LASSnet 2010: The Paper Trail: Documentary Forms and Practices
Duration: 01:16:23; Aspect Ratio: 1.333:1; Hue: 59.221; Saturation: 0.204; Lightness: 0.310; Volume: 0.245; Cuts per Minute: 0.497
Summary: Panel Description:
This panel attempts to understand ‘official’ documents as material objects that circulate across various epistemic, and social registers. Documents have been seen as bureaucratic record exemplifying the documentary micro practices of the governmental state, as artifacts of modern knowledge that are imbricated in specific technologies of writing, truth and authenticity and as talismanic objects capable of carrying, containing, or inciting affective energies which are experienced as real, in specific webs of sociality. As commodity forms, official pieces of paper from identity cards to divorce decrees, both disembody and rematerialize social, sovereign and economic relations. What is the place of documents in the bureaucratic universe - how do we make sense of their proliferation as legal objects, counterfeits, official and popular imitations and apparitions of the legal? What are the archival logics underlying documents and the technologies of identification and certification that produce the document as acceptable truth? What are the forms of legibility and illegibility engendered through these everyday bureaucratic practices and protocols?
Through this conversation, we hope to explore how particular legal documentary forms and writing practices, function as nodes of sovereignty and governmentality as well as counter-sovereignties, contestation and resistance.
Chair/Discussant: Radhika Singha
Panel coordinator(s): Taringini Sriraman and Shrimoyee Nandini Ghosh
Title:Forgery, Perjury, and Attestation in Early Colonial Madras
Panelist: Bhavani Raman, History Department, Princeton University
Abstract: This paper discusses the importance of attestation protocols and evidentiary practices to the exercise of colonial authority in early colonial Madras. Document writing under colonialism has remained subsumed in arguments about codification in which writing is contrasted to the fluidity of customary practice and oral guarantees. In contrast, this paper attends to the tense conditions under which the norms of generating credible information were determined, and degree to which monopolizing the protocols of attestation was central to Company juridical authority. Using official correspondence on forgery and perjury as a lens onto documentary procedure, this paper traces how the early colonial state’s discretionary authority was consolidated through documents in the popular imagination of Madras inhabitants.
Title: In the Image of the Document: the Ration Card and the ID Documents Regime in India
Panelist: Taringini Sriramanan, PhD (Delhi University), also registered as doctoral student at Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS)
Abstract: Identification documents are centrepieces of the paradoxical life of modern states, animated by sovereign discourses of legitimacy, legality, legibility but also those of everyday life, informality and illegality. They are products of rational authority and modern state functions of setting norms, enumerating and recording populations and evolving administrative categories. Yet they are an indispensable part of discursive processes of fashioning into existence and producing the modern state and enacting its persisting rationality. If documents are useful in the hands of modern states to reinforce bureaucratic, legal-rational authority, they also help constitute the very discursive material of which modern states have been moulded. If the functions of a document which entitle a holder to exercise vote, pay taxes, cross borders are all reiterative of state sovereignty, identification documents through their various ceremonial tokens of seals, stamps, signatures and the inscription of sovereign presence help set up this legal authority.
This paper seeks to foray into the discursive life of the identification document contained in the legal, cultural and social norms that it signifies and understand the various conceptual categories that constitute identity – name, residence, family, employment, gender and sexual status. An identification document, though it was the property of the state, was shaped by private actors like doctors, employers and firms. I make out the history of official construction of these categories to be far from being an inclusive, just and transparent process or one that strengthened the agency of legal subjects. Official mistrust of subjects, protocols of representation through which identities were filtered, bureaucratic conventions of objectifying identity through written testimonies and the fear of illegality ensured the distance of the document from the documented. While a comprehensive study of identification documents falls outside the scope of this paper, I wish to navigate through a wealth of rationing documents that were some of the earliest identification documents in post-independent India. A historical study of these documents straddling colonial and post-independence India (1940 to 1970 roughly) will help me piece together the identification documents regime which constantly precluded the self-definition and agency of subject-citizens in India.
Title:The Many Lives of Stamp Paper: The Telgi Stamp Paper Scam
Panelist: Shrimoyee Nandini Ghosh, Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, JNU
Abstract: Given its status in everyday life in India as an instantly recognizable, and immensely popular legal form, and its' uniqueness in combining a revenue and evidentiary function within a single legal instrumentality the marginality of 'stamp paper' and 'stamp duty' as objects worthy of analysis within the regime of doctrinal law is somewhat surprising. They have received little attention from the point of view jurisprudential scholarship, and the few legal books on the subject, are in the nature of manuals for the use of the practitioner. My paper attempts to map the many lives of stamp paper, as it circulates across various social, legal and epistemic worlds.
It is to in light of this background that I will then analyse the notorious Telgi Stamp paper scandal. In 2001, Abdul Karim Telgi was arrested for having defrauded the state of of Rs 100 crore (US $ 20 million) by infiltrating the state’s stamp paper distribution bureaucracy. The Telgi fraud case received unrelenting media coverage, until Telgi's conviction, and eventual death in custody. A scandal can serve as a “critical event" that reveals otherwise obscured socially embedded structural factors, working to contain 'contradictory, and possibly even violent social impulses’. In this paper I wish to use the moral spectacle of the Telgi scam to understand the (under)worlds of Indian legality, and something of the complicated relationships between power, paper, money and truth.
Title:Forgery, Perjury, and Attestation in Early Colonial Madras
Panelist: Bhavani Raman, History Department, Princeton University
Abstract: This paper discusses the importance of attestation protocols and evidentiary practices to the exercise of colonial authority in early colonial Madras. Document writing under colonialism has remained subsumed in arguments about codification in which writing is contrasted to the fluidity of customary practice and oral guarantees. In contrast, this paper attends to the tense conditions under which the norms of generating credible information were determined, and degree to which monopolizing the protocols of attestation was central to Company juridical authority. Using official correspondence on forgery and perjury as a lens onto documentary procedure, this paper traces how the early colonial state's discretionary authority was consolidated through documents in the popular imagination of Madras inhabitants.
2001
Abdul Karim Telgi
ID
India
Madras
Telgi
US $ 20 million
apparitions
archival
attestation
borders
bureaucratic
centrepieces
certification
codification
colonial
company
correspondence
counterfeits
"critical event"
crore
discursive
documents
employment
evidentiary
family
forgery
fraud
gender
governmentality
identification
illegibility
imitations
juridical
legal
legal-rational
legality
legibility
micro practices
money
money
moral
name
objects
official
paper
perjury
post-Independence
power
ration card
rationality
rationing
residence
revenue
scam
sex
sexual
sovereignty
spectacle
stamp duty
stamp paper
talismanic
taxes
truth
underworld
Title: In the Image of the Document: the Ration Card and the ID Documents Regime in India
Panelist: Taringini Sriramanan, PhD (Delhi University), also registered as doctoral student at Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS)
Abstract: Identification documents are centrepieces of the paradoxical life of modern states, animated by sovereign discourses of legitimacy, legality, legibility but also those of everyday life, informality and illegality. They are products of rational authority and modern state functions of setting norms, enumerating and recording populations and evolving administrative categories. Yet they are an indispensable part of discursive processes of fashioning into existence and producing the modern state and enacting its persisting rationality. If documents are useful in the hands of modern states to reinforce bureaucratic, legal-rational authority, they also help constitute the very discursive material of which modern states have been moulded. If the functions of a document which entitle a holder to exercise vote, pay taxes, cross borders are all reiterative of state sovereignty, identification documents through their various ceremonial tokens of seals, stamps, signatures and the inscription of sovereign presence help set up this legal authority.
This paper seeks to foray into the discursive life of the identification document contained in the legal, cultural and social norms that it signifies and understand the various conceptual categories that constitute identity – name, residence, family, employment, gender and sexual status. An identification document, though it was the property of the state, was shaped by private actors like doctors, employers and firms. I make out the history of official construction of these categories to be far from being an inclusive, just and transparent process or one that strengthened the agency of legal subjects. Official mistrust of subjects, protocols of representation through which identities were filtered, bureaucratic conventions of objectifying identity through written testimonies and the fear of illegality ensured the distance of the document from the documented. While a comprehensive study of identification documents falls outside the scope of this paper, I wish to navigate through a wealth of rationing documents that were some of the earliest identification documents in post-independent India. A historical study of these documents straddling colonial and post-independence India (1940 to 1970 roughly) will help me piece together the identification documents regime which constantly precluded the self-definition and agency of subject-citizens in India.
Title:The Many Lives of Stamp Paper: The Telgi Stamp Paper Scam
Panelist: Shrimoyee Nandini Ghosh, Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, JNU
Abstract: Given its status in everyday life in India as an instantly recognizable, and immensely popular legal form, and its' uniqueness in combining a revenue and evidentiary function within a single legal instrumentality the marginality of 'stamp paper' and 'stamp duty' as objects worthy of analysis within the regime of doctrinal law is somewhat surprising. They have received little attention from the point of view jurisprudential scholarship, and the few legal books on the subject, are in the nature of manuals for the use of the practitioner. My paper attempts to map the many lives of stamp paper, as it circulates across various social, legal and epistemic worlds.
It is to in light of this background that I will then analyse the notorious Telgi Stamp paper scandal. In 2001, Abdul Karim Telgi was arrested for having defrauded the state of of Rs 100 crore (US $ 20 million) by infiltrating the state's stamp paper distribution bureaucracy. The Telgi fraud case received unrelenting media coverage, until Telgi's conviction, and eventual death in custody. A scandal can serve as a "critical event" that reveals otherwise obscured socially embedded structural factors, working to contain 'contradictory, and possibly even violent social impulses'. In this paper I wish to use the moral spectacle of the Telgi scam to understand the (under)worlds of Indian legality, and something of the complicated relationships between power, paper, money and truth.
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