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Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2808-7684
AccessType
Open Access Dissertation
Document Type
dissertation
Degree Name
Candidate in Philosophy
Degree Program
Sociology
Year Degree Awarded
2023
Month Degree Awarded
September
First Advisor
Millicent Thayer, Co-Chair
Second Advisor
Moon-Kie Jung, Co-Chair
Third Advisor
Cedric De Leon
Fourth Advisor
Agustin Lao Montes
Fifth Advisor
Mwangi wa Gĩthĩnji
Subject Categories
Inequality and Stratification | Place and Environment | Politics and Social Change | Quantitative, Qualitative, Comparative, and Historical Methodologies
Abstract
Abstract: This dissertation focuses on the sovereignties that are lost when postcolonial nation-states are formed. It is a historical ethnography of the aftermath of the Indian annexation of the State of Hyderabad in 1948, part of a series of mergers of sovereign principalities that went on to constitute the territory of the Indian nation-state. Violence in contemporary India is seen as a postcolonial failure of the anticolonial project in which Dalits remain the absolute Other, and Dalit revolution for emancipation is seen as a politics of radical democracy. Anti-Dalit violence is thus the founding violence of the nation. Taking the asynchronous temporality of the nation as its starting point, the dissertation opens with a description of the 1978 Dalit demand for renaming Marathwada University located in the territory of the former state of Hyderabad. This enables an examination of the links between political violence in the present and the project of territorial sovereignty that comprises decolonization. My work draws on and contributes to three distinct sets of literatures: on political subjectivity and historical traumas; on nation-state formation; and on Empires. It reframes political violence directed against minorities through long-durée histories. It bridges postcolonial and memory studies by showing how the records of the postcolonial state continue and deepen the singular colonial project of archives. It moves beyond the history/memory binary to argue that a region is both a geographical landscape and a historical product. Finally, this study challenges the paradigmatic status of South Asia in the discourse of nation-state formation, and its linear narratives of transition. From the perspective of places like Hyderabad, Nagaland, Manipur, and Kashmir the nation-state project is one of foundational violence. The study seeks to de-exceptionalize South Asia and rethink the links between territory, sovereignty, and freedom in other regions across the world.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7275/36002496
Recommended Citation
Birla, Swati, "The Past Is A Foreign Country: The Politics Of Reterritorialization In India, Post-1945" (2023). Doctoral Dissertations. 2956.
https://doi.org/10.7275/36002496
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/2956
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Included in
Inequality and Stratification Commons, Place and Environment Commons, Politics and Social Change Commons, Quantitative, Qualitative, Comparative, and Historical Methodologies Commons