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Personal Law and Citizenship in India's Transition to Independence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 January 2011

ELEANOR NEWBIGIN
ELEANOR NEWBIGIN*
Affiliation:
School of Oriental and African Studies, Thornhaugh Street, London WC1H 0XG, UK Email: [email protected]
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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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 45 , Issue 1: From Subjects to Citizens: Society and the Everyday State in India and Pakistan, 1947–1970 , January 2011 , pp. 7 - 32
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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28 Ibid, pp. 10–14; The use of waqf law in this developed in the Ottoman Empire during the eighteenth century in response to the state's fiscal policies but became an even more popular way of protecting a family's hold over land in the nineteenth century, with the expansion of colonial power in this region. Powers, ‘Orientalism, Colonialism and Legal History’, pp. 537–538.

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