CRITICAL ASIAN STUDIES 161 colonial subjects with a racially determined secondary status, at independence the very same institutions had to serve the needs of independent citizens.55 This required redefining the legal relationship between and responsibilities of multi-ethnic populations – both as individuals and ethnic groups – and their governments.56 Some scholars have meticulously traced the contours of this redefinition in the Indian case, where birthright conceptions undergirded the acquisition of citizenship as framed in the 1955 Citizenship Act.57 But the Burmese experience in the decades following independence has not received similar levels of scrutiny. Faced with a similar task of framing the subject, content, and legal-administrative institutions of citizenship, the postcolonial Burmese government charted a much different path by adopting a more discriminatory citizenship model that overlapped with social conceptions of belonging and non-belonging drawn primarily along racial lines.58 These legal and status divisions were based on a rhetoric of pre-colonial indigenous nationalities considered to be more “belonging” than those categorized via colonial census and postcolonial rhetoric as “foreigners.”59 Following independence and what Sunil Amrith has called “the disavowal of migration” in South and Southeast Asia,60 an increasingly descent-based conception of citizenship emerged in Burma. A racialized conception of citizenship initially led to a slow implementation of naturalization and other policies which conferred citizenship on “non-natives” – with the onus always on the individual to prove citizenship rather than the state to prove foreign status.61 However, by the 1970s, state policies were increasingly based on more restrictive descent-based principles, eventually codified in the 1982 Citizenship Act, resulting in millions of people made administratively and functionally stateless.62 In the broader spectrum of South Asian citizenship regimes, this marked divergence – whereby Burma adopted an emphatical descent-based citizenship model from the start with some limited birthright provisions, while India started out as a birthright regime which eroded much more gradually – in spite of originating from a common moment of partition for the two countries, makes a comparative portrayal imperative. There also are significant overlaps between these two citizenship regimes, both in their historical and contemporary forms. Nativism has been a determinant in the acquisition of citizenship in both countries. In practice this means both distinguishing “natives” and prioritizing them over ethnic/religious others via legislation and the use of discriminatory and often highly discretionary administrative practices designed to parse natives 55 Jayal 2013. Sadiq 2017a. 57 Jayal 2019. 58 Cheesman 2017; Rhoads 2023a. 59 Cheesman 2017; Rhoads 2023a; Arraiza et al. 2020; Nyi Nyi Kyaw 2015; Prasse-Freeman 2017 and 2023; Sadan 2018; Myint-U 2020; Formichi 2023. The British colonial dichotomy between “native” and “foreign” populations stems from colonial census-taking, in which population categories frequently changed from caste to language to religion in tracking colonial subjects and internal migration patterns (Ferguson 2015), particularly given the circular migration of laborers between India and Burma (Amrith 2013). But it also stems from the everyday experience of colonialism in Burma, which, rather than being marked by European settlers, was experienced as men of Asian origin serving as agents of British colonization, or otherwise seen to be benefiting from it in some way, at the expense of the Burmese (Sadan 2018, 51). 60 Amrith 2018:107. 61 Rhoads 2023a. 62 For more on restrictions on other forms of citizenship such as naturalization, registration and birth right seen prior to 1982, see Aung Ko Ko et al. forthcoming. 56