ABSTRACT
The previous chapter found that the moment of transition from the colonial to the postcolonial was marked by a struggle over the soul of the state. This final chapter uses research on the ‘police action’ in Hyderabad to understand the contests which marked the early years of independent rule. To this end, it begins by situating the princely state of Hyderabad at the geographic, economic and cultural heart of the sub-continent, and locates the territory in the vision of India imagined by the new government of independent India. Second, it analyses the ways in which the Indian authorities addressed the question of relations between Hindus and Muslims after the fall of the Muslim-led government of the Nizam of Hyderabad. Finally, it turns to the ways in which the Indian army, and then the civilian authorities, confronted the communist Telangana movement in the eastern part of the state. The picture of the postcolonial state which emerges from this analysis challenges the current scholarship on the nature of the state in independent India, which tends to assume that the postcolonial state inherited strength and stability from the colonial state and its coercive institutions. On the contrary, the coercive network was subject to many of the same old inadequacies in the first decade after 1947: its institutions remained weak and subject to political pressures; ideological battles over the nature of the state continued to be fought out on the ground; and state agents remained unpredictable and at times unreliable. This chapter examines the ways in which the new government coped with its inheritance. It argues that these early years must be seen as a time of great dynamism, rather than as a period of stability inherited from the colonial state.
