Development, Citizenship, and the Bhakra–Nangal Dams in Postcolonial India, 1948–1952

Datos Bibliográficos

ID8958412
AutoresDavid Haines (0000-0002-2831-7160, University of Bristol, autor de correspondencia)
Año2021
Volumen65
Número4
Páginas1124-1144
Fecha de publicación2021-10-13
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaThe Historical Journal (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0018-246X • E-ISSN: 1469-5103
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0018246x21000625
OpenAlexW3206189162
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas3
Referencias citadas27

Historians have done much to unpick the image of development in poor countries after the Second World War as a technocratic phenomenon driven by centralizing planners and advocates of modernization. Yet scholars have done less to ask how development interacted with other major aspects of decolonization, notably the transformation of colonial subjecthood to postcolonial citizenship. Using the case of the Bhakra–Nangal dam complex, constructed in northern India during the late 1940s to early 1950s, this article argues that a major development project impacted not just on economic growth and the extension of state power, but significantly influenced the integration of postcolonial India's diverse political territories. At the same time, ideas about development and citizenship both offered resources that technocrats and dam-displaced people alike could use to make arguments about the relationship between people, territory. and the state. Development was not a rarefied space that escaped politics while extending state power, but was entangled in the broader processes through which subjects of an empire became citizens of a postcolonial state

Citizenship · Colonialism · Decolonization · Empire · Modernization theory · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sociology · State (computer science · Technocracy · Hydropower, Displacement, Environmental Impact · Law · South Asian Studies and Conflicts · Water Governance and Infrastructure