Dr William Gould, Dr. Sarah Ansari and Dr. Taylor Sherman
Research Grant
South Asia’s transition from colonialism to independence and democracy in 1947 was one of the most momentous events of the mid-twentieth century. Sixty years on, and with India currently in the news as the UK seeks, in the Prime Ministers words, to establish a ‘special relationship’ with its former colony and now growing superpower, this Research Grant project takes up the compelling history of citizens’ experiences of independence over this period, and their everyday contacts with the new state.
The project aims to show how comparisons between India and Pakistan provide unique insights into the question of the relative success or failure of the state in this politically sensitive part of the world. A comparative history of this nature is still waiting to be written as previous studies of India and Pakistan for this period have mostly been concerned with issues of economic development, the nature of the secular state (for India), the development of party politics and the nature of national state transformation (for Pakistan). There have been few studies on the development of popular, public cultures surrounding the state, and none has been comparative. In effect, histories of India and Pakistan since 1947 have been divided along nation-state lines – a division that artificially separates directly comparable social and political experiences.
This project is a grassroots comparative study of the transition from colonial rule to independence in three parts of the subcontinent, Uttar Pradesh and Hyderabad in India and Sindh in Pakistan. Its key focus is citizen experiences of the everyday state, the gap between the rhetorical, ideological platform set out in New Delhi and Karachi (Pakistan’s capital for most of this period) and the interpretations of this agenda in the locality. Citizen experiences of the state in both countries had much in common, issues of scarce resources (food, housing, public amenities, access to employment etc) in the late 1940s and early 1950s, for instance, resonated across the new national boundaries so recently created by independence. Corruption, and its management, as testified by the content of official records and contemporary newspapers, was an urgent problem for ordinary people living there as well as for the new administrations. In both places, the new state apparatus faced the challenge of accommodating raised expectations of citizens against a backdrop of practical difficulties.
The project website acts not only as a repository for examples of primary research material collected as part of the project but also as a sharing resource for works in progress. A number of archives have been used as research for the project as well as a series of oral history interviews by Dr Gould while in India, some of which can also be found on the project website.