Citizenship and Its Discontents: An Indian History - Rilegato

Jayal, Niraja Gopal

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0674066847 ISBN 13: 9780674066847

Casa editrice: Harvard Univ Pr, 2013

Riassunto

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.

Su questo libro

L'autore

Niraja Gopal Jayal is Professor at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance at Jawaharlal Nehru University, India.

Product Description

Book by Jayal Niraja Gopal

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Harvard Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0674066847
• ISBN 13: 9780674066847
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 366