Navigating authoritarian citizenship in India: a case study of the Irulars

This article investigates the precarious citizenship of the Irulars, a semi-nomadic community from southern India, in the contemporary authoritarian moment in India. Drawing from five months of participatory fieldwork with over 800 Irular families in Tamil Nadu, it foregrounds the experiences of a community whose formal status as Indian citizens stands in stark contrast to their everyday disenfranchisement. This article intervenes in three dominant trends within citizenship scholarship: first, the prevailing tendency to conceptualise citizenship as a formal legal status rather than as social act; second, the correlation between democratisation of former colonies and the liberalisation of citizenship regimes; and third, the scholarly focus on the communal instrumentalization of citizenship laws by the right-wing Indian State as the sole evidence of the autocratic turn in citizenship regulation. This study differently argues that the instrumentalization of citizenship predates contemporary authoritarianism and was embedded in colonial governance, with postcolonial democratisation failing to alter this trajectory. By inviting attention to a citizenship story of a community that is not a religious minority – therefore a community whose formal citizenship is not under threat – the article argues that the social experience of citizenship in the present authoritarian moment is produced through the collusion of a group of actors, including local society and scientific experts, who can be called ‘authoritarian citizens’. These actors, under the guise of democratising efforts, contribute to the maintenance of an authoritarian State that delegitimizes communities like the Irulars.