The Flux of the Matter: Loyalty, Corruption and the ‘Everyday State’ in the Post-Partition Government Services of India and Pakistan*

This article explores the new levels of uncertainty and fluidity produced by independence, partition and the integration of the princely states in India and Pakistan, and it investigates the impact of these events on the ‘everyday state’ in the years immediately following 1947. The flux witnessed in this period brought forth new questions about how to define loyalty in government service, and stirred new suspicions about the presence of minorities and political opponents within the services. The mass movements of people at this time incited fresh forms of jealousy over which groups had most success at securing government jobs, and reignited older demands for access to government employment. The realization of self-rule likewise heightened sensitivities about corruption in the services and inspired a wave of efforts to end corruption. This article explores the complex ways in which postcolonial rulers responded to these anxieties and sought to alleviate the sense of uncertainty that pervaded this period. Together, these linked events reconfigured the composition of the police and bureaucracy, and transformed the ideational underpinnings of the role of the government servant in both India and Pakistan.

Until the last decade or so, scholarship on former colonies in Africa and Asia divided at the moment of independence, with academics focusing on either the colonial period or the postcolonial one. For both sides, the key question was whether the achievement of political self-determination brought about any meaningful change in these territories. Under the influence of the postcolonial critique, the trend in the 1980s and 1990s was to highlight the powerful continuities between the colonial period and the era after independence, especially in the former colonies of the British Empire.¹ In the last ten years, however, historians have begun to cross the divide between studies of colonial rule and research on postcolonial states, and …