The Document in the Digital
Considered within the history of documenting welfare beneficiaries in India, the Aadhaar is unprecedented in that the unique number is a digital, portable identity and part of ‘a larger administrative and technological regime’ (Bennett and Lyon 2008) of cloud-based authentication. This chapter argues, however, that the production of this identifier has necessitated miming existing bureaucratic habits of inscription and mobilizing the rhetoric, ritualism and the materiality common to processes of issuing and verifying identification documents. Far from being an ID that is insulated from the host of administratively restrictive genres of identification documents like ration cards and caste certificates, the Aadhaar is relevant only within a paper-based matrix of elite norms of proof, urban spatiality of power brokerage, and the politics of staking out regional identities. Based on an intensive ethnography around a rural poor community, the chapter shows that the current welfare ecology still contingent on address norms requires not so much an electronic number identifier but rather a dynamic interplay of popular, quasi-legal, and legal documents of identity.