South Asia in Motion. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021. 345 pp. (Maps.) US$28.00, paper. ISBN 9781503614543.
The last twenty years has seen an explosion of scholarly literature engaged in analyzing South Asia’s transition from colonial subjecthood to independence and democracy. Sunil Purushotham’s work builds upon this extant historiography, whilst taking it in altogether new directions. Drawing on Kapila’s recent invocation of “violence as the essential political question” (Shruti Kapila, Violent Fraternity: Indian Political Thought in the Global Age, Princeton University Press, 2021, 3) within twentieth-century India (and beyond), From Raj to Republic examines how violence helped constitute a new regime of postcolonial sovereignty on the subcontinent. Throughout this monograph, Purushotham astutely captures the centrality of violence to emerging conceptions of citizenship and democracy, and carefully reveals its formative influence in the shaping of both postcolonial state and society in a multitude of ways. Utilizing case studies of the 1948 Police Action in Hyderabad, the recovery and rehabilitation of “Indian” subjects in partitioned Punjab, and post-‘48 counterinsurgency operations in the context of the Telangana Rebellion/ Revolution, his book stresses the “alchemical,” “transformative,” and “radical” (7–8) nature of India’s refashioning as a political space, as echoed in its titular refrain.
From Raj to Republic is revealing of how violence (at least in peninsular India) was not monopolized by the postcolonial state after independence in 1947, but was dispersed amongst the body politic. Purushotham makes a fascinating and persuasive argument about the Indian National Congress’s dual inheritance, not only as the immediate beneficiary of the repressive machinery of the colonial state, but also in terms of its long-term antecedents as an anti-colonial mass movement. By focusing on the latter, chapter 2 demonstrates the role of popular mobilization during the “Battle for Hyderabad,” when Indian forces entered the Nizam-ruled state of Hyderabad in September 1948 to ensure its incorporation within the Indian Union. During these operations, Purushotham uncovers how the central government mobilized, equipped, and ultimately relied upon a disparate set of militant and partisan organizations, including those on the Hindu Right, to destabilize and disrupt the Nizam’s government. In such ways, “subaltern violence was co-opted to reinforce rather than subvert the authority of the new nation-state” (82). This argument is re-illustrated in chapter 5 in the context of counterinsurgency activities in Telangana.
By capturing the dispersal of legitimized violence beyond the state, From Raj to Republic simultaneously explores the development of ideas relating to popular sovereignty and democracy at the moment of India’s independence. In the first two chapters, Purushotham explains how the Nizam’s regime was essentially represented as a Muslim power, both by but also beyond the Hyderabad state. Given these ongoing representations, violent displays of popular (as against the Nizam’s monarchical) sovereignty during the Police Action often came to be shaped by communalized notions of who constituted Hyderabad’s (and by extension, India’s) majority. In turn, rather than marking Hyderabad’s Muslims as an external “menacing and illegitimate other,” as had been the case during the partition of Punjab, “violence against them was an act of incorporation, of internalizing Muslims as a minority within a new national sovereign formation” (116). Such forms of violence were legitimized by the Indian Home Minister Vallabhbhai Patel, who foregrounded their revolutionary and majoritarian aspects when referring to them as evidence of “popular reaction and revulsion against the old order” (124).
Subsequent chapters build on these insights by exploring how the state’s authority and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship were differentially experienced by a diverse range of societal actors. Chapter 6 is particularly strong, focusing on the tribal rehabilitation scheme in Telangana, whereby Adivasis were relocated to roadside camps and rural welfare centres during the communist insurgency. As in the refugee camps of the Punjab (cf. chapter 3), this was in part framed around the protection and rehabilitation of vulnerable populations. At the same time, and by contrast, Adivasis were forcibly removed from their ancestral homes, in a pattern that anticipated/echoed coercive counterinsurgency paradigms employed elsewhere during decolonization in Africa and Asia. Central to such forcible relocation was a discourse of development, which drew upon the ideas of the Indian sociologist G. S. Ghurye. In the eyes of Ghurye and state officials overseeing the tribal camps, strategies to “civilize,” “modernize,” and “improve” the Adivasis would create assimilated and productive citizens within the new republic. Drawing upon Banerjee (Prathama Banerjee, “Writing the Adivasi: Some Historiographical Notes,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 53.1, 2016, 131–153), Purushotham tellingly captures how the camps were a manifestation of “an attempt to convert a telluric tribal politics” focused on territorial autonomy “into a regime of citizenship rights and the provision of state-led welfare and development” (240) perceived to be less threatening to the sovereignty of the Indian nation-state.
Chapter 4 also deserves special mention for its innovative use of the original first-person testimonial “statements” of partition refugees drawn from the East Punjab Liaison Agency’s (EPLA) archive at Chandigarh, Punjab. Purushotham dexterously navigates the complexity of these statements as “testimonial speech acts mediated through bureaucratic machinery” (166), detailing in successive sections their “functional and documentary aspects” as well as “their subjective or representational character” (173). He delineates how the structure of these testimonies—from their beginnings at the onset of the violent event to their culmination at the refugee camp—frequently supported the state’s rehabilitative master narrative, in which citizens’ lives and property now came under the sovereign protection of the new postcolonial state. Simultaneously, the statements provide insights into how refugees came to make claims for restitution within a new citizenship regime, and, in their infrequent narrative divergences, how incorporation within the official account of recovery and rehabilitation could be contested or inverted.
At the same time, I felt the material that came to constitute chapter 4 might have been better served as a standalone journal article. This informs a wider concern with the two chapters on Punjab, which in terms of historical context and sheer space within the monograph, receive much less attention than the material on peninsular India. Their inclusion seems to run against the grain of Purushotham’s point during the introduction that scholarly emphasis on partition in Punjab at independence has obscured the focus on events elsewhere (2). Elsewhere, chapter 1 is remarkably long, and much of its content is a work of synthesis. Perhaps here the uninformed reader might have been simply directed to existing scholarship (e.g. Eric Beverley, Hyderabad, British India, and the World: Muslim Networks and Minor Sovereignty, c. 1850-1950, Cambridge University Press, 2015), and the really original and significant aspects of this chapter might then have been more forcefully drawn out. On the vexing and perhaps rather tired question of continuity and change, much of the actual substantive content of the book pointed to connections between the colonial and postcolonial periods as much as to the radical break postulated during the introduction and epilogue. Finally, there was scope to draw more heavily upon recent relevant scholarship to further augment the content, such as on “criminal tribes” in Punjab (Sarah Gandee, “Criminalizing the Criminal Tribe: Partition, Borders, and the State in India’s Punjab, 1947-55,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 38.3, 2018, 557–572).
Ultimately, though, these relatively minor quibbles should not detract from what is otherwise an empirically and theoretically rich account of the constitutive role of violence in the forging of India’s new republic. This book will be particularly useful for scholars interested in this period of South Asian history, and I would also enthusiastically recommend it to those concerned with theories and ideas of sovereignty, democracy, citizenship, and violence more generally.
Oliver Godsmark
University of Derby, Derby