After the partition of 1947, certain documents became key to proving an individual’s allegiance and claims of belonging to the new nation-states of India and Pakistan. These documents, which emerged to standardize people’s exit and entry, but also came to certify their domicile, residence, and allegiance, calibrated the documentary life of belonging for those exercising mobility after 1947. Passports of various kinds and hues, permits and visas, refugee slips, and domicile, emergency, and migration certificates worked in conjunction with each other, acquiring new functionalities beyond their initial mandates. Further, there were also special permits to control travel between Portuguese territories in Goa and the French territories of Pondicherry.Footnote 1 Citizens of Tibet and the Maldives could get travel passes to India, while residents of Nepal and Bhutan were not required to carry any documents. Kashmiris traveling from Pakistan to their hometowns were required to obtain special permits.Footnote 2 For Indians traveling to and from Ceylon, a newly minted “India-Ceylon pass” became routine from 1949.Footnote 3 This became a key document determining the line between belonging and statelessness.
This article focuses on some of these documents, the new Indian passport in particular, and examines the ways in which these documents fashioned and laid claim to postcolonial belonging. The passport after 1947, I suggest, was a postcolonial document: it reflected its colonial antecedents even as it emerged as a central tool of state to govern mobility in independent India. The new Indian state initially viewed the passport as a tool to primarily regulate partition mobility. In contrast, those who now crossed the new borders between India, Pakistan, Ceylon, and Burma viewed the passport as a travel document that guaranteed exit, entry, and nationality in the absence of clear mandates. Within a few years, however, the passport came to signify nationality, citizenship, and belonging for those crossing the borders.
In South Asia, the passport as a document of mobility control was not new. Its earlier iteration, the British Indian passport, had a long history of controlling those the British Indian state deemed seditious agents (communists, anti-colonial nationalists, and enemy aliens) and economic liabilities (indenture laborers and students).Footnote 4 But after 1947, the passport also became a “gateway” document for those whose belonging was in question. In the post-partition period, this meant that those moving across borders, those born or having residence outside the newly designated territories of independent India, and those married to foreign nationals came to be viewed by the state as having divided loyalties and suspect citizenship. The passport, and multiple other documents such as the domicile certificate, permits, and so on, worked singly and in conjunction to frame the documentary life of belonging. Moreover, these documents proclaimed, through appropriate formatting and biographical information, the implementation of an elaborate domestic and international bureaucracy—the meanings of being Indian and belonging to the wider world. Those without access to these documents could not be legally mobile and were without nationality at a time when this identity was a crucial claim to belonging. Thus, the passport and related documents were dual by nature, simultaneously facilitating and restricting mobility.
Scholarship on colonial passports has advocated their role in restricting mobility, institutionalizing the “color bar,” attesting individual identity, and keeping “undesirables” under surveillance.Footnote 5 Beyond passports, other documents—such as ration cards in the post-World War II context—became central to welfare distribution and as “proof” of identity.Footnote 6 The postcolonial period saw the continuation of such colonial practices, but with certain key differences. The British Indian passport emerged in several forms to facilitate travel to and from newly independent India: the Commonwealth passport, which recognized British subjects in Commonwealth member countries, including India and Pakistan; the general passport, which new Indians could use to travel to specific countries; and a special Indo-Pak passport, which emerged in October 1952 to govern the vast migrations across the borders of India and East and West Pakistan. To make matters more complicated, the British Nationality Act (BNA) of 1948 noted that Indians, both within the new territories and overseas, would continue to be considered British subjects and Commonwealth citizens until the passage of legislation relating to citizenship.Footnote 7 Recent scholarship has suggested that the general Indian passport emerged as a tool through which the new Indian state managed mobility along caste lines. Working in conjunction with regulations of the BNA, such passport restrictions helped Britain to restrict the arrival of “undesirables” along color lines.Footnote 8 Within India, the Indo-Pak passport gave rise to a documentary regime that identified and sought to restrict the return and later citizenship of Muslim minorities in India.Footnote 9
By 1948, the general Indian passport came to be the primary evidentiary proof of being “Indian.” As a press note from the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) in September 1948 noted:
The Government of India have decided that henceforth Indians will be described in their passports as “Indians” (by birth, by naturalization, or by marriage as the case may be). This decision applies equally to subjects of Acceding states and to those belonging to other parts of the country, and the former will no longer be described in their passports as “British Protected Persons.” Provision has also been made for the use of the description “Indian” in respect of persons who belonged to the places now included in Pakistan, or were born or domiciled elsewhere, but who wish to be regarded as Indians. Such persons will generally be required to make a declaration of allegiance to the Dominion of India.Footnote 10
This announcement was a crucial and necessary shift, signaling the demise of a colonial identity in favor of a postcolonial one. All a person needed to do was declare allegiance to India and have it certified on stamp paper. However, nationality was not, as government authorities cautioned, to be confused with citizenship, and possession of an Indian passport was not proof of citizenship. Consequently, officials cautioned that “The term ‘India’ cannot however be treated as final until the Constituent Assembly itself has adopted it.”Footnote 11 Similar discussions were being carried out regarding the Pakistan passport.Footnote 12 The confusion between nationality, citizenship, and the passport was laid to rest with the promulgation of the constitution in 1950. Article 9 of the constitution established the first link, albeit indirectly, between citizenship and its evidentiary nature, declaring that the “voluntary acquisition of a foreign passport” would be tantamount to losing one’s citizenship.Footnote 13 There was no room for dual citizenship and “divided loyalties as India delinked nationality from citizenship.”Footnote 14 In the case of Pakistan, acquisition of a foreign passport was also equated with the loss of Pakistani citizenship. Moreover, like India, Pakistan’s constitutional understanding of citizenship, while liberal to the core, faced similar unscripted challenges when dealing with cases of those exercising mobility.Footnote 15
Permits and certificates
Given the immediate context of partition and decolonization, the Indian state understandably focused primarily on the regulating the massive number of migrants crossing each day between the newly created borders of India and Pakistan (both in the west and east). Both countries quickly developed specific sets of documents to regulate these movements. In July 1948, India adopted a permit system across its western border with Pakistan to curb what it perceived as the “one-way traffic” of Muslim refugees. Under the Influx from Pakistan (Control) Ordinance, entry into India now required a permit. Pakistan followed suit in October with the Pakistan (Control of Entry) Ordinance, claiming the need for internal security. However, there was no permit system on the eastern border between the countries. Before the India-Pakistan passport came into being, East Pakistan residents were often required to produce tax certificates to prove domicile, while Indian residents were restricted to fifteen days in East Pakistan. In this sense, there was some documentary control, however haphazard.Footnote 16 As several scholars have argued, the differing policies on the eastern and western borders stemmed from the Indian state’s understanding of the partition experience in this region as different, and where eastern migration was viewed as unwarranted and not significant.Footnote 17
The permit system implemented a new documentary understanding of mobility. Five kinds of permits were issued from the diplomatic representatives of India and Pakistan located in Bombay, Jullundur, Karachi, and Lahore: permits for temporary visits, resettlement (for Hindus from Pakistan), permanent return (for Muslims returning from Pakistan), repeated travel, and transit travel between East and West Pakistan. In true bureaucratic fashion, these permits were printed in triplicate, bound as booklets, and serially machine-numbered. One copy was housed with the issuing authority, another with the superintendent of police at the destination, and the third was given to the border-crosser.Footnote 18 The system of rolling deadlines (1 March 1947, 19 July 1948, 26 January 1950, and 15 October 1952) coupled with the increasing requirements for different kinds of documents proving allegiance, intent, and domicile made life difficult for those crossing the border, either routinely or under duress. For example, permits were required for travel to and from India and Pakistan, but to claim nationality or apply for a job in India, one needed to provide a domicile certificate that documented at least six months of residency within the new territories of India. Residency proof would then translate to employment eligibility in the new India and later could be included in claims for citizenship.
Routine “travel” itself became mired with confusion as it became entangled with understandings of permanent migration and hence loss of citizenship. For example, there were instances in which the Delhi authorities complained that some applicants for the Indo-Pak passport had “migrated” to Pakistan, but the applicants contested the official versions of “migration.” This was primarily due to the absence of “documentary evidence.” What could be the paper evidence proving such journeys as simply travel rather than an act of “migration”?
Permits, passports, and visas, according to the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), could be baseline evidence for such migration, as well as witness statements from applicants’ friends and family. In 1959, an MHA bureaucrat declared,
Just as the police cannot make allegations without reasonable grounds, the mere denial, without support evidence, by the alleged migrants cannot be accepted. They should be able to give details of the places where they resided during the alleged period of migration, which can be got verified through local inhabitants or other witnesses who know them.Footnote 19
For the state, intent on proving that travel was actually “migration” (which by implication meant that the traveler intended to become Pakistani and thus did not belong to India), the traveler was held responsible for proving both his intent and his action. Such proof was almost always in the form of travel documents, such as domicile certificates, passports, and permits.
The concept of domicile was not new. In fact, it had been outlined in the colonial-era Indian Succession Act of 1926, from which the new regulations heavily borrowed. According to this act, domicile of origin was usually determined by where one was born and the domicile of one’s father. However, given the context of the partition migrations, confusion arose as to how one could acquire a “new” domicile different from one’s domicile of origin. Could a person with a domicile in Pakistan claim domicile requirements for Indian citizenship and jobs? After 1947, new rules stated that people could possibly have a new domicile so long as they showed that they had stayed put for six months at a time in a different location.Footnote 20 Domicile certificates could attest one’s belonging to a place. However, women’s domicile would, until 1958, continue to reside with either their father or, in the case of marriage, their husband. This new definition of domicile became particularly significant once the Indian government announced that those who migrated to India after 19 July 1948 would need to provide a domicile certificate to apply for government jobs. In the absence of legislation, the general population misinterpreted this announcement, understanding that such a certificate would also be necessary to claiming citizenship.Footnote 21 As such, the MHA authorities very quickly became swamped with letters and self-declared statements on domicile, some of which were printed on stamp paper and others declared and attested by local officials.
Mahboob Ali Baig, one of the members of the draft constitution committee, anticipated that the idea of government-issued certificates regulating mobility might be misinterpreted. Baig pointed out that requiring permits and imposing six-month domicile requirements, especially on Indian Muslims returning to India, was a “defective” policy. He argued that a returnee:
was a citizen of India when Pakistan was included in India under the 1935 Act. I am speaking of a person who has been living in Pakistan which formed part of India and wants to return. Why do you want a certificate from him? Why do you want that he should reside here for six months? Why do you expect him to file a petition and be here for six months? He is an Indian and comes down here, not voluntarily, but under very tragic circumstances. He comes over to India because he could not live there on account of civil disturbances or for fear of civil disturbances. I do not want that any certificate should be produced by a person who comes from Pakistan to India.Footnote 22
Bhopinder Singh Mann made a similar argument of automatic citizenship on behalf of Hindu and Sikh refugees, arguing that:
any person, who because of communal riots in Pakistan has come over to India and stays here at the commencement of this Constitution, should automatically be considered as a citizen of India and should on no account be made to go to a registering authority and plead before him and establish a qualification of six months domicile to claim rights of citizenship.Footnote 23
Rather than simplifying matters, the new Indian state went full throttle in terms of its documentary requirements for regulating mobility and, in turn, certifying belonging. Even though the permit system was unpopular, especially among border crossers, Indian authorities—especially in the departments of relief and rehabilitation, defense, and home affairs—were keen to continue with the system. They argued that the permit system had been effective in curbing the return migration of Muslims.Footnote 24 If left unchecked, their return would put undue pressure on the already strained resources reserved for refugees.Footnote 25
Three things changed the permit regime to a passport regime. The unpopularity of permits, the need for new jurisdictional measures in line with the Indian constitution after 1950, and the need to standardize and control migrations on both the eastern and western borders provided the context for the adoption of the Indian Pakistan Passport and Visa Scheme in October 1952. The scheme introduced a special India Pakistan passport that permitted travel only between the two nation states. The general passport for international travel remained a separate travel document.
From the perspective of Indian officials, routine and hitherto “free” mobility now came under the scheme’s documentary requirements. For example, cultivators and petty traders who lived in the borderlands (defined as ten miles on either side of the India-Pakistan border) were now required to possess an F visa to pursue their livelihoods in this region. To acquire these visas, borderland residents had to submit another set of documents to the border authorities: khatian or rent receipts, certificates from a union board or panchayat president documenting residence, and often certificates from authorities across the border verifying legal trade and labor. These F visas were valid for five years or until the expiry of the holder’s passport, at which time the visa holder had to return to the local authorities for renewal. The F visa regulated routine cross-border mobility, but it also inadvertently provided certain documentary “rights” of residence that would be guaranteed by the Indian state. These documents could also, albeit in limited form, act as new forms of legal tender, protecting the holder from being identified as an “infiltrator” and being deported.
The permit system was only implemented on India’s western border with Pakistan. In an effort to curb migration in the east, the Indian authorities began to require migration certificates from members of minority communities who wanted to migrate to India from East Pakistan. Confusion arose over the term “minority community,” the basic criteria for migration certificates. Were Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan the only groups who came under such a rubric, or did it define all non-Muslims? What about members of scheduled castes whom Pakistan claimed were not part of the Hindu community and, therefore, not minorities? Indian officials reasoned that although applicants for migration certificates were primarily Hindus and Sikhs, certificates should be issued to all non-Muslim residents of Pakistan. But this decision raised another dilemma: if all Pakistani non-Muslims were, hypothetically, eligible for migration certificates, India could potentially be inundated by the entire non-Muslim population of Pakistan.
After October 1952, with the implementation of the passport system on both borders, the policy of migration certificates was dually applied and began to be seen as a documentary requirement for those intending to migrate with the aim of permanent settlement in the other country. Consequently, the Indian authorities decided that migration certificates would not be automatically issued and instead be dependent on the worth of each applicant. Low-level bureaucrats at the high commissions in Karachi and Dhaka were instructed that “facilities for migration should be given in all genuine cases but should not be available to every member of the minority community regardless of the merits of the case.”Footnote 26 Further, those who had landed property or a business in Pakistan were not entitled to migration certificates “unless there was a danger to their life” or “danger to the honour of women folk.” It was not clear how applicants were to provide evidence to this effect. What was clear was that India’s humanitarian claims had to defer to the economic imperative of limiting refugee and migrant populations.
By the 1960s, migration certificates came to certify the legal border crossing of Pakistani Hindu minorities intending to settle in India. When the Gujarat government asked the MHA whether these migrants should be viewed as Pakistani nationals and their mobility restricted within India, the MHA clarified that these certificates were only given to those seeking permanent settlement, and thus were to be viewed as “potential Indian citizens.”Footnote 27 Over the next few decades, India adopted a policy of non-deportation for Pakistani Hindus, even if they did not have valid residence permits or visas. This policy has also been reflected in the claims of Hindu Pakistanis “to belong in India on the basis of their Hindu identification and ancestral kinship ties to the region.”Footnote 28 Recent amendments to the Citizenship Act also suggest that assumptions of “permanent settlement” in the 1950s have translated into policies that now fast-track non-Muslim minorities in Pakistan and Bangladesh for Indian citizenship.
Documentary belonging
Travel documents became key to determining nationality, a notional understanding of citizenship, and belonging. Until the passage of the Citizenship Act of 1955, and even beyond that, such determinations disproportionately impacted particular mobile groups: partition migrants, especially Muslims returning from Pakistan; communists; women married to non-Indian citizens; and Indians overseas. Each of these groups represented the different but interrelated anxieties of postcolonial state formation.
Border crossers often faced harassment based on both their religious identity and what kind of documents they carried. By 1950, when the constitution declared that the voluntary possession of a foreign passport equated to the loss of citizenship, many who had taken the Pakistani passport (both Muslims and Hindus) as a utilitarian move to facilitate travel found it difficult to convince Indian authorities that they wanted to retain Indian citizenship. The travails of partition migrants spilled over to those whose movements did not involve crossing the partitioned borders. For example, Dr. Kanwar Mohammed Ashraf, a well-known historian, author, and left political activist, found himself in trouble with the Indian authorities in London over a passport. Ashraf had been living in London for several years and planned to travel across Europe and then return home to Aligarh. His application began a flurry of bureaucratic wrangling across different offices in London and Delhi. The key question for the authorities was: is he Indian or Pakistani?Footnote 29 As far as the Indian officials were concerned, he was partly to blame, as he had traveled from India to Pakistan in early 1948, been arrested in Pakistan (ostensibly for his communist activities), and then exited Pakistan for London. All he had with him was an emergency certificate issued by the Pakistani authorities.Footnote 30
As bureaucrats at the Ministry of External Affairs and Ministry of Home Affairs scrambled into action, their primary concerns were two-fold. First, whether Ashraf should be allowed to travel to Europe and other countries. Officials feared that, as a well-known communist, Ashraf’s tours would surely lead to anti-national speeches and activities detrimental to the political image of the new nation. As they noted: “In view of the violent anti-Govt. attitude of the Communists in India, and the activities elsewhere in the Far east, it has been our practice to regard communists as belonging to the category as ‘dangerous’, and passport facilities for travel abroad are generally not granted to them.”Footnote 31 On this ground alone, passport facilities should have been denied to Ashraf, as the authorities continued to pursue the colonial policies of restricting the travel of communist dissidents. Second, the post-colonial and post-Partition context brought up questions about whether, Ashraf, a Muslim Indian, was actually Indian, and whether his travel to Pakistan in 1948 could be construed as intent to become a Pakistani national. But what was different in the postcolonial moment was the question of whether Ashraf, a Muslim Indian, was Indian, as his travel to Pakistan in 1948 could have been construed as intent to become a national of that state. Travel to Pakistan, whether short or long term, was often used as evidence of intent to migrate and then interpreted as a desire for Pakistani citizenship.Footnote 32 Officials at the MHA noted that, as per the rules of being an Indian national, Ashraf would need to show documentary proof of “domicile.” His Pakistan-issued emergency certificate listed his domicile as Karachi (Karachi jail, to be exact), which was enough grounds to deny him an Indian passport.Footnote 33 The British government also voiced their hesitation, noting that they were unsure of Ashraf’s nationality.Footnote 34
To further complicate matters, Ashraf had been living in London for the past two years and thus could also be construed as a British national under the auspices of the British Nationality Act. What is significant for us to consider is not the legal standing of Ashraf’s claim to an Indian passport, but how the Indian authorities construed his belonging based on the documents he provided to support his application. MHA officials noted that, for all purposes, Ashraf’s application was similar to someone applying to return from Pakistan to India, as he had not acquired a proper permit to return when he left India in 1948. Thus, in their mind, Ashraf should not be given a passport to return to India. The case remained pending for almost a year and, after further consideration, the Indian state agreed to provide him with a single journey emergency certificate. This consideration was notably influenced by the Indian state’s desire to appear as the sole arbiter of Ashraf’s case (rather than Pakistan or the UK). However, an official memo stressed that the emergency certificate did “not constitute legal evidence of the nationality of the holder.”Footnote 35 Ashraf’s friendship with political bigwigs, such as Sarder Patel and Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, also helped his case. His return, as far as the Indian state was concerned, would not resolve the issue of his nationality; he would have to approach the authorities again in a separate application.
In the case of Josh Malihabadi, the well-known poet and the editor of Ajkal, a monthly Urdu journal, the documentary regime played out slightly differently in certifying his nationality and belonging. In December 1955, Malihabadi tendered his resignation to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, noting in his letter: “After contemplating for a long time, I am sorry to have come to this conclusion that my further stay in India will not in any way be in the interest of the economic, linguistic and cultural life of my children and my future generation.”Footnote 36 Newspapers in both India and Pakistan confirmed this move and reported that Malihabadi had become a Pakistani citizen by acquiring a Pakistani passport. Nehru, a close friend of Malihabadi, did not accept these news reports and asked the Indian High Commissioner in Karachi, C.C. Desai, to confirm whether Malihabadi had actually migrated to Pakistan with the intention of living there and had indeed taken a Pakistani passport.
Desai confirmed that about a dozen of Malihabadi’s family members, including his wife and son, had arrived in Lahore on the strength of a migration certificate. They had brought their belongings, including a Buick car, and the rest of their property was in transit. They had also been promised hefty compensation by some well-known Pakistanis, such as Iskandar Mirza, to help with the move. However, after a lengthy face-to-face meeting with Malihabadi, Desai noted two things. First, Malihabadi still retained an Indian passport and desired to return to India and “resume his Indian nationality which he had not given up and which he meant to preserve, although he would not like this fact to be known in the Pakistani circles.”Footnote 37 Second, Malihabadi noted that “he was an atheist and had described himself as such in his passport…that he believed in humanity and not in Islam.” For this reason, “he would never fit in into [the] (sic) Islamic concept of Pakistan.”Footnote 38 Malihabadi went on to share with Desai his plan to continue being Indian, by spending eight months in India and four months in Pakistan. For Malihabadi, his nationality and belonging were more than the Indian passport he was carrying or the Pakistani passport he had acquired. The passports were, as Indian officials suspected, to be used according to convenience. For Indian officials, having two passports equated to having two nationalities, which, by 1955, had been legislated as not permissible. They asked Malihabadi to surrender his Indian passport when he returned in 1956. Interestingly, when Malihabadi returned to India in the late 1960s to dispose of his properties in Uttar Pradesh (UP) and transfer the money to Pakistan, he again faced documentary trouble. This time, Pakistan seized his passport as punishment for his writing, what they perceived as, an anti-Pakistan tract in a local Indian newspaper. Consequently, he was unable to transfer the money from India to Pakistan.
Issues of nationality remained complicated for another group of Indians: married women and widows, especially those who were mobile and wanted to claim a different citizenship than their husbands. Until 1958, although there was no constitutional restriction, the issue of women’s citizenship after marriage became key in the framing of different directives in travel documents between India and Pakistan. The legal norm until the time had been to use the clause of “domicile” (meaning residence) as the determining factor for women who married across borders. A woman’s domicile, as both states understood it, was with her husband’s domicile and her citizenship transferred to his after marriage. The Pakistani Citizenship Act provided avenues for married women to be registered independently and for a Pakistani woman to retain her citizenship after marrying an Indian man, provided she did not acquire an Indian passport. Despite this, in most cases, Indian women married to Pakistani citizens were deemed to have acquired Pakistani citizenship after marriage, and vice versa. This understanding was useful to claiming Indian or Pakistani citizenship for scores of women (both Hindu and Muslim) who continued to follow traditional marriage patterns—the only distinction being that these marriages were viewed as cross-border unions, and the women acquired new nationalities upon marriage. In Pakistan, widows and divorced women previously married to Indian nationals who now wanted to return to their families in Pakistan faced a number of bureaucratic and legal challenges. Although the numbers were not many, debates around their “return” focused on the humanitarian aspects of each case, and privileged their nationality and religion in each individual application for citizenship.Footnote 39 India adopted a documentary approach, requiring Pakistani women previously married to Indian men and widows to remain in India as long as they had valid long term-permits or visas.Footnote 40
In the immediate aftermath of partition, the laws and understandings of citizenship remained gendered and open to contextual interpretation. Laila Murshed, whose husband had shifted to East Pakistan in 1951 and acquired Pakistani citizenship, approached the Indian authorities for an Indo-Pak passport in order to visit her husband. Her application was denied because, according to the authorities, her husband’s Pakistani citizenship immediately made her Pakistani as well, even though she resided in India. In her letter to the authorities, she questioned eloquently, “Is it the law of India that an Indian woman (above the age of 21 years) married to an Indian husband must lose her Indian citizenship against her will and volition as soon as her husband subsequent to her marriage acquires another (say Pakistani) citizenship?”Footnote 41 Her letters and petitions to various authorities bore fruit a year later, when the MEA agreed that she was still Indian and gave her a limited term (one year) passport. More importantly, passport directives changed after this, de-linking the domicile of husbands, wives, and children.
Clearly, this did not go far enough for some. In the spring of 1957, S.K. Effendi published an article in the Lucknow-based newspaper The Pioneer that ruffled more than a few bureaucratic feathers. The article, titled “Women’s Nationality,” declared:
Indian women (domicile in India) married to Pakistani husbands are being denied Indian nationality by our state passport authorities. Such women have been refused Indian passports. This is extremely unjust and arbitrary. Marriage is a sacrament and not a crime to be punished with forfeiture of nationality. Forfeiture of nationality is a sentence prescribed for outlaws only and everybody knows that marriage is no outlawry. I have never known or even heard of marriage being treated as a crime by the law of any country.Footnote 42
The authorities vehemently denied such charges, even issuing a public press note declaring that no such discrimination was occurring. Rather, they pointed out, if such cases did happen, it was because these marriages had taken place before the cutoff date of 26 January 1950 or the men had migrated to Pakistan before that date. Moreover, it was only if the wife intended to settle in Pakistan that she was advised to acquire a Pakistani passport. But if the woman wanted to retain her nationality, then she would be given an Indo-Pak passport, which allowed her to travel temporarily. In a system dependent on proving “intent” and situating individuals in terms of “domicile,” the Indo-Pak passport provided some temporary relief for those not wanting to make a permanent decision.
Married women’s citizenship continued to be entangled with their travel documents, even in the case of the general international passport. For example, when Zenat Shustriyan married an Iranian citizen, she applied for an Indian passport to travel to Tehran to be with her husband. Like Laila, Zenat perceived the passport to be a travel document facilitating her exit and entry. However, under Iranian law at the time, non-Iranian women acquired the nationality of their Iranian husbands and were thus required to get an Iranian passport if they wanted to be in Iran long term. The problem that Zenat faced was a clause in the Indian constitution, which declared that anyone voluntarily acquiring the passport of a foreign nation would lose all claims to Indian citizenship.Footnote 43 So Zenat was faced with a dilemma, “choosing between her country which she loves and cherishes and her husband.”Footnote 44 In Zenat’s case, the Indian authorities argued that the requirement to get an Iranian passport was not “voluntary.” She was given a temporary passport, but the Indian authorities cautioned that “the possession of two nationalities, namely that of India and Iran, would cause considerable inconvenience and complications in the future, she would be well advised to renounce either of the nationalities—Indian or Iranian.”Footnote 45 They did not elaborate what those complications might be, but possessing two different passports clearly violated India’s stand on dual nationality.
Conclusion
Travel documents such as the Indo-Pak passport, the general Indian passport, permits, and emergency and domicile certificates certified a new kind of belonging, mediated by postcolonial understandings of mobility and belonging. Routine mobility—foreign travel—often became understood as national acts, and carried with them the penalty of losing one’s citizenship. Partition migrants continued to face a documentary regime throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Such a refashioning of mobility was possible due to the Indian state’s increasing reliance on the emerging documentary regime in which travel documents became key pieces of evidence to secure belonging, entry, and return to the nation-state. Permits gave way to passports, with the Indo-Pakistan passport in particular regulating travel across borders. Its development was, in some ways, unscripted and dependent on cases such as Zenat, Ashraf, and those of partition migrants.
Seven decades after partition, India’s migration policies continue to develop the partition-era documentary requirements regulating people who cross the border for work, family visits, and religious pilgrimage. The recent amendments to India’s Citizenship Act (CAA) introduced, as Niraja Gopal Jayal suggests, “a transformative shift from a civic national conception to an ethno-national conception of India.”Footnote 46 This shift is also reflected in the ways in which documentary belonging is now calibrated through different certificates, such as the Overseas Citizen Card, which simultaneously denies status to Pakistani and Bangladeshi citizens and denotes diasporic Indians as “foreign nationals.”
Acknowledgements
I thank the anonymous reviewers of Critical Pakistan Studies for their insightful and critical comments which have helped me revise the final draft. I take this opportunity to thank the Department of History and the Provost’s office of the University of Dayton for providing sabbatical time and the American Institute of Indian studies for giving research funds to work at the archives in India and the UK. I am grateful to Arvind Elangovan and Rahul Nair for their critical suggestions which have contributed towards this version of the article.
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