[Reader-list] Sanjay Srivastava: Duplicity, intimacy, community An ethnography of ID cards, permits and other fake documents in Delhi

[Patrice Riemens]

Duplicity, intimacy, community
An ethnography of ID cards, permits and other fake documents in Delhi

http://the.sagepub.com/content/113/1/78.abstract?etoc


    Sanjay Srivastava⇓
        Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi University, India

    Sanjay Srivastava, Institute of Economic Growth, University of Delhi
Enclave, Delhi 110007, India Email: Sanjays3050 AT gmail.com

Abstract

In the annals of Indian modernity, narratives of tricksters and
counterfeiters have a long, popular, and cautionary history. The
topographies of deception outlined by colonial and post-colonial police
reports established both its history as an aspect of modern industrial
life as well as the city as the ‘scene of the crime’. This article
explores the meanings that attach to certain contemporary acts of
deceiving and faking, and the ways in which they are both produced by
being in the city as well as producing certain kinds of relationships. The
article focuses on the residents of a Delhi slum and their various acts of
producing fake identity cards and a variety of other documents. It offers
a discussion about simulation and dissimulation, feigning and duplicity,
and passing and pretending as significant contexts for gaining security of
livelihood and residence in the city as well as constituting specific
senses of community. Faking and counterfeiting, the article suggests, are
arenas where the state both constitutes itself and contributes to the
making of imagined non-state sensibilities of community.


(full article behind paywall. Ask a 'correspondent' to fwd it to you if
madly interested)