Political Futures and the Ends of Empire: Anti-Colonialism, Federation and Civil Liberties in Twentieth-Century South India

Presenter:

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Abstract

The princely state of Hyderabad became home to a unique confluence of political debate, combining questions about the future of Muslim politics and states on the subcontinent with discussions of post-colonial federation. Hyderabad, in the 1940s, was a multilingual and multireligious society, a predominantly Hindu society governed by a Muslim king (the opposite of Kashmir where a numerous Muslim population was governed by a Hindu monarch). What arose in Hyderabad in the colonial period was an emergent critique of monarchy along with an explicit desire for the continuance of the Hyderabad polity, either as a federated unit of India, or as an independent state, after the withdrawal of the British. Previously the history of linguistic nationalism that led to the formation of the first regional state of Andhra Pradesh immediately in post-independence India has been analyzed without any consideration of the history of the dissolution of its powerful neighbor, the princely state of Hyderabad. This produced a widening gap in the historical literature that was at a loss to give voice to political aspirations incubating in the erstwhile Hyderabad state that were broader than the triumphalist nationalism of the Indian National Congress. My current research turns to analyze the parallel development of public life, political modernity, the mapping of democratic futures in British India and the Princely state of Hyderabad. Some were coordinated efforts, others were parallel but all were in dialogue with larger international discourses of self-determination and federation to ultimately rethink political futures towards a people-centered government in postcolonial South Asia.