Keywords

These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

The chapters are based on the analysis of citizenship in terms of the theories that underpin citizenship in its many forms, and refer to the infelicities that arise when liberal theory meets illiberal cultures. In the final section, the book addresses the role of education, religion, the economy, identity, and architecture in the making of citizenship. Though based primarily on case studies, the book nevertheless is comparative in nature. The book suggests that the variation in levels of citizenship in time and space is the result of the entanglement of two different forces. Firstly, the primary influence on the state of citizenship is the result of the evolution of the concept of citizenship germane to local culture, tradition, and religion of a specific country, refracted by social evolution and political power, articulated and written onto the statute book by the state. The second major influence on citizenship are the forces of globalization, for no nation of the world today is an island, and national citizenship is quickened by the global flow of the concepts of freedom, equity and empowerment.

This complex interplay between structure and agency, intermediated by power and the flow of ideas are crucial to the understanding of citizenship in the contemporary world. In the same vein, the chapters are a part of a larger discourse which seeks to track the course of the global flow of culture and concepts, the moving forces behind which consist of the strategies of coping with asymmetry that marks the world we live in, and attempts to reverse it through counterculture, rebellion or hybridization. The larger project, of which the work on citizenship is a part, seeks to track the course of the transnational and trans-cultural migration of concepts from one context to another. The 11 essays in this volume aim at a re-appraisal of citizenship, and beyond it, to map global cultural flow for which the essays open a valuable window to a wide array of disciplinary, theoretical and comparative perspectives. Each contribution draws out the inherent tensions between a formal definition of the concept of citizenship, institutionalized in terms of a clear set of rights, duties, and affinities, and a more amorphous reality where values, symbols and power constantly intervene. As a result, the essays highlight some of the problems that arise when citizenship is used as a universal category, free of its cultural location, politics and historicity, or as a fixed relationship between the individual and the state.

Each of the chapters focus on a different facet of citizenship, and an accompanying methodology, be it physical structures and the study of architectural plans and urban design; diversity of perception as captured through surveys; ideas and their transfer through individuals and institutions; textbooks and the politics of policy making. Nevertheless, common to each of the pieces is an emphasis on the role of the actor, juxtaposed with the state, supporting, and sometimes undermining the individual through its authority and institutions. Agency is explored both as a culturally-determined attribute as well as a strategic response to structures of domination. Both dimensions grant importance to the flow of ideas and practices over time and space—a process that has been vastly accelerated thanks to new technologies of mass communication and the transparency that, as a visible symbol of democratic accountability, is increasingly required of the holders of power.

These issues are examined in the first section of the book which explores the existing literature on citizenship studies in terms of the process of citizen making (Schoettli), the emergence of innovative concepts such as “multi-layered citizenship” (Spiess), and turning subjects into citizens in transitional societies (Mitra). Section II analyses citizenship within a transnational context (Pfetsch on the European Union), as well as national contexts (Manor on Sri Lanka and Mitra on India). Five thematic essays examine the powers of flow from different angles: religion and flexible citizenship (Zavos), education and the middle classes (Lal), economic citizenship (Harriss-White et al.), tribal notions of citizenship (Nayak), and architecture and city planning (Hegewald). This introductory chapter sets the theoretical and comparative context for the essays by first outlining the phenomena that affect the nature and diversity of meanings attributed to citizenship in the contemporary world and then assessing the cumulative impact of these factors for a general understanding of this much frequented term of contemporary discourse.

With the endogenous and exogenous forces that account for the dynamism of citizenship as their point of departure, the analysts engage in mapping the dynamism of citizenship as a global phenomenon into the physical and notional spaces crucial to the citizen. This introductory chapter sets the stage for a comprehensive discussion of these issues. It explores the meaning of citizenship in the inner world of the actor and the observer on the basis of conversations with experts and actors. Furthermore, it identifies a lacuna in the conceptual landscape of citizenship that the book seeks to address, and sketches out a preliminary model and research design for a quantitative analysis of citizenship—which can, at best, be a snapshot of a dynamic reality.

National Politics and the Global Flow in the Making of Citizenship

While the concept of citizenship as cultural flow (as opposed to being fixed in a legal or constitutional sense) constitutes the overall framework of this book, the common approach that unites the essays—from a wide variety of disciplines—questions the character of citizenship as a top-down emanation from the commanding heights of the national state.Footnote 1 Though many of the essays have their own definition of citizenship, and follow the approach specific to the disciplines to which the authors belong, they all unite in treating citizenship as a political phenomenon that is amenable to comparative analysis, that draws on factors that go well beyond political and economic transaction, and legal specification, and which find inspiration in memory, visualization, ethnic identity, and social construction. This challenge to re-imagine citizenship emerges as much from the older, liberal democratic states of the world as it does from post-colonial states that joined the comity of nations in the wake of the Second World War.

The essays draw their empirical material broadly from the experience of Asian countries, where the conceptual flow of citizenship was accelerated by colonization, as well as from European life, which, through immigration and the creation of the European Union, is now experiencing the power of counter-flow. This challenge to the fixed parameters of the nation state comes from “neo-Europeans”. These people on the move who live their entangled lives between cultures and contexts, border crossing, and who nevertheless aspire to live a coherent, meaningful and dignified life in many different worlds simultaneously.

Although many of the chapters focus on specific national cases, the research design is comparative and cross-national and aims to open up the analytical space of a comparative and general study of the problem of citizenship. For instance, one learns from the Indian case that the relative success of the country at turning subjects into citizens, compared with the record of neighboring Pakistan or Sri Lanka, is not a unique attribute of the genius of Indian civilization. Instead, the approach adopted here formulates this as a function of India’s political structure, process and memory, woven together in an institutional arrangement that draws inspiration from both the modern state and traditional society. Citizenship in a specific national arena within the post-colonial world is a hybrid category, a conflation of the embedded and the imported. More crucially, the authors consider citizenship to be part of the conceptual flow and not one that is fixed to specific nation states. Under this radically new assumption which draws together the chapters, political actors who consider themselves citizens, but are not recognized as such from within the nation state, or those seen as criminals, outlaws, or renegades, can emerge as possible harbingers of new insights into the process of citizen making.

The dual, counter-factual character of contemporary citizenship, affirming the nation state even as it undermines the fundamental basis of national power, gives this book its special take on the world we live in. In the contemporary world, riven by ethnic conflict and ideology, the search for citizenship lends a new, sometimes violent edge, to the sense of identity, space and personhood. Dormant during the post-war enthusiasm for modernization and economic growth, citizenship has emerged in the twenty-first century as a salient issue, thanks to the complementary forces of globalization and the worldwide concern with human rights on the one hand, and the emergence of ethnicity and identity as central political issues in many transitional societies. Nor is citizenship entirely unknown in the “old world” of established, industrial, liberal democracies in whose midst the desire for citizenship is as much in evidence on the part of the transient, border-crossing people on the move, as the opposition to it among the “sons of the soil.”

The forces of globalization which accelerate the pace of the flow of people, things and ideas from one location to another, increasingly move the focus of political actors away from the familiar worlds of the locality, region, and nation state. They add new transnational institutions and political forces located outside the exclusive sphere of the national territory to the conventional repertoire of national actors and institutions to the range of forces that affect citizenship today. These forces affect citizenship in ways that are not immediately obvious. The relentless flows of trade, terror and technology across national frontiers challenge the conventional notions of the all-powerful nation state, sovereignty, and an exclusive national territory. Similarly, the limitless global flow of information, opportunities, and anxieties question the exclusive loyalty that the nation state conventionally demanded of its citizens. The sovereignty of the state is also breached by supra-state organizations from above, and non-state actors, refugees, immigrants and diaspora communities with divided loyalties, from below.Footnote 2 However, contrary to the argument of the advocates of seamless globalization, the world is not yet “flat”—to borrow Thomas Friedman’s expressionFootnote 3—nor has the curtain come down on the nation state.Footnote 4 For a vast majority of people global governance remains as much of a chimera as global citizenship. Even in retreat, states have fought hard to hold on to, and in some cases, enhance, the appurtenances of sovereignty and national interest.Footnote 5 Many have set severe limits to the agency of border crossing, deviant, or disobedient individuals and arrogated to themselves the final say on defining the rights and duties that go into the making of citizenship.Footnote 6

The main significance of the empirical results reported in the chapters of this book arises from the fact that the ubiquity of citizenship, resulting from its assertion as well as from its contestation is no indication of its conceptual clarity or cohesion. This conceptual “messiness” of citizenship,Footnote 7 its ambiguity and fluidity are the main concerns of this book. Grouped into three sections, the chapters examine some of the empirical untidiness of citizenship as a category of analysis in terms of the liberal theory of citizenship, its application to national and transnational contexts. Empirical in content, the essays consider such general issues as the conceptual flow of citizenship between and within cultures, the hybridizationFootnote 8 of the imported concept of citizenship and its entanglementFootnote 9 with indigenous notions of personhood, state policies to promote citizenship and their contestation by ordinary men and women who claim citizenship, or see themselves as excluded from it.

A second important aspect of the book is the light it sheds on the juxtaposition of the power of citizenship as a global concept and its significance for the national and international power structures. The accelerated pace of the global flow of ideas has deep consequences for both the structure and agency of citizenship. New ideas of rights and entitlement have affected the way national states and international organizations view order, governance, national and international laws of travel and residence. The global flow of ideas and new technologies of communication have also affected the perception of ordinary men and women in defining their political identity, belief, faith, worship, ritual, and living space. Today, the old notions of natural and unproblematic asymmetry—the hierarchy of the developed and developing; Western and non-Western; progressive and backward states—are contested. In the contemporary world, where most dictatorships have been discredited, legitimacy that the individual might extend to the authorities or withhold from them is crucial to citizenship. While individual agency is a necessary attribute of citizenship by itself, without the macro-infrastructure of rights and institutions that the state can provide, it is not sufficient to make a citizen out of subjects and those who rebel against the authority of the national state. Political power institutions of the nation state still hold the key.

Citizen-Making: The Dynamics of Trans-Cultural Flow and Hybridization

Since the concept of flow connects the endogenous concepts of citizenship in their national contexts with the exogenous influence, transmitted through the institutions and processes of globalization, it is important at this stage to dwell briefly on the meaning and significance that the authors of this volume attach to this key concept. Charting the flow of citizenship is a complex theoretical problem. The commonsensical, everyday reference to the flow of objects suggests a movement from one place to another in a steady unbroken stream, a “continuous mass”, in a manner that would be interpersonally visible, rather as one would think about the flow of blood in veins and arteries, of water flowing downstream or electricity moving across a conductive medium. However, can one attribute these characteristics to the flow of citizenship from one context to the other, and how does the agency of individuals and groups affect the momentum—to stop the flow—or, depending on the context, accelerate it? The authors of this volume undertake this task in terms of a juxtaposition of three methodological approaches. They attempt to understand citizenship in terms of their respective disciplines. In addition, they situate citizenship in the liminal space that connects the social sciences and the humanities. Finally, beyond the disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches, they bring into the analysis concepts and empirical phenomenon that are trans-disciplinary in the sense that these phenomena have not yet been claimed by any particular discipline.

The multiple forms of citizenship are the result of a complex set of forces which include the dynamics of the market, flow of power in international politics, and the growing network of national and international non-governmental organizations. This raises a number of questions that singly, or together, delve into the heart of the debate on citizenship today. What drives the flow of ideas, objects, and people and what significance does this have for the fixed parameters such as the nation state and linear time that underpin the world as we know it? What combination of structure and agency, on the one hand, and culture, context, national policy and conceptual inflow on the other, account for the shape that citizenship—the chosen window through which we look at the larger process of conceptual flow—takes? How does our empirical understanding of citizenship—in national and transnational contexts, but also in comparative perspective—help us to engage with these larger questions of conceptual flow, and the asymmetric relationship of Europe and Asia? How is the practical task of citizen making played out in different contexts such as heritage, education, the economy, religion, tribal identity, and the politics of space, architecture, and cityscapes? Who are “reluctant citizens” and what does the analysis of these cases signify for the whole idea of conceptual flow? Finally, do national arenas—the sites of converging and diverging flows of citizenship—generate any new concepts that are capable of a counterflow to the wider world beyond the immediate case in point?

These questions are germane to the larger project of “Asia and Europe in a Global Context: Shifting Asymmetries in Cultural Flows” that aims to understand the cultural flow marking the historical and political linkage of Europe and Asia. The visualization of citizenship as cultural and conceptual flow makes it possible to approach citizenship in its various contexts through a “third space”, beyond the fixed structures of nation states, or the all purpose agency that generates the momentum for the flow, egged on by the conscious rejection of asymmetry. The consequences of this flow are seen in the hybridization of the imported categories, through their interaction with indigenous categories, objects, and concepts.

The research design of the cluster starts off with the assumption that transcultural flows are involved in any, even the seemingly most local, phenomena. In addition, there is also a tension between cultural symmetry (homogenization) and asymmetry (differentiation) shaping the flows. This, in fact, constitutes the process of culture, not to be understood as geographical entities, but as transregional and transnational concepts that mostly come into existence only through contact with “others”. The localized and apparently fragmented have a deeper connectivity that may not be apparent at the outset. Cultures, seen from this perspective, are therefore not social groups or geographies, but social imaginaries that express or create distinctions and asymmetrical flows. Culture is not seen as a clear entity with social, religious, linguistic, or geographical boundaries. Due to their imbalanced structure, the flows transgress such boundaries and mobilize strategies to prevent or create streams. Ensconced in apparently sealed, localized boxes and approached through specialized disciplines, everyday life is embedded in a deeper reality best approached through conceptual tools that are transcultural, transdisciplinary and translingual.Footnote 10

The Liberal Canon: Contested and Re-imagined

The flow of ideas can render the fixed into the relative and the “normal” and the “natural” into the contested. Not every essay in this volume is designed to tackle each of these issues, but the fact that they engage with the core concept of the flow of ideas and institutions helps generate a larger debate about the relevance of the concept. The sections below will attempt to adapt the method of entangled historyFootnote 11 to the flow of citizenship as a method in order to problematize the fixed parameters of citizenship, with the contribution of Michael Walzer (1989) as an example.

Michael Walzer’s definition of citizenship has the requisite generality to constitute a bridge between conventional understanding and the radical departure from the norm that we attempt in this project. “A citizen is, most simply, a member of a political community, entitled to whatever prerogatives and encumbered with whatever responsibilities are attached to membership.”Footnote 12 Deceptively simple as it is, the definition encapsulates the deep contradiction between a Jacobin view of citizenship, and its liberal interpretation. The former equates citizenship with virtue, public spirit, and the hegemony of the political over all and other spheres of life where political participation is both a right and a duty for citizens, as distinguished from slaves, subjects, aliens, and residents who are not free. The liberal interpretation understands citizenship as a necessary foundation of a full life where the individual sets her priorities—such as family, religion, the pursuit of wealth, knowledge, the arts, or leisure. Citizenship, in this sense, is “an important but occasional identity, a legal status rather than a fact of everyday life.”Footnote 13 This is in contrast to the republican view which Walzer equates with the usage of the concept in the Greek city state where politics pervaded all spheres of life and played the leading role. The liberal (“Roman”, for Walzer) perspective, in contrast to the relatively small and culturally homogeneous Greek city state, is more appropriate to “large and heterogeneous populations whose members had no knowledge of one another and shared neither history nor culture.”Footnote 14

Tucked under the mantle of the modern state—the passport, rights, duties, frontiers—the perpetual tension between these two views, the Greek and the Roman, describes the everyday politics of contemporary liberal societies. The right to participate in liberal democracies includes the right not to participate. For advocates of issue-based politics who contest the establishment, such as feminists, ecologists, advocates of the rights of immigrants, minorities, and social deviants, apathy resulting from an excess of private pursuits, combined with political apathy, leads to an unintended legitimacy for the status quo. Their call to action—to give politics one’s all, reminiscent of “aux armes, citoyens”, the refrain of the French national anthem, evocative of the republican fervor of the French Revolution—can however only appeal to the fleeting and momentary enthusiasm of the masses. As Walzer, reflecting his liberal predilections, succinctly puts it, “Jacobinism enacts an inauthentic autonomy, and fails because it cannot sustain the enactment without continuous violence.”Footnote 15 Lucien Jaume’s exegesis of the concept which identifies the three distinctive strands of citizenship—conflicting and intertwined—that emerge out of the French revolution, provides a further explanation of the constellation of forces that unpacking the fixed parameters of citizenship reveals.Footnote 16

These legacies of the past controversies are seen in the disarray that lies beneath the still surface of the ubiquitous concept of citizenship, and are reflected to various degrees in the chapters. Mitra (Chap. 4) attempts to reconcile the Jacobin and the liberal views lead him to locate it in a “third space” that unites political rights and moral obligations, the individual and the collectivity, activism and quietism. This definition combines the structure of power—be it the state or other collectivities—and the agency of the individual. As the interface of the moral and the political (Fig. 4.1, Chap. 4), this operational definition offers an insight into a dynamic concept of citizenship. Just as the state is entitled to confer the legal rights of citizenship, the moral right to belong to the national space is something that citizens give themselves. When both converge in the same group the result is a sense of “legitimate” citizenship wherein individuals feel both legally entitled to their rights and morally committed to defend them. Noncitizens are either legal citizens devoid of a sense of identification with the soil, or people with a primordial identification with the land but no legal right to it. In a postcolonial context, citizenship thus emerges as a key category, a hinge that connects the state and society. “Layered citizenship”, which underpins the process, suggests the possibility that “one might have citizenship of different political units, the level varying in accordance with the local legislation and the engagement that individuals bring to their own sense of citizenship.”Footnote 17

The unpacking of the diverse ideological strands that constitute the concept of citizenship helps explain why identity politics often takes such violent turns.Footnote 18 This is also the ground on which the unproblematic and linear view of citizenship, often identified with T. H. Marshall, has come in for criticism.Footnote 19 In her essay “From T. H. Marshall to Jawaharlal Nehru: Citizenship as Vision and Strategy,” Jivanta Schoettli brings in the dimension of European-Indian entanglement. She argues that separated by a gap of just a few years, the British sociologist, T. H. Marshall and India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru border crossing, were contemporaries. What makes the parallel between Nehru and Marshall especially interesting is the fact that they shared the intellectual lineage of British liberalism as it had evolved in the nineteenth century and the particular variant of Fabian socialism that grew out of it in the early twentieth century. Both were preoccupied with the same questions of how to foster national integration and overcome socioeconomic divisions but within very different contexts. While Marshall was formulating a theory about the integrative function of citizenship rights to counter growing inequalities within post-war England, Nehru was debating the principles and articles of a draft constitution for a newly independent India.

Jivanta Schoettli’s essay seeks to identify some of the shared conceptual tools and institutional remedies that Marshall and Nehru reflected upon and applied. Both shared a belief in the potential for socioeconomic rights to act as the spur that would overcome divisions and disparities stemming from class in the case of England, and caste and religion in the case of India. In this way, Nehru acted as a carrier of conceptual and cultural flow from Britain to India. The chapter goes on to examine specific debates in the Indian Constituent Assembly that showcase the transcultural nature of decisions and institutions which later framed the discourse on citizenship within India’s postcolonial political development.

The main thrust of Clemens Spiess (Chap. 3) is to look into the overlap of European and the Indian discourses on citizenship. In order to determine this interface, the chapter provides a conceptual approach to the categories of “reluctant and excluded” citizens, and to the ideas of differentiated and multilevel citizenship. Spiess postulates that the idea of citizenship that once traveled from Europe to India got entangled with local culture, but the mutation resulting from this hybridization is confronted with the same challenges of inclusion and exclusion that characterized the European experience. Today, Europe faces similar challenges from growing cultural diversity and social inequality, as did India at the time of independence, and it has to rearrange its citizenship regimes accordingly. Both discourses share the challenges that growing transnationalism poses to their prevailing citizenship regimes. This brings Spiess to two more recent ideas of citizenship, namely differentiated and multilevel citizenship, and how they have resonated in the Indian and European discourses on citizenship respectively. The chapter asserts that both the Indian concept of a group-sensitive citizenship regime and the European experiments with multicultural citizenship rights have one thing in common. Both implicitly conceive of citizenship as a multilayered concept that sees citizenship as compromised by various “layers”—local, traditional, and transnational—beyond the national.

Mitra (Chap. 4) concludes this section of the volume with an analysis of the debate on the flow of liberal ideas of citizenship to non-Western societies. He suggests that progress in the field of citizenship is contingent on a rigorous exegesis of its conceptual content, the process of its transmission and its empirical correlates that can lead to a policy of citizenship. Existing theory, he argues, is not a guide to clarity on these issues. As a matter of fact, depending on where one stands in the national and international nexus of power, the status of individuals in terms of their claims to citizenship can be both confirmed and contested, depending on which strand of liberal theory of citizenship one draws on. He continues the analysis of the conceptual basis of citizenship through an inquiry into its philosophical and social construction, and sets the stage for the construction of a flow diagram that seeks to capture the dynamic process of citizen making in terms of its underlying parameters, some of which go beyond the realm of everyday politics. Towards this objective, the chapter undertakes a brief survey of the social constructions of citizenship, the evolution of the formal category of citizens from antiquity to present day, and the inner differentiation of liberal theory of citizenship, in order to cater to its complex empirical nuances and finally, to unite the various strands of citizen making in the form of a tool kit (Chap. 4). This neo-institutional model provides the basis for a transdisciplinary analysis of policy making with regard to citizenship.

Multiple Citizenship? The Transnational Challenge to the Nation State

Just as one asks if one could be “both Kashmiri and Indian at the same time” (see Mitra, Chap. 7), so might one ask how has the European Union succeeded in burying the memories of bitter conflicts of the past and produced the concept of European citizenship. In his chapter on the “conditionality of European citizenship,” Frank Pfetch raises this important question in the European context. The idea of citizenship in the European Union, he argues, is different from citizenships known in customary communities or in traditional nation states. It is transnational and dual in the sense that it is linked and additional to citizenship of the member states of the European Union. Every citizen of a member state is automatically a citizen of the Union. His essay explores the various types of relationships between citizenship and political frameworks, the different dimensions of citizenship, as well as the different categories of migration with respective national and European Union regulations. Also, the political role within the institutional settings of the European Union is analysed together with the most relevant treaty regulations concerning citizenship.

Frank Pfetsch argues that as a sui generis model, European citizenship can only be applied within a similar multilevel regional organization. Can one extend the concept of multiple citizenship(s) germane to the European Union to other arenas of contested national citizenship? Towards this objective, Manor (Chap. 6) identifies four interrelated ways to understand the term “citizen”. When we ask “who is a citizen?” one asks not one question but four. These are (one) who qualifies for official recognition by a particular state or government as a full member of its national community? (Two) Upon whom does a particular state or government bestow certain rights which are associated with citizenship—and what are those rights? (Three) Who affirms a set of values which are associated with citizenship: beliefs in democracy, accountability and tolerance? Finally, (four), who possesses sufficient political capacity—consisting of political awareness, confidence, skills and connections—to be able to operate effectively enough in the public sphere? The response to these questions, Manor suggests, is important for divided societies and immigrant nations. The solution to these complex problems lies in the development of the notions of group (differentiated) and of multilevel citizenship.

In Chap. 7, Subrata Mitra focuses on the concepts and measurement of citizenship in India. He delineates the Indian discourse on citizenship in three ways. The evolutionists see a seamless web that connects citizens of classical India with nagariks—the vernacular term that the Constitution employs to denote citizens—of contemporary India. Here, a fixed territory and a classical, stable, civilization become the parameters within which the concept evolves from antiquity to the present.Footnote 20 The concept of an unproblematic diffusion of citizenship within the territorial space of India has been contested over the course of the past decades by the proponents of collective identity as the sine qua non of an exclusive bond of citizenship. Hindutva, the Khalsa, the pan-Islamic identity, or more regionally focused identities such as the Naga, Mizo, Kashmiri are examples of involution where the citizenship bonds point inwards in search of the deeper recesses of the collective self, beyond the mere rituals of food, dress, or social networks, or articles on individual rights enshrined in the Constitution. Involution privileges identity over territory. Metaphorically, this approach presents a postcolonial landscape of citizens, subjects, and aliens as competing identities which seek to pull together their brethren around well-defined moral foci.Footnote 21

The third approach conceptualizes citizen making as a deliberate, “rationally” designed process.Footnote 22 In this case, the process of citizen making, whether by the actors themselves, or by their mentors such as the state, national, regional, and local leaders, draw up a mixed repertoire of tactics and policies. These stretch from the reuse of heritage to the adapting of conceptual flow through a process of deliberate hybridization. While evolution does not have a clear sense of agency and involution transfers agency from the individual to the community, the third approach endows the state and the designers of institutions in postcolonial countries with the responsibility of combining cultural heritage and individual rights within the framework of modern institutions. Article 1 of the Indian constitution which states, categorically, that “India that is Bharat shall be a Union of States,” referring thereby both to heritage and design, chimes in with this approach.Footnote 23

Flow Differentiated: Belief, Education, Class, Tribe and Space

The essays in the third section of the book explore the deep recesses of India’s religions, political philosophy, culture, history, public policy, and architecture to understand the linkage between the sources of citizenship and the actual formation of the citizen in India. John Zavos extends the idea of the political-cultural entanglement of Asian-European citizenships in Chap. 9. He argues that religious organizations have the potential to be significant actors as dynamic new ideas of citizenship are fashioned in the challenging contexts of global transnationalism. The chapter focuses on one particular religious organization, the Bochasanwasi Shri Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (or BAPS), examining its location in two different but related arenas of citizenship development, Britain and India. BAPS is a modern Hindu sampradaya with a marked transnational profile. It has branches across the world but is especially prominent in Britain and the United States as well as in India. Its primary constituency consists of Gujarati caste Hindu communities—mobile and often economically powerful communities in all of these contexts—who frequently seek to project themselves as “ecumenical” representatives of Hindu values.

This chapter is based on a notion of “flexible” citizenship drawn from the writing of Aihwa Ong. Ong argues that the late modern era invokes a flexible approach to citizenship amongst both individuals and nation states, as they seek to negotiate the dynamic flow of capital, ideas, goods, and people in a context of time-space compression. In particular, Ong argues that interdependencies develop, which work to “bring some kind of order to the disorderliness of transnational’s” (1999: 16). The chapter explores ways in which religion can operate as an ordering discourse in this context. Some nation states have increasingly come to view religion as a means of negotiating plurality and dynamism in their populations (variously conceived), and some population groups seek to secure citizenship identities in ways configured by religion. Religious organizations, Zavos suggests, can navigate the public discourses opened up by these trends in order to enhance their sense of belonging, their status, and their access to rights in relation to national, social, and political arenas. Zavos suggests that BAPS plays a significant role in the projection of Hindus as an ethnic community ideally placed to practice the “civic virtues” associated with developing notions of citizenship in the United Kingdom, and that it is also able to position itself as central in relation to a developing civilizational discourse associated with new ideas of Indian citizenship. BAPS is a sophisticated transnational organization. He argues that it deploys its transnational organizational resources in order to adapt core values of social service (seva) and a form of “cosmopolitan Hinduism” to these different national contexts, producing flexible and interrelated hybrid concepts that also draw on developing notions of religion in global arenas. As such, it provides us with a significant example of the “conceptual flow” of citizenship-related ideas between states, organizations, and communities in and across Europe (United Kingdom) and Asia (India).

Marie Lall focuses on the Western concept of citizenship as it has lodged itself in Indian thinking and in the political space that is linked to the changing nature of the nation state. She suggests that the concept has been adapted by India to fit the local context of a postcolonial multicultural and muti-religious society. Education has been the prime political tool to cement citizenship values and India’s classrooms are the laboratories where both the linked concepts of citizenship and national identity are forged. Just as globalization is changing the nature of the state it is also altering the nature of the social contract between state and citizens. Lall argues that the concept of citizenship in India has been affected by globalization in two ways. First through the partial withdrawal of the state from education and the rise of private alternatives for the growing middle classes, and second through the delinking of citizenship and national identity, for which education has been the prime political tool.

Is citizenship universal or context specific? Harriss-White, Mishra, and Prakash (Chap. 10) argue that citizenship is a universal concept that might have a tenuous bearing on reality. There is no consensus about the concept of economic citizenship, which, they suggest is currently being exported from the European heartland to developing countries in private aid-driven projects of social entrepreneurship. It is replete with tensions. Unlike the concept of political citizenship, economic citizenship is not a concept of formal equality. The employer fulfils the definition of the individualist entrepreneurial actor far better than the employee. Both the definitions and the practice and propagation of the concept ignore the most common kind of economic participation, which is through wage work. Those definitions laying stress on economic citizenship, as conferred through eligibility for social support, cannot be universal since relations of dependence, which confer eligibility, are socially constructed. Emphasis on the need of active citizens to seize and engage with the vitality of “markets” avoids the consideration of markets as capitalist with a distinctive logic and dynamic that deprive workers of active economic citizenship.

The second part of Chap. 10 examines the practice of the concept of economic citizenship as one that flows from the West per se but is not a concept that has lodged in Indian discourse. Hariss-White et al. analyze the role of the state, markets and civil society in furthering the project with a range of proxy labels which de facto advances economic citizenship. They use case material and a mass of literature to show how each of these major institutions may act as obstacles to what Marshall understood as a class specific and contested process. Through a case study of Arunachal they show the role of a non-state, non-market institution—ethnicity—in structuring and differentiating economic citizenship. They finally turn to India’s engagement with the global economy and analyze how transnational institutions and politics are further differentiating economic citizenship domestically.

Drawing on the “transcultural border crossing” and “translingual” concept of citizenship, the chapter by Prasanna Nayak (Chap. 11) highlights the asymmetry in the flow of citizenship by examining the case of tribal Orissa. Nayak argues that tribals who inhabit the hills and forests of Orissa enjoyed citizenship rights in their traditional set up. Culturally, they had inherited this variant of citizenship as padarias (rightful territorial groups) and khunt-katidars (early occupants of land, who slashed and cleared tree stumps). Within ethnic communities there was always the idea of citizenship in the context of the community. Tribals, under the rule of the “jungle kings” were accorded citizenship status and dignity as a community of equals. Their loyalty to the king derived from the exclusive rights, accorded by the royal authority that granted it, and with which they identified. In the post-independence decades, due to the intervention of electoral politics, linked to the individual and not the community, the traditional political structure—king-chief-village headman—underwent a transformation and citizenship in its tribal context was affected by the ferment of change. Despite many constitutional safeguards the modern state has failed to address this core issue of tribal citizenship and traditional rights. In consequence, tribal areas in Orissa, and those in the neighboring states and elsewhere in India have become the breeding ground of Naxalites. Tribal citizenship in modern India, in Nayak’s view, is at a crossroads.

Finally, in the concluding essay of this section, Julia A. B. Hegewald (Chap. 12) explores the significant role played by visual elements, in this context the design of public buildings and layout of newly-founded capital cities, in the making of citizenship. By focusing on the two sites of New Delhi and Chandigarh, the chapter examines these issues during two crucial periods of Indian political history: the colonial and the post-independence eras. She shows how, when planning the shape and decoration of governmental headquarters and the plan of a new capital city in New Delhi, built under British colonial rule in India, it becomes apparent that architects and urban planners were conscious of the need to address two distinct audiences: the British public at home and the local Indian population. Although this was strongly debated by politicians and architects at the time, the consensus reached in the end aimed to provide an architecture in which both parties were meant to find themselves reflected and to a certain extent represented. The second case, Chandigarh, illustrates the challenges the Indian postcolonial elite faced after Independence. Although an entirely national approach to building and planning, drawing exclusively on local South Asian traditions and motives could have been taken at this stage, an even stronger borrowing from the West can be observed. As Western modernism was equated with progress, transcultural flow from Europe to Asia continued with European architects in leading positions on Asian projects. Although, as Hegewald suggests cautiously, it might go too far to call this a reverse cultural flow, there are references to local stylistic and religious aspects in the architecture of European builders in Asia.

Hegewald’s chapter recaptures the issue of uniqueness versus generality of citizenship that has surfaced in several essays in the volume. Are the Indian examples unique or do they reflect more general global approaches and phenomena prevalent at the time of their conception? The chapter suggests that a number of contemporary illustrations from South Africa, Australia, China, Bangladesh, Brazil and Pakistan outline similarities as well as differences. On the whole they yield valuable insights with regards the agency of architecture and urban planning in the area of citizenship making. The conclusion sets the specific material examined in this chapter into a wider context and investigates questions of cultural and conceptual flow in citizenship making, and the case of the “reluctant citizen” in connection with visual tools and of a reverse flow. The latter started with the orientalist style of the Victorian age but continues in different forms to the present day. The mechanics of counterflow are based on power relationships. Flow used to be asymmetric because of the underlying uneven power relationship. With booming economies in the East, cultural flow has started to reverse. A number of recent constructions, public buildings designed by South Asian architects throughout the Western world, illustrate Asian architects as global citizens contributing to a counterflow of ideas and visual images back to the West.

The Global Flow of Citizenship: Europe to Asia, and Back Again?

Thanks to the global flow of ideas and objects, national citizenship, the totem of the European territorial nation states that emerged out of the Treaty of Westphalia (1649), has lost its exclusive, territorially bounded, and static character in the global age. Many today see citizenship as obsolete, or at least as a residue of the era of nation states, that is slipping steadily into oblivion. However, citizenship and its hybrid forms have shown surprising resilience. Though it is no longer a unique bond between the nation state and its exclusive territory, citizenship has metamorphosed into its new avatars. In the place of the classic passport, which proudly carries the symbolic seal of the state, one finds today an assortment of documents to suit the needs of the multinational business traveler, immigrants with multiple identities and loyalties, and the ubiquitous refugees (especially the lucky ones) with stay permits and special papers furnished by specific states. Beyond them are the illegal immigrants, living out their miserable lives in the entrails of large metropoles—hapless men, women and children on the move—who have a history but no specific destination. National frontiers, with the exception of the European Union, remain impervious to the foreigner; and even within Europe, at times of crisis, old memories of nationhood in terms of the flag and national currency edge their way to the forefront of political debate.

In an age when multinational corporations and non-state actors vie with national, sovereign states for influence in the international and national arenas, the salience of reconsidering citizenship in the light of new realities can hardly be overemphasized. Though the concept remains an integral part of the political vocabulary of our times, the sentiments and affinities that citizenship connotes have changed radically compared to the usage typical of modernization in the 1950s. Today, people no longer think of themselves in terms of the asymmetry that once described the relationship of citizens of the developed and the developing worlds. Finally, the cognitive content of the term itself has changed radically in terms of its scholarly understanding. This leads to a peculiar situation where a universal concept has hybridized into a myriad local and regional usages; and the usages of this category across time and space no longer connote a merely vernacular translation of a core concept. Citizenship today is a concept and an institution, but its form is not a universal constant.Footnote 24 These hybrid structures reflect the relative power of the indigenous ideas germane to the society and the imported concepts, their relative power, and their connectivity to the local structure of power and values.Footnote 25

The core issues that the authors of this volume address analyze the multiple faces of citizenship. The questions they raise have emerged as the main frontiers. How successful has the project of citizenship been in the postcolonial world? More crucially, how has the European provenance of the concept affected its legitimacy in the postcolonial world? Is citizenship an artifact of a cultural flow from the West to the non-Western world, or is it the inherent genius of each civilization, quickened by the stimulus of the contact with the West? Do policies and institutions designed to enhance citizenship work in reality? One of the main policy contributions of the research undertaken here is to show that citizenship gets accelerated when public policies enhance individuals’ sense of efficacy, and public norms lead to the convergence of the innate sense of personhood by the constitution. (See Figs. 4.1 and 4.2, Chap. 4). In terms of its construction, the sense of being a citizen gets accentuated when the persons concerned can see a convergence of their deeply held beliefs and the values espoused by those in authority.

At this point, the issue that we had encountered at the outset returns with renewed vigor. Does citizenship make sense both as an analytic and empirical concept? The plethora of meanings that citizenship evokes enriches the field of research but also makes progress in this field even more difficult. The varied ways in which citizenship is understood in diverse national contexts enhances the problem of measurement, and consequently makes the search for a general theory of citizenship beyond the prevailing liberal paradigm considerably complicated. Arguably, each fragment of the citizenship discourse is critically connected to the actual existence of a citizen “out there.” But, if all are citizens, and citizenship is all, then citizenship can mean precisely nothing! Is citizenship at all measurable in a manner acceptable both to the state and society, of which the individual is a part?

This conceptual uncertainty that underpins citizenship today joins new states with the old. The asymmetry that once bound them has become problematic in an era when the relationship of countries, as much as people within those countries, is more likely to be perceived as entangledFootnote 26 rather than hierarchic. Today, transnational citizenship questions the unproblematic view of modern, national citizenship where the political and emotive contents of this concept could be locked into the mold of the nation. The hegemony of imported notions of citizenship is challenged by the revival of premodern, endogenous concepts of citizenship, in the developed world. The pressure emerging from the flow of people, ideas, and objects has brought to the fore the need to stretch the exclusive, ethnic notions of citizenship. This is necessary to fit changed realities in which many races and ethnic groups must share the common living space of the nation on equal footings.Footnote 27

This is of course not to argue that the global has necessarily subsumed the national, or that flow has replaced the stationary reality of nations, boundaries, territorial space, and border checkpoints. Millions of people still live within their national states and will not know any authority other than that of the state of which they are citizens. In the contemporary world, globalization, which was meant to make citizenship and national boundaries increasingly less salient, has in fact revived their importance. The agenda of contemporary international politics is crowded with competing claims of the state and supra-state agencies on the loyalty of individuals and ethnic groups. In the absence of a global political order with binding character, nation states, acting in their capacity as the collective voice of their citizens, remain the most important agents of accountability and enforcement. Rather than the exclusive scenario of the national versus the global, the scenario that one is much more likely to come up with is one of entanglement, a demi-monde where one no longer knows where the nation stops and the wider world starts. The complex process through which subjects and immigrants become citizens thus pitches territoriality and ethnicity as competing norms for the entitlement to citizenship. Caught in this double bind, citizenship has become a contested category—an entangled and flexible relationship more than a fixed linkage—with the potential to become a political problem of global, as well as local importance.

In the final analysis, despite the flow of culture, objects, and people that affects all aspects of life in the contemporary world, most citizens, just like their predecessors, function within closed spaces. In that sense, the city wall was as important to the citizens of the Greek city stateFootnote 28 as the frontier continues to be for the inhabitants of the post-Westphalian nation states and postcolonial states, late comers to the comity of nations for whom citizenship is a badge of national honor. However, in the contemporary world, the search for identity can take individuals wherever they wish, virtually if not physically, and in that sense, citizenship today cannot be exclusively bounded by territory. It extends beyond the fixed coordinates of time and space, so emblematic of the modern state. The border-crossing, entangled lives that characterize the everyday existence of traders, terrorists, technicians and “travelers”, without the necessary travel documents underscore the reality of transnational citizenship.

Some of the issues relating to multicultural and multiple citizenship are closely connected to the works of Will Kymlicka.Footnote 29 The main thrust of his approach is to deny the classical liberal notion of citizenship as a uniform bundle of equal individual rights and duties in a closed political community. Instead, he has argued for some form of a differentiated citizenship, which takes into account the different positions, interests, and identities of citizens that emerge from gender, racial, ethnic, and religious discrimination, and which manifest themselves in various kinds of group rights. India may be considered as a prime example of an early incorporation of group-differentiated citizenship rights in the confines of a liberal secular state—way before the discussions about multicultural citizenship brought the idea to the fore. Of course, the reasons for the tilt towards a more particularistic, group identity and entitlement oriented conceptualisation of citizenship in India can be traced back to different histories and traditions of state formation and governance on the subcontinent. The case studies which showcase the extent of India’s achievements in this field might help identify the potential for a cultural and conceptual counterflow in the field of citizenship. A post-liberal, post-national theory of citizenship that can bind together these “new kids on the block” and the older inhabitants, and make them feel comfortable in close proximity to one another within an enclosed space, is still in the making.