In recent times, we have witnessed a global rise in the number of groups and individuals with ambiguous citizenship status. To understand the manner in which this trend has developed in the specific context of India, we need to understand the manner in which the broader region, often referred to as South Asia, came to be compartmentalised into distinct, but anxious, nation states. Recent debates in India regarding laws such as the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and updates to the National Register of Citizens (NRC) distinctly relate to these ambivalences. These laws point to how the production of apparently preeminent ideas of nation and citizen, in the South Asian context, emerge out of an ever-changing socio-political landscape, which continually seeks to addresses the unresolved rationalities that emerged over the course of colonialism and its eventual retreat. As a consequence of these ambiguities, the borders of citizenship in India remain vague. Citizenship in the Indian context hence has to be read as a terrain of conflict and struggle, where a multitude of social and political forces and ideological formations exist in unequal and often conflicting relationships. It is through these interactions, which take place at distinct locations, that both ‘citizens’ and ‘others’ are constituted. In this article, we are interested in the political and social imperatives of citizenship which allow for the exclusion of certain individuals and groups. In taking this approach, we intend to posit non-citizenship as an emerging area of citizenship studies. For this purpose, we locate the foundational logic of laws like the CAA and the NRC within the historical development of citizenship in India and more specifically Assam.