Archives of Postcolonial Sovereignty and the Fictions of Self-Determination
From the vantage point of sovereignties annexed in the post-WWII world, this presentation explores the habits of disruptive reading necessary to engage with the histories of decolonization. If the political project of liberation is intertwined with the politics of history, then developing a critical stance towards the archives of decolonization, particularly within the postcolony, is essential.
Between 1947 and 1975, India annexed several sovereignties, including Kashmir, Hyderabad, Manipur, and Nagaland, to consolidate the Union of Indian states through coercion and military action. Despite their subsequent mergers and assimilation, the people within these regions have pursued liberatory politics under conditions of occupation and repression by the Indian state. The annexation of these states is a defining, though understudied event, threatening the linear historical narrative of South Asia's transition from colony to nation. Within the archives of postcolonial sovereignty, these annexations remain hidden within the triumphalist statist histories of decolonization and the non-Alignment politics of Bandung.
Forgetting these annexations is necessary to constitute the postcolonial archive of a nation and to project the nation as a post-colony. Since the 1950s, the Indian state and regional political leadership have curated memoirs, letters, political pamphlets, and newspapers to create a historical record of the struggle that sought to abolish the Hyderabad state and merge it with India. The need to legitimize the annexation and produce political consensus forms the historical conditions for archival practices. Through an ethnography of the archives of postcolonial sovereignty—public, private, national, and regional—this presentation considers the archive as a site for fieldwork and examines the conditions of its curation. I show how archivists' curatorial practices foster historical consciousness of national independence and decolonization.
A historical critique for a liberatory politics should be crafted against the hegemony of archives of postcoloniality.