Identity And Identification In India

Can a state empower its citizens by classifying them? Or do reservation policies reinforce the very categories they are meant to eradicate? Indian reservation policies on government jobs, legislative seats and university admissions for disadvantaged groups, like affirmative action policies elsewhere, are based on the premise that recognizing group distinctions in society is necessary to subvert these distinctions. Yet the official identification of eligible groups has unintended side-effects on identity politics. Bridging theories which emphasize the fluidity of identities and those which highlight the utility of group-based mobilizations and policies, this book exposes didactic enforcement of categorizations, while recognizing the social and political gains facilitated by group-based strategies.

Weaving together a hitherto unattempted history of making and verifying identification documents, In Pursuit of Proof tells stories from the ground about the urban margins of India, and Delhi in particular. The book moves with agility across the late colonial era and the postcolonial years marked by ration cards, refugee registration certificates, permits, licences, and affidavits. How did the ration card, introduced during the Second World War, crystallize into proof of residence? After the Partition, how did the Indian state classify refugees as poor, displaced, and lower caste? Might there be alternative conceptualizations of the much-maligned ‘Licence Raj’? How does proof manifest itself for those living in Delhi’s slums? And how does the unique identification number, termed the Aadhaar, impinge on rural migrants dwelling in the city? Relying on intensive ethnographic and archival methods, the book answers these questions and theorizes the Indian state as one whose welfare capacities of governing are drawn from popular knowledge practices of documenting and proving identities.

Questions of identity and identification are among the most important evolving concerns of contemporary cultural studies. Through processes of personal identification with discursively constructed subject positions, identities emerge across a wide range of cultural practices in the course of social interactions involving the use of language and other semiotic systems manifested in cultural artefacts of various kinds. The present collection includes a selection of papers on the topic of identity and identification in cultural studies today. Incorporating theoretical contributions and practical case studies, this monograph adds to contemporary debates on identity-forging practices from various theoretical positions in different social, historic and national contexts. The chapters of this volume range from overtly theoretical discussions on the construction of identities and subjectivities in post-modernity, to examinations of the crucial role of (print) media in identity-construction and -representation processes in contemporary social formations through an insight into other key issues in cultural studies, such as gender politics and the construction of femininities, the hybridization of identities in the context of postcolonial work, and the interplay between collective identities and discourses on nation.

This book explores contesting identities, international politics, migration and democratic practices in the context of globalizing India. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, it looks at one of the oldest migratory routes across a volatile region in eastern India which is fraught with violent claims of separate statehood. The book offers an account of how the ‘North Bengal’ region has acted as a gateway to migrant populations over time and points to why it must be understood as a shifting and liminal space through a study of Bodoland, Gorkhaland, Kamatapuri, Siliguri and the Greater Cooch Behar movements. It shows the region’s politics of identity or quest for homeland not as a means of compensating for the lack or absence of identity, but as an everyday practice of living that very absence, across borders and boundaries, without arriving at any definitive and stable identity, along with impacts and manifestations in democratic political processes. A major intervention in modern political theory – shedding new light on concepts such as home and homeland, space and self, sovereignty, nation-state, freedom and democracy – this book will be of interest to scholars and researchers of political science, modern South Asian history, sociology and social anthropology, and migration and diaspora studies.

Revisionist in approach, global in scope, and a seminal contribution to scholarship, this original and thought-provoking book critiques traditional notions about Anglo-Indians, a mixed descent minority community from India. It interrogates traditional notions about Anglo-Indian identity from a range of disciplines, perspectives and locations. This work situates itself as a transnational intermediary, identifying convergences and bridging scholarship on Anglo-Indian studies in India and the diaspora. Anglo-Indian identity is presented as hybridised and fluid and is seen as being representative, performative, affective and experiential through different interpretative theoretical frameworks and methodologies. Uniquely, this book is an international collaborative effort by leading scholars in Anglo-Indian Studies, and examines the community in India and diverse diasporic locations such as New Zealand, Britain, Australia, Pakistan and Burma.

The effects of the partition of India in 1947 have been more far-reaching and complex than the existing partition narratives of violence and separation reveal. The immediacy of the movement of refugees between India and the newly-formed state of Pakistan overshadowed the actual effect of the drawing of the border between the two states. The book is an empirical study of border narratives across the India-Bangladesh border, specifically the West Bengal part of India’s border with Bangladesh. It tries to move away from the perpetrator state-victim civilian framework usually used in the studies of marginal people, and looks at the kind of agencies that the border people avail themselves of. Instead of looking at the border as the periphery, the book looks at it as the line of convergence and negotiations—the ‘centre of the people’ who survive it every day. It shows that various social, political and economic identities converge at the borderland and is modified in unique ways by the spatial specificity of the border—thus, forming a ‘border identity’ and a ‘border consciousness’. Common sense of the civilians and the state machinery (embodied in the border guards) collide, cooperate and effect each other at the borderlands to form this unique spatial consciousness. It is the everyday survival strategies of the border people which aptly reflects this consciousness rather than any universal border theory or state-centric discourses about the borders. A bottom-up approach is of utmost importance in order to understand how a spatially unique area binds diverse other identities into a larger spatial identity of a ‘border people’. The book’s relevance lies in its attempt to explore such everyday narratives across the Bengal border, while avoiding any major theorising project so as not to choke the potential of such experience-centred insights into the lives of a unique community of people. In that, it contributes towards a study of borders globally, providing potential approaches to understand border people worldwide. Based on detailed field research, this book brings a fresh approach to the study of this border. It will be of interest to researchers in the field of South Asian studies, citizenship, development, governance and border studies.

As A Commentator On The Worlds Of Love And Hate , India S Foremost Psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar Has Isolated The Ambivalence, Peculiarly Indian, To Matters As Various And Connected As Sex, Spirituality And Communal Passions. In Intimate Relations, The First Of The Well-Known Books In This Edition, He Explores The Nature Of Sexuality In India, Its Politics And Its Language Of Emotions. The Analyst And The Mystic Points Out The Similarities Between Psychoanalysis And Religious Healing, And The Colours Of Violence Is His Erudite Enquiry Into The Mixed Emotions Of Rage And Desire That Inflame Communalism.

How do text, performance, and rhetoric simultaneously reflect and challenge notions of distinct community and religious identities? This volume examines evidence of shared idioms of sanctity within a larger framework of religious nationalism, literary productions, and communalism in South Asia. Contributors to this volume are particularly interested in how alternative forms of belonging and religious imaginations in South Asia are articulated in the light of normative, authoritative, and exclusive claims upon the representation of identities. Building upon new and extensive historiographical and ethnographical data, the book challenges clear-cut categorizations of group identity and points to the complex historical and contemporary relationships between different groups, organizations, in part by investigating the discursive formations that are often subsumed under binary distinctions of dominant/subaltern, Hindu/Muslim or orthodox/heterodox. In this respect, the book offers a theoretical contribution beyond South Asia Studies by highlighting a need for a new interdisciplinary effort in rethinking notions of identity, ethnicity, and religion.