Overcoming Internal Difference: Integrating India’s ‘Peripheries’ after 1947

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

Upon decolonization in 1947, New Delhi inherited a fragmented geobody. The new state encompassed colonial-era provinces, princely states, and ‘tribal’ areas, all of which had histories of varying relationships with a central government. While the new Indian state acquired suzerainty over all of these, the ways these relationships between local, regional, and national actors would function was far from clear. The papers on this panel offer new perspectives on integration and Indian nation-building, demonstrating that the story of developing relations between the New Delhi metropole and the country’s peripheries – whether defined in terms of politics, ethnicity, or geography – was complicated and highly fraught. Daniel Haines’s paper explores the confluence of geography, techno-politics, and parochialism in Bilaspur, a tiny princely state, where competition between Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, and the central government to control the Bhakra-Nangal Dam site played out in the 1959s. Akhila Yechury considers the referendum in Chandernagore and the conflicting expectations of integration, particularly in terms of national, regional and administrative identities and belongings. Elisabeth Leake addresses the reorganization of Assam into a number of new states in the late 1960s, which involved a large degree of political compromise based on economic realities versus local ethnic demands for autonomy. Through a spatial and temporal range of case studies, this panel reveals various political and social tensions that emerged as a result of postcolonial state-building across India.

Area of Study

• South Asia

Session Organizer

• Elisabeth Leake, University of London

Chair

• Anish Vanaik, Purdue University

Individual Presentations

• Voting for the Nation: The Integration of Chandernagore, c. 1949 - Akhila Yechury, University of St. Andrews

• Drowning Bilaspur: Dams, Debate and National Integration in 1950s India - Daniel Haines, University of Bristol

• Conflict and Compromise in the Reorganization of Northeast India - Elisabeth Leake, University of London

Discussant

• Anish Vanaik, Purdue University