“NRC se Azadi”: Process, Chronology, and a Paper Monster

This article considers the demands for azadi (freedom) from the National Register of Citizens (NRC) that were central to the protests that swept through India over 2019-2020. It does so by considering the processes through which such a gargantuan bureaucratic exercise would be executed as well as through a consideration of its attachment to the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). This leads to a conceptualization of the NRC as a “paper monster” possessed of the power to divide and devour India. The article argues that the bureaucratic processes demanded by the NRC would greatly exacerbate the violence of paperwork that lies at the heart of the Indian state. The NRC will strengthen the longstanding dubiousness associated with all documents and can only culminate in the creation of an alternate paper-based reality of who really is an Indian

“It’s a conspiracy theory <i>and</i> climate change”

This paper traces the introduction of the category of climate change into the Indian Himalaya. Climate change emerged as an explanation for recurring incidences of human-animal conflict and the disappearance of a protected species through the labours of the local state bureaucracy. Even as the narratives on climate change were being imbued with expert authority, counter narratives dealing with the very same phenomena voiced by long-term residents of the Himalayas were summarily dismissed by the state as constituting mere conspiracy theories. This paper accords both these narratives equal space and details the effects of the explanatory force of climate change in this region. It argues for an enhanced ethnographic specificity to the political work done in the name of climate change. Building upon ethnographic insights, this works ends by outlining certain distinctive characteristics of climate change as a concept and call to act upon the world.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from HAU via http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau5.1.005

Trial by Fire:Trauma, Vulnerability and the Heroics of Fieldwork

In this Introduction, we take two persistent tropes of fieldwork, the ‘trial by fire’ and the ‘heroic fieldworker’ to task. Our analysis traces out what we call everyday decentering of these tropes, which we argue is necessary for fieldwork to be taught and engaged with beyond romanticised twentieth century masculinist heroics. We argue that anthro-pology and related field research based disciplines might be better served by adopting a more ethnographic approach towards the lived reality of fieldwork. Through our review, we situate the contribution that the six pieces in this volume make to pedagogies of the field. Readers are invited to continue this conversation about fieldwork futures in anthropology’s second century

Certifications of citizenship: the history, politics and materiality of identity documents in South Asian states and diasporas

Experiences in the post-partition Indian subcontinent refute the conventional expectation that the 'possession of citizenship enables the acquisition of documents certifying it' (Jayal, 2013, 71). Instead, identity papers of various types play a vital part in certifying and authenticating claims to citizenship. This is particularly important in a context where the history of state formation, continuous migration flows and the rise of right-wing majoritarian politics has created an uncertain situation for individuals deemed to be on the ‘margins’ of the state. The papers that constitute this special issue bring together a range of disciplinary perspectives in order to investigate the history, politics and materiality of identity documents, and to dismantle citizenship as an absolute and fixed notion, seeking instead to theorise the very mutable ‘hierarchies’ and ‘degrees’ of citizenship. Collectively they offer a valuable lens onto how migrants, refugees and socio-economically marginal individuals negotiate their relationship with the state, both within South Asia and in South Asian diaspora communities. This introduction examines the wider context of the complex intersections between state-issued identity documents and the nature of citizenship and draws out cross-cutting themes across the papers in this collection

Paper tiger: law, bureaucracy and the developmental state in Himalayan India

A big cat overthrows the Indian state and establishes a reign of terror over the residents of a Himalayan town. A welfare legislation aimed at providing employment and commanding a huge budget becomes 'unimplementable' in a region bedeviled by high levels of poverty and unemployment. Paper Tiger provides a lively ethnographic account of how such seemingly bizarre scenarios come to be in contemporary India. Based on eighteen months of intensive fieldwork, this book presents a unique explanation for why and how progressive laws can do what they do and not, ever-so-often, what they are supposed to do. It reveals the double-edged effects of the reforms that have been ushered in by the post-liberalization Indian state, particularly the effort to render itself more transparent and accountable. Through a meticulous detailing of everyday bureaucratic life on the Himalayan borderland, Paper Tiger makes an argument for shifting the very frames of thought through which we apprehend the workings of the developmental Indian state

Introduction: remaking the public good: a new anthropology of bureaucracy

In this introductory article, we call for a new anthropology of bureaucracy focused on ‘the public good’. We aim to recapture this concept from its classic setting within the discipline of economics. We argue that such a move is particularly important now because new public goods – of transparency, fiscal discipline and decentralization – are being pressed into the service of states and transnational organizations: it has therefore become critical to focus on their techniques, effects and affects through fine-grained ethnography that challenges the economization of the political. We demonstrate our approach through some ethnographic findings from different parts of India. These show how fiscal austerity leads to new limited social contracts and precarious intimacies with the post-liberalization Indian state. This relationship between new public goods and forms of precarious citizenship is then further illuminated by the six articles that follow in this special issue

Introduction: remaking the public good: a new anthropology of bureaucracy

In this introductory article, we call for a new anthropology of bureaucracy focused on ‘the public good’. We aim to recapture this concept from its classic setting within the discipline of economics. We argue that such a move is particularly important now because new public goods – of transparency, fiscal discipline and decentralization – are being pressed into the service of states and transnational organizations: it has therefore become critical to focus on their techniques, effects and affects through fine-grained ethnography that challenges the economization of the political. We demonstrate our approach through some ethnographic findings from different parts of India. These show how fiscal austerity leads to new limited social contracts and precarious intimacies with the post-liberalization Indian state. This relationship between new public goods and forms of precarious citizenship is then further illuminated by the six articles that follow in this special issue

Eating Money: Corruption and its categorical ‘Other’ in the leaky Indian state

AbstractThis article studies corruption in India through an ethnographic elaboration of practices that are colloquially discussed as the ‘eating of money’ (paisa khana) in northern India. It examines both the discourse and practice of eating money in the specific context of the implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005 (NREGA). The article works through two central paradoxes that emerge in the study of corruption and the state. The first paradox relates to the corruption–transparency dyad. The ethnography presented shows clearly that the difficulties in the implementation of NREGA arose directly out of the transparency requirements of the statute, which were impeding the traditional eating of money. Instead of corruption being the villain it turns out that, in this particular context, it was its categorical Other—transparency—that was to blame. The second and related paradox emerges from an ethnographic examination of the processes and things through which development performance, corruption, and transparency are established and adjudged in the contemporary Indian state. Corrupt state practices and transparent state functioning are authoritatively proclaimed through an assessment of evidence—material proof in the form of paper—that is constructed by the Indian state itself. The push for transparency in India at the moment is not only leading to an excessive focus on the production of these paper truths but, more dangerously, is also deflecting attention away from what is described as the ‘real’ (asli) life of welfare programmes. Ultimately, this article contends that we need to eschew treating corruption as an explanatory trope for the failure of development in India. Instead of devising ever-more punitive auditing regimes to stem the leakages of the Indian state, this work suggests that we need a clearer understanding of what the state really is; how—and through which material substances—it functions and demonstrates evidence of its accomplishments.</jats:p