Emotions in the Time of ‘Licence Raj’

What happens when low-ranking officials encounter (identification) documents in a society saturated by emotion-laden practices of kinship and ritual? Documents of rationing summoned deep interpretive traditions of governance and enabled the fluid negotiation of administrative boundaries of rules. In addition, they unlocked emotions of food officials that were ‘culturally motivated’ and ‘socially articulated’ (Lutz and White 1986: 409) and conjured dynamic constructions of the bureaucratic Indian self. This chapter argues that it is by paying attention to the tangibility, materiality, and at other times, the magical power of rationing documents to circulate in various spaces that ‘street-level bureaucrats’—to deploy Michael Lipsky’s phrase (Lipsky 2010: xi)—were able to flesh out cultural norms that were dear to them during the period designated the License Raj in India.

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.

Refugees and Their Displaced Documents of Identity

This chapter begins by posing the question, how did the Indian state classify refugees as poor, displaced, and lower caste and how did it create the material infrastructure of identifying welfare beneficiaries? The Partition, which brought in its wake a sea of displaced populations that deluged both countries, threw up conundrums of identification that straddled the philosophical and the feasible, the material and the intangible. Given that there were no pre-existing genres of recognizing the refugee figure so alien to the memory of the colonial state, civic and rehabilitation authorities had no choice but to accept and privilege alternative or ‘collateral evidence’ that emerged from the makeshift documents and narrated itineraries of refugees and refugee associations. While focusing its inquiries on a smaller universe of those disparagingly termed ‘refugee squatters’ in post-Partition Delhi and their housing claims, the present chapter seeks to show how refugee knowledge and popular practices of self-recognition were salient to the fashioning of identification documents.

Conclusion

The conclusion of the book argues that state conventions of issuing identification documents and administering poor subjects by absorbing popular knowledge practices did not manifest themselves abruptly or evenly. The very terms and connotations of people demanding certain genres, making and re-making identification documents cannot be read independently of the historical and socio-spatial contexts in which relations between the state and its subjects unfolded. Where the Indian state has drawn out its welfare capacities through popular mobilizations by collectives such as workers’ unions, refugee associations, and slum residents, a unique reliance on a number-based ecosystem threatens to undo the reciprocities and dynamics of governing the poor. We may then be in clamorous need of paper-based infrastructures and potentialities of engendering evidentiary knowledge of the welfare subject where they allow for such innovations.

Making Proof in a Slum

In the popular memory of slum residents and the urban history of Delhi, a survey exercise and a drive to issue a bundle of IDs stand out for their remarkable move to erase the mandate of producing proof of identity. This enumeration and identification initiative carried out under the vigilant leadership of the then-prime minister V.P. Singh was unprecedented in that it demolished historically sacrosanct criteria of submitting evidence of ‘occupation’. Such an intervention, however, forced the enumerating food official to respect the administrative ‘factum of residence’ by relying on extra-documentary aesthetic-material and affective practices of counting and verifying families and their slum residences. This chapter argues that the initiative and its aftermath enabled both a precarious and kind regime of urban legalism where residents were able to set up a diverse range of material, emotional, and familial claims on housing benefits through popular practices such as counterfeiting, securing FIRs for lost cards, and filing Right to Information (RTI) petitions against counterfeiters.

Wartime Identification

This preliminary chapter presents a picture of the various wartime initiatives to identify, enumerate, and classify subjects in what constituted a historic and unprecedented moment of colonial documentation. During the period of the Second World War, the ration card emerged as an indispensable administrative marker of a verifiable address and a ‘proper’ family as well as a critical model of identification in fraught discussions around fraud and corruption. While the colonial regime of rationing documents opened the floodgates to a deluge of genres which varied on the basis of province, state, and region, this chapter demonstrates that in Delhi they were the outcome of cultural mobilizations by groups such as textile workers’ unions, railway unions, washermen’s groups, and religious communities.