Imperial Afterlives Citizenship and Raci

CITIZENSHIP STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2021.1984494
Imperial afterlives: citizenship and racial/caste fragility in

Canada and India
Ajay Parasram and Nissim Mannathukkaren
Department of International Development Studies, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada
ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This paper looks to the historical imbrication of racial and caste Received 1 December 2019
supremacy with citizenship, drawing attention to the inherent colo- Accepted 1 July 2021
niality of citizenship in post-imperial Canada and India. We examine KEYWORDS
the transition from explicit to insidious, unofficial forms of institutio- Race; caste; settler
nalized racial/caste supremacy. Explicit forms of supremacy have colonialism; fragility;
established and normalized forms of hierarchy that ascribe tiers of coloniality; citizenship
citizenship, even after legal guarantees of supremacy have been
removed. We seek to examine the coloniality of modern citizenship
to (a) better historicize the ongoing colonial violence of citizenship
within post-imperial places and (b) penetrate the shield of fragility to
help citizens come to terms with their unearned privileges.
I. Racial and caste supremacy and the antecedents of fragility in Canada and
India1
This paper explores how the modern notion of citizenship is steeped in white fragility in
settler-colonial Canada and caste fragility in postcolonial India. We argue that modern
citizenship, as a state regime of inclusion and exclusion, operates on political assump-
tions anchored in developmental and civilizational myths justifying colonial encounters
of the last 200 years. We are interested in how the white supremacy that dominated the
politics of the British territories of Canada and India in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries has been normalized and transformed through the contemporary regime of
citizenship, and with it, the nationalistic rendering of ‘exalted’ political subjects as full
rights-bearers opposite Othered populations within each country, be they Indigenous or
racialized people in Canada or religious-minority, ‘lower-caste’, or Indigenous commu-
nities in India. Accordingly, we study how the modern/colonial regime of citizenship acts
as a colonizing tool to serve exalted national interests: white, settler-colonial nationalism
in Canada or upper-caste, postcolonial nationalism in India. We study the seemingly
disparate cases of Canada and India together because the modern regime of citizenship
offers a clear link through which to consider colonialism, race, and caste in these post-
British states. Examining citizenship demonstrates the institutional and cultural legacies
CONTACT Nissim Mannathukkaren NMannathukkaren@Dal.Ca;

This article is published as part of the special issue entitled “Citizenship and/as Settler Colonialism: Towards Decolonial
Horizons.”
© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 N. MANNATHUKKAREN AND A. PARASRAM
of structural white supremacy in both cases; it also contributes to the theorization of

citizenship by highlighting the imperial and colonial dimensions of citizenship as a
category of inclusion and exclusion in different, but imperially related, contexts.
Brahminical and ‘upper-caste’ supremacy is a thread that runs through colonialism,
the anti-colonial movement and post-colonialism in India. Caste and hierarchy based on
caste is the central cleavage of Indian society; it is one of the most oppressive forms of
social exclusion in the world passed down over generations by endogamy and occupa-
tion. In the fourfold Varna classification system of the Hindu religion, Brahmins (priests,
scholars) are at the top, followed by Kshatriyas (kings, warriors), Vaishyas (traders,
farmers) and Shudras (artisans, laborers). In the purity-pollution complex of the
Brahminical system, the ‘untouchable’ castes2 were not even considered part of the
fourfold caste system; they were beneath that. They now politically self-identify as the
Dalits and are administratively known as the ‘Scheduled Castes’, a terminology formu-
lated during the colonial era.3
Colonial understandings of caste have distinctly shaped its post-colonial operations
and their impact on citizenship in India. According to Banerjee-Dube, these under-
standings ‘have come to inflect and inform caste-based movements and anti-caste
struggles’ (2014:513). Bureaucratically recognized language describing caste, devised by
the colonial administration, has sway in the present. We note this not to reduce the post-
colonial period to colonialism or to ignore the vast period of precolonial history,
especially of caste, but to understand the ‘path dependencies of modern institutions’
(Brun 2010). Similarly, although the territory claimed by Canada continues to be home to
resilient and resurgent Indigenous Nations, the hegemonic influence of Canadian insti-
tutions has normalized a Eurocentric whiteness as the embodiment of political
subjectivity.
Rajesh Sampath (2015) argues, ‘the story of one struggle for social justice can illumi-
nate the pitfalls and prospects of success of another’. Race and caste cannot be conflated,
yet there have been persistent efforts by race and caste activists to bring to the fore the
similarities of racial and caste oppression. One of the most important of these attempts
was at the World Conference Against Racism in Durban (2001), where Dalit activists
tried unsuccessfully to designate caste discrimination as analogous to racial discrimina-
tion. The ‘dominant view that emerged from the conference was that race relates to
biology and caste to social system, and therefore that casteism was not at all comparable
to racism’ (Lardinois 2012).
Scholarship in critical race studies has long acknowledged that race has no biological
meaning, though white people’s belief in its validity during the heyday of race ‘science’ in
the 19th century has had significant historical impact. Such theories were also used to
understand caste in colonial India. There were attempts, based on ‘scientific’ anthropo-
metric measures like cranial measurements, to classify caste on the basis of Aryan and
aboriginal races (Banerjee-Dube 2014). Some British ethnographers ranked castes
according to the ‘degree of Aryan and Dravidian blood’ (Skaria 1997). Blood was
important in Canada as well; the institution of blood quantum and the Indian Act sought
to reorganize diverse Indigenous forms of citizenship to serve colonial statecraft. Blood
quantum as a state technology, like the idea of assimilation of Indigenous peoples and
nations into a new country of ‘Canada’ or the provinces that precede Canada, had
fundamental genocidal purpose. This form of colonial science created conditions of
CITIZENSHIP STUDIES 3
intergenerational erasure that have impacted Indigenous people across the vast conti-
nent, especially Indigenous women whose political power was curtailed to match the
normative expectations of European patriarchy (Gehl 2014; Simpson 2014). As Lana
Latour (2019:15–16) explains,
In settler polities, the boundaries of the nation have been and continue to be defined along
racial lines. Therefore, naturalizing settlers as proper subjects of rights while rendering
nonwhite people outside the scope of civil society – and, at times, humanity -is a structural
feature of settler colonialism.
As such, race-making and bordering is an essential part of the modern/colonial regime of

settler-colonial citizenship.
The Indian Act developed out of a legal genealogy of overt white supremacy,
beginning with the ‘Gradual Civilization Act’ of 1857 and informed by generations of
the settler-colonial fiction of terra nullis. Applied to Turtle Island, terra nullis did not
hold that the land was ‘empty’ as is commonly understood (Mackey 2016) but that the
inhabitants were civilizationally incompetent to possess land; thus, the land was
claimable by the doctrine of European discovery (Stasialus and Jhappan 1997:96–109;
Manuel 2017:88–93). The economic and political development of Canada historically
and contemporarily relies on an ongoing process of dispossessing Indigenous people
from their land, and by extension, their worldviews (Bernard 2018; Corntassle 2012).
The racial and temporal politics at stake here situate Indigenous people as ‘past’ when
resistance to colonisation never stopped with the confederation of the new state of
‘Canada’ in 1867 (Coulthard 2014; Coulthard and Simpson 2016; Hill 2009; Paul 2006;
Simpson 2014).
Racial inferiority was a part of the colonial story in India as well, and racial
taxonomy played an important role in the divide-to-rule strategy on the densely
populated subcontinent. The British Indian Army was reorganized on notions like
‘martial races’ (Cohn 1987), consequential even in the post-colonial present. The
British also differentiated between castes and tribes (the latter ranked lower), a distinc-
tion carried over by the postcolonial Indian state. These are ‘colonial constructions of
wilderness’; the Indigenous people, collectively known as Adivasi, were given appella-
tions like ‘savage’, ‘plundering’, and ‘predatory’ and were thought to be slightly more
intelligent than animals (Skaria 1997). And this primitiveness began to symbolize
India’s backwardness itself under postcolonial nationalist development regimes
(Skaria 1997). The dispossession of Adivasis in the post-colonial period has its roots
in colonialism (Mannathukkaren 2018a).
We address citizenship as a colonizing and racializing mechanism by examining the
transition from these explicit forms of racial/caste supremacy during the official colonial/
imperial era to more insidious and unofficial forms of institutionalized white/upper-caste
supremacy in both cases. Indians have also been present in Canada since the 19th century
and are an increasingly influential minority interest. While we do not dwell on the
process of ‘becoming’ a citizen to a great extent, better understanding of the operation
of citizenship historically in Canada and India will be helpful for future studies concerned
with diasporic connections and citizenship regimes. There is considerable circulation of
Indians to Canada and Canadians to India. Thirty-four percent of international students
at Canadian universities are Indian and between 2016 and 2019, immigration from India
to Canada has increased by 105% (Anderson 2020; El-Hassal 2020) We are not suggesting
that the institution of citizenship is inherently good or bad – citizenship as a legal regime
has been utilized in various ways and contexts and such generalizations gloss over
important nuances. The institution has been put to good use in some cases, for example,
the leadership of Dalit intellectual and politician B. R. Ambedkar, called the ‘Father of the
Indian Constitution,’ in his role as the Chair of India’s constitution drafting committee.
The gradual liberalization of citizenship policy in Canada also marks significant improve-
ment from its explicitly racist origins.
Nevertheless, there is an inherent coloniality to the institution of modern citizenship,
when citizenship is conceived as a homogenous universal. The classic statement by Iris
Marion Young on such a conceptualization of ‘universality as generality, and universality
as equal treatment’ (1989:251) explains the problem. Young argues that early forms of
republican citizenship in America and Europe were posited on the dichotomy of public
and private spheres. The latter was marked by particular interests, emotions, and
characteristics decidedly not universal in scope. All oppressed groups were thought to
belong to the private sphere; the public sphere, characterized by the interests of generality
and imbued with rationality, belonged to the white male. As long as such dichotomies
persist
the inclusion of the formerly excluded in the definition of citizenship – women, workers,
Jews, blacks [sic], Asians, Indians, Mexicans – imposes a homogeneity that suppresses group
differences in the public and in practice forces the formerly excluded groups to be measured
according to norms derived from and defined by privileged groups. (Young 1989)
The modern institution of citizenship, understood as a technology of colonization, is

then also a world-making project that obscures the colonial violence of the universal,
territorial state. A modern citizen has rights to a state and is bureaucratized accordingly;
other forms of citizenship that speak to different kinds of kinship and alliances are
ahistorically scripted as outdated in a state-based world that simply ‘is’ rather than a
world that has been made along vectors of intersectional power. This largely universa-
lized, Eurocentric understanding of citizenship is the focus of this paper.
Citizenship in Canada and India owes much to their imperial encounters with the
United Kingdom. In both cases, explicit forms of racial supremacy have established and
normalized forms of hierarchy that ascribe tiers of citizenship, even after legal guarantees
of supremacy have been removed. As Meltzer and Rojas (2013) have argued, citizenship
cannot be understood to be a political or legal question alone; indeed, as we will argue
within, the de facto practice of citizenship in contemporary Canada and India demon-
strates imperial ‘hangover’ of this particular technology of inclusion into and exclusion
from the national community. While the specifics and trajectories of each case differ,
both offer comparative insights into the coloniality of modern citizenship. In both cases,
explicit white supremacy was foundational to the state-nation’s political institutional
development.
The categories of ‘settler-colonial’ and ‘postcolonial’ are not dichotomous. Although
embodied colonizers left India in 1947, the international system as we currently
experience it was formed during the age of modern imperialism and important logics,
such as the expectation that state-nations exercise total territorial rule within a
physically defined boundary, are now ubiquitous (Agnew 1994; Taylor 1994).
‘Postcolonial’ states, by virtue of practicing statecraft along these parameters, expose

the imbrication of the territorial state with coloniality (Parasram 2014). Internal
colonialism, then, remains an important link between ‘post’ and ‘settler’ colonialisms.
Despite being ‘postcolonial’, India has shown characteristics of internal colonialism:
State formation in 1947 was accompanied by extraordinary ‘internal violence’ com-
mitted by the state in militarily securing territory, like the princely state of Hyderabad
(Purushotham 2015), or in suppressing secessionist movements in North-East India
for many decades (Datta 1992). The most tragic example of this is in the state of
Jammu and Kashmir, which has seen ‘puppet regimes, rigged elections, popular
insurgency, military repression and terrorist violence’ (Chatterjee 2019a). The sense
that ‘Kashmir is a property of India’ (Chatterjee 2019a) has led to the Hindu-
nationalist government abolishing the special autonomy provisions for Kashmir in
India’s constitution without consulting elected representatives of the state. The Indian
government has also changed its refugee policies to explicitly exclude Muslims from
seeking refuge in India on the basis of religious persecution (from Pakistan,
Bangladesh and Afghanistan) while allowing Hindus (and even Sikhs, Jains,
Christians, Parsis and Buddhists), scripting India as a homeland for Hindus and the
neighbouring states as natural homelands for Muslims.4 These examples also speak to
other axes of oppression that universal citizenship mask: race and religion. The former
is prominent vis-à-vis the North-East, with over 200 tribal communities of Mon-
Khmer, Tibeto-Burman and Tail lineage facing considerable racial discrimination
from the Indian state (Thianlalmuan and Hanghal 2017). The Muslim minority is
emerging as the most dangerous ‘Other’ in upper-caste Hindu imagination, with severe
consequences under the recent ascendance of Hindu nationalism. Hindu nationalism
plays multiple roles in silencing the lower castes (by appropriating them to a unified
Hindu identity), the Muslim minority (by positing them as ‘anti-nationals’ undeserving
of citizenship), and tribal communities (through racialization and developmental
discourses of primitiveness).5
While the processes differ in Canada, conflicts over territory have been a constant over
the last century. Aside from the material violence of state repression against Indigenous
people, there is also an ontological violence at stake, emanating from the settler-colonial
government’s cognitive dissonance regarding questions of land or water defences led by
Indigenous protectors. For example, 2020’s nationwide actions, popularized by hashtags
like #ShutdownCanada and #Reconcilliationisdead, were demonstrations of solidarity
with hereditary chiefs of the Wet’suwet’en Nation and their refusal to allow resource
pipelines across their territory (Seatter 2020). Significant parts of Canada, particularly the
West Coast, have no treaties and thus the question of sovereignty is an unresolved issue
that arguably makes the settler-colonial state ‘squatters’ on Indigenous territories.
Despite Canada being in a process of ‘reconciliation’ with Indigenous peoples since
2015, when reconciliation is tested against the economic interests of settlers, state
repression remains the blunt object wielded to violently assert the supremacy of the
settler-state across the territory. This can be seen in other Indigenous-led land defence
conflicts in recent years, including the anti-fracking campaign at Elsipogtog First Nation
(Langdon 2019), the Stop Alton Gas movement led by grassroots Mi’kmaw grand-
mothers near the city of Halifax (Bernard 2018), the ongoing clash over sovereignty
associated with Mi’kmaw lobster fisheries (Pannozzo and Baxter 2020) and the famous
1991 ‘Oka Crisis’ at Kahnasatake where the white settler government’s need to build a
golf course atop sacred Mohawk land required the state military to be mobilized
(Simpson 2014).
In the next sections, we discuss citizenship and white supremacy in settler-colonial
Canada, then citizenship and caste supremacy in postcolonial India. We conclude by
drawing out the significance of these cases for understanding the coloniality of citizen-
ship in post-imperial contexts.
II. White supremacy through citizenship in Canada

Beneath the international reputation of Canada as a polite and progressive state rests
political foundations of genocidal policies against Indigenous Nations, enslavement of
Black people followed by racial segregation after 1834, and a legacy of white British
supremacy in immigration and citizenship objectives (Alfred 1999; Bannerji 2000;
Cooper 2006; Mathieu 2010; Maynard 2017; Razack 1998; Stasiulis and Jhappan 1995;
Thobani 2007; Yu 2009). The development of ‘nation’ and its wedding to a territory is a
product of 19th-century European empire, making it a relatively new global concept
(Branch 2011; Anderson 1983). As Bhandar and Dhamoon (2019) argue, most historio-
graphical accounts of nation-building in Canada segregates projects of British, French
and various Indigenous nationalisms and histories of African and Asian migrants to
Canada – but doing so obscures how these ‘competing nationalisms are entangled webs
of colonialism and anticolonialism rather than just independent historical struggles for
nation and belonging’ (16). Settler-colonial nationalism has been steered from the top
down to sanitize North America’s recent history as one of wilderness and linear devel-
opment rather than complex politics and international relations (Beier 2009). This
national strategy seeks to superimpose universal governmental legal authority on other
nations and is not unique to Canada; it mirrors the relationship between the Indian
government and its social construction of Adivasis lacking in development/civilization.
Imperial knowledge moves in multiple, simultaneous directions, and civilizational hier-
archies have left imprints globally.
Settler-colonial citizenship has been predicated on the violent endeavour to extinguish
distinct forms of nationhood and, consequently, diverse perspectives on what it means to
be a citizen (Simpson 2014). As Sunera Thobani (2007) has explained, ‘the central
contradiction of Canadian citizenship, deeply rooted in its earliest stages of development,
is that the citizenship rights of settlers, nationals, and immigrants remain based in the
institution of white supremacy’. Thobani highlights that the process of forming a
coherent sense of ‘Canadian’ deliberately Othered Indigenous populations on their
own land and ‘exalted’ a white, British and largely male category that was explicitly
favoured until the 1970s.
This was not rhetorical; explicit racial preference for white Europeans was part of
Canadian citizenship and immigration policies until the immigration reforms of 1967, a
century after the formal British period ended (Yu 2009). As Indigenous scholars have
long maintained, the dispossession of Indigenous people from their lands is evolving and
ongoing political, economic and ontological violence through which the nascent settler-
colonial government sought to assimilate or eliminate Indigenous people (Bernard
2018Coulthard 2014; Paul 2006; Simpson 2014). The existence of Indigenous people
and the number of sovereign nations posed an existential threat to the emerging colonial
idea of Canada. Erasing Indigenous people as a legal category and assimilating them as
‘Canadians’ was an explicit policy objective in the Indian Act (1876) and its many
revisions, seen acutely in the framing of Indigeneity as a civilizational deficiency to be
‘developed’ (Lawrence 2003; The Indian Act 1876; Helliwell and Hindess 2002).
While most literature on citizenship emphasizes qualification or criteria for inclusion
into the nation, such a reading is problematic in settler-colonial contexts because it
assumes that nation and state at least roughly overlap. But colonial dispossession of
Indigenous Peoples and imperial exclusion of racialized subjects is central to the devel-
opment of citizenship policy in settler-colonial Canada. As Bhambra (2015:106) writes,
‘What is missed in such analyses is the pre-existing political frame that organizes actors
into being political or non-political, included or excluded’. Failing to account for the
inherent politics of exclusion within the modern regime of citizenship conditions one to
see a ‘non-citizen’ as lacking full, rights-bearing subjecthood (Bhambra 2015; Thobani
2007).
White supremacist immigration and citizenship policies have obscured the historical
presence of Asian workers, entrepreneurs and farmers within what historian Henry Yu
calls the ‘Old Pacific Canada’. White supremacists in Western Canada sought to bring
white European settlers along the national transportation infrastructure built by Chinese
workers in the 19th century. As Yu (2009) maintains, it is no coincidence that the 1885
Chinese Head Tax was instituted in Canada following the completion of the Western
portion of the national railroad. The social construction of ‘Canada’ as a white, settler-
colonial society reflects the intentions of early politicians to model Canadian political and
social institutions and values on the motherland (Stasiulis and Jhappan 1995). White
settler efforts to erase Indigenous citizenships joined anti-Asian and anti-Black racism in
an effort to make/keep Canada white and Christian.
Gaining Dominion status within the British Empire in 1867, Canada eventually
established its own Citizenship Act in 1947. The politics of inclusion and exclusion
prior to 1947 were governed by the Dominion Act (1872), Indian Act (1876) Chinese
Immigration Acts (1885, 1887, 1892, 1900, 1903 and 1923), the Continuous Journey
Regulation (1908), as well as the Immigration Acts of 1906 and 1910. The nationalist
fiction of Canada as a vast, uninhabited land to explore served the twin purposes of
undermining Indigenous nationhood and making white immigration a cornerstone of
Canadian identity from the earliest days. In the context of strong anti-Asian racism,
Canada passed the 1908 Continuous Journey regulation, which stipulated that immi-
grants must arrive on Canadian shores in a single trip – impossible to do from most of
Asia and India. This represents one example of how structural white supremacy nestles
into a seemingly liberal (in that it is ‘universally’ applied) immigration policy. In practice,
however, this piece of legislation set the context for a century of anti-Asian immigration
policies in Canada. As Hasan et al. (2019:128–129) argue,
In practical terms, the Immigration Act reforms of 2012 and the Safe Third Country
Agreement are echoes of the Continuous Journey Regulation of 1908. In both cases, through
discrimination on the basis of race or country of origin is not explicit, it is clear that the
limitations imposed have far more serious impacts on the travelling bodies of people coming
from great distances, travelling by water, and travelling under conditions of duress that
make official documentation difficult or impossible.
Hasan et al. are writing about the history of the Komagata Maru and the securitization of
brown bodies as ‘threats’ to Canada’s hegemonic white political subject. The Komagata
Maru gets to the heart of imperial citizenship and racial hierarchy, linking Canada and
India as parts of the British empire whose position was determined by race.6 Writing
white supremacy into law without naming it was essential to the settler-colonial national
project.
In Canadian newspapers and within parliamentary debates, whites strove for any
reason to block the migration of people of African ancestry into Canada. This included
claims to healthiness, baseless assumptions about Black sexuality and morality, and an
explicit desire to keep Western Canada white. A 1911 article in the Edmonton Evening
Journal grouped together the ‘yellow man, the red man, and the black man’ as undesir-
able citizens for Canada (Mathieu 2010). Canada introduced the first explicitly racial
exclusionary policy in the Western Hemisphere that year to block entry to Black farmers
from the United States who were fleeing persecution from the Klu Klux Klan in
Oklahoma (Stasiulis and Jhappan 1995). Like many of the complaints expressed in the
time’s public discourse, the ordinance blames the weather; landing in Canada was
‘prohibited of any immigrants belonging to the Negro race, which race is deemed
unsuitable to the climate and requirements of Canada’ (P.C. 1324). Regardless of what
the law said, the newspapers were clear that race was the issue. As Mathieu (2010:23)
writes in her study of the period, journalists from the Manitoba Free Press travelled to
meet the Oklahoma refugees, and noted that, ‘apart from race, they were a promising lot
of settlers’.
Canada’s first Citizenship Act streamlined processes relating to citizenship and immi-
gration in the post-World War Two context. The explicit favouring of British migrants
remained under the first Citizenship Act not just in law but, importantly, woven into the
cultural and political fabric of the nation. Prime Minister William Lyon MacKenzie King
famously spoke in the House of Commons on the subject of immigration to Canada:
. . . the people of Canada do not wish as a result of mass immigration to make a fundamental
alteration in the character of our population. Large scale immigration from the orient [sic]
would change the fundamental composition of the Canadian population. (House of
Commons Debates, 1 May 1947: 2646)
King, held in such high regard in Canada, was Prime Minister during exclusionary
policies affecting Chinese people and the internment of Japanese-Canadians and theft
of their property.
Efforts to prevent and discourage racialized people from moving to Canada never
stopped but instead transformed into the discourse of the ‘model minority’, in which
nonwhite immigrants are quick to showcase their ability and desire to assimilate into the
cultural and political expectations of the dominant national culture. As historian Vijay
Prashad (2001) has argued, model minorities blend into the white supremacist milieu
when they fail to account for class privilege, as highly educated middle- and upper-class
migrants arrive and ‘succeed’. Structural white supremacy, like the structural caste
supremacy explored later, does not require white (or upper-caste) bodies to perpetuate
it; through shaping the normative expectations and contours of citizenship and the
institutions and policies around it, the interests of the privileged can be protected
subconsciously by Others embedded in, and indebted to, the system. As Bonita
Lawrence and Enakshi Dua (2005) have argued, people of colour who migrate to Canada
and then engage in social justice struggles become co-opted into further entrenching
settler-colonial logics when they do not centre their advocacy in recognizing and working
against the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous people from their lands. The power of
structural white supremacy in Canadian citizenship and immigration has been its ability
to naturalize Eurocentric law, then mobilize the colonial representation of Canada as a
nation of immigrants whose racism is merely incidental to the time rather than consti-
tutive of the nation. Transitioning away from explicit white supremacy in Canadian
immigration and citizenship laws did not lead to the end of structural racism; it led to
removing race as criteria in the black letter of the law, and embracing race-neutral
language aimed at achieving very similar objectives (Ashraf 2019; Hasan et al. 2019;
Parasram 2019). The transition from racial supremacy that was both lawful and broadly
seen as moral until recently is related to the rise of contemporary white fragility in
Canada, and as we will see later in this article, this is also mirrored in removing explicit
reference to caste in post-colonial Indian law.
III. White fragility, rage and citizenship

In the aftermath of the Second World War, explicit white supremacy was rendered
unfashionable by the revelations of Nazi Germany’s genocide against Europe’s Jewish
population (Thobani 2007). Immigration policies gradually shifted away from racialized
categories for immigration in the 1940s and 1950s, emphasizing economic fit by the
1960s and 1970s (Thobani 2007, 426). Canada turned towards official multiculturalism to
frame the citizenship narrative, specifically aiming to undermine the increasingly power-
ful criticisms arising from Francophone nationalism and Indigenous scholars and acti-
vists in the context of Red Power movements. While white British supremacy seems to be
abated in that it is no longer written into law, its political and social culture has been
preserved through the discursive rendering of white Christian subjectivity as authenti-
cally ‘Canadian’. Though mainstream narratives of Canada as a welcoming nation to
immigrants abound, careful analysis of public opinion through polling and national
media in the 1970s indicate a strong anti-immigrant and anti-refugee sentiment even
as Canada was relocating Asian refugees from Idi Amin’s Uganda and from Southeast
Asia (Gateman 2020). With the removal of explicit white supremacy from Canadian
policy and law and the official championing of multiculturalism instead, white fragility
has flourished wherein white Canadians as a general group have come to see themselves
as ‘normal’ Canadians and struggle to come to terms with how the legacy of white
supremacy has materially and intergenerationally privileged whiteness at the expense
of Indigenous people and racialized people in Canada (McLean 2018).
White settler fragility in Canada takes many different forms, but following Craig
Proulx (2018), it can be particularly visible through white claims concerning the rule
of law, representation of white innocence opposite Indigenous or minority cultural
and legal expectations, and the representation of equality as sameness. White settlers
have benefitted historically from the adoption, without negotiated agreement, of
Eurocentric law and notions of property that are protected in British common law
or French law, but in the last few decades, Canadian courts have increasingly
recognized many Indigenous legal traditions. Hypocritically, white fragility manifests
in the legal domain by simultaneous claims to innocence and claims that Canada
needs to respect the single (and thus universal) ‘rule of law’. Proulx (2018) outlines
this in the case of white backlash and fragility catalyzed by Indigenous people in
Caledonia/Kanonhstaton, and we can see the same racial fragility surrounding the
Wet’suwet’en land defence in the spring of 2020. Canadian national media was rife
with outlining the damage Mohawk solidarity rail blockades had on ‘innocent’
businesses and workers. Representing Indigenous land defence in this way performs
the nationalist work of pushing activists and land defenders outside of the nation,
erasing the fact that Indigenous people and their allies are also workers and business
owners suffering economic hardship. It reduces the macro-historical and sovereign
politics at play to short-term economic pain, acting as a form of anti-Indigenous
nationalist propaganda. The consequences of this framing are enormous and have
already taken policy form. In the province of Alberta, Premier Jason Kenney’s
controversial Bill 1 (Critical Infrastructure Defence Act) threatens Draconian fines
and incarceration intended to reflect the harm anti-extractive activism exacts on the
province (French 2020).
Settler-colonial entitlement runs deep. As Eva Mackey (2016) has carefully
explained, white settler nationalism is so naturalized that some claim they were
present before Indigenous people in certain parts of the country based on a flawed
but discursively powerful understanding of the colonial-era notion of terra nullis
and the doctrine of discovery discussed earlier. White fragility, or the inability of
white people to understand themselves in racialized terms or engage in significant
conversations about race (DiAngelo 2011, 2018), takes the form of perceiving a
‘meritocracy’ that is free from racial power – which is as ahistorical as it is discur-
sively influential (McLean 2018). Working in the context of the United States, Carol
Anderson (2016) has described the ways through which white supremacist logics
operate through courts, laws and society since the end of the civil war to the present
day as ‘white rage’. Rage, explains Anderson, is not directed towards the presence of
Black people; rather, it is activated by Black resilience and Black successes, making it
a useful way of understanding white fragility in Canada as well as Brahminical
fragility in India (Anderson 2016).
Read in conversation with Proulx, Simpson, and Thobani, we can understand white
rage as a motivating factor conditioning the white fragility of citizenship and rightful
claims to political subjecthood in Canada. Efforts to address the systemic deficit of
racialized and Indigenous people within institutions like the public service, university,
police forces, etc. have been met with broad perceptions articulated in media and
around water coolers about the unfair and undeserving privilege that Indigenous
people and people of colour have relative to white people. Whereas prior to the 1960s
whiteness was explicitly dominant in politics and law, its removal in the language of the
law without dismantling the structures that privileged whiteness in the first place has
created the conditions under which white people feel entitled to dominate public space
and marginalized by their exclusion from affirmative action measures (Parasram 2019).
When others dare to defy expectations, white settler rage comes to the foreground as
exhibited during the 2015 federal election campaigns in Canada where the rights of
Muslim women to wear the hijab during their ascension to citizenship was an impor-
tant debate (Milewski 2015).
From the 1990s on, right-wing parties have continued to frame immigration as a
cultural problem with concerns about the ability of Canada to ‘absorb’ and ‘integrate’
immigrants and refugees. During the 2019 federal election, billboards decrying ‘mass
immigration’ that echoed Mackenzie-King’s concerns more than half a century ago
popped up across the country until the company who owned the signs took them
down following public outcry. To be clear, white supremacy remains a serious concern
in Canada, but the discourse of multiculturalism and diversity has worked to insulate
white settlers from coming to terms with how the present distribution of wealth and
national political subjectivity have systematically favoured whiteness. That some progress
is being made in reconciliation with Indigenous Nations and breaking down racial
barriers to citizenship in Canada triggers white fragility, because citizenship broadly
defined is still white and Eurocentric at the level of expected behaviour and norms.
The work of dismantling the structural white supremacy of political subjecthood and
citizenship in Canada is arguably underway, but nowhere near complete. Still, this small
opening triggers white fragility and rage in many white citizens who feel their political
subjectivity is being degraded by Others who need to ‘get over’ colonialism, while
ignoring how structural white supremacy conditions ‘normal’ political subjectivity in
Canada. The experience of citizenship in Canada troubles the ease with which nation and
state come together; it brings into focus how structural white supremacy can be gradually
rendered invisible until people of colour can administer it as they incrementally work
their way into already-constituted institutions like formal politics, bureaucracy, business,
and more. The normalization of racial supremacy fuels racial fragility because settlers
(white and racialized alike) have experienced at least two generations in which they have
been taught not to think in racial terms at all. The body of the abstract, modern citizen
remains a white, cis male in settler-colonies.
We turn now to India, whose experience with modern citizenship both overlaps and
radically departs from that of Canada. Describing how Brahminical supremacy stems
from and overlaps with the institutional development of citizenship in a postcolonial
context helps us understand the coloniality of modern citizenship.
IV. Brahminical supremacy in India

Although caste hierarchy has been the main sociological division in Indian society,
modern citizenship is marked by its erasure.7 Citizenship and the contestations around
it, especially with regard to caste, can be traced to British colonialism’s interventions in
the political sphere since the late 1700s through systematic mapping and documenting
of the Indian population along with its economic and geographical aspects, culminating
in the 1871 Census. Bernard Cohn describes this process as ‘objectification’. As Cohn
puts it
central to the process of objectification have been the hundreds of situations that Indians
over the past two hundred years have experienced in which precedents of action, in which
rights to property, their social relations, their rituals, were called into question or had to be
explained. (Cohn 1987)
Even before census exercises, as Brun argues, this had begun through legislation that
criminalized entire castes for social practices like female infanticide (Brun 2010).
By the mid-1800s, the British administration felt that ‘caste and religion were the
sociological keys to understanding the Indian people’ (Cohn 1987). Both, especially caste,
became the central operating categories of policy formulations. While Orientalist scho-
lars and Protestant missionaries had different takes on caste, they were unanimous on the
uniqueness of caste to ‘traditional’ India (Banerjee-Dube 2014). Before colonialism, along
with the severity of caste oppression, there were local variations. As Dipankar Gupta
argues, there were discrete castes and multiple hierarchies on the ground (2002:1) in
contrast to the theoretical and scriptural view of a rigid and homogenous fourfold caste
or chaturvarna system. Politics was not completely subsumed by religion, and caste was
subject to political struggles. If in precolonial times, the legal system was not only
dependent on religious texts but also on diverse customs of region, caste and family,
these were supplanted with the ‘hegemony of textual law’ in which classic legal texts
gained criticality. Colonialism ‘simplified and rationalized the complexity’ of caste,
privileged the larger caste-cluster” (Carroll 1978) or demarcated society into broad
religious categories (Guha 2003), devising a uniform, all-India system of classification.
By giving credence to Brahminical scriptural texts, colonialism legitimized the upper-
caste narrative. At the same time, there were also contradictory colonial tendencies, like
moving away from religious texts to an empirical and ethnographic approach after the
1850s (Dirks 1992).8
The 1901 Census was a landmark one in which enumeration of castes was accom-
panied by the exercise of building a ranking system and hierarchy. This created a huge
response in terms of conflicts, contestations, and new resistance pathways (Banerjee-
Dube 2014). New forms of caste-cluster consciousness and competition for higher status
among castes were triggered and given legitimacy. Rankings were not only about social
status but mainly about material consequences. Thus ‘government patronage, jobs, and
political appointments’ (Carroll 1978) were dependent on them. The 1901 classification
scheme acquired an almost immutable importance in claims about caste rankings
(Carroll 1978). As a result of these disputes, the counting of caste in census was
abandoned altogether in 1931 (Dirks 1992).
The ‘nation’ that emerges in opposition to the colonizer is a hierarchical project marked
by several exclusions and silences. As M.S.S. Pandian (2001:8) argues, the ‘very domain of
sovereignty that nationalism carves out in the face of colonial domination is simulta-
neously a domain of enforcing domination over the subaltern social groups, such as lower
castes, women, marginal linguistic regions, by the national elite’. The anti-colonial nation-
alism that emerged is a Brahminical/upper-caste one ‘which delegitimised the language of
caste in the domain of politics by annexing it as part of the cultural’ (Pandian 2001, 10,
emphasis original). In a similar vein to the abstract modern citizen in settler-colonial
Canada being marked by whiteness, the abstract, modern, secular post-colonial citizen
brought into being through nationalism is marked by caste (Nigam 2000, 4256).
Even while the nationalism-colonialism binary subsumed internal differences like
caste within nationalism, there was always resistance to the nationalist narrative from
the margins since the early days of anti-colonial struggle. B.R. Ambedkar, the most iconic
Dalit leader of India, was a relentless critic of the national movement hegemonized by the
Indian National Congress with M.K. Gandhi as its figurehead. He wrote in his 1936
seminal work, ‘Annihilation of Caste’,
The first and foremost thing that must be recognized is that Hindu Society is a myth. The
name Hindu is itself a foreign name. It was given by the Mohammedans to the natives for
the purpose of distinguishing themselves. It does not occur in any Sanskrit work prior to the
Mohammedan invasion. They did not feel the necessity of a common name, because they
had no conception of their having constituted a community. Hindu Society as such does not
exist. It is only a collection of castes. Each caste is conscious of its existence. Its survival is the
be-all and end-all of its existence. Castes do not even form a federation. A caste has no
feeling that it is affiliated to other castes, except when there is a Hindu-Muslim riot. On all
other occasions each caste endeavours to segregate itself and to distinguish itself from other
castes. (Ambedkar 2008, 20)
In fact, Ambedkar was a strong proponent of a separate electorate for the ‘Depressed
Classes’, as Dalits were called before the category of Scheduled Castes was adopted. In
1932, the British colonial state accepted the demand. But the Congress thought this was
deeply threatening to the unity of the nation as well as the Hindu community. Gandhi
undertook a fast unto death to make the British repeal the decision. Ambedkar had to
give up on his demand only because of Gandhi’s fast, and he regretted this decision later
(Ayoob 2008). Thus, the building blocks of the post-colonial nation’s citizenship were
already being put in place through a denial of the rights of the most oppressed groups in
society. Ambedkar, despite fighting for legal and institutional provisions, also went
beyond them to make an ethical case. Ambedkar, therefore, ‘unequivocally suggests
that it is the ethical moral domain rather than the legal domain that provides stable
conditions for the effective resolution of the Dalit question’ (Guru 2011, 113).
The continued social and economic marginalization of Dalits in India in the present
has to be largely attributed to the community’s lack of political power. The only conces-
sion that the Dalits got was the special provision in the Constitution of India for
affirmative action for the Scheduled Castes (and Scheduled Tribes) with regard to
government jobs and seats in government educational institutions. Nevertheless, reser-
vation (affirmative action) has become the biggest bone of contention in contemporary
Indian politics.
Ramnarayan Rawat demonstrates through his historical account how stereotypes
about ‘ritually impure’ occupations of Dalits have perpetuated their relegation to degrad-
ing jobs and formed the basis of their untouchability and oppression (2011:3, 6). What is
of crucial importance here, as Rawat notes, is that this is a feature of both colonial and
postcolonial governments, thus breaking the binary of colonialism and nationalism. Dalit
castes like Chamars have resisted the ‘dominant colonial and Hindu representations of
the supposed impure origins of their communities, their occupations and their identities’
(Rawat 2011, 9).
Yet, Dalit attitudes towards colonialism were ambivalent. Colonialism, while shoring
up many existing aspects of the caste order, also contributed to a disturbance of
established hierarchies. For example, the British missionaries questioned the ‘creedal
bedrock of caste’ and ‘initiated and abetted caste rebellions’ besides providing English
education to some sections of Dalits and lower castes (Singh 2009:290). But this does not
mean that Dalits were passive recipients of missionary largesse. Many Dalit social
movements, including religious ones, went beyond the framework inaugurated by the
missionaries, which combined a religious idiom with secular goals like securing landed
property and education (Mohan 2006). The contradictory avenues opened up by British
intervention in caste led to tendencies like strengthening of the anti-Brahman movement
(Reddy 2005), and the active colonial policy of ‘divide and rule’ saw measures like pitting
one religion against the other (Guha 2003, 158) or restricting the employment of
Brahmans through quotas (Dirks 1992, 73).
V. Upper-caste fragility and citizenship

In India’s post-independence era, the Dalit quest for education, jobs and land has
exacerbated Brahminical/upper-caste fragility and produced intense conflicts. The land
reforms that were historically implemented in India, except in a couple of states, were an
utter failure. Sixty per cent of Dalit households did not own any farmland in 2013, and
70% of Dalits were agrarian labourers on others’ farms in 2011 (Gokhale 2019).
Discrimination against Dalits remains both overt and covert. While untouchability has
been legally abolished, it survives in various parts of India. According to the India
Human Development Survey (IHDS-2), the largest non-government household survey,
27% of respondents practiced untouchability in some form (Chisthi 2014).9 From 2006 to
2016, the crime rate against Dalits went up by 25%, cases pending police investigation
went up by 99%, and conviction rates fell by 2% (Saldanah and Mallapur 2018).
Along with these overt forms of violence and discrimination against Dalits is the
transmutation of caste under modern conditions. Upper-caste privilege under modernity
becomes more intractable because it is articulated through the discourse of ‘“efficiency”,
“merit” and even “hygiene”’ rather than caste (Nigam 2000, 4268). That is why the biggest
point of contestation in the last three decades has been around affirmative action
(reservation) measures undertaken by the government – despite only 6.5% of employed
persons working in the formal sector (The Wire 2018). The overwhelming domination of
the informal sector in India means, as Mosse (quoting Harriss-White) states, that it is a
sector ‘regulated not by legal-institutional structures of the state, but through social
structures of gender, religion and caste’. Only 3% of Dalits are covered by the formal
(government) sector (2018:430). Therefore, the lives of the vast majority of Dalits are
determined by a sphere ridden with caste inequalities. We have discussed the severe
exclusions Dalits face in land ownership above. Therefore, economic liberalization and
the opening of the Indian markets since 1991 has not necessarily mitigated caste
hierarchies. On the contrary, neoliberal capitalism has reinforced many existing caste
inequalities as new forms of exploitation (Shah et al. 2018) and in areas like higher
education and elite, white-collar jobs, there is a widening of disparities under high
market-led growth (Mosse 2018). But in the public discourse, ‘the prominence given to
the issue of reservations is telling for its diversion of attention from the role of caste in the
informal structures of the economy’ (Mosse 2018, 431). In 1990, reservation was insti-
tuted for the category Other Backward Classes (OBCs) or lower castes other than Dalits,
numbering 3743 castes. This brought the total reservation quota to 49.5%. OBCs are
estimated between 41% and 52% of the Indian population (Dhingra 2018; Mosse 2018;
Network 2007). This could be one of the most critical developments in India’s post-
colonial history, something that could change its politics and society irreversibly. It was
an outcome of Dalits and OBCs in politics, emerging independently as actors through

their own political parties. This posed an immense threat to the Brahminical order.
Backlash, which included violence against the lower castes, was expected. ‘These devel-
opments actually represented the unravelling of the structure of nationhood that had
been laboriously built over the years of the national movement and given further shape in
the Constituent Assembly’ (Nigam 2000, 4258).
Despite the implementation of reservation in government jobs and educational
institutions, the scale of marginalization that exists among the lower castes is unprece-
dented given the dominance of the informal economy. But even where there is reserva-
tion, there is an almost complete absence of Dalits and OBCs in the higher echelons
(Dhingra 2018) while Dalits, Tribals/Adivasis and OBCs are between 67% and 78% of the
Indian population. Despite reservation in teaching jobs in government educational
institutions, the quotas are not filled. In central universities, in the category of full
professors, upper castes constitute 95%. In the public-owned Indian Institutes of
Technology and Indian Institutes of Management, among the full-time professoriate
Dalits and OBCs constitute less than 8% and 3%, respectively. The same situation prevails
in the judiciary, the media, the arts, and the most popular arenas of entertainment in
India, cricket and commercial cinema. Less than 4% of judges in the higher judiciary
belong to Dalit and Tribal communities. In the lower judiciary, the story is not starkly
different. Data from 11 states show that the representation of OBC, SC, and ST judges
range from 12% to 14% (Mannathukkaren 2018b). As the scholar Robin Jeffrey noted in
2012, there were almost no Dalits in Indian media newsrooms – the same as in 1992 – so
‘stories from the lives of close to 25% of Indians (Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes)
are unlikely to be known – much less broadcast or written about’ (Jeffrey 2012). A recent
study conducted by Savitribhai Phule Pune University, Jawaharlal Nehru University and
Indian Institute of Dalit Studies, titled ‘Wealth Ownership and Inequality in India: A
Socio-religious Analysis’ found that the Hindu High Castes own 41% of India’s wealth,
while Dalits and Tribals/Adivasis owned only 11% of the wealth (Business Today 2019).
These are staggering levels of marginalization, probably unmatched in any older
democracy. Even the United States, a country marked by equally egregious forms of
ongoing racial oppression, violence and supremacy, has done better than India in
representation of its largest racial Other. The presence of African Americans in popular
culture, in the arts and sports, for example, is in marked contrast to the near total absence
of Dalits and lower castes in popular culture and other spheres in India.
The deep, structural nature of upper-caste hegemony masquerading as citizenship
must be understood to make sense of the fragility produced when caste is challenged.
The greatest barrier – as with racial/white supremacy, but in a more pronounced
fashion – is the unwillingness to concede that oppression and exploitation on the
basis of caste occurs.10 As Mosse explains, this caste refusal pervades both govern-
ment policy and societal discourse. This is the reason why postcolonial Indian
governments abandoned census based on caste (Mosse 2018, 423). Caste is seen to
have no consequence for the material and economic life opportunity of a person.
Thus, ‘the public denial of caste as actionable injustice goes along with its protection
in private and its portrayal as a matter of culture’ (Mosse 2018, 424). Thus, structural
caste oppression has been masked by the language of merit. Merit has become the
central argument in upper-caste resistance to whatever little gains made by the
oppressed castes. Affirmative action has led to a backlash among the upper castes
leading to a hostile environment of discrimination in educational institutions. This
has led to numerous cases of suicides among Dalit students (Biswas 2016). The
upper-caste construction of the undeserving nature of ‘quota’ candidates is pervasive
in the public sphere. As Dalit scholar Gopal Guru points out,
the reduction of the Dalit to wretchedness is achieved through maltreatment by institutions

and maladjustment of Dalits into such institutions. Such a callous attitude is more shocking
when it is displayed by the government, and more shattering when it is inflicted with deep
contempt by civil society toward the very government institutions created for the Dalit. (Guru
2011, 104)
The backlash to affirmative action has acquired critical proportions in various forms,
including, ironically, the claim for quota by dominant castes not historically oppressed.
The most serious threat to it has recently come from a constitutional amendment brought
in by the right-wing Modi government to introduce 10% additional reservation on the
basis of economic disadvantage and not the criterion of social oppression and discrimina-
tion – this is targeted at those (upper) castes not included in the current reservation. The
amendment was necessary as Indian courts had in various rulings disallowed reservation
on economic criterion alone, and that reservation should not exceed 50%. The proposed
law hits at the heart of social justice, for the ‘attempt to establish a parity between the
grounds for reservation of socially discriminated “classes” and economically disadvantaged
“sections” is misleading and disingenuous’ (Chatterjee 2019).
The backlash against the lower castes has taken a new and more dangerous form
in which anger has been displaced onto a new ‘external’ Other, the Muslim. Dalit and
lower caste assertion has led to ‘strengthening of upper-caste and upper-class pre-
judice in distinct ways’, which has also contributed to the ‘resurgence of the Hindu
Right’. (Banerjee-Dube 2014, 525). There has always been an intimate relation
between caste, (religious) communalism and secularism, as Dilip Menon (2005) has
argued. But the recent right-wing Hindu nationalist electoral victories across India
have taken this attempt to unify the Hindu community vis-a-vis an external ‘enemy’
to unprecedented levels because of the scale of local violence against the Muslims.
Further, there are attempts to make inroads for this anti-Muslim discrimination into
the Dalit castes, which have been successful at least electorally to an extent (in the
recent general elections). And there was evidence of the participation of some Dalits
in the anti-Muslim pogrom of Gujarat riots of 2002 (Kanungo 2007, 1852). As
Kanungo argues, ‘despite its inherent anti-Dalit character, Hindutva [the political
ideology of Hindu nationalism] has been projecting an illusory casteless Hindu
society (Kanungo 2007, 1852)’. One of the biggest ways in which it has tried to
attract Dalits was by appropriating the Dalit icon, Ambedkar, by converting him
from a revolutionary anti-caste leader to a Hindu social reformer (Kanungo 2007,
1852). The outreach to the Dalits by the Hindutva is superficial, as demonstrated by
the leadership of the BJP, the political party heading the movement, being over-
whelmingly upper caste (Tewari and Kaushika 2018). It is an instrumental attempt to
win Dalit votes, for there are no substantial efforts to annihilate caste and usher in
equality. But as even professedly secular projects have failed to erase caste, it is not
surprising that some Dalits would abandon them for the project of Hindutva.
The above discussion on India shows how the nation and citizenship, from colonial
intervention to anti-colonial resistance to post-colonial state-building, are deeply marked
by caste hierarchies. The future of annihilating caste in India and restituting citizenship
to its original constitutional intent depends on whether the resistance of Dalit and
subaltern castes to the Brahmin-led, upper-caste social system is successful or if it is
subverted by the latter through means like channeling lower-caste resistance into a
majoritarian, anti-Muslim, nationalist project. Ambedkar’s vision of an ethical and
moral transformation of society has been unrealized under universal citizenship. Here,
as Guru argues, it is not enough to focus only on ‘inequality and distributional aspects of
injustice’ but also critically on the ‘language of self-esteem and self-respect’ (Guru
2011, 102).
VI. Conclusion
White supremacy and upper-caste supremacy are no longer celebrated within Indian and
Canadian law; however, they remain deeply woven into the social and political fabric of
both post-British states. Our objective was not merely to demonstrate that Canada and
India are both racist polities – sadly, there is nothing unique about the operation of
racism and national Othering in the 21st century. Our purpose was to bring into focus
the structural impact of white/caste supremacy and its hegemonic manifestation in the
form of racial fragility through examining citizenship. In an international context where
people are quick to point to the most overt forms of racial supremacy, it is easy to ignore
the mundane and everyday ways structural privilege has institutionalized itself in the
political cultures of post-imperial places.
The ruse is maintained by racial and caste fragility. Being able to move through society
without thinking about race and caste renders those white and upper-caste citizens fragile
and defensive about their privileged positions in society. The precolonial contexts and the
historical trajectories differ substantively but cross paths through citizenship. In Canada,
the project of settler-colonialism seeks to ignore and replace already existing forms of
citizenship; in India, British policy sought to harden already existing forms of social
stratification as a means to divide and rule. While diversity abounded across Turtle Island
and South Asia long before the colonial period, colonialism has strongly shaped and
presented a universal notion of ‘citizen’ in both societies. The explicit hierarchies of
citizens have been legally abolished, but the political institution of citizenship remains
firmly attached to a common-sense understanding of who a ‘natural’ citizen is in each
country. Hierarchy need not formally exist, for it is practiced in the everyday. Citizenship
as a lens of analysis helps us understand the important overlaps between the ‘post
colonial’ and the ‘settler colonial’, specifically how the most privileged sustain their
positions as universal citizens opposite national ‘Others’. In this way, racial/caste fragility
cannot be understood to be incidental, even if part of its operation relies on the
‘innocence’ of those at the top. Rather, racial/caste fragility enables the nationalist fiction
that Canada and India are already equal societies not in need of deep structural reforms
to dismantle the legacies of colonialism incubated in both post-British places.
When we speak of the coloniality of citizenship, we mean that the colonial and
imperial hangovers from the period of explicit white supremacy remain hidden in
plain sight. Rather than blaming the weather as a reason for anti-Black immigration
and asylum policy, Canada can instead talk about economic fit or physical geographical
distance. Rather than democratizing access to education, India (and Canada too) instead
mobilizes ‘meritocracy’ against progressive public policy – if not in law, then clearly in
practice. Moreover, the cultural norms and characteristics of the dominant groups have
become the unacknowledged ‘normal’, thus putting at a disadvantage the cultural capital
of the oppressed groups. This is neither to ignore the brutal and physical forms of
violence that the lowest castes in India are subject to even in the present, nor to excuse
ongoing colonial violence in Canada such as the wielding of state power against land and
water defenders or the ongoing genocide against Indigenous women and girls (Gehl
2020). Yet, these brutalities cannot find an open justification, and the legal system has to
be seen to be acting against the violation of the constitutional guarantees of citizenship:
equality and liberty. But all this is carried out ineffectually, as the larger social sphere is
suffused with dominant caste interests and privileges in India and the hegemony of
Eurocentric forms of justice and law in Canada.
Even as we have drawn similarities between the logic of citizenship in both
nations, it should not be read as glossing over important distinctions too. Racial
supremacy in Canada is a product of settler colonialism, brought to life under the
impact of European colonialism. Caste domination is millennia-old in India, but it
has been substantially shaped by the colonial encounter, which – even while
producing contradictory effects – did not dent its stranglehold. Caste supremacy
of the present is an outcome of older forms of ‘traditional’ hierarchies combining
with technologies of ‘modern’ colonialism and the native oppressors adopting the
language of the colonizers. Postcolonial citizenship has not been able to completely
shake itself off the colonial language, seen in the many laws and mores that are a
legacy of the British Raj. At the same time, it is critical not to reduce postcolonial
India to colonialism as Dirks does by arguing that ‘India’s postcolonial condition is
not its precolonial fault’ (Dirks 1992, 76). This can become a position that believes
‘real historical agency is fundamentally Western’ (Guha 2003, 151)), or that caste is
a British invention. Also, it is vital to recognize the intense conflicts and mobiliza-
tions questioning caste hierarchies that have characterized all periods of history, and
that caste-identity formation happens even beyond official colonial or postcolonial
classification (Gupta 2002; Guha 2003). The precolonial, colonial and the postcolo-
nial are not simple discontinuities; rather, we exist in a global colonial present in
which empire has formed both territorial state-nations and the universal citizens
that dominate them.
Notes
1. Both authors live in Canada and come from an upper-caste location. Following Dia Da
Costa (2018), we strive to be cognizant of the many ways through which caste privilege and
Brahminical fragility permeate diasporic scholarship in ways that mirror white fragility
(DiAngelo 2018) and are complacent with settler-colonial nationalism (Lawrence and Dua
2005) – another way in which race and caste come together. As Soundararajan (2012) shows,
upper-caste domination is unbroken in diasporic settings. Diasporic formations cannot be
understood ‘outside the intersections of settler colonial capitalism, white supremacy, anti-
blackness and Brahminical supremacy’ (Upadhyay 2019, 154).
2. Untouchability has been formally abolished.
3. Dalits were relegated to performing degrading and ‘polluting’ jobs like ‘manual scavenging,’
a term used in India for the manual cleaning of human feces from dry toilets or sewers. The
Scheduled Castes numbered 16.6% of the population in the 2011 census and the Adivasis or
the Indigenous people (officially, ‘Scheduled Tribes’) were 8.6% (Dhingra 2018). The official
category of Scheduled Castes refers to Hindu Dalits only and does not include Dalits who
converted to other religions.
4. The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which embodies these new policies, has been
passed by the Indian Parliament, but are yet to be notified as law. It is clearly discriminatory
on many counts. First, it only targets neighbouring Muslim-majority countries; they do not
include Myanmar, Bhutan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and China despite the fact religious persecution
happens in these countries as well. Second, it discounts the fact that various minority
Muslim sects are persecuted on the basis of religion in countries like Pakistan. And third,
the Act seems to clearly violate the Indian Constitution which guarantees equality of all
citizens (Seshadri 2020). While the new policies do not target existing Indian Muslim
citizens, the CAA conjoined with the proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC) to
freshly document every Indian citizen might gravely threaten millions of Indian Muslims
who might not have documents like birth certificates to prove their citizenship. This was
seen when the exercise was conducted in the Indian state of Assam.
5. It is important to note here that Muslims in India are marked by caste-like hierarchies
as well. Thus, there are different groups, the Ashraf (‘nobles’: of foreign origin, or
converts from Hindu upper castes), the Ajlaf (‘commoners’: mostly converts from
Hindu lower castes) and Arzal (‘despicable’: converts from Hindu Dalits) (Gayer and
Jaffrelot 2012:7).
6. In 1914, 376 South Asians (most Punjabis) sailed aboard the SS Komagata Maru to
Vancouver, Canada. They sought entry as subjects of the British Empire, but were techni-
cally in violation of the 1908 Continuous Journey Regulation passed by Canada in 1908. For
details, see Dhamoon et. Al (eds) Unmooring the Komagata Maru: Charting Colonial
Trajectories (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2019).
7. In this paper, we are focusing on only one dimension of this exclusion: caste. There are
others, like religion, race, gender and language.
8. Outlining the colonial contribution to the shaping of modern citizenship through the
process of objectification and enumeration does not mean pre-modern communities were
completely fuzzy and fluid, or that precolonial regimes were not interested in enumeration
(Guha 2003). Sumit Guha shows the enumeration exercises of the Mughal and Maratha
Empires preceding the British rule and argues that ‘fixing of identities and attributes was an
important part of routine administration’ (Guha 2003, 153).
9. Untouchability originally meant practices that imposed social segregation on the Scheduled
Castes and banned interactions that allowed touch. For the survey, two questions were
asked: (1) whether the respondents practiced untouchability and (2) whether they had a
problem with a Scheduled Caste person entering their kitchen or sharing utensils.
10. One recent example is the reaction to Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, endorsing a placard
saying ‘Smash Brahmanical Patriarchy’ in a visit to India: ‘a troll-army took offence to
the poster and then bombarded specific accounts with casteist slurs and threats of
violence.’ Twitter had to apologize for the offence caused (Kaur 2018). It shows the
entrenchment of caste privilege and also the difficulty in even naming the oppressor in
the Indian context (Kaur 2018).
Acknowledgments
We gratefully acknowledge the copyediting support of Fazeela Jiwa, without whom we would still
be working on this project. We would like to thank Chinnaiah Jangam for his comments on the
paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Funding
We gratefully acknoweldge fundig support from a SSHRC Expore Grant that supported this
project.
Notes on contributors
Ajay Parasram researches the colonial present, or how many historical colonial entanglements
continue to structure the present in ways that are normalized including territory, sovereignty, and
structural forms of oppression. He is a multigenerational byproduct of British colonialism, with
roots in South Asia, the Caribbean, and Turtle Island. His work can be found in Geopolitics,
Postcolonial Studies , Studies in Political Economy .
Nissim Mannathukkaren's research interests are focused on Hindu Nationalism, communism,
democracy and development, and modernity. His latest book is Communism, Subaltern Studies
and Postcolonial Theory: The Left in South India (Routledge, 2021). He has publications in
journals such as Sikh Formations, Journal of Peasant Studies, Inter-Asia Cultural
Studies, Dialectical Anthropology, South Asian History and Culture, Third World
Quarterly, Journal of Critical Realism, International Journal of the History of Sport,
and Economic and Political Weekly.
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CITIZENSHIP STUDIES

Imperial afterlives: citizenship and racial/caste fragility in

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

CONTACT Nissim Mannathukkaren NMannathukkaren@Dal.Ca;

of structural white supremacy in both cases; it also contributes to the theorization of

As such, race-making and bordering is an essential part of the modern/colonial regime of

The modern institution of citizenship, understood as a technology of colonization, is

‘Postcolonial’ states, by virtue of practicing statecraft along these parameters, expose

II. White supremacy through citizenship in Canada

III. White fragility, rage and citizenship

IV. Brahminical supremacy in India

V. Upper-caste fragility and citizenship

an outcome of Dalits and OBCs in politics, emerging independently as actors through

the reduction of the Dalit to wretchedness is achieved through maltreatment by institutions

Bernard, D. 2018. “Reconciliation and Environmental Racism in Mi’kma’ki.” Kalfou 5 (2):

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