Centre for South Asian Studies

Description

In revising the notion of ‘partition violence’ as civil war, I reconstruct the profound political significance of this violence that has otherwise been rendered subjective and apolitical.

In 1947, the language of—albeit fraught—‘brotherhood’ and fellowship was replaced by that of ‘the people’,  discovered and demarcated by repeated utterance in powerful pronouncements. The transfiguration of ‘fraternity’ to sovereignty was grounded in the violence of civil war that ushered in the age of republicanism. As the new but dominant political category, ‘the people’ inaugurated and became the basis of the Indian constitution and the foundational principle of the new sovereign power of India. This catastrophic violence was not incidental, but integral—foundational—to this arrival of ‘the people’ as the proper subject of the political in India. Focused primarily on Sardar Patel, I will chart the historical transformation of India’s political horizon from servitude to republican sovereignty with the aggressive incorporation of ‘the people’ as its basis.

Speaker bio:

Shruti Kapila is Professor of Indian history and global political thought at the University of Cambridge and a fellow, tutor and director of studies at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. She is also Co-Director of Global Humanities Initiative, a university initiative partnering with 6 partner universities in the global south.  Author of Violent Fraternity: Indian Political thought in the Global Age (Princeton, and Penguin Random House India, 2021) she is the editor of An Intellectual History for India (CUP, 2010) and the co-editor of Political Thought in Action: The Bhagavad Gita and Modern India (CUP, 2013). Her writing has appeared in leading academic journals such as Past and Present, Public Culture and Modern Intellectual History and in international publications such as the Financial Times, India Today, Prospect, Al Jazeera and she is a columnist with The Print India.