Bonded citizenship

Caste, Partition, and the prevention of exit

Bibliographic Data

ID3617895
AuthorsUttara Shahani (0000-0002-8428-5028, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume59
Issue2
Pages1-28
Publication date2025-06-23
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueModern Asian Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0026-749X • E-ISSN: 1469-8099
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0026749x25000034
OpenAlexW4411572116
LanguageEN
References cited21

Historians of the Indian Partition focus on the permit systems the governments of India and Pakistan put in place to stem refugee entry and prevent the return of evacuees. However, the prevention of exit became, alongside non-entrée and the prevention of return, part of an official strategy of immobility in South Asia directed at marginalized castes. At Partition, Pakistan saw the labour of 'non-Muslim' marginalized castes as essential to its national wealth. It believed it had to retain them at all costs. On the other side of the border, the article discusses the Indian government's laggardly, and often indifferent, response to the struggles of caste-oppressed groups trying to migrate to India. The article builds on scholarship on mobility capital and partial citizenship in the aftermath of Partition to argue that with the prevention of exit, citizenship incorporated an imposed nationalization that embodied the status of marginalized castes as more than a minority and produced a form of bonded citizenship

Caste · Citizenship · Combinatorics · Demographic economics · Economics · Partition (number theory · Political science · Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography · Law · Mathematics · South Asian Studies and Conflicts · South Asian Studies and Diaspora

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