ABSTRACT
Chatterjee’s (2004) observation that citizenship will take on two different shapes, the ‘formal’ and the ‘real’, makes reference to a well-rehearsed duality evident in the citizenship literature. This takes the form of work that emphasises a ‘formal’ and legally coded status alongside more ‘substantive’ examples of socio-political engagement. Chatterjee’s concept of ‘the real’ disrupts the reductive rationality in which ‘the latter is seen as a condition of possibility of the former’ (Isin and Nielsen 2008: 2), and he argues that the negotiated instability that the ‘real’ represents may be exaggerated in postcolonial space. By approaching citizenship substantively, not just as an analytical concept, this chapter will explore that ‘negotiated instability’ in greater depth, asking how Urdu-speakers access rights and in what form, and analysing the dynamic between individual agency and structural constraints. In the light of the contemporary configurations of ‘community’ already discussed, and the significance of settlement in processes of identity construction today, I will examine in particular the way experiences of citizenship are affected by physical segregation or the spatial dynamics of settlement.
