160 E. L. RHOADS AND R. DAS Besides legal and political opposition, from December 15, 2019 to March 24, 2020, India witnessed one of the most evocative popular movements in recent history. Peaceful sit-in protest demonstrations, led mostly by Muslim women, blocked an arterial road for more than three months at Shaheen Bagh, a neighborhood in southern Delhi. Joined by people from a cross-section of society, Shaheen Bagh protestors grew to as many as 100,000, one of the longest peaceful protests of its magnitude in modern India.44 Such contemporary events have foregrounded the question of citizenship in both Myanmar and India which, until independence in the 1940s, shared the same legislation governing foreigners, imperial citizenship, and naturalization.45 Yet, to date, there has been very little research on this shared history, much less in a comparative framework.46 Although there have been comparisons of citizenship regimes in India and Pakistan,47 Burma has been largely ignored, despite its political and cultural links with the subcontinent, migrants, refugees, and evacuees on both sides of the border, and a shared colonial past.48 The administrative separation of Burma from British India in 1937 – legislated through the 1935 Government of India Act and the 1935 Government of Burma Act that created a bicameral Burmese legislature – was South Asia’s first partition.49 This separation was intended to limit Indian immigration and circular migration to Burma.50 It was supposed to do so by transforming a nascent embryonic border made of shifting sanitary and other regulations entailing some checks on migrants into a clearly demarcated hard border.51 But the flow of people between India and Burma did not end with this administrative separation. An Indo-Burmese agreement on immigration was signed in 1941 but was never fully put into practice prior to Burmese independence due to the Japanese occupation of Burma during the Second World War. Nor was it designed to limit all movement between Burma and India.52 In fact, hundreds of thousands of Indian war-time evacuees were able to return to Burma after 1945.53 Despite, or perhaps due to such a shared history, Burma’s 1947 Constitution conferred citizenship on selected segments of the population and delineated the parameters of citizenship eligibility for others.54 The emigration and dispossession of Burma’s South Asian communities in the latter half of the twentieth century should not be viewed in isolation from similar debates over citizenship and belonging related to partition elsewhere on the subcontinent. As newly independent states, both the Burmese and Indian governments began reconfiguring their political, social, and economic institutions to redefine their political communities. While during colonial times these institutions were meant to control and regulate 44 Business Standard 2020. Myanmar’s Constitution came into effect on January 4, 1948, and India’s on January 26, 1950. For recent work on these topics, see Guyot-Rechard 2021; Amrith 2018; Rhoads 2023a and 2023b; Ikeya 2020; Egreteau 2011; Osada 2021. 47 Sadiq 2009; Saigol 2003. 48 Saha 2015; Emmrich et al. 2022; Prasse-Freeman 2023. 49 Guyot-Rechard 2021; Saha 2015. 50 Amrith 2013; 2018. 51 Osada 2011. 52 Khan and Sherman 2021; IOR, 1947. 53 Egreteau 2014; Greene 1948, 46; GUB, 1953. 54 Rhoads 2023a. One of the specters of coloniality that continued to be raised after independence was embodied by the “many communities of Asian origin who were considered foreigners who came to the country en masse under the British flag” (Sadan, 2018, 51). 45 46