Universität Erfurt
Max-Weber-Kolleg für kultur- und sozialwissenschaftliche Studien
Postfach 90 02 21
99105 Erfurt
In June 2014, the state of Andhra Pradesh, India, was bifurcated into two separate states - the new state of Telangana and the truncated state of Andhra Pradesh. The bifurcation was a result of a long-standing demand for a separate state within India, with agitation peaking and waning in phases. In the last phase of this long drawn movement (particularly between 2007 – 2014), the agitation reached such frenzy that it saw a spate of suicides by young students in the Telangana region. This provided a moral legitimacy and urgency to the movement. One can argue that the last phase of the movement was also possibly one of the highly politicized, mediatized and sentimentalized one. It venerated a separate state as an almost sacrilised space, that would develop itself utilizing its resources that till then had been exploited by non-Telanganites, mostly the agrarian upper castes hailing from the other regions of the undivided state. Preliminary research suggests that the demand for a separate state during the last couple of decades also found much resonance among many ‘high skilled’, upper caste and affluent diaspora from the Telangana region domiciled particularly in the United States, but also in the Gulf countries. This regional diaspora found a common cause with their brethren ‘back home’ despite the divide of time and space, thereby stretching the movement from a localized topography, onto a transnational plane.
While some literature is available on the origin of demand for a separate state in peasant struggle in pre-Independent India, or the politics of sub-regional nationalism post independence, the transnationalisation of the movement and the role of the regional diaspora in the creation of the recently carved state of Telangana has not garnered any academic attention so far. Using multi-sited ethnography, this study will unravel the ways in which transnational migrants shaped the public perception for the creation of a separate state. Further it examines how this discourse is embedded in regional political economy, mediated by social relations, cultural values and political aspirations – all of which have perhaps played vital role in the transnationalization of the Telangana struggle. This project will attempt to untangle these connections that have made transnational mobilisation for a separate state in India a possibility. The research has far reaching implications not only in terms of its policy implications but also about emergent forms of diasporic engagements in (regional) political movements in global south.
Universität Erfurt (Campus)
Nordhäuser Str. 63
99089 Erfurt