The arbiter state : governance of the minority at the micro-level

Abstract

This thesis examines the governance of the minority at the micro-level in late colonial India. While the colonial production of micro-level state authority was inescapably conditioned by numerous political struggles between colonial subjects, the centrality of the minority in this story of state formation and citizen making is missing from most conventional descriptions of colonial governmental rationality. This study argues that the specifically colonial formulation of the minority as a figure to be both protected and inserted on to the path to modern citizenship shaped the regulation of customary modes of charity and inheritance as well as the regulation of local government power itself. Indeed, the dual commitment to protecting and modernizing of the minority constituted the micro-level state as arbiter: absolute in its judgment in cases of conflict between subjects, even though this authority was predicated on the principles of non-interference and deliberation.