The First Decade: The Making of Post-Colonial State in India and Pakistan

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

Recent scholarship on post-colonial South Asia has begun to focus on the 1950s as a formative decade for the newly independent Indian and Pakistani states, when each country framed their respective Constitutions, debated legislations on rights and citizenship, formulated and implemented economic policies to improve the lives of their populations. This panel brings together an inter-disciplinary group of scholars who explore this first decade through the lens of the ‘State’ and re-examine its relation to religion, citizenship, women and agrarian planning, issues that would command increasing political and public attention in subsequent decades. Why and how did the Pakistan state become an Islamic Republic? How would the Indian state tackle its mobile populations and designate their nationality and citizenship? How would it modernize agriculture, increase food for its citizens and control population growth of its ‘teeming millions’? Although the panelists approach the project of post-colonial state formation from diverse angles, they come together to ask how planners, policy makers, bureaucrats, and legal authorities in India and Pakistan envisioned the promises of freedom, framed policies and legislations that would impact the lives of their citizens. Significantly, they question the ways in which their aspirations were framed and informed by both ideas of modernity and the preceding colonial experience. In the process this panel hopes to discuss comparatively, the transitions, transformations, continuities and changes between the last decade of colonial state and the first decade of post-colonial state in South Asia.

Area of Study

• South Asia

Session Organizer

• Haimanti Roy, University of Dayton

Chair

• Indivar Kamtekar, Jawaharlal Nehru University

Individual Presentations

• Struggling to Write a Constitution: The Long Gestation (48-56) and Short Life (56-58) of Pakistan’s First Constitution - Feisal Khan, Hobart and William Smith Colleges

• Paper Trails: Mobility, Identity and the Indian State, 1947-60 - Haimanti Roy, University of Dayton

• “When you have two, that will do”: Family Planning and National Planning in 1950s India - Mytheli Sreenivas, Ohio State University

• Agricultural Planning in Postcolonial India - Prakash Kumar, Pennsylvania State University

Discussant

• Indivar Kamtekar, Jawaharlal Nehru University