I am You, as You are Me: Citizenship and Belonging in the South Asian chhitmohols

• In Event: 3251 - Section on International Migration Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 2. Asian Immigrants, Citizenship, and Belonging

Abstract

Scholarship on the erstwhile South Asian enclaves or chhitmohols, has been limited to discussions on the isolation of these spaces and its people, who remained stateless for nearly 70 years before their integration in 2015. However, recent ethnographic work has revealed that the same conditions of isolation were circumvented by a substantial proportion of its residents who procured identification as citizens through reliance on associations of familiarity, kinship and matrimony to extend and legitimize ties to their country of residence or nationalistic association. The welfares of such identification as citizens of a country which never recognized them as constituents were negligible. In fact, voting was used as a means of asserting their unacknowledged identity as citizens within their immediate socialities.

Citizenship, understood as a legal-political institution, based on status, rights and duties, involving practices that distinguish between formal and substantive citizenship and subjectivities of citizen and non-citizen falls short of explaining the motivations behind such acts of citizenship. Investigating it through acts will shift the contours of analyzing citizenship by asking ‘what makes the citizen?’ rather than ‘who is the citizen?’ The question that this paper seeks to answer is: How are identities of citizenship and claims of belonging to a space (re)defined by ‘acts of citizenship’ performed by communities lying outside the state’s authoritative awning?

Author

• Surya Sankar Sen, National Institute of Advanced Studies