Settle, Mobilize, Verify: Identification Practices in Colonial India:
01 Aug 2000-Studies in History (Sage PublicationsSage CA: Thousand Oaks, CA)-Vol. 16, Iss: 2, pp 151-198
TL;DR: A range of historical work has outlined the process by which British paramountcy and colonial order actually evolved by suppressing a dynamic of competitive state-building in eighteenth century India, and arresting the fluidity of social forms associated with it as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: As the East India Company extended its territorial dominion, the civilizational encounter was sometimes described as one between a society dynamized by trade, enterprise and English liberty and the melancholy stasis of the Hindus. The political despotism of Muslim rulers and the sacredotal despotism of the brahmanical order were blamed for this social involution.l Yet a range of historical work has outlined the process by which British paramountcy and colonial order actually evolved by suppressing a dynamic of competitive state-building in eighteenth century India, and arresting the fluidity of social forms associated with it.2 2
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06 Oct 2014TL;DR: In this paper, the authors discuss the global biometric arena and the history of the biometric registration and the limited curiosity of the gatekeeper state in South Africa and the United Kingdom.
Abstract: Introduction: the global biometric arena 1. Science of empire: the South African origins and objects of Galtonian eugenics 2. Asiatic despotism: Edward Henry on the Witwatersrand 3. Gandhi's biometric entanglement: fingerprints, Satyagraha and the global politics of Hind Swaraj 4. No will to know: biometric registration and the limited curiosity of the gatekeeper state 5. Verwoerd's bureau of proof: the Apartheid Bewysburo and the end of documentary government 6. Galtonian reversal: apartheid and the making of biometric citizenship Epilogue: empire and the mimetic fantasy Conclusion Bibliography Index.
139 citations
01 Mar 2005
TL;DR: In this paper, a narrative of the administrative catastrophe that followed from the grand project of building a central biometric population register for all Africans, the issuing of identity cards and classification of the huge body of fingerprints that poured in from the countryside is presented.
Abstract: Hendrik Verwoerd, Apartheid's founder, imposed what he called the 'Bewysburostelsel' – a term that is best translated as the 'bureau of proof regime' – on South Africa during the 1950s. This paper is a narrative of the administrative catastrophe that followed from the grand project of building a central biometric population register for all Africans, the issuing of identity cards and classification of the huge body of fingerprints that poured in from the countryside. The story examines internally-generated crises and some of the ways those subjected to the Bewysburo sought to defeat it. It offers a new explanation of the origins of Verwoerd's Bantustan policy, for the pervasiveness of violence in the 1960s, and for the Apartheid state's paradoxically blind strength in the decades that followed. The paper thus addresses some of the key questions in the history of the Apartheid state, but it may also offer several important lessons for the contemporary American, and British, effort to build centralised national security databases, like John Poindexter's recently-closed office of Total Information Awareness, or David Blunkett's biometric identity card.
58 citations
11 Oct 2012
TL;DR: The importance of birth registration as the foundation for the fulfillment of other rights is reflected in Article 7 of the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which places the right to a name and nationality immediately after the primary right that children have to life itself as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: AROUND THE WORLD STATES REQUIRE that their citizens register as tax-payers, property owners, school students, patients, drivers, welfare recipients, and insured workers. The modern state seems almost to have become a registering machine, with the act of registration replacing taxation as the citizen’s most common encounter with the state. This is because registration lies at the centre of the process of ‘textually mediated organisation’ that Giddens (following Weber and many others) has observed as the raison d’être of the modern state (Giddens 1985, 2: 185; Sankar 1992, 9). Civil registration – the administrative recording of the birth, death, and marital status of individual citizens – is the linchpin of this web of obligations and rights. The significance of birth registration, in particular, as the ‘foundation for the fulfillment of other rights’ is reflected in Article 7 of the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which places the right to a name and nationality immediately after the primary right that children have to life itself (Szreter 2007, 68; Mackenzie 2008, 534). Yet many people, perhaps as many as half of the global population, live out their lives unrecorded by any state system of civil registration: Unicef (2005, 3) estimated that 36 per cent of births worldwide went unregistered. This is an even more disabling birthright lottery than the inequalities that go with registration, as expounded by Shachar (2009). These undocumented peoples exist on the margins of all societies, but the largest contiguous blocks of unregistered populations live in South Asia and on the African continent, where, until very recently, national systems of civil registration have not succeeded in recording even a majority of births (Setel et al. 2007, 1570; Kwankye 1999, 430; Jewkes and Wood 1998). This situation is changing rapidly as universal systems of civil registration, often complemented by biometric identification schemes aimed at adults, are being fostered by donor aid oriented towards meeting the Millennium Development Goals and other statisticallymeasured public health projects. One non-governmental organization in particular, 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42
55 citations
TL;DR: The authors examines the way in which legal codification, the scrutiny of the high courts, and the expansion of the "native Bar" restructured colonial 'preventive policing' and examines the degree to which summary judicial powers wielded by the executive head of the district were incorporated into the code, not excised from it.
Abstract: This article examines the way in which legal codification, the scrutiny of the high courts, and the expansion of the ‘native Bar’ restructured colonial ‘preventive policing’. Habitual Offender legislation in England targeted the ex-convict, but in India the bad-livelihood sections of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC sections 109–110) permitted a far more flexible construction of ‘habituality’. They illustrate the degree to which summary judicial powers wielded by the executive head of the district were incorporated into the code, not excised from it. Educated Indians critiqued this combination of executive and judicial powers in the hands of the district magistrate, yet CrPC ‘preventive sections’ proliferated. Furthermore, in 1918 the Punjab province passed a Habitual Offender Act which, drawing upon the pattern of the Criminal Tribes Act (Act XXVII of 1871), permitted CrPC section 110 to be used to restrict the suspected ‘habitual’ to a certain area as well. Hitherto amendments to the CrPC were supposed to be matters for central not provincial legislation. The Punjab Act inaugurated an era of provincial enactments to intern or release ‘habituals’, structured around essentialist contrasts between urban and rural space. Under the surface of drives to codify colonial law a striated jurisdictional topography continued to re-form.
46 citations
Cites background from "Settle, Mobilize, Verify: Identific..."
...86 Radhika Singha (2000), ‘Settle, Mobilise, Verify: Identification Practices in Colonial India’, Studies in History, 16 (2), pp. 151–198....
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01 Jan 2015TL;DR: The legal framework of sovereignty in a world of nation-states is discussed in this article, where a passage to another India: Hyderabad's discursive universe is discussed. But the authors focus on the legal framework and do not consider the economic aspects of the region.
Abstract: Introduction: fragmenting sovereignty 1. Minor sovereignties: Hyderabad among states and empires 2. The legal framework of sovereignty Part I. Ideas: 3. A passage to another India: Hyderabad's discursive universe 4. Hyderabad and the world: bureaucrat-intellectuals and Muslim modernist internationalism Part II. Institutions: 5. Moglai temporality: institutions, imperialism and the making of the Hyderabad frontier 6. Frontier as resource: law, crime and sovereignty on the margins of empire Part III. Urban Space: 7. Remaking city, developing state: ethical patrimonialism, urbanism and economic planning 8. Improvising urbanism: sanitation and power in Hyderabad and Secunderabad Conclusion: fragmented sovereignty in a world of nation-states.
41 citations
References
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01 Aug 1995
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors dealt with ethnology, caste, and religion, in the region of Central-India; Asia; South-Asia; and, India in general, covering the tribes and castes of Madhya Pradesh.
Abstract: Covers the tribes and castes of Madhya Pradesh (India). This work deals with ethnology, caste, and religion, in the region of Central-India; Asia; South-Asia; and, India in general.
169 citations
"Settle, Mobilize, Verify: Identific..." refers background in this paper
...Declining resources would close off the trickle of men, women and children of other castes and communities into such bands.(38) Tougher policing was supposed to replace those Oriental accomodations with `thieving and predatory communities' which gave lowly beings some leverage over livelihood....
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132 citations
"Settle, Mobilize, Verify: Identific..." refers background in this paper
...Recurrent theft could be punished by cropping the nose and the ears.(93) At a time when the Company endorsed slavery in India a permanent attestation of possession on the body may not have needed elaborate justification....
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58 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the East India Company emerged as the paramount power in Malwa following the third Anglo-Maratha war (1818), it preferred placing the entire area under indirect rule.
Abstract: Malwa, lying at the heart of the Indian peninsula, was a difficult region for the British from the point of view of colonial penetration. This part of the country was still unconquered at the beginning of the nineteenth century. When the East India Company emerged as the paramount power in Malwa following the third Anglo-Maratha war (1818), it preferred placing the entire area under ’indirect rule’. For the rest of the colonial period Malwa
3 citations
"Settle, Mobilize, Verify: Identific..." refers background in this paper
...Political `pretenders' seemed to drum up a following at will.(10) Appropriating an equation between `polluting' and `ugly' from the upper strata of Indian society, colonial reports described peripatetic communities, such as the Badhaks, or Maghiya Doms as `low and stinking', or of a `repulsive appearance'....
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