizens’ organizations emerged to expose examples of local corruption surrounding rationing and supply. These organizations used the local press and the mechanisms of the local state itself in their attempts to expose officers’ corruption. Unlike the late 1930s where critiques of police and administrative corruption, where publicized, were generally linked to specific anti-colonial movements and campaigns, by the early period of post-independence UP, corruption was now more widely discussed. Moreover, specific cases against individual officers were rooted out, publicized and disseminated more widely. The press was freer after the war, and citizens’ expectations were also clearly higher. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, administrative corruption was discussed in terms of older structures of power that ought to be reformed by a ‘modernizing’ state. However, as will be seen below, the new public critiques of corruption also

19 See for example, ‘Who Gains from Cloth Decontrol?’ Magazine section, National Herald, 11 April, 1948, p. 2. 20 Jawaharlal Nehru to Pant, 13/4/51, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (hereafter NMML) Pant Papers, reel 1. 21 Jawaharlal Nehru to Pant, 8/2/1952, NMML, ‘Secret Note’, Pant Papers, reel 1.

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became part of a complex mechanism of political protection of officers and local leaders themselves exposed to corruption scandals, and were used as a means of exposing rivals.

The politics of corruption and anti-corruption in the supply offices A central focus of corruption scandals and complaints over the 1940s and early 1950s was the peculiar structure of the food and civil supply machinery, and in particular, the new hierarchy of administrative officers set up to administer the controls. These were headed by the District Magistrate, and a Regional Food Controller, and most importantly, involved the recruitment of temporary gazetted officers—Town Rationing Officers, Area Rationing Officers and District Supply Officers (hereafter ‘TRO’, ‘ARO’ and ‘DSO’). These administrators formed an important although ambiguous link between local administration of controls and public outrage surrounding it, and were at the heart of a complex range of controversies and clientelist networks across UP over the late 1940s and 1950s. DSOs and TROs received special rates of pay of Rs. 300, comparable with the India Career Services which at the time generally started at Rs. 350.22 These officers were vulnerable, being constantly exposed to public controversy because their posts were temporary (and hence they did not have the same statutory protection as permanent civil servants). However, they also had significant local power. Licenses of dealers in controlled food grains could be suspended, pending complaints against them as reported by rationing inspectors. It was pointed out in 1946 that, ‘such a practice will encourage corruption on the part of the Inspectors as the suspension of a licence is a life and death question for a dealer. Such cases when contested in the regular court require about six months time to be decided. During this long period the entire business of a dealer is ruined and stocks get spoiled. . .’.23 Indeed, the courts were often irrelevant to the powers of these officers. Under the UP Food Grains Control Order, 1945, the licensing authority could suspend or cancel licenses, irrespective of 22

Interview with R. K. Trivedi (Lucknow), 18 March, 2008. ‘Hony Secretary of Beopar Mandal, Chowk Bazar, Dehra Dun, 3 October, 1946 to Commissioner for Rationing and Civil Supplies, UP, Lucknow’. ‘Food grains Control Order’, UPSA, Food and Civil Supply, Box 34, File 135/43. 23

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a court’s decision.24 The possibilities for additional remuneration for these officers were also vast. And partly because of this, there were several court cases in which the UP government had to defend against accusations of vindictive license cancellations and the like.25 Most importantly, the TROs and DSOs from this period were nearly all immersed in some form of local factional network involving political, familial or business links, some going back generations. Such networks often financed local power bases of politicians by the early 1950s. In the first two weeks of November 1951, C. B. Gupta, the UP Food and Civil Supplies Minister, was accused of distributing ration shops and licenses to supporters in different towns, and handing out coal and fuel licenses to Congress sympathizers. Gupta nicely summed up the political intricacies of Food and Supply in a defensive letter to Nehru: Unfortunately I was entrusted with some of the most ticklish and difficult portfolios like Food and Civil Supplies much against my will. But I can assert that I have seldom exercised my discretion in matters where powers of patronage could be used. It should be remembered that the number of licensees for various commodities in the Uttar Pradesh will be probably over two lakhs and the number of applicants who want this or that permit will run into several times that number. There must be hundreds of Congressmen who could be holding this or that permit but the accusers seem to have taken special pleasure in picking out a few Congressmen who are not associated with their group in the Congress, even though these persons have obtained their licenses through the normal channel.26

Because of this kind of pressure from the top, or in order to maintain political protection for their own gain, DSOs and TROs sought out new income. Some benefitted from their clients’ black market activities. B. R. Sharma, DSO at Banaras in the mid-1950s, was allegedly involved in the appointment of favoured contractors, through networks

24 ‘Office Memorandum, J. D. Banks (For Commissioner) to Hony Secretary, Beopar Mandal, Dehra Dun’, Ibid. 25 For example, ‘In the Court of Civil Judge, Aligarh. Pauper Suit no. 11 of 1956. Radha Kishan s/o Jai Narain, partner of Firm Radha-Kishan Sannamal, a present residing in Lachmi Narayan Temple Daughali, Goberdhan District Mathura— Plaintiff Versus 1. The State of Uttar Pradesh, summons to be served on Secretary to Ministry of Food and Civil Supplies, Uttar Pradesh, Luknow. 2. Shri Bhaskar Rao Sharma, at present District Supply Officer, Kanpur’ in Personal file of B.R. Sharma, UPSA, Food and Civil Supply, Box 6, file 155/44. 26 C. B. Gupta to Jawaharlal Nehru, forwarded to Pant, 11 November, 1951, Pant Papers, reel 1, NMML.

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of subordinates.27 A petition signed from ‘the people of Gorakhpur’ claimed that Syed Ahmed, TRO/DSO of Basti, and later Gorakhpur, only granted licenses to powerful groups linked to his family, and ignored aam log.28 Significant here were the accusations of communal or caste bias—something which had a special kind of purchase both just before and after independence. The complaints against K. S. Sirohi, TRO of Budaun, included his apparent appointment of coreligionists and lackeys into subordinate posts and the granting of licenses to particular Sikh families, which contributed to his deep involvement in the management of black market profiteering, especially in construction.29 In many cases, there were accusations of party or factional favour in the granting of licenses. For example, in the file of the Lucknow Area Rationing Officer in 1948–1949, R. S. Jouhri, the character roll contained the very common type of statement—that, ‘His aptitude for intrigue and tendency to mix up in local politics prevent him from being as useful as he could be . . . there were certain complaints but nothing was substantiated as they were due to intrigues of local parties’.30 Clearly, as was the case with the long and chequered career of the K. B. Misra, who worked as ARO across UP but was constantly seen in Lucknow mobilizing MLA31 supporters, officers needed to have powerful political and business links in each locality, and such connections helped them in times of personal career crisis and public scandals.32 These officers were therefore immersed in their own kinds of clientelist networks. And this was something which citizens’ organizations were often set up to combat. For example, a resolution urging the Banaras authorities to take drastic steps to eradicate corruption from government offices entrusted with the distribution of goods in the city was passed at a ‘meeting of residents’ on 4 January, 1948. The resolution asked local MLAs not to bring pressure to bear 27 G. N. Tiwari, Ex AFGI, Allahabad, June 1954. Personal file of B. R. Sharma, UPSA, Food and Civil Supply, Box 6, file 155/44. 28 ‘Members of DSO staff—complaint’ 14 May, 1955, ‘Personal File of Sri Syed Ahmed’, UPSA, Food and Civil Supply, Box 21, File 791/45. 29 R. p. Nautiyal, MLA Garhwal to C. B. Gupta, Minister for Food and Civil Supplies, 3 May, 1954, ‘Personal file of K. S. Sirohi’, UPSA, Food and Civil Supply, Box 12, File 864/45. 30 ‘Representation regarding R. S. Jouhri character roll, personal file’, UPSA, Food and Civil Supply, Box 14, File 839(P)/45. 31 Member of the Legislative Assembly (India). 32 See ‘Personal File of Sri K. B. Misra, ARO’, UPSA, Food and Civil Supply, Box 21, File 790/45.

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upon the Government and officials to suppress cases of corruption.33 However, with the right kind of political support or cover, the bungling of procedures or rules became much easier. Very common was the acquiescence in rule breaking and creative accounting, for a cut (or ambiguous bribe). B. R. Sharma, a DSO already transferred to Allahabad for bad behaviour, profited in this way from one Sri Kesari Narain—a rationed retailer of Bharti Bhawan area. The latter allegedly misappropriated food grains up to 90 maunds by making entries on bogus ration cards and wrong (farzi) additions in the sales register. The case against the dealer was then sent to Sharma who, according to one witness, accepted a bribe of Rs. 1,000. Karan Singh Sirohi, while in Budaun in the early 1950s, allegedly used his rationing inspector in an elaborate scheme to collect bribes from licensees.34 The UP newspapers were full of similar cases throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the files themselves show how the interjection of local power brokers allowed such misdemeanours to be overlooked by departmental enquiries. One activity which easily evaded complaint mechanisms and public censure due to high level political protection, was ‘partibandi’, or the dividing up of ill-gotten gains by the staff of supply offices. In 1950– 1951, the supply office at Allahabad was the scene of an intricate, longterm embezzlement of infamous proportions, involving 18 officers, godown inspectors and dozens of outsiders, including MLAs and local party bosses. In total, Rs. 18,361 was misappropriated or embezzled and took nearly two years to fully unearth.35 Political protection, financed by racketeers was also evident in Aligarh. In the file of Saraswati Prasad, it was noted that one contact had been making tons of money by securing permits for sugar, steel and cement etc. from the District Supply Officer of Aligarh, and selling them in the black market. The local police and the present Distt. Supply Officer are openly in collusion with the said Goonda . . . and anybody can see him near the DSO’s 33 ‘MLAs asked not to frustrate Anti-Corruption Activity in Banaras’, The National Herald (Lucknow), 7 January, 1948, p. 8. 34 ‘Complaint against Sri Karan Singh Sirohi, DSO/TRO Budaun’, 1/10/51, ‘Personal file of K. S. Sirohi’, UPSA, Food and Civil Supply, Box 12, File 864/45. 35 Extract from Food and Civil Supply (C) Deptt. File no. 1140/1951 reg. Embezzlement in Town Rationing Office (Issues) Allahabad, Shyam Bahadur Singh Visen DSO/TRO (personal file of), UPSA, Food and Civil Supply, Box 24, file 619/49. ‘Report of inspection on the quantity accounts of the office of the Dy Town Rationing Officer (Issue), Allahabad for the period from April 1, 1950 to December 31, 1951’ ‘Embezzlement in TRO Office, Allahabad’, UPSA, Rent Control C, Box 2, file 1140/1951.

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office everyday, obtaining permits on bogus names, and funnily he enjoys the patronage and support of Mr N. S. Chowhan MP.36

The controversies surrounding supply, controls and rationing affected in a broad way, both the publicity surrounding corruption itself and popular discourses about the relationship between administrator and Indian ‘citizen’. In the face of potentially vindictive supply officers, those approaching the supply machinery sought to protect their interests informally. So in a very real sense, expectations surrounding administrative corruption involved the UP urban public in quite new ways from those of the 1940s. Twenty-four thick personnel files chart the careers of individual TROs and DROs in the Food and Civil Supplies Department in UP, and in all of them there were at least a few accusations against the officer’s integrity. In fourteen files, the accusations and investigations are complex and take up most of the file. The work of DROs and TROs was naturally vulnerable to general public complaint and the ire of public lobby groups, usually couched in the new language of ‘public service’ and citizenship. This powerful anti-corruption discourse, as Jeffrey has shown for contemporary West UP, mobilised the Nehruvian and colonial ideal of the ‘servant state’. For example, Makhan Lal Sharma complained about the DSO of Banaras to K. M. Munshi, the Governor of Uttar Pradesh, on 24 July, 1952, through the Collector of Saharanpur. He had applied in 1950 for permits for Iron sheets and barbed wire to the District Supply Officer and was told that stocks were not available, but had seen that others had managed to get them. He claimed he had been harassed by Sharma, who, he complained, ‘had no right to do so with me when I am a citizen of Free India and got independence after endurance for years and years undergoing many cruelties of the British Govt. from time to time’.37 Gopinath Singh, MP, Hariharnath Shastri Memorial Committee, wrote to Sampurnanand about Sharma on 19 April, 1956: ‘. . . it appears to me that the present District Supply Officer in Kanpur lacks the sense of courtesy that the members of the public have a legitimate right to expect from a public servant of his rank in a popular and democratic regime. . .’. Before 1947, most of these officers, coming from the deputy collector level of the

36 Kanhaiya Lal Sharma, Rajkiya Press Mazdoor Sangh to G. B. Pant, 30 January, 1961, in ‘Sri Saraswati Prasad, personal file’, UPSA, FCS, Box 13, File 960/45. 37 Makhan Lal Sharma to Sri K. M. Munshi, Governor, Uttar Pradesh, 24 July, 1952, Personal file of B. R. Sharma, UPSA, Food and Civil Supply, Box 6, file 155/44.

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services, were Indians. But Britons were also among those accused. For example, one Major C. J. O. Bradley was prosecuted in a bribery case surrounding house allotment in Lucknow.38 The common expectation in these complaints that the Indian citizen could expect ‘public service’ from this part of the bureaucracy, was one that self-consciously connected notions of bureaucratic disregard for civic rights, to colonial times. In a number of UP towns, general complaints asserting the new democratic rights of the people against colonial-style local autocracies came from self-proclaimed citizens’ organizations. A letter from ‘the residents of Agra’ in August 1950, about the attitude of Hiranand Jhangiani, TRO, stated that he was objectionable and annoying. He had created terror in business circles, bringing business to a standstill. ‘He does not think himself to be a public servant. He has no courtesy for the public. He has the mentality of old type of Britishers’.39 ‘The citizens of Ballia’ used a spokesperson to represent against the allegedly nepotistic activities of the DSO there, Shyam Swaroop Tandon, who purportedly helped family members to obtain all manner of permits. The complaint read that, The present DSO. . .is so filthy in his talks and so rude in his behaviour with the public that we have become sick of him. In addition to all these he is thoroughly corrupt and has polluted the whole atmosphere here. The sooner he is shunted off from this place the better for the public of Ballia. The present District Magistrate perhaps hails from the same place as the DSO and this has made him all the more emboldened. . . and hence he thinks that nobody can harm him.40

Clear in these complaints was the shift from emphasis on ‘good family’ as a qualification for public service, to a more general notion of citizenship. S. S. Tandon’s recommendations for service in 1936, described him as coming from ‘a very respectable and loyal Tandon family of Etawah. . .’. By 1960, he was being targeted by the Faizabad

38 Petition of R. S. Jouhri to G. B. Pant, 1948 in ‘Representation regarding R. S. Jouhri character roll, personal file’, UPSA, Food and Civil Supply, Box 14, File 839(P)/45. 39 Residents of Agra to Minister for Food and Civil Supply, 27 August, 1950, in ‘Sri H. G. Jhangiani ASO Agra (Personal File)’ UPSA, Food and Civil Supply Box 24, File 629/49. 40 Murli Manohar to Ali Zahir Saheb, 6 November, 1957, ‘Sri S. S. Tandon, personal file of’ UPSA, Food and Civil Supply, Box 5, file 141/44.

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Zila Congress organization as nepotistic and profiteering, in collusion with a particular Tandon family in Akbarpur.41 Quite a lot of the reporting in the press was born of frustration with the inadequacies of the supply machinery itself. As the District Magistrate of Agra reported in 1959, in defence of the Supply Office, ‘People requiring a major share have to go back disappointed as small issues do not satisfy their needs. These people have to satisfy themselves through press reports’.42 This meant that DSOs and TROs had to be masters of publicity management themselves. In Moradabad in 1959, Karan Singh Sirohi, TRO, was faced with a virulent smear campaign in the weekly Parvatiya, leading him to propose legal action against the editor. An apologetic letter later appeared in the paper, which satisfied the TRO. It then transpired that Sirohi had privately concluded an agreement with the editor who, the District Magistrate felt, probably had some information against him. One note on this file pointed out that some other officers had been actually paying small fees to the editor of the paper, to protect their reputation.43 Then, when in the late 1950s, Sirohi was called to answer departmental charges against him, he once again used the press to protect his reputation, by favouring another editor.44 The DM of Azamgarh pointed out that, ‘Sri Sirohi has quoted one single cutting, which refers to his popularity. I know the particular correspondent who sent it and he might have been pleased with Sri Sirohi at a particular time because of some particular favour.’45 By 1948 at the latest, rationing and supplies had become bywords for corruption and black marketeering in UP. And it was well understood that this was by no means a clear cut case of public victimization, but that such forms of corruption were so creative, precisely because they highlighted the ambiguous nature of the local state in relation to citizen lobbies, refugees, business interests and

41 Reference note of Hari Shanker Civil Judge, Etawah, 21 December, 1936 and Vice President DCC, Raj Bahadur Sinh, Zila Congress Pres, Faizabad, D. Sharma and three others, to Minister for Civil Supplies, Uttar Pradesh, 30 November, 1960. Ibid. 42 Margin note on letter—Satya Prakash Gupta to the Commissioner, Agra Division, 17 October, 1959. ‘Sri Saraswati Prasad, personal file’, UPSA, Food and Civil Supply, Box 13, File 960/45. 43 D.O. No. 38/ST-59 (DSO), 30/3/59, ‘Personal file of K. S. Sirohi’, UPSA, Food and Civil Supply, Box 12, File 864/45. 44 K. N. Srivastava, DM Azamgarh to G. p. Pandey, Additional Secretary to Government, 22 May, 1957, ibid. 45 Ibid.

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political organizations. This was an area in which local reputation and political capital could be manipulated through the press, especially when larger corruption scandals regarding supplies were regular fodder for the hack, such as the Kanpur Municipal Board cement misappropriation scandal of January 1948.46 It is possible to see this in detailed practice in many of the TRO files: how officers and those accusing them of corruption used the idea of public opinion and public disgrace, to highlight irregularities in administration, or to generate political capital. In particular, the discourses of corruption were tied up to other notions of public morality. B. R Sharma, for example, at Allahabad was ‘. . . being talked [about] on the street[s] of Allahabad and everyone is amazed to see how such debauched, dishonest and corrupt officers are retained in the department’.47 In this politics of corruption and anti-corruption surrounding civil supply the TRO/DRO had to become a master of publicity, as well as a figure who could manoeuvre between an array of political interest groups in the city or district.

Corruption, citizenship and the Muslim government servant In the aftermath of partition and the controversies surrounding evacuee properties, notions of corruption interacted too with charges of ‘communalism’ in the press. Following the assassination of Gandhi at the end of January 1948, the RSS was banned and any accusation of involvement in a communal controversy over the 1940s could be potentially damaging for career politicians. This extended to Muslim leaders and officers too, although here the implications were different. In the first years following partition, the issue of Muslim ‘loyalty’, particularly within the civil services, became a means of defining the rights and responsibilities of Indian citizens in relation to Pakistan, particularly in areas like UP. As such, where allegations of ‘communal bias’ were directed against Muslim officers, the implications went beyond simply involvement in controversy in India. A whole range of anti-corruption moves against Muslim TROs and DROs, made 46 ‘Inquiry into Cement Misappropriation’ The National Herald (Lucknow), 6 January, 1948, p. 6. 47 A Rationing Employee to Sri C. B. Gupta, 5/1/54, Minister for Food and Civil Supplies, UP, Lucknow Personal file of B. R. Sharma, UPSA, Food and Civil Supply, Box 6, file 155/44.

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reflections on how their actions for personal gain also threw doubt over their loyalty to the state: corruption was easily associated with the idea of Pakistan, particularly where claims were made about the basic provision of housing, and controlled items to co-religionists. The ‘potentially untrustworthy’ Muslim officer was an easy target. Syed Ahmed, TRO/DSO of Basti and later Gorakhpur, was hounded through a Hindi press campaign by his own staff who complained, among other things, about his alleged Muslim bias, and his supposed sexual advances towards Hindu and Christian girls.48 The complaints against another DSO of Kanpur in the early 1950s, Nawab Syed Mohammad Hasad Khan Nawab, were spearheaded by the local Congress organizations. Khan allegedly lived a luxurious life with two wives and two first class motor cars for his pleasure trips, and, according to the complainant, was not just a ‘Nawab’ but a ‘double Nawab’. He was described as ‘a communal minded officer’, of ‘League mentality’. His lifestyle, the complainant argued, was maintained by the organization of bribes and black market activities through one of his Muslim inspection officers. He allegedly used his driver as a middleman for illegal exactions from petty illiterate dealers. When this corruption was about to be exposed, the DSO managed to send the driver to Pakistan.49 The Hindi press image of the UP Muslim, especially civil servant and policeman, as potential evacuee and ‘Pakistan sympathiser’ was important here. In some cases, the failures of particular departments were blamed on Muslim evacuees— this was the case in the supply office in Allahabad, during the huge embezzlement scandal of 1948–1952, where a Muslim TRO had migrated.50 And in the ‘efficiency drive’ of the early 1950s, supposed links to Pakistan were used in other departments as a pretext for rooting out useless officers. Mohammad Mobin Khan, a Kanungo of Mainpuri, was alleged to be in illegal possession of the Sir land of an evacuee, Nawab Nasiruddin Khan, and was described in his character roll as ‘lethargic and useless. He is also said to have close contacts with Pakistan . . . His son-in-law who formerly lived in Aligarh has gone to 48 ‘Members of DSO staff—complaint’ 14 May, 1955, ‘Personal File of Sri Syed Ahmed’, UPSA, Food and Civil Supply, Box 21, File 791/45. 49 Amar Chand, District Congress worker to the Chief Minister, UP, Lucknow, ‘Complaint against Sri SMH Khan Nawab, District Supply Officer Hamirpur’, 14 July, 1952, ‘Appointment of Sri Syed Mohd Hasan Khan Nawab, DSO/TRO’ UPSA, Food and Civil Supply, Box 14, File 964/45. 50 Confidential letter, dated 9 July, 1953, from DM, Allahabad, ‘Embezzlement in TRO Office, Allahabad’, UPSA, Rent Control C, Box 2, file 1140/1951.

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Pakistan. Although he says that he has no touch with him, yet his loyalty to the Indian Dominion cannot be said to be beyond doubt’.51 The ambiguous nature of citizenship and citizens’ rights in the late 1940s and early 1950s politicized the corruption surrounding rationing and civil supplies in a new way. A sense of uncertainty surrounding rationing for refugees and the policing of the new immigrants on UP’s streets was clearly apparent in the press. On the front page of the Lucknow National Herald on 6 January, 1948, two adjacent headlines appeared. The first, ‘Work as Protectors of the People’, reported on the speech of the UP Governor, Sarojini Naidu, to a police parade in Lucknow, in which she declared that those who worked for the freedom of India were no longer the ‘badmashes’. But alongside this article, another headline read, ‘Refugees tear gassed in Delhi’—the police had used tear gas on refugees who had attempted to take possession of houses in Phatak Habish Khan, vacated by Muslims.52 Similar kinds of conflicts were also taking place in Lucknow, over the municipal ban on street vendors, leading to a demonstration of refugees in the city, and the rumour of organized communal conspiracies to allow refugees to grab Muslim properties in January 1948.53 The conflict between the rhetoric of public service and the realities of post-partition on the streets, were echoed in the highly charged areas of housing and rationing. Importantly, the food and civil supply situation linked to the issue of refugees to and from Pakistan, since not only did many of the poorer refugees qualify for rationing, but also the same officers in charge of food and supplies, viz. the District Supply Officers and Town Rationing Officers, were also responsible for rent control in relation to evacuee properties. DSOs and TROs as ‘Relief and Rehabilitation’ officers, or rent controllers were again in the spotlight and because of the refugee situation their work was easily tied into the political rhetoric of communalism. As mentioned above, Muslim DSOs and TROs were particularly vulnerable to the accusation of communal bias, but such accusations were made all the easier by the extensive local power and discretion that evacuee 51 ‘Report of cases’ 25 January, 1950, in ‘Compulsory retirement of the official after completing the service of 25 years or attaining the age of 50 on the grounds of efficiency’, UPSA, Revenue B, Box 121, File 1082B/1948. 52 The National Herald (Lucknow), 6 January, 1948, p. 1. 53 ‘Refugee demonstration in Lucknow’, The National Herald (Lucknow), 21 January, 1948, p. 3; ‘Bid to buy property at cheap rates: capitalists among refugees behind communal troubles’, Ibid., p. 3.

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property rules allowed the officers themselves. P. D. Tandon, the champion of Hindu rights over independence, received a number of communications from Sindhi refugee organisations, complaining about Muslim bias in the actions of rent controllers. For example, on 29 January, 1950, the Sindhi Hindu Refugee Panchayat complained to Tandon, ‘That 4 rent controllers are appointed here for reducing the rents of the houses in which the refugees live. But they take the side of the landlords and harass the poor refugees and they dismiss the application of poor refugees.’ A list of Muslim government servants was also supplied by the Panchayat, who had allegedly kept evacuee properties in their hands and were collecting the rents. The Sindhi Hindu Refugee Panchayat claimed that refugees were dying of hunger and that the rent controllers were killing them, since ‘they do not get the houses from the Custodian owing to the interference of the influential persons and responsible authorities’. The organisation demanded that the evacuee property ordinance be put into force immediately and that steps should be taken against Muslim officers who were ‘disloyal to the government’.54 But these kinds of complaints about ‘corrupt’ or ‘communal’ decision making were possible precisely because so much local power had been given to supply officers and rent controllers.55 In some places, TROs and DSOs held up the renewal of trade licenses and rations as a kind of local sanction against displaced persons who had illegally occupied vacated Muslim properties. And, although it was not officially sanctioned, policy surrounding evacuee properties in UP in the first two years after independence certainly encouraged the situation. The UP Custodian of evacuee property made it clear that officers on the ground could make up their own minds about such properties: As I mentioned to you we want to be fair in the administration of the law. We have no intention of penalising the Muslim nationals of India. But the Pakistan Muslims cannot be treated leniently. If the District Officer, after making summary enquiries, is morally convinced that a person is an evacuee as defined by the law, that person’s property must be taken over . . . We do not want long drawn out legal proceedings, and have, for that reason, cut out all interference by the courts. If we ourselves start entrusting the administration 54 The representative of the Sindhi Hindu Refugee Panchayat, Jaipur, Durgapur Camp, Gopaldas H. Ladhani, Congress Social Worker to p. D. Tandon 29 January, 1950, National Archives of India, Tandon Papers, File 301. 55 For a comparative study of how this played out in Bengal, see Joya Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947–1967 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 129–131.

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of the law not to administrators, but to judicial officers, we shall be defeating the purpose of the Ordinance. Apart from peculation and corruption that will spring up, proof will be exceedingly difficult.

The Custodian pointed out that the UP government could not allow people to just turn up and claim that they are not evacuees but loyal Indian citizens, as has happened in Delhi. ‘If he is not here, he cannot turn up, and that is the best proof of his being an evacuee and his property being evacuee property.’56 The actions of those administering such properties in UP’s cities and elsewhere were as deeply immersed in local political networks, as those officers, described above, who controlled rationed goods. It is, therefore, easy to see how the personal motivations of Muslim officers, in potentially lucrative, corrupt transactions, were often publicly associated with political disloyalty, particularly when such accusations suited the purposes of an officer’s political opponents.

Conclusion For most of the late colonial period in UP, intricate webs of influence built through the local state existed as entrenched ‘customary’ pockets of power, where the question of corruption was highly ambiguous.57 As Raj Chandavarkar has shown, this situation was tolerated partly because the British needed to cement conservative alliances in the countryside, and were unwilling to upset existing fiefdoms, beyond maintaining gazetted officer esprit de corps.58 They also lacked money and manpower. These weaknesses were magnified once war threatened to upset relative economic and political stability. The supply and control policies of the mid-1940s effectively created a system of rules and under-manned bureaucracies which opened up all kinds of new financial opportunities for those able to use their existing local contacts. Later, this provided rich pickings in a system of factional one-party dominance, which depended (as Paul Brass’s 56 V. D. Dantyagi to Bhagwan Sahay, 27 August, 1949, ‘Administration of Evacuee Property in UP—Method and Tracing out’ UPSA, Relief and Rehabilitation, Box 41, file 552/49. 57 This was also an idea expressed by Vibhuti Narain Rai in a range of meetings I had with him over the spring of 2008. 58 Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, ‘Customs of Governance: Colonialism and Democracy in Twentieth Century India’, Modern Asian Studies, 41, 3, (2007), pp. 441– 470.

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work shows, footnote 5) on personal and factional alliances, linking locality to district and state, and increasingly on the mobilization of political funds. The systematic exchange nexus and black money of licenses and permits, already there in the crisis years of 1942–1943, provided an ideal source. These were linkages which formed a kind of pre-history to the business-Congress links that went along with permit-license-quota raj, as shown by Stanley Kochanek (footnote 6). What this paper has begun to demonstrate too, though, is how this situation changed the experience of the local state for UP citizens. And this is where the supply bureaucrats form a crucial focal point. Managing the publicity of corruption certainly became more important. Posing oneself as ‘anti-corrupt’ was already seen as a cunning plan in the face of constant public controversy, and the sudden emergence of ‘citizens’ organisations’ directed by local Congress bodies became a new political ploy. The representation of corruption also changed over the 1940s and 1950s, presaging new ideas about the Indian public and their rights vis-à-vis the local state. Like never before, ‘corruption’ could describe a whole range of social ills: the instability and violence of the mid-1940s, the predicament and ‘rights’ of refugees, and the sensitive accusations of communalism. ‘Corruption’ or bhrashtachaar became a descriptive term with a richer content, a problem which redefined the challenges and limits of Indian citizenship, and an idea which later would come to be seen as a natural function of the everyday state. The changes in the representation of corruption between the late 1930s and 1950s, related to the increasing responsibilities of the state, and the impact of local officers in the everyday lives of ordinary Indian citizens. Food and Civil Supply was a crucial area, which administered rationing for UP’s urban poor, and controlled the supply of key industrial and manufacturing inputs. The development of the state machinery in this area coincided with three crucial political changes. Firstly, it came about at a time of increasing party political competition, when the roots of the ‘Congress system’ were forming. Secondly, it emerged when ideologies of the state were increasingly influenced by ideas about ‘modernization’ and ‘development’. Finally, it took place around the time of one of Asia’s largest mass migrations, and most widespread episodes of communal violence. As a result of these political intersections, as we saw in the first section, the idea of ‘corruption’ became more than just a description of administrative or political morality. It also connected to debates about how a ‘modern’ state might emerge from colonialism. Political

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and media discussions about corruption (compared with the interwar period) were now widely publicized and more clearly part of everyday gossip from the streets, right up to the assemblies. Corruption was also now represented in the press as a blight which affected increasing numbers of Indians as ‘citizens’, as they attempted to adjust and make sense of their political freedoms. As the second section explored, reference to the ‘corruption’ of others became a peculiarly useful political tool, in the new context of local political competition leading up to the first general elections: the strategies of UP’s many factional contests frequently made use of the involvement of opponents in corruption scandals, particularly those linked to civil supply. Finally, as the final section of this paper showed, ‘corruption’ was also a part of political discourses which marked out issues of loyalty to the state. Here, the relationship between India and Pakistan, and specifically, the ambivalent position of Muslim government servants in the aftermath of partition, was crucial. More than ever before, ‘corruption’ scandals became a means of marking out the rights and duties of ‘citizens’ rather than ‘subjects’ of the Indian state. However, alleged involvement in the scandal of corruption could pose problems, for some Indians at least, in how far their rights as citizens might be enjoyed.

C Cambridge University Press 2010 Modern Asian Studies 45, 1 (2011) pp. 57–80.  doi:10.1017/S0026749X10000223

Performing Peace: Gandhi’s assassination as a critical moment in the consolidation of the Nehruvian state YASM IN KHAN Department of Politics and International Relations, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, TW20 0PX, UK Email: [email protected]

Abstract The consolidation of the Nehruvian state’s sovereignty after Independence is traced here as a contingent event which was tightly linked to the impact of Gandhi’s assassination and the mourning rituals which followed his death in 1948. The Congress was able to use the funeral, mortuary rituals and distribution of Gandhi’s ashes to assert the power of the state and to stake the Congress Party’s right to sovereignty. This intersected with localized and religious expressions of grief. Gandhi’s death therefore acted as a bridge, spatially and temporally linking the distant state with the Indian people and underscoring transitions to Independence during the process of postcolonial transition from 1947–1950.

Introduction Despite ever-increasing attention to performance as a mode of politics and the way that performance has shaped political possibilities in the postcolonial era, Gandhi’s death and assassination, and associated mourning rituals, have been curiously neglected as sites of historical research.1 Gandhi was assassinated on 30 January, 1948 and his death was followed by epic public outpourings of grief. A public funeral 1 Versions of this paper have been presented at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of Edinburgh, University of Southampton and at the ‘Everyday State in South Asia’ workshop in Leeds in September 2008; I am grateful for many useful questions, comments and suggestions. On theatricality and ritual in the Indian political arena, see Thomas Blom Hansen, Wages of Violence. Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Jim Masselos, The City in Action: Bombay Struggles for Power (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007); and

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in New Delhi was followed by a fortnight-long official mourning period and then the immersion of his ashes in Allahabad. By any standards, the public reaction was overwhelming and there was widespread participation in these rituals by immense numbers of people. The mourners on the river banks at Allahabad were estimated as ‘numbering more than a million’.2 Indian nationalist historiography placed a considerable amount of emphasis on the date of Gandhi’s death as the turning point in ‘communal’ relations after Partition. This narrative conveys both the triumph of Congress over the adversities of Partition and the triumph of ‘secularism’ over ‘communalism’. It was also an important way to make sense of Gandhi’s assassination, as he was a martyr to the cause of ‘communal’ peace, and the public ‘returned to their senses’ only through his death. Yet the main bulk of posthumous scholarly attention to Gandhi’s assassination focuses on the legal case against Gandhi’s assassin, the prosecution of the accused and the Congress-directed suppression of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and other associated religious nationalist movements in the immediate aftermath of the killing.3 During the weeks following Gandhi’s death the prohibition on religious nationalist parties and the trial of his assassinator, Nathuram Godse, were used by the Congress Party to secure political power and leverage for the Congress vis à vis rivals and challengers. Some social complicity in Gandhi’s assassination and the failure of those around him to protect him were clear. The Kapur Commission of Inquiry blamed a generalized apathy about protecting Gandhi. He

Srirupa Roy, Beyond Belief: India and the Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 2 The Times, 13 February, 1948. This figure was also used by the British High Commissioner in Delhi. 3 Christophe Jaffrelot, ‘Opposing Gandhi: Hindu Nationalism and Political Violence’ in D. Vidal, G. Tarabout, and E. Meyer, (eds), Violence/Non-Violence. Some Hindu Perspectives (Delhi: Manohar-CSH, 2003), pp. 299–324; David Hardiman, Gandhi in his Time and Ours (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003), pp. 185–194; A. G. Noorani, Savarkar and Gandhi: The Godse Connection (Delhi: Leftword Books, 2002); Claude Markovits, The UnGandhian Gandhi: The Life and Afterlife of the Mahatma (London: Anthem Press, 2004); Ashis Nandy, ‘Final Encounter: the Politics of the Assassination of Gandhi’ in At the Edge of Psychology: Essays in Politics and Culture (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 70–99. Ashis Nandy’s article locates Gandhi’s assassination in its social and psychological context, unravelling the complex layers of interdependency between the assassin and the assassinated as mirror images of one another. Nandy stresses the fact that Gandhi’s thought threatened to subvert all the foundations of Godse’s own thinking, in his emphasis on de brahminsation, his understandings of Hinduism, and his re-evaluation of femininity and sexuality.

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was someone for whom the police, for decades, under the tutelage of the Raj, had become accustomed to perceiving as the enemy.4 In the first few hours, as the news of Gandhi’s death spread, mixed with grief, there was the fear that a Muslim may have been responsible, and the awareness that, if so, there could be many more attacks although the government went to great lengths to circulate information about Godse’s culpability quickly. But before the news was disseminated that a Hindu extremist had been responsible, there were violent attacks against Muslims in Lucknow and in Bombay.5 One ICS officer remembered the terror that ‘some lunatic Muslim’ might have been responsible, and the law and order authorities were on a state of high alert.6 Once the details emerged, incidents of inter-religious violence subsided, becoming rare for several weeks and then reviving on a reduced scale. On 4 February the RSS, Muslim National Guards and the Khaksars were banned. Across India, perhaps 200,000 RSS swayamsevaks were detained,7 and the state moved decisively against the RSS. In Uttar Pradesh, for example, there were around 2,000 arrests.8 The Hindu Mahasabha was not banned and continued to operate in ‘a shadowy area between what was acceptable in public life and what was not’.9 Both the RSS and Mahasabha had poor relationships with each other, and were wracked with internal dissent and organisational discord, as they attempted to reformulate their constitutions and 4

Nandy, ‘Final Encounter’, p. 89. Opinion of domestic political situation, (IOR) L/PJ/8/794, First half February, 1948. 6 M. A. Quraishi, Indian Administration Pre and Post Independence: Memoirs of an ICS (Delhi: BR Publishing, 1985), pp. 164–165. This moment of entangled anxiety and relief is also depicted in Salman Rushdies’s Midnight’s Children (London: Vintage, 1981), p. 142, when a packed cinema hall hears the news of Gandhi’s death: ‘. . .and finally the radio gave us the name. NathuRam Godse. “Thank God”, Amina burst out, “it’s not a Muslim name!” And Aadam, upon whom the news of Gandhi’s death had placed a new burden of age: “This Godse is nothing to be grateful for!”. Amina, however, was full of the light-headedness of relief, she was rushing dizzily up the long ladder of relief. . . “why not, after all? By being Godse he has saved our lives!”.’ Gandhi’s death was also widely mourned in Pakistan. If Gandhi had been killed by a Muslim, the national and international outcomes could have been gravely different. On the impact of Gandhi’s assassinations among Muslims see, Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 145. 7 Walter Andersen and Shridhard Damle, The Brotherhood in Saffron: the RSS and the Hindu Revivalism (Boulder: Westview Press, 1987), pp. 51–52. 8 B. R. Nanda (ed.), Selected Works of Govind Ballabh Pant (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993) Vol. 12, p. 44. Pant at a press conference, 15 December, 1948. 9 Bruce Graham, Hindu Nationalism and Indian Politics: the origins and development of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 12. 5

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establish new agendas.10 The reputation of the Mahasabha was also damaged by the assassination. As the General Secretary admitted, The diabolical murder of the Mahatma Gandhi has for the time being besmirched the fair name of the Hindu Mahasabha and I must confess with pain that there is considerable panic and nervousness amongst the responsible members and workers of the Hindu Sabha in the United Provinces.11

The crackdown against the RSS could be used to exclude factional rivals within the Congress. There were many ways in which ideological binaries between secularism and communalism became blurred in local politics and remained far from clear-cut.12 However, for the purposes of this paper, it can be stressed that this was a major consolidation of power following Gandhi’s death, both at a mundane and a symbolic level: through the selective use of the state apparatus, and the strengthening of Nehru’s prime ministerial authority; the trial of Godse and his co-conspirators staged in the Red Fort; sanctions against the complicit rajas of Alwar and Bharatpur; the arrest and imprisonment of many Congress ‘opponents;’ and a prosecular propaganda and educational drive. This guaranteed the ascendancy of secularism and democracy as the legitimate ideological foundation of the Indian state and its constitutional and legal status, notwithstanding grave failures in implementation. As Gyanendra Pandey has suggestively noted, it is an improbable story of how a certain kind of bodily sacrifice in the public sphere—and a refusal by one outstanding leader to give his consent to the particular conception of the political community that was emerging— changed the nature of sociality at the local level.13

The mundane consolidation of this power was made explicit in the aftermath of Gandhi’s death, for example, the draft constitution of the Indian Union and the first annual budget of free India were both 10 On the inner struggles of these organisations, see Andersen and Damle, Brotherhood in Saffron, Graham, Hindu Nationalism, Chapter 2, and Cristophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics, Chapter 2. 11 All India Hindu Mahasabha papers, M-19 (1948), Statement of Bishan Chandra Seth, 1948. 12 William Gould, Hindu Nationalism and the Language of Politics in Late Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Ayesha Jalal, Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam since 1950 (London: Routledge, 2000). 13 Pandey, Remembering Partition, p. 145.

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published in early March 1948, only six weeks after Gandhi’s ashes had been scattered. Yet, there has been little attention paid to the funeral and mourning rituals themselves as political events, widely shared and experienced by recently-emancipated postcolonial Indians, new citizens of the Indian nation state. The historical record has intuitively recorded Gandhi’s death as ‘a turning point’ but has assumed this as a priori and due to the ‘natural’ shock of his death. This change in mood cannot be assumed as natural, though, given the severe and ongoing consequences of Partition and Gandhi’s own unpopularity at the time. Assassinations are random and contingent events, but also unfold ‘in the terms of a particular cultural field, from which the actors draw meaning’.14 Assassinations are not necessarily integrative, and death rituals do not necessarily bring people together in a Durkheimian sense.15 Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984 was followed by grave violence against Sikhs and violence against Muslims and RSS members followed Gandhi’s own death in the hours after his killing. State funerals of renowned individuals are, by their very nature rooted in the final rites of a person’s life and their deep emotional resonance present opportunities that assist political actors to transcend social cleavages. Funerals may act to assimilate and to cohere disparate social groups. The respect due to the dead places a taboo on dissent and may lead, whether in Republican France or nineteenth-century America, to exceptional political solidarity and temporary exemption from the mundane, the partisan and the divisive.16 But this outcome cannot be taken for granted and politics may be shaped by the process of mourning itself.17 In the Indian sub-continent the political usage of 14 Marshall Sahlins, Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 291. 15 Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (Originally published in 1912, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 16 Avner Ben-Amos, Funerals, Politics and Memory in Modern France, 1789–1996 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Barry Schwartz, ‘Mourning and the Making of a Sacred Symbol: Durkheim and the Lincoln Assassination’ Social Forces, Vol. 70, No. 2 (December 1991). 17 ‘Mourning may be used’, write Rebecca Saunders and Kamran Aghaie ‘for hegemonic or counter hegemonic, oppressive or emancipatory, purposes; processes of mourning contain a formidable cache of loose power, ideologically useful affect, and empty signifiers that numerous entities—religious, political, social, economic— have not failed to put to use’. Rebecca Saunders and Kamran Aghaie, ‘Introduction: Mourning and Memory’ Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Vol. 25 No. 1 (2005), p. 22. See also, Michael C. Kearl, Endings: A Sociology of Death and Dying (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Liz Wilson (ed.), The Living and the

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tombs and death anniversaries has a particularly rich and complex pre-colonial history and in the twentieth century this has been wellutilized and adapted for political purposes by the Congress Party, whose own leading dynasty has been peculiarly afflicted by a series of unfortunate deaths and assassinations.18 Indeed, the centrality of death to Indian life and religious thought, the importance of violent deaths in particular and their appropriation by both Brahmanical Hindusim and folk cults, suggests that Gandhi’s death was a political event with the capacity for deep social transformation.19 This paper does not seek to challenge the intuitive and empirical evidence which emphatically shows that 30 January, 1948 was a critical turning point. Rather than revise this historical orthodoxy, this paper will argue that it was not only the fact of Gandhi’s death itself but through the performance of the attendant rituals, ceremonies and the public and private manifestations of grief that Indian state sovereignty was consolidated and extended. Here, the term ‘sovereignty’ is used to signal a concern with how a postcolonial state, to some extent exogenously created by external intervention, expands and consolidates its imagined, figurative and metaphorical power in the political sphere after the moment of independence. The maintenance of sovereign power preoccupies all states but raises particular issues in the context of decolonization. In postcolonial states patrimonial, community and religious centres of power have vied for omnipotence with the sovereign power of the nation state in overlapping and intersecting ways.20 The postcolonial state expands and attempts the displacement of

Dead: Social dimensions of death in South Asian religions (New York: State University of New York Press, 2003); and Peter Metcalf and Richard Huntington, Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 18 The affliction of South Asian dynasties such as the Bhuttos and Nehru-Gandhis by assassination deserves further critical investigation and analysis. 19 Claus Peter Zoller and Elisabeth Schombucher (eds), Ways of Dying: Death and its Meanings in South Asia (Manohar, 1999), Stuart H. Blackburn, ‘Death and Deification: Folk Cults in Hinduism’, History of Religions, Vol. 24, No. 3 (February, 1985), pp. 255–274. 20 For valuable discussions of contested sovereignty in the postcolonial context see Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Steputtat (eds), Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants and States in the Postcolonial World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Thomas J. Biersteker and Cynthia Weber (eds), State Sovereignty as Social Construct (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

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‘lower-order legitimacies’ but is ever only partially able to do so.21 In India, where state sovereignty has exuded a powerful imaginary in many places, there has been a project of retrospectively naturalising the appearance of state-sovereignty fit. Naturalising sovereign power is always an ongoing enterprise. There is a particular irony here as Gandhi himself was an advocate of alternative forms of sovereignty and an important critic of the Westphalian nation state. Yet, Gandhi’s death provides a moment during which the sovereign power of the nation-state, led by the Congress Party (which Gandhi was also deeply critical of by the time of his death), could be expanded and consolidated. This is not to suggest either a simplistic reductionism in which the power of the secular state becomes fixed, sovereign and settled after Gandhi’s death. Clearly this had to be constantly remade and reiterated. Riots continued alongside the economic and political marginalization of Muslims and myriad problems concerning the consolidation of the nation state. The public reactions to Gandhi’s assassination made a decisive difference in the reception of statecentric articulations of secularism by inscribing power in a particular idiom at a time when alternative Hindu-nationalist formations had been far from discredited. Grassroots interpretations of Gandhi’s assassination intersected with the modernizing and memorializing political discourse of the Congress. The ways in which the Congress acted as ‘the state’ during the funeral was vital. The bestowing of the ashes, organization of the rituals without colonial constraints, and use of the full force of the media and governmental resources, interlinked provinces and districts through a chain of instructions and commands. Debates about the nature of the state in postcolonial South Asia have pointed to the Nehruvian state’s distance and detachment from everyday, commonsense and quotidian life in the 1950s. The state led a project of transformation, regulating citizens’ bodies and naturalizing sovereign power while unexpectedly colliding with the upward pressures of alternative centres of sovereignty. There has also been increasing ‘entanglement’, in the words of Partha Chatterjee, of elite and subaltern politics since independence.22 In this light, 21 The phrase is from Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. 31. 22 See discussions in this Special Issue. Also, Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Steputtat (eds), States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001); Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Steputtat

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Gandhi’s death and attendant rituals sit within a specific matrix of circumstances at a critical juncture, where both temporally and spatially the sovereignty of the postcolonial state was still uncertain. The contested nature of state sovereignty and the human and ideological insecurity was part of an extended process in the months following Partition. The vast humanitarian challenges of refugee resettlement collided with the problems of contested borders, the incorporation of the princely states, tense relations with Pakistan, particularly but not solely about Kashmir, and a dark shadow over the authority of Nehru who was engaged in private ideological tussles with the Home Minister.23 Private armies substituted for police authority and political activists were able to heavily influence policy and circumvent or challenge state authority or replace it altogether at many levels of government, and in many provinces. The Mahatma’s funeral in New Delhi, 30 January–1 February 1948 Gandhi’s funeral, carried out in New Delhi within 24-hours of his death, was a curious hybrid of colonial ritual, Hindu tradition, and spontaneous outpourings of public grief. It was the first state spectacle organized in independent India after Independence Day in 1947. The funeral was an invented ritual which deviated from ‘traditional’ Hindu funerary rites, for instance, the bier was not carried by kinsmen but placed on a carriage. It was also infused with imperial echoes of the Delhi durbars while displaying many of the tropes of the annual Republic Day ceremony. It may have been familiar, then, in some ways to the crowd but was also unique and unrepeatable. The militarism of Gandhi’s funeral (and the sheer irony of it) has been observed by contemporary commentators and later writers. (eds), Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants and States in the Postcolonial World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); and Partha Chatterjee ‘Sovereign Violence and the Domain of the Political’ in Hansen and Steputtat (eds), Sovereign Bodies, p. 85. 23 Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (London: Yale University Press, 2007). Srirupa Roy identifies the same dates, describing this as the ‘long transition’ from colonial rule, Beyond Belief, pp. 25–26, 70. See also Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rochona Majumdar and Andrew Sartori (eds), From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007). Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar emphasizes the protracted and constructed nature of the Pakistani and Indian states during the processes accompanying Partition, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

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Four-thousand troops, 1,000 armed men, 100 police and 100 navy men marched in the funeral procession itself, including the Rajputana Rifles, Madras Regiment, Bengal Sappers and Miners, Indian Signal Corps, armoured vehicles and the mounted cavalry of the GeneralGovernor’s bodyguard. Gandhi’s body was carried from Birla House24 on the morning of the funeral and placed on a converted gun carriage which was very heavily covered in flowers and sandalwood, with only the face of the Mahatma visible. This was pulled by troops, with relatives and other disciples on foot in front of it. At a quarter to mid-day the cortege pulled out of the driveway to the sound of blown conch-shells. The procession moved from Albuquerque road onto Queensway then onto Kingsway and to the India Gate, which it reached less than an hour later, with Gurkhas and paratroopers proceeding in front in order to clear the way. Baldev Singh, Nehru and Patel were seated alongside the body by this time on the main vehicle itself, with Gandhi’s son, Devdas Gandhi, as the chief mourner, seated at the head of the vehicle. The kinship of the leading Congressmen with Gandhi was therefore visibly emphasized with Nehru naturally assuming the role of ‘son and heir’. The cortege then moved through the Memorial Gate and then to Hardinge Avenue, Mathura Road and Powerhouse Road (one reminder of the ongoing process of transition to independence was that these roads were still bearing their old names) ending at the bank on the edge of the river Yamuna. State funerals had been used consciously as a political tool within and between imperial states prior to independence.25 The elaborate design, planning and execution of Gandhi’s last rites was a selfconscious manifestation of state (and the Congress Party) sovereignty intended to inscribe state power (and the power, as Thomas Blom Hansen has put it of the ‘sublime state’)26 at a time of acute crisis 24 Birla house was at 5 Albuquerque Road, renamed after the date of Gandhi’s death as Tees January Marg. 25 Modern state funerals in Britain were a Victorian innovation. When the Nawab of Oudh was deposed in 1856, the exiled Queen Mother travelled to Europe. She died in Paris and was given a French state funeral as a diplomatic snub to Britain. Controversies continue about the political implications of state funerals in South Asia; consider the debates about Mother Theresa’s televised state funeral in 1998. 26 In understanding this, Thomas Blom Hansen offers a useful analytical framework. He examines the ‘myth of the state’ in India, in other words, the multiple ways in which the state is understood and perceived. He argues that the Indian state is typically imagined in a dual way; on one side there is the ‘profane’ aspect of the state, which encompasses the self-interest, brutality and banality in the humdrum of everyday administration. Corruption, violence and inefficiency would all be included

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in the legal, policing and governmental strategies of the state. In the processional part of the funeral the ‘Hindu-ness’ of Gandhi was thoroughly marginalized. Infused with colonial symbolism, certain aspects of the ceremony could have been replicated along Whitehall or the Mall in London. Indeed it echoed explicitly the state funerals of British monarchs in the use of flags at half-mast, the guncarriage, military pageantry and use of a crowd-lined mall. The funeral was extensively photographed by Henri Cartier-Bresson and other international photographers and also aerially photographed. It was projected into the homes and marketplaces of Indians who could not attend through a specially relayed live All India Radio broadcast. This lengthy outdoor broadcast in itself was a technological feat which utilized the latest technology such as a mobile transmitter van.27 The appropriation of, and expansion into, the grand colonial architectural spaces of Lutyen’s and Herbert Baker’s Delhi, in parallel with ceremonies and rituals on Independence Day and Republic Days, was deliberate. It speaks clearly of the explicit aim of linking Gandhi (who after all had no formal political position within the state at the time and had of course worked in opposition to many of the power monopolies and militarism of the Westphalian nation-state) to the visible architecture of Delhi’s state power. This did not pass unremarked upon by eye-witnesses, particularly the design of the route which entailed the body passing under the India Arch, now called ‘India Gate’. He was the first Indian to be ‘honoured’ in such a way. ‘His going under the India Gate was perhaps symbolic. Alive he would

in this category. On the other side stands the ‘sublime’ aspects of the mysterious and powerful state, which is known through ‘its hidden resources, designs and immense power, and the higher forms of rationality or even justice believed to prevail there’. Ordinary Indians look to the state as the arbiter of legitimate claims and the provider of law and order, even if on many occasions it fails in this role. It is therefore essential that this myth of the state is upheld. T. Blom Hansen, ‘Governance and Myths of State in Mumbai’ in, Chris J. Fuller and Veronique Beneii (eds), The Everyday State and Society in Modern India (London: Hurst, 2001), pp. 34–38. 27 Sabeena Gadihoke, ‘Uncovering Histories: Homai Vyarawalla and chronicling the nation’ in Homage to Mahatma Gandhi (Unpublished paper, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi). The appropriation and use of All India Radio by the Congress was another important way to extend imagined sovereignty in 1947– 1948—a medium with national reach but tightly controlled and closed to political leaders until independence. After independence Congress made regular use of the medium to convey national messages. See Alasdair Pinkerton, ‘Radio and the Raj: broadcasting in British India (1920–1940)’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society ISSN 1356–1863, Volume 18.2, 2008, pp. 167–191.

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have scoffed at the idea’, noted one observer.28 Naturally the personal role of Mountbatten who had remained in India as Governor-General and was a very astute believer in, and manipulator of, theatrical and public pageantry was also a hidden hand behind the planning of these aspects of the funeral procession. The crowds, as seen in news reels and photographs, were spectacularly large and densely packed and stood mostly in a ‘passive’ role as stunned and silent onlookers. Nehru had paternalistically reminded people of the need for silence and had, interestingly, requested no ‘demonstrations’ on the radio the evening before. Some had scrambled up trees and lamp posts in order to try and take darshan (sight) of the Mahatma and the silence was punctuated with loud cries of ‘Mahatma Gandhi ki Jai’ and ‘Mahatma Gandhi Zindabad’ (Long live Gandhi). At the site of the pyre at Rajghat, shrubs and nettles had been cleared to create a space for the cremation and a brick and mud platform was raised on which the pyre was built. The intended plan was that the dignitaries and relatives would assemble close to the pyre. The crowds were to be held back from the main site by a cordon of barbed wire which was at least one hundred yards away from the platform where the body lay. The barrier was manned by mounted troops who were charged with holding back the pressing crowds. The ceremony was to be public, but not so public that all Indians could participate in it, and ambassadors and other foreign dignitaries were privileged in their nearness to the body. The Chinese ambassador, for instance, was the first to lay a wreath at the foot of the pyre. Lord and Lady Mountbatten, who had absented themselves consciously from the procession, now also joined the inner circle and were seated around the cremation site. The national flag was removed from the body and sandalwood logs were piled up on top of it. Ramdas Gandhi performed the lighting of the pyre and the attending priest, Pandit Ram Dhan Sharma, recited Vedic texts. As the flames climbed upwards crowds surged forward against the cordon, broke it and rushed forward ‘dangerously close to the pyre’. 28 K. L. Gauba, The Assassination of Mahatma Gandhi (Bombay: Jaico, 1969), p. 160. These colonial continuities in ritual planning have been remarked upon in other contexts; the assumption of pre-colonial motifs and rituals by the British in colonial darbars and, in the post-1947 years, the postcolonial state’s appropriation of restyled imperial ritual for events like Republic Day. Bernard Cohn, An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996); Jim Masselos, ‘India’s Republic Day: The Other 26 January’, South Asia Vol. 19 (special issue) (1996), pp. 183–203; Roy, Beyond Belief, pp. 66–105.

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Troops were directed to intervene and Nehru was personally seen urging people to go back while leading members of the cabinet picked up small children. Eventually, mounted lancers were used to physically press back the people who had come to see Gandhi’s last rites. The spatial and hierarchical distance of the VIPs was therefore vigorously and repeatedly reinforced through the cordoning off of separate areas, the use of barbed wire and the lathi charges and use of mounted troops. Leading politicians stressed the need for orderly discipline throughout the crowds.29 The funeral itself the was undoubtedly a spectacular sight but appears to have been oddly disconnected from the mass of Indian people in the crowd who, for the most part, were consigned to playing the roles allotted by Nehru as onlookers, passive crowds, respectfully distanced from the Mahatma’s body. This spectacle was orientated in many ways to the international gaze. The importance of Gandhi as a Great Man in the eyes of the world’s leading politicians was paramount. Gandhi’s greatness and by extension, Indian-ness itself, were being honoured and making headline news from Washington DC to Beijing. This global recognition was another important ingredient of Gandhi’s death. This was particularly pronounced on the political right-wing. The Uttar Pradesh Congressman Purushottam Das Tandon emphasized how, ‘World history will still remember him when many other figures strutting the world stage today are forgotten’.30 It was only the beginning of a wide series of official and semi-official mourning rituals and contrasts with the wide array of mourning practices all over India. A fortnight of mourning and the immersion of Gandhi’s ashes In contrast to the official state funeral, which had been organized by the Commander-in-Chief and centred upon Delhi and orientated towards the international gaze, local and state level mourning took on vernacular forms which far transcended official instructions and 29 The disciplining of crowds took on new dimensions now that the Congress was the party of sovereign power, raising critical questions about the legitimacy of crowd action. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘In the name of politics: Sovereignty, Democracy and the Multitude in India’ Economic and Political Weekly, 23 July, 2005. 30 The Pioneer, 2 February, 1948. The Pioneer, a Lucknow-based English language paper, contained particularly detailed reports on the funeral and its aftermath in 1948.

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orders from the Congress Party. Gandhi emerged now as a saintly personage and even miracle-worker and his corporeal relics took on a special importance. It was this mediation of the funereal rites by the public which transformed the rituals from empty or ‘banal’ state-centred gestures and infused them with political meaning and transformative possibilities. It may have instigated the groundswell of feeling in favour of ‘secularism/toleration’ towards non-Muslims. This gave much-needed credibility to Nehruvian secularism with which this historical moment is now so well (and rightly) associated. Almost immediately after Gandhi’s death a struggle over how to honour his memory and how to dispose of his physical body began. A strong lobby for embalming Gandhi’s body in the manner of Lenin was fought off with Nehru’s personal intervention. He even mentioned it in his address to the nation the night preceding the funeral. ‘It was his wish repeatedly expressed that this should not be done. . .we decided we must follow his wishes in this matter no matter how much others might have wished otherwise’.31 However, although traditional cremation was decided upon, the veneration of Gandhi’s body and, after his cremation, of his relics, went far beyond state-sanctioned or officially orchestrated proceedings. After the actual darshan of the body itself was no longer possible, following the cremation ceremony, the crowds continued to pursue a physical connection with Gandhi, preferably by looking at or touching his bodily remains, or if that was not possible, by puja (reverent worship) and prayers in front of his image. There was a clamber for Gandhi’s bodily remains, both physically at the site of Raj Ghat and then in many ensuing debates surrounding the distribution of his ashes. After the pyre had burned out at Raj Ghat on the evening of the funeral, even late at night large crowds still remained. ‘There was a great scramble and a diligent search for small twigs of the sandal chips near the pyre and many were seen with the greatest reverence picking up withered and trodden rose petals, picking up twigs from the mound of wreaths or bits of ash blown by the breeze’.32 At the site of the place where the Mahatma had fallen as a result of the gunshots at Birla house, the spot where his blood had fallen also became a sacred site and a deep pit emerged as people gathered up handfuls of the earth,

31 32

Ibid., 31 January, 1948. Ibid., 2 February, 1948.

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at the back of Birla House bamboo poles have been erected round the spot where Mahatma Gandhi fell in order to discourage the public from scooping handfuls of earth to preserve as sacred souvenirs. There was already a pit over a foot deep. A large number of people visited the spot today and offered prayers.33

Indeed, access to this site itself became controversial and highly contested. Birla House introduced visiting hours as a way of managing the crowds and the Congress High Command received bitter complaints about denial of access to the site. As Bhagwan Das Halna wrote to Nehru, I beg to apologise to write this letter to you. Had it not been a matter of utmost national importance, I would certainly not have troubled you with it. The thing is that not only I but millions of Indians think that the place where the Mahatmaji was shot dead has become sacred and is like a pilgrimage to us. On the evening of 13th March 48 I went to Birla House to pay my respectful homage to this sacred place but was told that people were not allowed to enter in Birla House for this purpose since 11th February. I was simply dumbfounded and had to return very sadly and with tears in my eyes. . . . When pacci vedi [an altar] has been constructed there and when the same is worshipped daily with flowers according to press reports, we also should not be deprived of that puja.34

Some demanded that the bones should be preserved rather than scattered and telegrammed in protest. ‘Gandhiji’s ashes alone may be dissolved. Request preservation of bones as sacred relics. Recalling preservation of Buddha’s relics. Pray issue instructions’.35 Indeed, this explicit parallel drawn with Buddha was not far-fetched. During the two-week mourning period, Gandhi’s former role as a political leader, associated with politicized decisions such as the balance of payments settlement with Pakistan, seems to have been transcended. As the day of the immersion ceremony at the sangam at Allahabad approached, one English language newspaper headline even suggested, ambivalently, ‘Mahatma Gandhi being worshipped’.36 33

Ibid., 2 February, 1948. Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, All India Congress Committee papers G-8 Part 2 (1947) [Hereafter AICC], Bhagwan Das Halna to Nehru 19 March, 1948. In his reply on 9 April, the Congress secretary, Sadiq Ali, acknowledged, ‘We are aware of the widespread feeling in the matter you have raised in your letter. The matter is receiving our serious consideration.’ 35 The Pioneer, 9 February, 1948, Telegram to Nehru. 36 Ibid., 11 February, 1948. 34

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Most significantly of all, the national fortnight of mourning declared by the Congress leadership coincidentally coincided with the holding of the Ardh Kumbh Mela at Allahabad, or Prayag, at the confluence of three rivers Ganga, Yamuna and Saraswati, which was held every six years and at which thousands of sadhus, gurus and pilgrims had gathered for a mass ritual bathing, for the cleansing of past sins. At the camp at the Ardh Kumbh Mela, thousands of pilgrims daily were praying in front of a large portrait of the Mahatma which had been placed on a dais with a charkha (spinning wheel) in front of it, and the Quran and the Gita on either side of it. They were reported to be ‘worshipping the dais as a temple of God and many of them have even offered coins as is customary in temples of other deities’.37 Over the following fortnight the kinship of the deceased and his relationship to the broader community were constantly articulated and made explicit in the rituals themselves and in the wider media commentary. The paternalistic role of ‘Bapu’ (Father) had a long lineage in the anti-colonial movement. After death this status was reinforced by a gendered vocabulary which stressed the orphaning and child-likeness of the people left without their leader. Devdas Gandhi spoke of his countrymen as ‘fellow orphans’ and the headline of The Pioneer, marked with a black border on 31 January, proclaimed ‘The nation is fatherless’. Devdas’ broadcast on All India Radio was an intimate and personal account of Gandhi’s last days and minutes and the procedures for dealing with the body after his passing. This included details of his final breaths, how the body was undressed and the location of clots of blood. This metaphor of Gandhi as the father and co-parent to Mother India was prevalent in the following two weeks. Intimate rituals, usually closed to all but the closest kin, were shared by all. Although the family were closely involved, the Congress was also projected as an extended ‘family’ and Nehru was very much the ‘son’ and heir with his own political status and authority clearly reinforced in the aftermath of the death. The collective responsibility for Gandhi’s death, as stressed by Nehru and Congress leaders, was reiterated in public discourse.38 This also had resonance with Indian understandings of death. An innocent victim, subject to a sudden and violent death, universally carries a special status across varieties of Hindu belief. A ‘bad or 37

Ibid., 11 February, 1948. See for example, N. N. Agarwala, India’s Saviour Crucified: A challenge for us to think and act (Agra: Shiva Publication, 1948). 38

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untimely death’, which has come suddenly and at the hands of a murderer, can only be redeemed or transmuted into a ‘good death’ (akal mrityu) through the actions and good intentions of those who serve the deceased. In this context, the extraordinary outpouring of grief and ritual honouring of Gandhi’s memory and image, and the substantive political changes which occurred almost immediately in the aftermath of Gandhi’s death, can be properly understood. There was almost obsessive concern about the manner and timing of Gandhi’s death and an intimate association between the people and the deceased as a paternalistic presence. As Jonathan Parry writes, ghosts are likely to recur unless ‘appropriate propitiatory rituals are perfectly performed’.39 In the classical reading, Gandhi’s own death would have been a product of his own bad karma. This almost unthinkable proposition posed a challenge for the society in which it had taken place. A bad death could at least be transmuted into a better one by propitiatory rituals and by a time of tranquillity and good fortune. This had a direct political implication and there was a repeated emphasis in the political rhetoric on the notion of shame. Gandhi’s death was a product of the Indian people’s own wrongdoing and had to be borne and atoned for by society as a collective ‘family’. As Nehru said, ‘We are all responsible for this unprecedented tragedy. . . . It is a disgrace that [the] people of India could not save Mahatma Gandhi’.40 In the crowds of mourners for Gandhi, symbolic acts such as head shaving, the removal of shoes and the donning of white khadi became widespread.41 The distribution of Gandhi’s ashes The fortnight of official mourning and the immersion ceremony in Allahabad, during which Gandhi’s ashes were immersed in the 39 Jonathan Parry, Death in Banaras (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 161–162. 40 Sarvepalli Gopal, (ed.), Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru [hereafter SWJN] (New Delhi, Oxford University Press) 2nd series, 5, pp. 63, 65. Speech at Jullundur, 24 February, 1948. 41 There were also parallels here with the death of princely rulers, such as the death of Maharaja Umaid Singh in 1947 and Maharaja Hanwant Singh of Jodhpur in 1952. These deaths were similarly not simply family matters but demanded widespread and overt public mourning over two weeks in which members of all communities participated by paying their respects, often by visiting the royal palace, many also shaving their heads. See Marzia Balzani, Modern Indian Kingship: Tradition, Legitimacy and Power in Jodhpur (Oxford: James Currey, 2003), p. 45.

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confluence of the rivers welded together a collective sense of responsibility for Gandhi’s death. This was twinned with renewed respect for the Congress Party and an enhanced sense of state power. The rituals involved a long circuitous special train journey that carried Gandhi’s ashes through the Uttar Pradesh political heartland of both Congress and Hindu nationalism. Then the Congress parcelled out ashes to all states of India. This played a decisive role in linking together reverence for Gandhi with the authority of the Congress and the state. The train, the Asthi Special,which carried Gandhi’s ashes to the prayag (confluence) at Allahabad was made up of five third-class carriages. The urn was placed in the middle carriage, heavily covered in flowers and khadi flags and illuminated by six electric lights, and so clearly visible to spectators from the platform. Large images of the charkha and Ashoka’s national lion seal were painted on the carriage. The deliberately engendered closeness between the national flag and the Congress flag, which were easily confused, was also reinforced by the presence of both national and Congress flags on the train. The train halted at ten stops in western Uttar Pradesh during its journey to Allahabad where vast crowds had assembled to take darshan.42 These rituals clearly drew upon earlier forms of Congress organization and resembled in many ways the Gandhian satyagrahas and Congress activities of a nostalgically-remembered Gandhian heyday.43 The funeral train, weaving its way from city to city in North India in 1948, presented a very familiar echo of earlier trains from which the fortunate could catch a darshan of the Mahatma. Many of the same people may have stood in the crowds. Black flags, used in the hartals (strikes) and processions of the Non-Cooperation, Civil Disobedience and Quit India movements, were a symbol of mourning but also resonant of these former days of public protest. Another familiar aspect was the role of the pledge, a regular Congress staple employed on Independence days and Republic days. Numerous speeches of Congress leaders in the aftermath of Gandhi’s death mentioned the need to pledge to communal peace, to honour Gandhi’s 42 There are echoes of President Lincoln’s funeral in 1865 which utilized a very long and public train journey through America and acted to cohere a divided public at a critical moment. See Barry Schwartz, ‘Mourning and the Making of a Sacred Symbol’. 43 Shahid Amin, for instance, has stressed the importance of train carriages and train stoppages during Gandhian campaigns of the early 1920s. Shahid Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura 1922–1992 (Delhi: Penguin edition, 2006), p. 189.

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principles and stressed the moment as a redemptive one. Pledges were solemnly sworn on the day of the funeral in collective meetings.44 The ceremonies also acted as physical places for old Congress comrades to meet with one another. Congressmen from all the UP provinces and adjoining provinces assembled at Allahabad for the immersion of the ashes. Nostalgic and sorrowful meetings acted as a way of reconsolidating Congress and as part of the party’s purification process. Centrally-directed commemorations were not a new innovation for the Congress and Lisa Trivedi has emphasized the importance of the ‘visual consistency’ of ritual holidays and the ‘reconfiguration of time’ by swadeshi proponents from the 1920s onwards, underpinned by specific calendars and well ordered agendas.45 Gandhi’s jayanti had long been celebrated annually in October and dates such as his incarcerations and fasts had been marked in the past. The death anniversaries of leaders such as Lala Lajpat Rai, G. B. Tilak and Bhagat Singh had long been signalled by processions, hagiographical press articles and emphasis on their sacrifices. In short, very familiar political tropes from the campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s (but which had become associated with an outdated mode of politics in many ways by the late 1940s) were revived by the funeral spectacle. The striking difference of course, now, was that the Congress had displaced British power and these Congress idioms could be presented as officially sanctioned government symbols. The funeral may have superficially, and initially, born all the hallmarks of imperial British ritual imposed from on high but this was rapidly subverted and transformed into a more complex interaction between Indian people and nationalist memory. In this light, the decision to distribute some of Gandhi’s ashes from Delhi to all the states of India was a political masterstroke on the part of the Congress. The instruction that ashes should be scattered in local rivers, spatially linked together India in a modern ‘cartographic 44 One, printed in a pamphlet, to be completed by the reader, read as follows: ‘I, rudely shaken to my very foundations by the sudden and unexpected demise of Bapuji, the Father of Our Nation, hereby pledge that I shall do everything possible, by action and thought, to see his cause succeed. I will see—| a) That communalism is eradicated from every walk of our life | b) That untouchability is liquidated once and for all, and | c) That Social and Economic Democracy is brought into reality, that being the latest mission which Gandhiji laid down in the Harijan. | I am affixing my signature to this pledge, after full realisation of the difficulties involved as also the significance of this mission. Babuji Zindabad, Jai Hind.’ (Agarwala, India’s Saviour Crucified, unpaginated.) 45 Lisa Trivedi, Clothing Gandhi’s Nation: Homespun and Modern India (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), pp. 102–108.

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imaginary’. This linked together the provinces of India with India’s physical geography and Gandhi’s actual bodily remains. This network radiated out from Delhi and was under direct Congress control and supervision.46 The ashes would be divided and portions would be sent to every provincial government, under the guidance of the state governors, who arrived in Delhi to collect the urns. The provincial governments were then directed to divide the ashes into three parts and to allocate them within their province. In reality this rule was flouted. In Bombay all ministers received a portion. The distribution of the ashes became a deeply political act, as provinces, leaders and districts struggled to assert their right to receive a portion of the sacred ashes. ‘There has been keen competition and pressing requests have been received both by the provincial governments and in Delhi for portions of the ashes from places not in the programme’.47 Quite plainly, there were not enough to go round. These can not simply be seen as acts of commemoration but became closely intertwined both with the extension and consolidation of political power by Congress provincial cadres and the marginalisation of opponents and factional rivals. The immersion ceremonies also provided an opportunity for the regrouping of Congressmen who came from long distances to participate. The final part of the programme included the following rivers: Godvari at Nasik, Krishna at Bezwada, Cauvery at Srirangam, Sabarmati at Ahmedabad, Hooghly at Calcutta, Sutlej in East Punjab, Mahanadi in Orissa, Rivers Gomti and Gaya, the Brahmaputra in Assam, the Pavnar at Wardha and the seashores at Puri, Rameshwaram, Cape Cormorin and Porbunder. In reality, an underground trade in these ashes quickly developed and there are still at least two (unauthorized) places (one in the USA and one in India) where people claim to have possession of Gandhi’s ashes. In 1997, ashes were uncovered in an urn in a bank vault in northern India, and were later scattered at the confluence of the Yamuna and Ganges rivers. Some ashes scattered in 2008 had been kept by Sriman Narayan, a businessman and associate of Gandhi and passed into the hands of his son, a businessman based in Dubai, upon Narayan’s death.48 46 On cartography and the visualization of space in modern India see Sumathi Ramaswamy (ed.) Beyond Appearances: Visual Practices and Ideologies in Modern India (Delhi: Sage Publications, 2003). 47 The Pioneer, 9 February, 1948. 48 ‘Father of the nation laid to rest: the afterlife of Mahatma Gandhi’. The Independent, Thursday, 31 January, 2008.

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It seems far from coincidental that several of the locations selected for the receipt of ashes were afflicted by inter-religious conflict. Decisions were motivated by the idea that social tensions could be alleviated by Gandhi’s ‘presence’ in the form of ashes, just as in life his presence had been a calming presence in riot-torn areas. In Punjab, where the severe refugee crisis continued on a daily basis, military and police led the procession for the consignment to the River Sutlej. The contested state of Hyderabad was not initially in the list of destinations scheduled to receive a portion of the remains, but was added as a last-minute inclusion to the list. The prominent participation of princely rulers also emphasized the inclusiveness of the event. The distribution of the ashes of Gandhi, in particular, was a way for the Congress Party to extend its patronage to rulers who were weakened by the Partition crisis and wanted to cement their affiliation with the Congress settlement or, conversely, to marginalize and undermine the legitimacy of others. A special train was laid on from Rampur, the small Muslim majority princely state in western Uttar Pradesh, which had been affected by violent protests due to the state’s accession to India. The Nawab of Rampur and ‘leading Hindu and Muslim citizens of the state’ came to Delhi to collect an urn of ashes, which was then carried back to the city, where the ashes were placed in a local river.49 In a country where large crowds frequently constitute and shape the performance of politics, the scale of public involvement in Gandhi’s death rituals deserves to be restated. The division of the ashes into parts, and the spiritual force with which they were vested meant that Gandhi could literally be in hundreds of places at once in February 1948. Special trains carried people from the districts to attend the immersion ceremonies. Meetings were held in mosques, churches, temples, educational institutions, trade unions, clubs, Congress committees and bar associations. The moment could also be utilized as a way of squaring conflict and providing an extraordinary outlet for reconciliation which would otherwise have been unavailable. A disputed plot of land contested by Hindus and Muslims in Bangla Bazaar, a suburb of Lucknow, was dedicated as a space to raise a memorial to Gandhi instead. The manner in which Gandhi’s remains were linked to the architectural spaces of the state, particularly provincial assembly

49

The Pioneer, 9 February, 1948.

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buildings, is also worth noting. In many other states, the prime minister, governor, ministers and members of the public filed past the ashes which had been placed in a glass case in a porch-way of the provincial assembly building alongside a vast portrait of the Mahatma. Gandhi’s image and memory were linked to the state’s physical machinery and to its municipal buildings, provincial assembly buildings, bureaucrats and symbols.50

Memorialization Nehru was strikingly self-conscious about Gandhi’s memorialization and reflexive about the ways in which Gandhi’s memory could be appropriated for national causes after his death. While wishing to honour him and to avoid opportunistic commemoration he was also astute about the utility of Gandhi’s death-memorials to the national cause. The importance of theatricality, performance, ritual and commemoration was as well understood by Nehru as by his viceregal predecessor—‘. . .brick and mortar has its uses’ he wrote on a proposed national memorial for Gandhi, ‘and is desirable to give some solid and substantial shape to our work. This has a psychological importance and a permanence’.51 The ownership of Gandhi’s memory and its connection to state power, however, rapidly became a challenge to centralized authority. Nehru in particular consistently attempted to define the limits of commemoration and to create a centralized monopoly on the project of Gandhi’s memorialization. Provincial Congress cadres and local groups went too far and Nehru complained that too many streets and places were being named after Gandhi which would result in confusion. He was concerned at signs of coercive actions to extract donations to Gandhi memorial funds. He intervened to reverse an order making

50 Film footage of the regional ceremonies reinforces this point and suggests the ways in which state officials were involved, the scale of crowd participation and the different ceremonial procedures accompanying the immersion of the ashes into the waters. See Babuji’s Demise available at http://www.gandhiserve.org [accessed 27 September 2010]. This film shows the immersion of Gandhi’s ashes, processions, crowds and ceremonies at Allahabad, Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, Kanya Kumari, Travancore, Cochin, Ahmedabad, Kandla and Nasik. 51 Valmiki Choudhary (ed.), Dr. Rajendra Prasad: Correspondence and Select Documents (Allied Publishers, 1984–1995), vol. 8, p. 58. Note from Nehru on proposed national memorial for Gandhi.

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compulsory deductions from the salaries of civil service officers in Uttar Pradesh.52 He also personally oversaw the sites associated with the cremation and funeral. ‘The surface of the platform on which Mahatma Gandhi’s body was cremated may be cemented in order that people in search of sacred earth from the spot will not be able to tamper with it’ he instructed within days of the cremation.53 Concrete, then, the ultimate symbol of the modernizing and developmental aspirations of the postcolonial state, could, quite literally, be used to seal Gandhi’s memory and to limit people’s interaction with his corporeal remains. Nehru also made protestations about ‘unauthorized’ or public expressions of grief in the form of statues, basing his arguments on an aesthetic sensibility underpinned by a hierarchy of artistic expression which is worth quoting at length: Nevertheless, it is perhaps inevitable that some statues might be put up. If so, the greatest care should be taken that only real works of art are permitted. Unfortunately the standard in India of such statuary has been low and most people are satisfied with anything that bears a remote resemblance to the person concerned. Our cities and public places are full of structures which cannot by any stretch of the imagination be called artistic or pleasing to the sight. I have been shocked on many occasions at seeing these totally inadequate efforts. I should like to warn most earnestly those who are thinking in terms of having statues not to take any hasty decisions and to await a full consideration of this question by the National Memorial Committee under the chairmanship of the Congress President.54

This intervention was a pronounced attempt again by the new prime minister to reassert the authority and sovereignty of the state in public spaces. This speaks of the distance between the Nehruvian executive and its secular logic and the vernacularization of commemoration, grief and memorialization in a different cultural register. The Congress High Command tried to discipline the ways in which Gandhi was remembered, Nehru deploring temples, statues and other memorial shrines which would ‘savour of idolatry’ being erected all over the country. Nevertheless, public expressions of grief were outrunning the ‘authoritative’ versions of public commemoration.55 These events also worked as the end of an era. There was closure on the nationalist struggle which was associated with Gandhi more 52

SWJN, 2nd series, Vol. 6, pp. x. Letter to Pant, 18 June, 1948. SWJN, 2nd series, Vol. 5, pp. 45–46. Undated note accepted by the cabinet on 3 February, 1948. 54 SWJN, 2nd series, Vol. 5, p. 66. Statement to the press, 25 February, 1948. 55 SWJN, 2nd series, Vol. 5, p. 66. Statement to the press, 25 February, 1948. 53

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than with any other human being. As P. Sitaramayya, a future All India Congress president, stated in his tribute in an All India Radio broadcast in early February 1948: Mahatma Gandhi had finished his task and while the world will mourn his loss, by no means premature but altogether unnatural, we must recognise that as an ‘avatar’ that has finished his task has no place anymore in the domain of his functioning. . . . He is the tenth avatar that has descended into the world in this age of kali to make dharma walk on two legs. Indeed since June last year Mahatma Gandhi had reason to feel that he was outliving his need and that the gulf between his concept of society and policy and the accepted concepts around him was widening. The avatars in the past met with such a crisis on the eve of their nirvana.56

This reflected a widespread sense that Gandhi’s death had completed his work. His death marked a temporal shift and underscored transitions from colonialism to post-colonialism in the profoundest sense. A most compelling question is to what extent Gandhi himself may have anticipated this, or even had a death-wish, as Ashis Nandy has speculated. In this light, Nehru’s observation that ‘Even in his death there was a magnificence and complete artistry’ could not be more fitting.57 In this way it was not only the grief which accompanied Gandhi’s death which made it a seminal moment in the foundation of the Indian state’s legitimacy, but the sheer fact of his death. Whether it was mourned, celebrated, or discussed as a legal case or as a source of conspiracy theories and intrigues, indifference to such an event was impossible and the shared experience of his death developed a new sense of Indian-ness. Spatially this gap between citizens and state was narrowed by the close connections between the capital, New Delhi and the transmission by radio, newspaper and film of the rituals which were taking place across the country (and within the new country’s borders) and then, later, of the trial of Nathuram Godse. Today this point is upheld by ‘Gandhi’s prominence in local memories of independence and partition’ and, as Peter Gottschalk has described in his fieldwork probing contemporary memories of Gandhi’s death, ‘the ubiquitous 56

Times of India, 5 February, 1948. SWJN, 2nd series, Vol. 5, p. 48. Written on 5 February and published in Harijan, 15 February, 1948. This also poses questions about the political culture of assassination in South Asia more generally, which could be explored further in relation to members of the Bhutto and Nehru-Gandhi dynasties. 57

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description by Arampur residents of Gandhi as rashtrapita (father of the nation) demonstrates the determination and success of the state to craft a memory that recognizes independence as both continuous with a venerable past and discontinuous with foreign domination’.58

Conclusion Distinguishing mourning from the rituals through which this mourning was enacted is not possible. However, the materiality of Gandhi’s memorialization is surely not insignificant. Public and ritualized responses to Gandhi’s death enabled the state to attempt to demarcate the extent of its power. The grey and poorly delineated legacies of citizenship, of marking out who was an Indian or a Pakistani and where borders lay, was complex and lasted for many years after Independence. But Gandhi’s death was a critical moment at which Indian-state-ness was graphically inscribed by the Congress. The rituals following Gandhi’s death also performed a critical bridging function between the state and the people. It enabled the reassertion of nation-state legitimacy in a new form at a time when the pluralistic and liberal legal framework of India’s future constitution was far from assured. This was a collision-moment of the public and private, of state and society and an entanglement of the past and the future. It marked not simply the de-legitimization of the right and extremist forces but the actual legitimization, or at least nominal acceptance of, the new authority of the post-Partition, Congress-led, state. This state was both a spatial geographical settlement and centre of sovereign authority. This may have remained a Congress aspiration rather than a reality in places, and other lower order legitimacies continued to compete for power. Yet there is evidence of a sharp reduction in inter-ethnic violence and a greater acceptance of the secular message of the state immediately after Gandhi’s death. The rituals following Gandhi’s death contained all the collective emotional resonance, inner contradictions and localized interpretations of a Gandhian movement staged in colonial times alongside the sanction and support (rather than resistance of) the governmental machinery of the state.

58 Peter Gottschalk, ‘A Mahatma for Mourners and Militants: the social memories of Mohandas Gandhi in Arampur’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Vol. 25, No. 1 (2005), p. 56.

C Cambridge University Press 2010 Modern Asian Studies 45, 1 (2011) pp. 81–107.  doi:10.1017/S0026749X10000326

Migration, Citizenship and Belonging in Hyderabad (Deccan), 1946–1956∗ TAYLOR C. SHERM AN International History Department, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK Email: [email protected]

Abstract Whilst the history of the Indian diaspora after independence has been the subject of much scholarly attention, very little is known about nonIndian migrants in India. This paper traces the fate of Arabs, Afghans and other Muslim migrants after the forcible integration of the princely state of Hyderabad into the Indian Union in 1948. Because these non-Indian Muslims were doubly marked as outsiders by virtue of their foreign birth and their religious affiliation, the government of India wished to deport these men and their families. But the attempt to repatriate these people floundered on both political and legal shoals. In the process, many were left legally stateless. Nonetheless, migrants were able to creatively change the way they self-identified both to circumvent immigration controls and to secure greater privileges within India.

Introduction The middle of the twentieth century witnessed a transition from an era which was characterized by the relatively free movement of people within the British Empire to a period in which postcolonial nationstates attempted to control flows of migrants more closely. This change left migrants across the former British Empire in an anomalous and often disadvantaged position: Indians in South Africa had limited political rights; the bulk of Indians in Ceylon acquired the nationality of neither India nor Ceylon; Indians resident in Burma who did not ∗ This research has been generously funded by the UK’s Arts & Humanities Research Council. I would like to thank Eleanor Newbigin and Omar Khalidi for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

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wish to become Burmese citizens after independence there were made to register and apply for permits to stay; South Asians in Malaya who left the country after independence in 1957 risked being refused reentry.1 At some point in the early postcolonial period many of these countries experienced what might be called a crisis of citizenship, in which the breaking of imperial bonds of migration, trade and finance was proffered as the solution to a wide variety of postcolonial ills. Thus, General Ne Win put pressure on Indians to leave Burma in 1962,2 Kenya placed restrictions on the rights of Indians in the late 1960s,3 and Idi Amin expelled Asians from Uganda in 1972.4 Much less is known, however, about the fortunes of people of non-Indian origin in India.5 The following pages track the fate of Arabs, Afghans and other groups of Muslim migrants in Hyderabad after this princely state was forcibly integrated into the Indian Union in September 1948. In the interregnum between independence and the introduction of the Indian Constitution on 26 January, 1950, the government of India took practical steps to ensure that the actual movement of people into India was restricted.6 This included the introduction of permits and, later, passports for those travelling between Pakistan and India.7 Moreover, shortly after independence Afghans in India were required to be in possession of passports.8 In Hyderabad the Military Governor and the unelected ministry sought to send many people of non-Indian origin to their ‘home’ countries. This paper tracks the government of India’s plan to repatriate these men and their families and makes three main arguments. First, it suggests that, for India, the shift from empire to nation-state was 1 Hugh Tinker, ‘Indians Abroad: Emigration, Restriction and Rejection’ in Michael Twaddle (ed.), Expulsion of a Minority: Essays on Ugandan Asians (London: The Athlone Press for the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, 1975), pp. 15– 29. 2 Ibid. 3 Daniel Rothchild, ‘Kenya’s Minorities and the African Crisis over Citizenship’, Race (London), vol. 9, no. 4 (1968), pp. 421–37. 4 Twaddle, Expulsion of a Minority. 5 cf. Ellen Oxfeld, Blood, Sweat and Mahjong: Family and Enterprise in an Overseas Chinese Community (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). 6 Joya Chatterji, ‘Partition, Migration and Citizenship in South Asia, 1946–2006’ paper presented at workshop, From Subjects to Citizens (4 September 2008). 7 Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), Chapters 3 and 5. 8 Departmental note by B. K. Kapur, 19 May, 1948, National Archives of India (hereafter NAI), Ministry of States (hereafter MoS), f.59-H/48.

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complicated not only by the huge migrations of partition, but by the presence of significant numbers of Indians in other British colonies and migrants from the Empire in India. This meant that the government of India’s calculations about its citizens were never confined within the country’s boundaries. Of course, India was not unique in this respect. Just as other historians have suggested, this research argues that the fact of migration was central to the process by which the Indian nation was demarcated.9 However, and this is the second argument, formal legal questions of citizenship and residency were reliant upon more informal, on the ground negotiations over the meaning of nationality and the nature of belonging. The shift towards a world of nation-states precipitated the emergence of a legal regime governing nationality in former British colonies that often conflicted with precisely those ethnic conceptions of belonging that had given rise to the demand for independence in the first place. In principle, this new legal framework required documentary evidence to prove one’s citizenship, including birth certificates and passports, in order to establish the right to enter a country either for travel or to work.10 Whilst the existing literature places great stress on the importance of this documentary regime, this paper argues that, in practice, the authorities were heavily dependent upon both the self-identification of individuals and the everyday understandings of belonging, even for the production of these documents. Thus, this research engages with scholars who have noted the dissonance between a formal rhetoric of secularism and informal attitudes and practices which excluded Muslims from the Indian nation.11 It extends this particular question to ask whether Muslims of Afghan and Arab origin could hope to retain any sense of belonging in postcolonial India. 9 Radhika Viyas Mongia, ‘Race, Nationality, Mobility: a History of the Passport’, Public Culture, vol. 11, no. 3, (1999), pp. 527–535. 10 This framework had been developing since the nineteenth century. On the history of the passport, and the regulation of migration see, John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000); Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 11 Gyanendra Pandey, ‘Can a Muslim be an Indian?’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 41, no. 4 (1999), pp. 608–629. More recent work has suggested that even formally secular legal regimes tended to be structured in ways that served the interests of Hindu men, see, Eleanor Newbigin, ‘The Codification of Personal Law and Secular Citizenship: Revisiting the History of Law Reform in Late Colonial India’, Economic and Social History Review, vol. 46, no. 1 (2009), pp. 83–104.

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Third, and finally, the following pages trace the fortunes of individuals who were excluded from India either by informal understandings or legal regimes, but who were also excluded from their so-called ‘home’ countries. Many people whom the authorities wished to deport were simply rejected by their home country because they failed to fulfil the documentary requirements to prove their citizenship. It appears that these men and women were left stateless. But this did not mean that they were rendered helpless or trapped between states. On the contrary, individuals often circumvented immigration controls, changed the way they self-identified for their own ends, and used their alien status to try to better their position in India.

Hyderabad and its place in the imperial economy of migration Notions of nationality and subjecthood within the British Empire had been a rather untidy tangle of local and imperial rules,12 but in practice everyone within the empire (with some important exceptions, including slaves) enjoyed the freedom to live and work anywhere in the realm. Bolstered by an ideology of free trade and the demographic imperative to settle new lands and move labour to where it was needed, the movement of people within the Empire had been largely unrestricted for much of the nineteenth century.13 Later, the free movement of certain people within the empire came to be restricted. Thus, flows of indentured labour from South India were subject to more regulation from the late nineteenth century.14 And the white dominions placed restrictions on Asian immigration from the early twentieth century.15 By the late 1930s, some, though not all, British colonies required passports for entry, but their primary purpose was to keep out various classes of ‘undesirables’, ranging from ‘prostitutes’ and ‘habitual drunkards’ to circus troupes, rather than to restrict 12 Ann Dummett and Andrew Nicol, Subjects, Citizens, Aliens and Others: Nationality and Immigration Law (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990); Daniel Gorman, Imperial Citizenship: Empire and the Question of Belonging (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). 13 Randall Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration in Post-war Britain: the Institutional Origins of a Multicultural Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 39. For a study of the ideologies behind imperial immigration policy see, Gorman, Imperial Citizenship. 14 Sunil Amrith, ‘Indians Overseas? Governing Tamil Migration to Malaya, 1870– 1941’, Past and Present, vol. 208, no. 1 (2010), pp. 231–261. 15 Marilyn Lake, and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line.

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immigration per se.16 From the 1920s, passports were required for those entering India,17 but the colonial state willingly declined to enforce its own rules, especially on land routes.18 Because colonial authorities often neglected to police their borders, even non-British subjects could enjoy relatively free movement within the British Empire. This meant that it was fairly easy to come to live and work on the subcontinent for those who had the financial means to do so. Hyderabad had long been a desirable destination for migrants from the far reaches of the subcontinent, as well as from Afghanistan, the Arab world and even Southeast Asia. In the late eighteenth century, Hyderabad became a centre of migration for Arabs from the Hadhramaut, who worked as soldiers and scholars in the state.19 In the early part of the nineteenth century, the Nizam of Hyderabad provided refuge for Arab, Rohilla, Sikh and Pathan (Pashtun) mercenaries, whom the British wished to expel after the defeat of the subcontinent’s many warring states, including the Marathas.20 Once in Hyderabad these migrants took up various professions, from trade and moneylending, to employment in the Nizam’s army, or his special Arab irregular forces, the Nazm-i Jamiat, the latter of which exercised watch and ward duties over the palaces of the Nizam and his family. Hyderabad actively recruited immigrants in some cases. When Salar Jung I reorganised the Nizam’s administration in the second half of the nineteenth century, for example, he brought in talented administrators from North India, many of whom had been educated at the Muhammedan Anglo-Oriental College in Aligarh.21 Hyderabad 16 For details on the rules in each colony see, Passport Control Manual, 1939, India Office Records, British Library (hereafter IOR), L/P&J/8/745; Summary of Visa Regulations, January 1947, IOR L/P&J/8/745. 17 Indian Passport Act (XXXIV of 1920), and Passport Rules, 1921, IOR L/P&J/8/736. 18 Deputy Secretary to the Government of India, Foreign & Political Department, to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Burma, the Chief Secretary to the Government of NWFP, His Majesty’s Envoy Extraordinary & Minister Plenipotentiary at the Court of Afghanistan, and the Agent to the Governor General and Chief Commission in Baluchistan, 28 December, 1934, IOR L/P&J/8/736. 19 Omar Khalidi, ‘Sayyids of Hadhramout in Early Modern India’, Asian Journal of Social Science vol. 32, no. 3 (2004), pp. 329–345. 20 Omar Khalidi, ‘The Hadhrami Role in the Politics and Society of Colonial India, 1750s–1950s’ in Ulrike Freitag and William G. Clarence-Smith (eds), Hadhrami Traders, Scholars and Statesmen in the Indian Ocean, 1750s–1960s (Leiden: Brill, 1997), pp. 67–81. 21 Francis Robinson, Separatism Among Indian Muslims: the Politics of the United Provinces’ Muslims 1860–1923 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 26, 123–124.

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State thus accumulated a significant population of Afghans, Arabs, and North Indians.22 Many migrants adopted Urdu as their language and married locally, and their mixed descendents added yet more diversity to Hyderabad’s population. In addition to these Muslim migrants, the Nizam’s government also welcomed Kamma settlers from the Telugu-speaking areas of Madras to bring uncultivated lands in Telangana under the plough.23 At the same time, migrants did not all move in one direction: a considerable number of weavers left the state in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to settle in the main weaving centres of Bombay province where demand for their goods was higher.24 As a result, Hyderabad had become a rather cosmopolitan place: its mixed population was supported by an official ideology epitomized by Hyderabad’s court and nobility, which were famed for their inclusiveness.25 This did not mean that Hyderabad’s population lived in perpetual harmony; this mix did suffer occasional crises. Hyderabadis protested against the entry of outsiders, or ‘non-mulkis’, into the services after Salar Jung I recruited North Indians into the administration.26 In the 1850s, Arabs were deemed to be a ‘menace’ for their alleged involvement in money-lending and the violence which often accompanied the collection of loans. Hyderabadi and British authorities combined to stem the problem: the British restricted the entry of Arabs at the port of Bombay, and Salar Jung I established a special court (Qadat-i Urub) to deal with cases involving Arabs.27 Nearly a century later, after the Second World War, Arabs again found themselves unwelcome in the state. The Nizam’s government asked the British for permission to extern Arabs from the state, not only because of 22 See, Omar Khalidi, Muslims in the Deccan: a Historical Survey (New Delhi: Global Media Publications, 2006). 23 A. Satyanarayana, ‘A Note on Land, Caste and the “Settler” in Telangana’ in S. Simhadri and P. L. Vishweshwer Rao (eds), Telangana: Dimensions of Underdevelopment (Hyderabad: Centre for Telangana Studies, 1997), pp. 30–34; and Inukonda Thirumali, Against Dora and Nizam: People’s Movement in Telangana (New Delhi: Kanishka Publishers, 2003). 24 Douglas Haynes, and Tirthankar Roy, ‘Conceiving Mobility: Weavers’ Migrations in Pre-Colonial and Colonial India’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 36, no. 1, (1999), pp. 35–67. 25 Karen Leonard, ‘The Hyderabad Political System and its Participants’, The Journal of Asian Studies vol. 30, no. 3 (1971), pp. 569–582. 26 Karen Leonard, ‘Hyderabad: the Mulki non-Mulki Conflict’ in Robin Jeffrey (ed.), People, Princes and Paramount Power: Society and Politics in the Indian Princely States (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 65–106. 27 Khalidi, ‘Hadhrami Role in the Politics and Society of Colonial India’, pp. 76–77.

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their alleged involvement in money-lending and drug use, but because some members of the Nazm-i Jamiat had come into conflict with the dominant political force in the state, the Ittehadul Muslimin.28

Independence, partition and Hyderabad In 1947, as India and Pakistan gained independence, the princely states were left in legal and political limbo.29 Hyderabad, like Kashmir, chose not to join either of the two dominions.30 As the Nizam’s government tried to negotiate its way out of joining the Indian Union, Hyderabad’s cosmopolitan society faced several crises, from a communist insurgency to the rising militancy of the Razakars, who promoted Muslim rule in the state. Although Hyderabad was not disconnected from developments in the rest of the subcontinent, its politics had not crystallized along religious lines in the way that all-India politics did in the months surrounding August 1947. But as strife within Hyderabad escalated, the state was drawn into a discursive interpretation of all-India politics which was dominated by the experience of partition. Hyderabad’s nascent internal politics were fragmented along linguistic, caste and religious lines, but the state’s political divisions did not directly correspond to those in the rest of India. Linguistic affinities tended to define the major parties in the state, with separate organizations for Kannada speakers and Marathi speakers, whilst in the Telugu-speaking areas in the east of the State, the Andhra Maha Sabha, with its communist agenda, was the dominant political force. During the war, the communists in Telangana had begun an insurgency against landlords and the forces of the Nizam that continued after 1947.31 For its part, the Hyderabad State Congress had pretensions to unite the entire state, but in effect its three

28 Extract from a secret note from W. V. Grigson, Revenue and Police Member, H.E.H. the Nizam’s Executive Council, Hyderabad, [undated], NAI, MoS, f.117P(S)/47. 29 Ian Copland, ‘Lord Mountbatten and the Integration of the Indian States: A Reappraisal’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 21, no. 2 (1993), pp. 385– 408. 30 On the failed negotiations to bring Hyderabad into the Indian Union see, Lucien D. Benichou, From Autocracy to Integration: Political Developments in Hyderabad State (1938– 1948), (Chennai: Orient Longman, 2000), Chapter 6. 31 Thirumali, Against Dora and Nizam.

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linguistic groups operated in relative autonomy from one another. When the Nizam failed to accede to India by 15 August, 1947, the Hyderabad State Congress launched a campaign designed to force the Nizam to join the Indian Union that included both non-violent protest and anti-government acts of violence.32 Language was not the only fault line in Hyderabadi politics, however. By 1947 the Hyderabad State Congress and the Andhra Maha Sabha were demanding that the Nizam accede to the Indian Union. But both the main dalit parties, the Depressed Classes Association and the Depressed Classes Conference, had declared that they wished to stay out of the Union in order to avoid being dominated by caste Hindus. Finally, there was the Majlis-i Ittehadul Muslimin, which had been established in 1927 and claimed to represent the interests of Hyderabad’s Muslim population. At its inception, the Ittehad had criticized the Nizam’s rule, and pushed for more representative government, but on the basis that Muslims should rule Hyderabad. By 1947, the party held significant influence over the Nizam. At partition, the party supported both the creation of Pakistan and the idea that Hyderabad should stay out of the Indian Union.33 As communists and nationalists stepped up their own campaigns, the Ittehad’s paramilitary volunteers, the Razakars, set about realising the Ittehad’s pro-Muslim agenda with aggression against anyone whom they considered to be an enemy of the regime. Of course, not all Muslims were united, let alone united in support of the Ittehad: both nationalists and communists counted Muslims amongst their ranks, and there had been fighting between members of the Arab Nazm-i Jamiat and members of the Ittehad.34 These squabbles were the source of the attempt to deport Arabs, as cited above. Furthermore, many government servants saw the spike in Muslim-chauvinist sentiment inspired by the Ittehad and the Razakars as a betrayal, not only of Hyderabad’s cosmopolitan ethos, but also of Islam.35

32 Swami Ramananda Tirtha, Memoirs of Hyderabad Freedom Struggle (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1967), pp. 176–187. 33 Carolyn M. Elliott, ‘Decline of a Patrominal Regime: The Telengana Rebellion in India, 1946–1951’, The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 34, no. 1 (1974), pp. 27–47, especially p. 35. 34 Extract from a secret note from W. V. Grigson, Revenue and Police Member, H.E.H. the Nizam’s Executive Council, Hyderabad, [undated], NAI, Ministry of States, f.117-P(S)/47. 35 Fareed Mirza, Tehsildar, to the First Taluqdar, Nander District, 15 July, 1948, NAI, MoS, f.104-H/48.

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Although the fault lines in Hyderabad’s many internal conflicts did not run neatly along religious lines, Hyderabad’s political situation nonetheless came to be seen through the same lens as the disturbances of partition in North India. The structure of rule in the state, where a predominantly-Muslim government held power over large numbers of the disadvantaged, many of whom were Muslim, but the majority of whom were Hindu, appeared to divide the population along religious lines. This was especially so as the Nizam’s forces, who were mostly Muslim, descended to suppress the communists and nationalists, the bulk of whom were Hindu. In addition, two short-term trends increased the perception in New Delhi that Hyderabad was a state run by Muslims for Muslims. Firstly, the Ittehad and the Razakars, who wished Hyderabad to avoid accession to the Indian Union consciously remoulded Hyderabad’s image into that of a Muslim State. They attempted to recruit men from across the Muslim world to fight to protect Hyderabad’s ‘Muslim State against the invasion of Hindus’.36 According to Indian Government documents, former members of Hyderabad’s army were sent to Afghanistan and to Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (NWFP) to recruit forces to protect the state.37 In turn, the government of Bombay refused entry to men from the Frontier and the Hadhramaut on the ground that they were expected to travel to Hyderabad in order to enlist in the Nizam’s forces.38 Secondly, thousands of Indian Muslims sought the protection of the Nizam during the violence of partition. The Nizam’s Palace in New Delhi was used to house more than 1,500 Muslims who had sought shelter from the violence which engulfed the capital in September 1947.39 And several hundred thousand Muslims left India and established themselves in Hyderabad, especially in Hyderabad City.40

36 D. K. Krishna, Assistant Director (States), Intelligence Bureau, Ministry of Home Affairs to V. P. Menon, Ministry of States, 25 May, 1948, NAI, MoS, f.59-H/48. 37 Government of Central Provinces to Ministry of Foreign Affairs, New Delhi, 25 May, 1948, NAI, MoS, f.59-H/48. 38 Copy of telegram from Restis, Bombay to Homex, New Delhi, 9 April, 1948, NAI, MoS, f.198-P/48; Secretary to the Government of Bombay, Home Department to the Secretary to the Government of India, Ministry of States, 7 August, 1948, NAI, MoS, f.59-H/48. 39 The Superintendent, H.E.H. the Nizam’s Palace, New Delhi, to the Political Secretary, H.E.H. the Nizam’s Government, Hyderabad Deccan, 25 November, 1947, APSA, Installment no. 70, list no. 6, serial no. 53. 40 Government estimates put the number of North Indian refugees in Hyderabad at around seven lakhs, Note by Raja Dhondi Raj Bahadur, Minister for Rehabilitation, 5 August, 1949, NAI, MoS, f.10(27)/49.

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As the Nizam’s forces bore down more heavily on their opponents in Hyderabad, and non-Hyderabadi Muslims gathered in the state, the territory was drawn into an all-India narrative of partition. Although each locality, indeed, each person, experienced partition in a unique way, as Pandey has shown, these separate instances of violence were often given larger significance as they were transposed into events of national suffering. Thus, individual acts of violence became national wrongs and entire communities were rendered undifferentiated and suspect.41 The catastrophe of partition produced a postcolonial polity in which political parties organized around Muslim interests were almost completely discredited, and the loyalty of Muslims in India was easily cast in doubt. These views informed the government of India’s treatment of Muslims who wished to return to or remain in India after partition.42 They also shaped the treatment of Muslims amongst communities of overseas Indians in the remaining British colonies, including Kenya.43 They certainly coloured interpretations of the situation in Hyderabad, for the government of India concluded that the unrest in Hyderabad threatened to destabilize ‘the communal situation in the whole of India’, and decided to invade the state to restore order.44 On 12 September, 1948, therefore, the government of India launched its ‘Police Action’ in Hyderabad. In spite of the name, the move really entailed a full scale military invasion of the state. Although the formal invasion was concluded very quickly, the state witnessed widespread anti-Muslim violence in its aftermath.

The official view of Afghans, Arabs and Pakistanis—Razakars and outsiders The fact that Hyderabad had been woven into that all-India partition narrative by September 1948 was important because it informed the way the government of India and the Military Governor in Hyderabad viewed questions of belonging in the state after the invasion. Thus, 41 Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), Chapter 5. 42 Zamindar, The Long Partition, especially Chapter 3. 43 Deborah Sutton, ‘Divided and Uncertain Loyalties: Partition, Indian Sovereignty and Contested Citizenship in East Africa, 1948–1955’, Interventions vol. 9, no. 2 (2007), pp. 276–288. 44 Note for the Cabinet by V. P. Menon, Secretary to the Government of India, Ministry of States, May 1948, NAI, MoS, f.1(6) H, 1948.

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there was widespread distrust of Muslims in Hyderabad as Major General J. N. Chaudhuri led Indian troops into the territory. As Military Governor, Chaudhuri wanted to rid the state of nonindigenous Muslims. There was a remarkable absence of debate in government over whether this policy was legally permissible. Indeed, in the lack of legal clarity which prevailed at the time, the idea that non-indigenous Muslims may have had rights to residence or even citizenship in India was not raised. Instead, everyday understandings of belonging determined the fate of these men and their families. Suspicion of Muslims dominated the Military Governor’s policy from the inception of the occupation. As they swept into the state, Chaudhuri’s forces arrested thousands of people: the Nizam’s military forces were detained as they surrendered, and approximately 17,000 civilians were imprisoned on suspicion that they were engaged in anti-Union activities. Chaudhuri explained, ‘Naturally, among those arrested, the majority were Muslims . . . They had been pointed out as Razakars by people who were, at that time, considered reliable’.45 In the post-invasion lexicon, the term Razakar did not necessarily denote only those who were members of the volunteer corps. Rather, it was widely used to describe anyone suspected of Muslim chauvinism or of opposition to the integration of Hyderabad into the Indian Union. As Chaudhuri’s observation makes clear, it was widely assumed— incorrectly—that most Muslims were Razakars. By one non-official estimate, as many as 25,000 Arabs were jailed in the aftermath of the invasion.46 A separate non-official source suggested that around 2,500 Afghans were also held.47 According to government figures around 6,22548 people described as ‘Pakistani nationals’, who had worked not only in the Nizam’s forces but as petty traders, shopkeepers, money-lenders, masons and mechanics, were also detained in various camps around the State.49 The latter is a particularly curious category given that the legal regime regarding 45 J. N. Chaudhuri, Military Governor, to the Deputy Secretary to the Government of India, Ministry of States, 17 February, 1949, NAI, MoS, f.12(4)-H/49. 46 Note by Saif bin Sultan Husein bin Abdulla bin Umar Al Quaiti, LLM, MA, [undated], National Archives UK, DO 142/441. 47 Translation of cutting from Afghan (Karachi), 10 February, 1949, NAI, MoS, f.12(4)-H/49. 48 Minutes of a discussion held in the Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India, with regard to the question of the repatriation of Pakistan Nationals from Hyderabad (Deccan), [undated], NAI, MoS, f.10(12)-H/49. 49 Note by Jagat Singh, Ministry of External Affairs, 18 April, 1949, NAI, MoS, f.10(12)-H/49.

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nationality was anything but clear at this time. The Military Governor argued that it was ‘absolutely necessary to get rid of the Pathan and Arab outsiders in Hyderabad as quickly as possible’.50 His Government, in co-ordination with the central government, decided to deport these men to their countries of origin. By one estimate there were around 21,000 people to be deported,51 and most would have to be kept in detention camps until they could be escorted from the country. As they were awaiting deportation, their families were also detained. At this time, women and children under the age of 16 did not have separate rights of nationality or domicile in international law. Instead, their rights were legally bound to those of their husband or father. Thus, the government made plans to deport the Indian-born wives and children of these migrants. In the meantime, the men and their families were held in detention camps, behind barbed wire and under armed guard.52 Within a short time, many in the camps had spent all their ready cash and were in dire straights. One group of former members of the Nizam’s forces who were waiting to be sent to Pakistan lamented that, ‘We have no clothes to cover ourselves and we have no money to look after the other personal necessaries of life’. They decried the conditions of the camp, writing, ‘The ladies are in a very depressed state and shocked at their imprisonment in a barbedwire fence and separated from their husbands. . .The future of our children is being ruined recklessly, as we are unable to educate them.’53 Chaudhuri, acknowledging the poor conditions in the camp, told the Centre, ‘morale in Dhond camp [is] extremely low’, and he urged the government of India to expedite the removal of the detainees.54 As it became clear that Indian forces had acted with excessive zeal in detaining these Muslims on the assumption that they were Razakars, new rationales were developed for their detention and removal from the state. Writing of the Afghans, Chaudhuri stressed the fact that,

50 Foreign New Delhi to the Chief Secretary to the Government of Bombay, 14 October, 1948, NAI, MoS, f.175-H/48. 51 Southern Command Adm. Instr. no. 50, Repatriation Camp Dhond, 8 October, 1948, NAI, MoS, f.175-H/48. 52 Milgov Hyderabad State to Foreign New Delhi, 16 March, 1949 (received), NAI, MoS, f.10(12)-H/49. 53 Q. Bahadur, Hav/Cl 8th Hyderabad Infantry and 21 others to the Military Governor,