156 E. L. RHOADS AND R. DAS blinders,” contemporary scholars who research citizenship often adopt a comparative lens, as an understanding of how political membership is regulated in different contexts not only leads to learning about citizenship regimes across time and space, but also to a better understanding of how political membership is governed within one’s own community.4 We use a comparative historical approach to analyze postcolonial citizenship in Myanmar and India, tracing the divergent paths of citizenship in each since the British colonial government administratively separated the province of Burma5 from British India in 1937.6 This comparison has considerable relevance for broader discussions of contemporary postcolonial citizenship in both states, especially given the genocidal violence against Rohingya in Myanmar and their resulting statelessness stemming from the 1982 Citizenship Act,7 and, in India, the Modi administration’s contentious Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019 and its increasingly identity-fused understanding of citizenship.8 More specifically, as the questions of who is and is not a citizen have become increasingly pertinent, we argue that a specter of the potential foreigner shapes citizenship regulations in both Myanmar and India. Through a close reading of these two states’ successive citizenship legislation originating from a common colonial source, we demonstrate how this specter is ingrained in the history and memory of both, and continues to push both states away from an inclusive jus soli (birthright) principle towards a more exclusionary jus sanguinis (descent-based) definition of citizenship. There are some marked differences in each, as the government of Burma/Myanmar has conceptualized citizenship more restrictively since independence whereas in India legislative changes have gradually narrowed the definition of citizenship. We nonetheless identify clear commonalities that support our argument about the muscular majoritarian-fuelled ideas of citizenship currently on display in both countries. Our analysis is rooted in the interdisciplinary domain of citizenship studies, which is theory-rich but has not produced a comprehensive definition of citizenship.9 The most common definition, as membership in a nation-state, and alternative framings about the status and practice of citizenship, all carry certain presumed “conception[s] of politics, culture, temporality, and sociality.”10 Hannah Arendt famously critiqued the universality of human rights by demonstrating how rights are lost when an individual is not a citizen of any state. In Arendt’s formulation, the “right to have rights” is the right to membership in a political community, the right to belong, epitomized by the concept and status of citizenship.11 Twentieth century scholarship on citizenship tended to “locate the origins of modern notions of citizenship at the conjecture of political, intellectual, and legal currents in early modern Europe.”12 This work was influenced by T.H. Marshall’s typology of civil, political, and social citizenship13 and Hans Kohn’s ethnic and civic models of 4 Vink 2017, 222. We use “Burma” to refer to pre-1989 Myanmar. The military junta changed the English name for the country in 1989 to match the Burmese language name for the country, “Myanmar.” The choice of using Burma/Myanmar is not political but rather to align with contemporary historical sources used in this article. 6 Guyot-Rechard 2021; Saha 2015. 7 Brinham 2019; Nyi Nyi Kyaw 2017. 8 Roy 2022. 9 Isin and Nyer 2014. 10 Isin and Nyer 2014, 1. 11 Arendt 1951. 12 Chatterji 2012,1049. 13 Marshall 1949. 5