Citizenship, community and the state in Western India: the moulding of a Marathi-speaking province, 1930s-1950s.

This thesis examines how ideas about citizenship emerged out of the mutually constitutive relationship between the ‘everyday’ state and society in the specific region of Maharashtra, western India. By concentrating upon Maharashtra between the 1930s and 1950s, it looks to provide new perspectives upon the construction of citizenship in India during this formative period, thereby complementing, building upon and re-contextualising recent scholarship that has been principally interested in deciphering the repercussions of independence and partition in the north of the subcontinent. This thesis suggests that the reasons why Maharashtrians supported the reorganisation of provincial administrative boundaries on linguistic lines were intrinsically linked to ideas and performances of citizenship that had emerged in the past few decades at the local level. Despite the state’s interactions with its citizens being theoretically based upon accountability, objectivity and egalitarianism, they often diverged from these hyperbolical principles in practice. Because local state actors, who were drawn from amongst regional societies themselves, came to be subjected to pressures from particular sub-sets, groups, factions and communities within this regional society, or shared the same exigencies and sentimental concerns as its ordinary members of the public, the circumstances in which citizenship was conceptualised, articulated and enacted within India differed from one location to the next. Perceptions of the state amongst ordinary Indians, and their sense of belonging to and relationship with it were thus formulated in the discrepant spaces between the state’s high-sounding morals and values, and its regionally specific customs and practices on the ground.