@article{1481721,
      recid = {1481721},
      author = {Jayal, Niraja Gopal,},
      title = {Citizenship and Its Discontents : An Indian History /},
      pages = {1 online resource (346 p.)},
      abstract = {Breaking new ground in scholarship, Niraja Jayal writes  the first history of citizenship in the largest democracy  in the world-India. Unlike the mature democracies of the  west, India began as a true republic of equals with a  complex architecture of citizenship rights that was  sensitive to the many hierarchies of Indian society. In  this provocative biography of the defining aspiration of  modern India, Jayal shows how the progressive civic ideals  embodied in the constitution have been challenged by  exclusions based on social and economic inequality, and  sometimes also, paradoxically, undermined by its own  policies of inclusion. Citizenship and Its Discontents  explores a century of contestations over citizenship from  the colonial period to the present, analyzing evolving  conceptions of citizenship as legal status, as rights, and  as identity. The early optimism that a new India could be  fashioned out of an unequal and diverse society led to a  formally inclusive legal membership, an impulse to social  and economic rights, and group-differentiated citizenship.  Today, these policies to create a civic community of equals  are losing support in a climate of social intolerance and  weak solidarity. Once seen by Western political scientists  as an anomaly, India today is a site where every major  theoretical debate about citizenship is being enacted in  practice, and one that no global discussion of the subject  can afford to ignore.},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/1481721},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674067585},
}