Citizenship and its discontents : an Indian history / Niraja Gopal Jayal.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Jayal, Niraja Gopal.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Citizenship--India--History.

Citizenship.

Civics, East Indian.

India--Politics and government--1947-.

India.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (viii, 366 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 2013.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Breaking new ground in scholarship, Niraja Jayal writes the first history of citizenship in the largest democracy in the world-India. Unlike the mature democracies of the west, India began as a true republic of equals with a complex architecture of citizenship rights that was sensitive to the many hierarchies of Indian society. In this provocative biography of the defining aspiration of modern India, Jayal shows how the progressive civic ideals embodied in the constitution have been challenged by exclusions based on social and economic inequality, and sometimes also, paradoxically, undermined by its own policies of inclusion. Citizenship and Its Discontents explores a century of contestations over citizenship from the colonial period to the present, analyzing evolving conceptions of citizenship as legal status, as rights, and as identity. The early optimism that a new India could be fashioned out of an unequal and diverse society led to a formally inclusive legal membership, an impulse to social and economic rights, and group-differentiated citizenship. Today, these policies to create a civic community of equals are losing support in a climate of social intolerance and weak solidarity. Once seen by Western political scientists as an anomaly, India today is a site where every major theoretical debate about citizenship is being enacted in practice, and one that no global discussion of the subject can afford to ignore.

Contents:

The subject-citizen: a colonial anomaly

Legal citizenship and the long shadow of the partition

Aspirational citizenship: migrants and emigrants

Pedagogies of duty, protestations of rights

The unsocial compact

Social citizenship in neo-liberal times

Genealogies of mediated citizenship

Passages from backwardness to citizenship

The future of the civic community.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780674070998

0674070992

9780674067585

0674067584

OCLC:

827083283