Decolonisation and its Discontents: Naga Claims-Making and Indian State-Making, 1944-1966
On 19 November, IPCS hosted Dr Lydia Walker, Past & Present Fellow, Institute of Historical Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London, for a talk on Decolonisation and its Discontents: Naga Claims-Making and the Indian State-Making, 1944-1966.
After the Second World War, countries across the colonial world achieved independence from European and Japanese imperial rule. Empire had built a quilt of enclaves and entrepôts, excluded areas and autonomous regions, diaspora populations and special jurisdictions. How did these peoples and aspirational polities claim forms of recognition when new postcolonial state governments worked to subsume them in their own state-making projects? Through the example of Nagas in India’s Northeast, this talk considered the relationship between minority political claimant and new postcolonial state government as determinative rather than marginal to the process of global decolonisation.