CANCELLED - CSAS Lecture Series | In Defense of Collateral Evidence: Refugees and Post-Partition IDs in Delhi

Unfortunately and due to unforeseen circumstances, this event has been cancelled.

The Partition of India and Pakistan, which brought in its wake a sea of displaced populations, meant it was not merely refugees and their effects but equally the identity documents that were issued to them prior to migration that suffered from a sense of displacement. Given that the figure of the refugee was alien to the memory of the colonial state, it was hardly surprising that there were no pre-existing genres of recognizing her. With the exception of Calcutta, Delhi received a disproportionate number of refugees compared to other cities and urban authorities had to grapple with the absence of an infrastructure of enumerating and identifying them. In this city, various actors such as the Ministry of Relief and Rehabilitation, housing agencies, the Delhi administration and refugee associations acted in concert to fortify the process of rehabilitation from the chaos of displaced identity documents. While an official identity document, termed the refugee registration certificate did emerge, it was unrealistic for authorities to undertake rehabilitation on the strength of the scarce possession of this document. Simultaneously, urban rehabilitation authorities refused to exempt (Dalit, upper caste Hindu and Sikh) refugee ‘squatters’ from encumbrances of submitting evidence of their caste, nationality, displacement, entry, occupation and presence in the planned city. Using several genres of primary historical sources, this paper inquires into how the Indian state went about knowing the refugee dwelling in urban spaces in ways that straddle the philosophical and the feasible, the material and the intangible. In particular, it asks the question, what role did refugee knowledge play in the fashioning of identity documents between 1947 and 1960? This paper must also be read in another register, namely, the popular making and not just the popular life of identity documents in marginal spaces of dwelling at an early hour of state formation.

Tarangini Sriraman is author of In Pursuit of Proof: A History of Identification Documents in India published by OUP India. The book weaves together a hitherto unattempted history of making and verifying identification documents in the urban margins of India. She teaches Politics and History at the School of Liberal Studies in Azim Premji University, Bangalore. She has previously been a South Asia Program Fellow, Cornell University, Postdoctoral Fellow at Centre de Sciences Humaines, New Delhi and Visiting Associate Fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. She has also received the Charles Wallace Research Grant, London. Her work has been published in journals like Economic and Political Weekly, Contributions to Indian Sociology, Indian Economic and Social History Review, and South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal.

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