Personal law and citizenship in India’s transition to independence

Newbigin, Eleanor

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.

Citation

Newbigin, E. (2011). Personal law and citizenship in India’s transition to independence. Modern Asian Studies, 45(01), 7-32. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X10000338

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2011
• Deposit Date: Dec 15, 2014
• Publicly Available Date: Jan 2, 2111
• Journal: Modern Asian Studies
• Print ISSN: 0026-749X
• Electronic ISSN: 1469-8099
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 45
• Issue: 01
• Pages: 7-32
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X10000338
• Publisher URL: http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=7950506&fileId=S0026749X10000338
• Additional Information: Additional Information : This article, and the special issue in which it is included, has also been published in book form: Taylor C. Sherman, William Gould, Sarah Ansari (eds.) From subjects to citizens: Society and the Everyday State in India and Pakistan, 1947–1970, (Cambridge University Press, 2014) ISBN: 9781107064270 http://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/history/south-asian-history/subjects-citizens-society-and-everyday-state-india-and-pakistan-19471970