ABSTRACT
The conflict between ‘native’ itinerant practices and ‘modern’ techniques of governmentality provoked indigenous practices of ‘counter-mobility’ in (post)colonial India. In the face of a series of Vagrancy Acts being deployed the 1940s, Rahul Sankrityayan, in his Ghumakkar Shastra (1948, Treatise on Vagabondage), advocates for vagabondage, which would be a slap at colonial government(ality). However, by now Hindu–Muslim relations has turned hopelessly discordant. This chapter discusses how the treatise counterpoises India’s postcolonial anxieties around the heuristics of mobility with the prevailing Hindu-nationalist sensibility: much as the text is predicated upon embracing the world as one family, it does, however, offer fleeting impressions of communal precepts.
