'In Pursuit of Proof' brings forth a hitherto unattempted history of claiming, making and verifying identification documents in the urban margins of India and Delhi in particular. The book summons to life past and contemporary processes of bureaucratic recognition and administrative verification of subjects by locating them in the everyday material worlds of especially the poor. In attempting to illuminate the paper regimes of welfare that are now being radically transformed owing to the technological infrastructures of Aadhaar, the author resorts to eclectic forms of ethnography and archival research to delineate the pursuit of proof across various timescales.
AbstractThis article traces what I term the affective activism of volunteers, civil society organizations, 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' affects 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 digital 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 figures 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. [affective activism, India relief work, Covid‐19 lockdown, migrant workers, digital archiving, and visual politics]
This article looks at rhetorical devices employed by certain classes of claimants in applications for rationed commodities in wartime Delhi in the last decade of colonial rule. In the face of a war-driven colonial frenzy to regulate and constrict all essential and non-essential commodities, rhetoric in application-writing flourished. The covering letters accompanying application forms for rations resembled petitions in their appeals to sovereignty, their affinity to rhetorical parlance, the scope they extended to applicants to exploit colonial structures of bureaucratic authority and their role in shaping the formation of cultural subjectivities. This turn to rhetoric was equally implicit in colonial responses to requests for supplementary rations which were phrased in turgid and caustic prose that drew out the various rationalities of the war and colonial rule while taking cognizance of the encumbrances and cultural imperatives of the everyday. Rhetorical thrusts were not confined to the written requests accompanying the application form. The forms for rationed commodities like motor spirit, electricity, tyres and tubes were themselves peppered with persuasive graphic signs and artifacts that enacted certain relationships between the document and the rule, between intermediate and higher authorities, between applicants and rationed commodities.
This article seeks to find the metaphorical 'signature' of the food official in the intricate materialities of everyday life and particularly, in one such familiar realm, the production of documents. While doing so, this article considers the worlds of instinct, emotion and conscience as well as kinship and family in shaping official roles and welfare processes. This article argues that documentary practices of rationing provided the space for the self-fashioning of food officials who animatedly fleshed out their parts in enacting various regulations and injunctions. This article also attempts to lay out the postcolonial framework of food distribution through an ethnographic study of documentary forms and practices around the rationing document within what used to be the Union Territory of Delhi from 1965 to 1990.
