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Download fileBureaucracy, community, and land: The resettlement of Meos in Mewat, 1949-50
This article documents in detail hitherto unavailable what Shail Mayaram called an “onslaught by the modern bureaucracy of the postcolonial state” on the liminally placed Meo community in the Mewat region comprising the former princely states of Alwar and Bharatpur and the Gurgaon district of the former province of East Punjab. A people well-described as “in-between Hinduism and Islam,” Meos found themselves, at a time of “two-nation” theory and consequent “partition politics,” a misfit. This article begins from where the existing accounts of the story of Meos end i.e. 1949 and trace the fraught process of their reterritorialization on their own land, now part of a partitioned nation-state. Given the current ascendant culturally nationalist Indian state-society, it revisits the Mewat of 1949-50, representing it as a community lab of the early Indian nation-state, tests its claims of parity, equality and freedom and provides a ‘pre-history’ of the contemporary violence there.
History
School
- Social Sciences and Humanities
Department
- Politics and International Studies
Published in
Journal of Social HistoryVolume
54Issue
1Pages
306–329Citation
ANKIT, R., 2019. Bureaucracy, community, and land: The resettlement of Meos in Mewat, 1949-50. Journal of Social History, doi:10.1093/jsh/shy119.Publisher
Oxford University Press © The AuthorVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced version of an article accepted for publication in Journal of Social History following peer review. The version of record ANKIT, R., 2019. Bureaucracy, community, and land: The resettlement of Meos in Mewat, 1949-50. Journal of Social History, 54(1), pp. 306–329 is available online at: https://academic.oup.com/jsh/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jsh/shy119/5366885 and https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shy119.Acceptance date
2018-11-06Publication date
2019-02-28Copyright date
2020ISSN
0022-4529eISSN
1527-1897Publisher version
Language
- en