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.

The Forgotten Orientalist: Louis Malle

Of all the famous explorations of India by Westerners, from Kim to Slumdog Millionaire, none has been so undeservedly ignored by post-colonial scholarship as Louis Malle's epic seven-part 1969 documentary L'Inde fantome, and its accompanying theatrical release Calcutta. Their recent release in a Criterion Collection DVD box set, with crystal-clear restored picture and English subtitles, promises to remove this extraordinary document from the arthouse circuit and bring it to the attention of more students of Indian history, especially in the classroom. A rigorous analysis of Malle's project has so far been the domain of film enthusiasts, but viewing it beyond the narrow lens of artistic technique reveals a complex and contradictory view of India at a particular point in its history as an independent nation-state.

Malle's extended and multifaceted look at India, from urban poverty to social unrest to the remote concerns of its tribal populations, and touching all the hot topics -religion, caste, class, gender- must be judged both as a measure of its historical work (how it reveals a time and a place) and as a literary device that problematises the relationship between a society and an outside observer. In this respect Malle is surely an Orientalist, a Westerner obsessed with exploring India who continually veers between confidence and despair, condescension and sympathy, sincere effort and authorial laziness. Unlike other Orientalists, however, he is unusually open about his frustrations; his ramshackle narration does not shy away from discussing his struggles at coming to terms with what he sees before him. This is perhaps what makes these documentaries endearing even when the viewer may vehemently disagree or question Malle's approach. Even so, one would have to admit that Malle is always better with the historical particularities than with the generalisations and attempts to extract meaning from the pictures.

The first episode of L'Inde fantome, shown as a miniseries on television, is by far the worst and sets up an unpromising frame. Malle's conceit was that he would let the camera guide him, and he would act more as an observer than as an interpreter. His lack of familiarity with India, especially his choice to travel without translators speaking local languages and apparently without doing much background reading, is a deliberate choice to get at the "real" India. He starts out by emphatically rejecting all the contributions from the middle and upper classes, whom he derisively calls "Anglicised Indians," casting them as inauthentic. Government officials, academics, and anyone who speaks in good English is automatically distrusted and dismissed. The problem with this approach is that first, these groups play a vital role in shaping the realities Malle sees around him, and secondly that he does not interview many of the other Indians anyway, and when he does they speak mostly in English! Malle's prejudices lessen as the series moves on, and we get to hear a lot from businessmen, party leaders, and a few artists. One of the strongest aspects of the film from a historical point of view are the uneasy interviews with famous figures like Jyoti Basu and Bal Thackeray. Malle's suspicious questions do not give them a free pass; indeed, especially in Thackeray's case (then a young, charismatic figure on the rise), letting them speak is enough to allow the viewer to form a decisive opinion about what's going on. Thackeray proudly displays his aggressive communalism, and Malle doesn't need a voice-over to paint him as a dangerous force in Indian politics.
But it is the subalterns who suffer the most in Malle's presentation. Peasants, urban crowds, beggars, tribals, sadhus, and especially women are viewed from a distance, as a spectacle or an object of particular interest. They look into the camera, and the camera looks back, recording silently. They rarely speak, and when they do it is in broken English or with the help of an unknown translator. We never find out where Malle gets his information about who the subject of a particular scene is and what he or she is doing. How do we know how much this bricklayer earns? How do we know which caste this woman is from? Malle of course doesn't need to detail every step of the filming process, but his narration (recorded after he had returned to France) appears as a detached account that is part fact, part imagination and conjecture. For example, when Malle admits that his peaceful utopian view of fishermen on the banks of the sea is disrupted by a banal argument over the price of fish, he doesn't go further by telling us why the people are arguing. He films on and on, the women yelling at each other in the vernacular without translation. The viewer gets the point: the endless interplay between the fantasy of India and the mundane, but Malle is still secretly afraid of the mundane and stops short of letting the viewer go too far into it. Some part of the scene must still remain mysterious and fundamentally incomprehensible.

Malle's Orientalism is dominated by his perceived inability to ultimately "know" India. This is most obvious in the extended Bharatanatyam segment in Part 2. After days of uninterrupted filming of dancers practicing, Malle is convinced that the essence of India is beyond him and all outside observers. Through their movements, the dancers express a quality of "Indianness" that is only known to them and cannot be accessed from the outside. His obvious proof consists of two white dancers, who (Malle thinks) are too clumsy and can learn only by rote, never achieving the natural grace of the Indian students. Here, on the one hand Malle is an atypical Orientalist because he respects Indian culture and does not presume to dissect it, categorise it or manipulate it. On the other hand, what could be more typically Orientalist than advocating such an essential separation of the human experience? Malle is categorically saying that learning the mythology, practicing the dance, speaking the language, and any other kind of epistemic activity is bound to fail. This perspective deeply influences how Malle approaches almost all his subjects, but becomes especially evident in the villages. When discussing caste hierarchy or religious practice, Malle gives a few limited explanations, but always retreats into the impossibility of ever knowing why people behave the way they do. They are Indians, we are Westerners. They think differently than us, and view the world differently. We can observe, record, comment but not understand.
In one way, this is the inevitable outcome of Malle's choice to film from a distance and not to try and know India in the first place. This may be a well-meaning attempt to prevent his own prejudices and investigative techniques from corrupting the desired "real," but it is more often due to a sense of fear and uncertainty that he is inherently incapable of knowing India. In this respect, Malle's documentaries are worth careful study to tease out the ambiguities of the outsider in India. This is rich literary ground.
Historically speaking, this ambiguity is more harmful than interesting. Malle demonstrates several times the ability to make subtle and unique observations about how post-colonial Indian society works, on topics that far too little scholarship has focused on. For example, in the first episode, he notes that mainstream Indian newspapers do not report on violence or rape. This quick point, derived undoubtedly from comparing the Indian press with the one in France, can lead us to ask a thousand questions: about patriarchal norms, a "tacit consent" to construct an information flow that puts some facts in the public sphere while concealing others, or about the distance between the urban literate newspaper reader and the rural site of certain events. Finally, we can ask how this has changed in the past 40 years since Malle's documentary (the observation would certainly not hold true today). In the fifth episode, this theme is briefly touched upon again when Malle notes that few crimes against Dalits are reported in the press, and that it only takes a policeman or minor official to break the "law of silence" (Malle's term) for these acts to see the light of day. Now we also have a glimpse of the middlemen on the information chain, and the complex position they find themselves in. These topics are severely underdeveloped in studies of post-colonial India, for justifiable reasons of sensitivity and obscurity. Malle's outsider view casually and almost unconsciously brings them to light.

But in the end, Malle cannot transcend the central contradiction of his project, between the desire to explain and the inability to know. He spends much of the seven episodes talking about economic exploitation, showing the power of rich landlords and urban capitalists, the proletarianisation of peasants, and the struggle to organise for better working conditions. He interviews prominent Marxists and assists at major demonstrations (including a striking student riot dispersed by tear gas and gunfire in Calcutta). Malle is sympathetic to the oppressed and speaks the language of class, as would be expected of a French intellectual in 1968. But despite his confident and fair economic analysis of India's problems, Malle slips back into the language of peasants as "fatalistic," and incapable of change. In the very last scene, Malle offers what is perhaps the most adventurous explanation he is capable of: that the India of tradition from time immemorial is changing into an India beset by the recognisable economic woes of the modern world. The tyranny of caste becomes the tyranny of class. It's a simplistic judgment that ignores the many ways in which caste and class have interacted and co-existed, and how their relationship evolves across time and space. In the end, when it came to giving his film a title, Malle chose to admit that finding the "real" India was impossible. For him it remained merely a phantom.

The Empire Debate: Thinking at an Angle

I may be seven years too late on this one. In the months after 11 September 2001, when the United States had finished bombing Afghanistan and was gearing up for another round in Iraq, the word "empire," with its many meanings, past, present and possible, was seemingly on everyone's lips. When Donald Rumsfeld caustically stated, "We don't do empire," the floodgates were opened and historians poured into the breach. The historical balance sheet of previous empires, which almost exclusively meant our apparent predecessors the British (with a few token references to the schoolboy debater's favourite retreat, the good old Romans!), were furiously calculated from both the Left and the Right with a view to answering a surprising question: not merely whether empire was good or bad, but should the United States become one? And if it was one already, should it continue, or even try harder, to be one?

The arguments against the position that the U.S. has an imperial role to play in today's world have been made ad nauseam, and I have no intention of repeating them here. They usually involve a simple rhetorical tactic: directly rebut the apologists' claims that previous empires (read: the British) had done "good things." Thus, the critics started listing a whole lot of "bad things," from famines to massacres to institutionalised racial and economic discrimination. This calculus went back and forth until the only thing a reasonable person who hadn't yet made up their mind about this could conclude was that empires had done both good and bad things, and picking a side was by and large a question of political preference.
An altogether more interesting thing to do is to take the imperial apologists' claims at face value and see how they measure up to their own promises; in other words, to dissect the internal logic of the argument itself.

Summarised quickly, the "good things" the British Empire gave to the world include economic development (the shining example being India's railroad system), parliamentary democracy (plus the rule of law and notions of citizenship and liberty), and some cultural fun stuff like the English language and team sports (cricket). All of these things make it easy for countries like India to be part of a modern, globalising world. Now, if we agree that this is indeed good, the question then becomes, what is the role of empire in the process?
One ingenious critique of the idea of empire was suggested by Amitav Ghosh in the essay "Imperial Temptations," published at the height of the debate in 2003. Empire as a way of bringing good things to the world was bound to fail because it "cannot be the object of universal human aspirations." In other words, not everyone can have an empire, which relies on a permanent hierarchy of ruler and ruled. Ghosh says the idea of a nation-state, whatever its failings, at least holds a generalisable promise: that everyone, everywhere, can be a citizen with equal rights in his or her country. He also points out that empires tend to inevitably expand, leading to overreach and conflict. This is a useful rebuttal to the notion that the U.S. should be the world overlord lest we all descend into a Dark Age of petty squabbling states; instead, hegemonic U.S. power is likely to strain its own resources and give rise to a host of competitors large (China) and small (various terrorist networks and rogue states) all striving to bring down the giant. Perhaps this point has only become clearer since 2003.

But even if empire is a rotten way to get it done, what of those good things? The internal logic of the argument "Empire brought good things therefore empire is good" is fundamentally flawed for a simple reason. All those good things can be fully enjoyed only after the empire is gone! For example, Indians can use their railroads today because the British are no longer there to impose the many restrictions they were built under. Saying this is not necessarily agreeing with the "drain of wealth" theory. On balance, however small the advantage, it's better for Indians to use all the railroads for their own purposes all of the time. Next, parliamentary democracy. Only after a political independence movement that created a separate nation can Indians have constitutions and elections. And so on, until we are left with only cricket (and maybe not even that, considering how deeply Indianised the sport has become).
The conclusion here is that empire needed a powerful counter-force (for example, anti-colonial nationalism) to dissolve itself and spread its good things to the very people it had meant to help all along. An apologist could counter that the British Empire was not brought down by nationalism but by its own weakness and lack of will. Thus, if India and the rest were colonised some more, perhaps a few more decades or centuries until all the good things were in place, the empire could have left of its own accord and its subjects would be better off. This ignores quite forcefully the last thirty or so years of the British Empire: political reforms in India, for example, were not handed down smoothly according to some beneficent master-plan but fought for tooth-and-nail by nationalists (who realised themselves only after many years and internal squabbles that they wanted to be independent). The point is that nobody knew when the end would come, let alone planned it. Without resistance of any kind, it is conceivable that the British Empire would have gone on forever with less of the good things and more of the bad.
This brings me to the final nail in the coffin of the pro-empire argument. Frederick Cooper has brilliantly written in his book Colonialism in Question that when the British and French empires "tried to make themselves more forward-looking economically and more legitimate politically, they could not face the escalation of claim-making their actions encouraged, the tensions that followed from their economic interventions, and the high cost of making an empire meaningful as a unit of belonging." In other words, when empire tried to bring more good things it found the demand so overwhelming it had to give it all up fast. Or, as I've put it above, empire required its own demise to complete its mission, which means that empire is ultimately unable to do the job.

There is one more line of reasoning that could yet salvage the empire: counterfactuals. If empires are doomed to fail, is it not better that we had them for a while, considering the alternatives? Wasn't the British Empire better for its colonies than the German or the Russian? Here there are multiple confusions and nuances. First of all, critics do not condemn the British Empire because it was British but because it was an Empire. The very phenomenon of European imperialism is in question. Secondly, it follows that we cannot imagine a scenario in which only the British would not start an empire. A reasonable historical counterfactual would instead suppose that if one European power did not expand, neither would the others. The conditions that gave rise to imperialism (technological progress, maritime exploration, the interconnected European economy with its industrialising tendencies) gave rise to many empires, often because of competition with each other (i.e. the British became powerful in the late 18th century in large part because they had overtaken the Dutch, then the French). Indeed, as Amitav Ghosh reminds us, if the mark of success for a nation is having an empire, then all nations who aspire to success will want one.
The only counterfactual that remains is, if Europe had not expanded, would the rest of the world be better off evolving on its own, India going forth from the Mughals and so on. This question is impossible to answer, because modernity and empire happened to have progressed together. England in the 18th century, if you didn't know what the future would bring, was not a much better place to live in than Mughal India. And when living conditions and economic development and all that began to improve, they did so in metropole and colony at the same time, to the disadvantage of the colonies. Scholars dreaming up "alternative modernities" can do so at their leisure. Like it or not, the modern world and empires are inseparable. It only remains to be seen if this still holds true.