Ankit_M C Chagla and the Nationalist Imaginations of a Political Minority in India 1947 67 (1).pdf (506.94 kB)
Download fileM.C. Chagla and the ‘nationalist’ imaginations of a ‘political minority’ in India, 1947-67
This article is about some of the governmental experiences of the jurist/diplomat/minister M.C. Chagla, through which, it seeks to cast a certain light on the possibilities and limits of relations between a majority state and a minority individual, albeit of the privileged kind. His pre-eminent presence in Bombay’s legal fraternity from 1922 and the High Court from 1941 bequeathed to him a sense of belonginess, which was largely untouched by the upheavals of 1947. His 11 years as Chief Justice, followed by five years as India’s envoy in US/UK, saw him being elevated to the central cabinet, but not without a question mark, at his non-party and non-majority identity. His short ministerial stint till 1967 ended over two issues of identity politics – a domestic language policy and an international crisis – providing a prism to see the coming together of competence, concerns and convictions around cooperation across parties, classes and communities.
History
School
- Social Sciences and Humanities
Department
- International Relations, Politics and History
Published in
Journal of Muslim Minority AffairsVolume
41Issue
3Pages
491-509Publisher
Taylor & Francis (Routledge)Version
- VoR (Version of Record)
Rights holder
© The authorsPublisher statement
This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Taylor and Francis under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Acceptance date
2021-10-20Publication date
2021-11-11Copyright date
2021ISSN
1360-2004eISSN
1469-9591Publisher version
Language
- en