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The accession of Junagadh, 1947–48: Colonial sovereignty, state violence and post-independence India
By revisiting the events from July 1947 to February 1948 that comprised the accession of the
princely state of Junagadh to India, this article gives an insight into the newly independent
Dominion’s ‘mobilisation of violence’ in re-fashioning its sovereignty and authority. In doing
so, it adds to the growing historical literature on state formation in India that argues that
multiple crises of the period 1947–49—post-partition violence in Punjab and Delhi, rebellion,
accession and war in Kashmir and the so-called ‘police-action’ in Hyderabad—far from being
aberrations to the emerging Indian nation-state were, instead, affairs through which its new
sovereignty evolved. The mobilisation of Indian defence forces in the lead up to the accession of
Junagadh in November 1947 and the management of violence directed at Junagadh’s Muslims
afterwards are yet another instance of the forcible incorporation of Indian princely states and
Indian Muslims into the reconstructed post-colonial state. Present in this matrix were also the
‘sub-states’ within Junagadh and the attendant questions of their autonomy, an instrumentalist
alarmism about popular will and unrest and a hastily conducted referendum. These aspects
of this contested accession have remained overshadowed in the historical record and are here
revised to provide an alternative narrative.
History
School
- Social Sciences
Department
- Politics and International Studies
Published in
The Indian Economic & Social History ReviewVolume
53Issue
3Pages
371 - 404Citation
ANKIT, R., 2016. The accession of Junagadh, 1947–48: Colonial sovereignty, state violence and post-independence India. The Indian Economic & Social History Review, 53(3), pp. 371 - 404.Publisher
© The Authors. Published by SAGE PublicationsVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Acceptance date
2016-05-22Publication date
2016-08-03Notes
This paper is in closed access.ISSN
0019-4646eISSN
0973-0893Publisher version
Language
- en