January 24, 2022
India Citizenship Act, 1955
Together with the Constitution of India (promulgated in 1949), the 1955 Citizenship Act defined the precise nature and bestowal of citizenship in the new postcolonial state of India. It determined that Indian citizenship could be acquired via birth, descent, registration, naturalization, and (crucially) incorporation of territory into the Indian state.
List of reading
Anupama Roy, Mapping Citizenship in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)
Haimanti Roy, “Paper Rights: The Emergence of Documentary Identities in Post-Colonial India, 1950-67,” South Asia 39, no. 2 (2016): 329 - 349