The Lives of Documents

Recently, the Indian government has announced with much fanfare that former Infosys chief Nandan Nilekani will be put in charge of a project to introduce a national biometric ID card. The advantages, laid out in reports from publications like the Economist and the Wall Street Journal, seem appealingly obvious: better provision of services to the poor, especially migrants, ending the confusing system of local identifications subject to state-level corruption and "vote-bank" politics, and above all domestic security from potential terrorists (read: infiltrating Pakistanis). Most of the reader comments submitted to the above named papers on this story are celebratory, viewing the project as a great step forward for India's development. There is also, however, a troubling reminder of the process by which states come to know their citizens: the Economist article, for example, is titled "Peering into their murky world." Gathering information in order to make individuals legible to the state is one of the first principles of what Foucault termed "governmentality," and much historical research over the past few decades has explored just how complicated this task becomes in colonial and post-colonial societies.

India has a long history, dating back to the Raj, of government attempts to identify, classify and record its population. Previously fluid identities (of ethnicity, caste, class, religion) must be fixed, an often impossible or hopelessly contentious procedure. The ostensibly impartial bureaucratic spirit instead produces its own logic of distinctions and exclusions. This is most evident when ascertaining citizenship in the post-Partition states of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Thousands of people are caught between official classifications, their families divided and their identities, loyalties and sentiments of belonging uncertain. Within India, a country that contains a sizable minority population (mostly Muslims), the constant fear of an "enemy within" makes the spectre of Pakistani infiltration all the more effective as a justification for the project of knowing the population. The imperative of domestic security is only partly about terrorism; it also solves the problem of potentially disloyal Muslims and re-defines "Indianness" as something more restrictive. It is therefore not surprising that the ID card scheme was first promoted by L.K. Advani and the BJP, and in the wake of the 2002 state-sponsored massacres of Muslims in Gujarat, trusting governments to be responsible stewards of personal information and not use them toward communal ends is not a given. This mechanism of limiting citizenship and rights is also available for use against illegal or undesired immigrants, threatening further divisions and conflict in the wider South Asian region.

On the other hand, the state's attempt to peer into the "murky world" inherently suffers from enormous difficulties. Of India's 1.2 billion people, those most immediately targeted by the ID card scheme, the poor and migrants who currently lack documentation, are also the hardest to identify and track. Searching for their identity involves actually bestowing documentation upon them for the first time, initiating a confusing and troubled relationship between pieces of paper (or plastic) and the sense of who a person is. During the late colonial period, the need to certify one's status for the purposes of political representation or employment led to lasting anxieties about belonging among marginal groups (like Anglo-Indians on the railways). The document is not a neutral record but a powerful intervention that fundamentally changes the way people perceive themselves and their relationship to the community. The universalising mission of the new ID card likewise threatens not to erase local or regional divisions but to further fracture the personal and political consciousness of those living on the territory of India.


Two of the best books on South Asian history to have appeared in recent years, both as part of the "Cultures of History" series from Columbia University Press, deal with the themes discussed here. Both approach certain modern bureaucratic practices across the colonial/post-colonial divide as living forces intruding into and remaking the most intimate aspects of people's lives. Vazira Zamindar's The Long Partition looks, in part, at the formation of the passport system as the means by which the post-colonial states of India and Pakistan sought to resolve claims of belonging. The stories of divided families, "stateless" individuals, and the long, unfinished process of fixing identities to the nation-state reveal the difficulty and ultimately the violence of such a project. Laura Bear's Lines of the Nation discusses the ambiguous role documentation plays in Anglo-Indians' understanding of themselves: forced by the colonial railway bureaucracy to provide stringent proof of their familial origins, they continue to the present day to be haunted by a lack of (written) evidence that may challenge their status. The struggle of Anglo-Indians to maintain their group identity in the face of an uncertain past and their precarious position in modern Indian society reveals the unforeseen results of centralised bureaucracies attempting to impartially record and classify. Zamindar's and Bear's remarkable historical contributions remind us that documents, whether passports, railway archives, or biometric ID cards, have many lives beyond their role as carriers of information. Their production is an act with serious consequences, and we would do well to heed them.