The power of the ‘universal’: caste and missionary medical discourses of alcoholism in the Telugu print sphere, 1900–1940

This article explores missionary medical discourses in three Telugu journals published in the early twentieth century, to analyse how caste pivoted denunciations of alcohol, especially toddy and arrack, in the Madras Presidency and the Hyderabad state. It argues that one women’s missionary journal, Vivekavathi, deployed medical knowledge to formulate subtle and occasionally explicit condemnations of toddy and arrack as unclean and unhealthy substances. The journal relied on universal medical and missionary, British and American knowledge frameworks to mark out Dalits and other marginalised castes as consumers of these local beverages. This stigma was conjured through medical narratives of marginalised castes as lacking in the knowledge of alcohol’s relation to digestion, toddy’s role in ruining maternal and child nutrition, the unhygienic environment of arrack shops and their propensity to ‘alcoholism’. However, this article also traces counter-caste voices who too invoked ‘the power of the universal’ to dispel caste stigma against marginalised castes. While both sets of voices deployed medical ‘enslavement’ to alcohol as an interpretive move, they differed in their social imperatives and political imaginaries, defined in caste terms. This article explores a third set of implications of the term ‘universal’ by analysing global medico-missionary narratives of alcohol in two other Telugu journals. On a methodological plane, this article also pushes for a hybrid reading of what counts for ‘scientific instruction’, where hymns, catechisms, parables and allegories are considered alongside conventional scientific experiments. In that sense, it upholds vernacular missionary publications as an invaluable resource for the social history of medicin

Affective Activism and Digital Archiving: Relief Work and Migrant Workers during the Covid-19 Lockdown in India

This article traces what I term the affective activism of volunteers, civil society organiza- tions, and lorry drivers engaged in relief work to assist stranded migrant workers wanting to travel home during the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic and national lockdown in India. I define affective activism as an archival practice that is driven by relief figures’ af- fects of fear, anger, and aspirations—in this instance, toward their legal and administrative accountability to funders. Drawing on my ethnographic work in a relief network and using independent interviews I conducted, this article critically compares two modalities of dig- ital archiving conducted by relief figures: collecting migrant workers’ Aadhaar—unique biometric number identifiers issued to Indians—and digitally archiving their relief efforts through videos, voice-notes, and WhatsApp Messenger screenshots. I argue that relief fig- ures expressed their anxieties in the form of talismanic beliefs that records of Aadhaar and their material infrastructure would keep safe the migrant workers they were trying to help. Alternately, and sometimes, concomitantly, they performatively deployed Whatsapp artifacts to support their accountability in the face of bureaucratic and political specters. Both forms highlight the desire of relief figures to exceed paper forms and state practices in their archival impulses

Bearing witness to the Covid-19 lockdown

During the lockdown, migrant workers have produced ‘proofs’ to lay claim to promised aid, display grief and gratitude, and to archive violence they faced. These fragments from the worker-as-witness throw up critical questions on practices of welfare and aid

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

In pursuit of proof : a history of identification documents in India

Weaving together a hitherto unattempted history of making and verifying identification documents, In Pursuit of Proof tells stories from the ground about the urban margins of India, and Delhi in particular. The book moves with agility across the late colonial era and the postcolonial years marked by ration cards, refugee registration certificates, permits, licences, and affidavits. How did the ration card, introduced during the Second World War, crystallize into proof of residence? After the Partition, how did the Indian state classify refugees as poor, displaced, and lower caste? Might there be alternative conceptualizations of the much-maligned ‘Licence Raj’? How does proof manifest itself for those living in Delhi’s slums? And how does the unique identification number, termed the Aadhaar, impinge on rural migrants dwelling in the city? Relying on intensive ethnographic and archival methods, the book answers these questions and theorizes the Indian state as one whose welfare capacities of governing are drawn from popular knowledge practices of documenting and proving identities

In pursuit of proof : a history of identification documents in India

Weaving together a hitherto unattempted history of making and verifying identification documents, In Pursuit of Proof tells stories from the ground about the urban margins of India, and Delhi in particular. The book moves with agility across the late colonial era and the postcolonial years marked by ration cards, refugee registration certificates, permits, licences, and affidavits. How did the ration card, introduced during the Second World War, crystallize into proof of residence? After the Partition, how did the Indian state classify refugees as poor, displaced, and lower caste? Might there be alternative conceptualizations of the much-maligned ‘Licence Raj’? How does proof manifest itself for those living in Delhi’s slums? And how does the unique identification number, termed the Aadhaar, impinge on rural migrants dwelling in the city? Relying on intensive ethnographic and archival methods, the book answers these questions and theorizes the Indian state as one whose welfare capacities of governing are drawn from popular knowledge practices of documenting and proving identities

Shifting Temperance Landscapes: Locating Caste and Gender within the Spatial Politics of Drink in the Madras Presidency

This article examines spatio-political formulations of drink in caste terms during the 1930s in the Madras Presidency (region) in colonial South India. It advances two arguments. The first argument is that the temperance agitation, driven by the regional wing of the dominant nationalist party organization, the Tamil Nadu Congress Committee, relied on physical, legal, and social formulations of space expressed in caste terms. One such articulation entailed the likening of toddy to the menstrual blood of an Adi Dravida woman. The second, more critical argument is that the resignifying of stigmatizing meanings of alcohol within egalitarian and empowering temperance landscapes of Adi-Dravida political formations is deliberate. The article demonstrates the urgency of framing temperance vis-a-vis Dalit politics of public space in overarching terms. It also asks and answers the critical question of how Adi-Dravida and Tamil Nadu Congress political figures imagined each other and manifested in each other’s spatial sites of alcohol

Enumeration as Pedagogic Process: Gendered Encounters with Identity Documents in Delhi’s Urban Poor Spaces

This paper argues that the various encounters of female slum residents residing in Delhi’s margins with identification documents shape certain instrumental and symbolic forms of knowledge about the city. Urban poor women’s encounters with identity documents produce ‘piecemeal pedagogies’ in which these women try to educate themselves and each other about bureaucratic channels and application procedures in and through handling documents. Such encounters also yield thick knowledge about the city and gendered frameworks of access and entitlement. The arguments about the pedagogic process are made through an assessment of various forms of literacy complicated by unequal social relations. This paper frames the pedagogies of ID documents in the lives of the city’s urban poor over the last two decades, which have been marked by shifting technologies of enumeration

Bearing witness to the Covid-19 lockdown

During the lockdown, migrant workers have produced ‘proofs’ to lay claim to promised aid, display grief and gratitude, and to archive violence they faced. These fragments from the worker-as-witness throw up critical questions on practices of welfare and aid