Governance in the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster begins as the management of a crisis and lasts for a limited time. In the long aftermath, a disaster offers an opportunity to introduce new modes of governance, often in response to the failure of protection that the disaster represents. Natural disasters such as the destructive 1934 earthquake in Bihar (India) are not only disruptive and often tragic events but also the beginning of a social process of coping and rehabilitation. Historical disaster research underline how aftermaths can serve as opportunities to reorder society or reinforce the existing social order. After the devastating earthquake in 1934, numerous civil society associations organised financial aid and mobilised man-power to aid the victims of the disaster. Both the state and civil society groups consciously deployed disaster relief as a means to appease social groups of people such as the middle classes and urban residents. From the perspective of civil society organisations, politicised disaster relief became a tool for nation building and a practice in state formation. This paper argues that disaster relief and the regimes of aid laid out by the colonial state and civil society organisations represented and produced ideas of citizenship and legitimate government institutions in the aftermath of the 1934 earthquake. Disaster governance could thereby represent attempts at reinforcing or reinventing colonial subjects and citizens as well as shaping the framework of the envisioned nation state. The questioning of colonial governance in the aftermath by civil society organisations serves as a site for analysing political ideas underpinning aid, relief and reconstruction in the making of an alternative modeof governance.