Conjugal Self, Conjugal Citizen: Negotiating the Either/Or of Post-Independence Indian Citizenship

In this presentation, I juxtapose the production of cultural citizenship as it takes form in Hindi and Tamil short story writing of this period with the juridical production of post-Independence legal citizenship. These discursive arenas demonstrate that underlying the conceptualizations of both citizenship-as-national identity and citizenship-as-rights (Sundar Rajan 2003; see also Sinha 2006 and Yuval-Davis 1997) is an anxiety over the institution of marriage. Not only is marriage being newly defined in both arenas in this moment, but also it is through this institution that the relationships between citizens are framed. That is to say, conjugality, the principle relationship that generates Indian subjectivities in post-Independence Hindi and Tamil short story writing, is also that which confers citizens’ rights in the state-juridical sphere (see for example: Hodges 2008, Majumdar 2009, Sreenivas 2008, and Uberoi 1996). By virtue of the man-woman relationship conjugality designates, Indian subjectivity, as it manifests in both Hindi and Tamil short stories and Indian constitutional and juridical discourses, is profoundly gendered