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.
Introduction: The people, the state, and ‘uttering counterfeit’
Narratives and instances of faking and trickery have a long, popular, and cautionary history within the annals of Indian modernity. These include law-and-order laments, ‘civic-minded’ publications such as Pauparao Naidu’s 1915 book The History of Railway Thieves, with Illustrations and Hints on Detection (Lal 1995), and contemporary manifestations such as the cultures of ‘piracy’ in the audio-visual industries (Manuel 1991; Sundaram 2009). But what social insights do cultures and processes of counterfeiting and faking offer? In colonial police reports that deal with the manufacture of fake currencies, the narrative incorporates a number of cities and neighbourhoods, mentions Muslims and Hindus as machinists, financiers, and ‘utterers’, describes barter of a variety of goods (such as ghee and silver), and lists the various kinds of social events (such as weddings and public feasts) that counterfeiting makes possible (Annual Police Administration Report of the Delhi Province 1941). Counterfeiting gave rise to a web of concrete relationships, and the topographies of deception – including government offices, police stations, jails, ‘parade’ grounds, shops and marketplaces, and railway stations – outlined by colonial reports establish both its history as an aspect of modern industrial life as well as the peculiarity of the city as the ‘scene of the crime’ of deception. Given this background, I would like in this article to explore the meanings that attach to certain contemporary acts of deceiving, and the ways in which they are both produced by being in the city as well as produce certain kinds of relationships and ways of being in the city. This discussion is, then, about simulation and dissimulation, feigning and duplicity, and passing and pretending as significant contexts for gaining security of livelihood and residence in the city. It is based on fieldwork at the Nangla Matchi (‘Nangla’) ‘slum’ settlement (hereafter ‘basti’ or settlement to reflect local usage, see also Menon-Sen and Bhan 2008) in central Delhi between 2005 and 2006. The basti, established in the late 1970s, was demolished in 2006 to make way for an urban ‘beautification’ programme connected to the preparation for the 2010 Commonwealth Games.
At the times of its demolition, Nangla contained a population of between 25,000 and 30,000, almost all of them migrants from villages and small towns in different parts of India. Nangla residents were employed in a wide range of informal sector activities, including street-selling, domestic labour, guards for private security firms, and three-wheeler taxi drivers. Their relationship to the formal economies of the market and the state (explored in Srivastava 2011) was always a tenuous one, frequently mediated by a variety of local leaders, and erratically dependent upon patronage from politicians seeking to convert the area into a pocket-borough. In a city of some 14 million, approximately 3 million urban poor live in over 1000 informal settlements such as Nangla Matchi (Ramanathan 2006). Nangla was also home to a large number of factory workers. However, the ‘increasing informalization of industrial labour’ since the 1980s that economists Goldar and Aggarwal (2011: 142) point to meant that this group also existed within a wider context of economic and social insecurity. In this sphere, there was ceaseless pursuit of documents and certificates that, it was hoped, would provide a measure of permanence and security.
Identities in passing: Between the state and the market
For the urban poor, proof of identity is necessary for all manner of things: to demonstrate that one is not a ‘foreigner’ (read ‘Bangladeshi’) who wishes to take ‘advantage’ of the rights of Indians, purchase subsidized food and cooking fuels, and obtain access to free healthcare, education, and cheap housing. The poor find it particularly difficult to comply with the demand for evidence of permanent settlement in the city, for their life strategies are intimately connected to passage, and movement – enforced mobility to seek a better livelihood – diminishes the possibilities of enumeration and classification and the chances of becoming the ambiguous subject of governmentality. The effort that is required to secure appropriate documents and paper-work that make for a life in the city is not only surrounded by anxieties and apprehensions but also specific strategies and cultures of making the acquisitions. These are, we might say, the strategies of ‘vagabonds’ (Bauman 1998) – people subject to enforced mobility – to secure a foothold in the city as permanent ‘citizens’, having been displaced from their rural localities through processes that present as national crises but are triggered by trans-national capital.
I had gotten to know Amit Kumar, a former resident of Nangla, in mid-2007. After the locality was demolished in 2006, he had been – following state policy – allotted a plot of land at a government ‘re-settlement colony’ at the northern edges of Delhi. After having been ‘relocated’ from Nangla to the Savda-Ghevda Resettlement Colony (‘Savda’), Amit had become a pradhan (community leader) for many of Nangla’s ex-residents who were also shifted to Savda. The pradhan’s position is a tenuous one and depends on his (pradhans are mostly men) ability to act as a middle-man between residents of a basti and the state. The pradhan takes part in negotiations that relate to securing amenities such as clean drinking water and electricity – normally unavailable as these are ‘illegal’ settlements in the state’s eyes – and staving off demolition and removal. At any time, there may be several pradhans within a locality, and each must try to outwit the others in order to both maintain and increase his following.
One day, Amit mentioned that he was going to the secretariat of the Delhi state government in order to petition the Principal Secretary of the Department of Urban Development about a group of ex-Nangla residents who had not received an alternative plot of land – as it is stipulated when a slum is demolished – despite being able to prove their entitlement under relevant government regulations. The Delhi High Court had issued orders in July 2008 that the government should ‘re-verify’ the eligibility of a large number of basti evictees who had been left out of the group to be provided with land in ‘resettlement’ localities. The court had noted that the initial survey to determine eligibility was ‘defective’. However, Amit said, the file with the court order was ‘stuck’ somewhere in the Urban Development office and no action had been taken. I asked him if I could accompany him, and we met at the Pragati Maidan exhibition grounds in central Delhi, the venue for the annual India International Trade Fair, and a place where many Nangla residents worked. He was there to meet some ex-Nangla residents whose non-allotment ‘cases’ he was pursuing. Later, we proceeded to the Secretariat. Arriving at the Secretariat building, we entered through electronic check points. Amit told the receptionist that he wanted to see ‘Mr Jain’, who is in-charge of the ‘Bhagidari section’ 1 within the Chief Minister’s office. The receptionist looked at him with some suspicion – Amit’s trousers were shiny with wear, his shirt-collar was frayed, and he was carrying a tattered brief-case – and asked where he had come from. When he responded ‘Savda resettlement colony’, she was on the verge of dismissing him from her presence. He urged her to call Mr Jain so that he could ‘speak to him personally’. Hesitatingly, she agreed and dialled a number for him. After a few minutes of conversation, Amit handed the phone back to the receptionist. A short while later we were issued a ‘chit’ that allowed us to enter the complex. The secretariat is a labyrinthine complex with several different levels, corridors, nooks and crannies. There are multiple entry and exit points to different sections which lead to an ever proliferating number of passageways, wings and alcoves. I could barely keep up with Amit as he moved with familiarity from one floor to another, criss-crossing corridors to find the shortest route. His knowledge of the location of different offices in the building was as precise as that of his neighbourhood. Every now and then he uttered ‘water wing’ or ‘bijlee [electricity] section’.
Soon we were at the office of the Principal Secretary, Urban Development department. ‘But’, I said to him, ‘you told the receptionist that you were going to the Bhagidari section’. He smiled and said that Bhagidari was the ‘softer’ part of the bureaucracy, and that if he had asked for access to ‘Urban Development’ he would surely have been turned back. We were told that the Principal Secretary was in a meeting and would only be available around four in the afternoon. It was now 1pm. Amit said we should go and meet Mr Jain in the Bhagidari office. He told Mr Jain that he had come to meet him as I was very keen to see him because I had been doing ‘research’ on Bhagidari. Somewhat startled, I offered Mr Jain my gratitude for making some time for me.
Jain is the Superintendent of the Bhagidari section and was courteous in his responses. He seemed to be aware of Amit’s strategies for gaining access to the government office. However, he also displayed, as much as I could make out, a genuine sympathy for such strategies. Jain said that he felt that as far as the poor are concerned, urban governance schemes such as Sanjha Prayas (‘Collective Effort’) have not achieved ‘very much’, but that ‘we are trying’. He was, indeed, the ‘soft’ bureaucracy Amit could use as a bridgehead to get to the more unyielding sections.
When we finished with Mr Jain, Amit suggested that we visit Mr Narang, who is in charge of the Delhi government’s Sanjha Prayas programme which, beginning in 2007, has sought to replicate the Bhagidari idea with residents of bastis and resettlement colonies. We walked into Mr. Narang’s tiny office and were, once again, treated with courtesy. He said that while he, in his official capacity, was not able to do much, at least he had the sense that he was trying to do something. So, he said, he makes sure that any one from a basti can come to his office whenever they like. Of the 920 or so basti and resettlement colonies in Delhi, he said, only 29 are part of Sanjha Prayas. Amit told Mr Narang that he had dropped in because ‘Dr Srivastava, who has been researching Sanjha Prayas, was very keen to see you’. Mr Narang smiled knowingly and offered us tea.
The economies of passing-as-another, ‘uttering counterfeit’, and forging documents, though they have cross-class dimensions, speak with particular salience to the lives of the urban poor in as much as they play a far greater role in the making of the web of urban subaltern relationships. So, while Michael Taussig (1997) is right to note that ‘Like the official and the “extra-official,” the true and the forged [are] flip-sides of stately being; neither could exist without the other’ (Taussig 1997: 18), the fake-realm does not quite determine the life-worlds of the middle-classes in the same ways that it does of the urban poor. Further, though the intertwined nature of the real and fake create the state’s ‘mystique of sovereignty’ (Taussig 1997: 18), this does not itself explain how mystical sovereignty is implicated in constituting the dense and intimate webs of relationships either between the ‘people’ and the state, or that between the ‘fake’ and the ‘real’. Mr Narang’s knowing smile told us that much.
However, before we get to the semiotics of Mr Narang’s smile, there is a necessary detour through some other contexts of obtaining proof. During the course of fieldwork, I had gotten to know 22-year-old Ramu and his close friend Prakash quite well. Ramu is from the small town of Fatehpur – approximately 550 km east of Delhi in Uttar Pradesh state – and had been living in Nangla since 2002. Around 1975 his father, Ramesh, moved from Fatehpur to the nearby city of Kanpur, also in Uttar Pradesh, to learn tailoring and, after a few years there, travelled to Kolkata to set up a tailoring business with a friend. However, the venture was not successful. He then found a job as a security guard at Pragati Maidan exhibition grounds in Delhi, leaving this position to work at a container terminal, then again as a security guard; finally, when I met him in 2007, he was employed in a textile factory and lived on the factory premises. His wife is in Fatehpur and another son, younger than Ramu, studies in Kanpur. About ten years ago Ramesh had built a hut in Nangla, which is where Ramu lived. Ramesh would visit Nangla as often as he could.
I provide the above background to Ramu’s family in order to reiterate the unstable grounds of livelihood and residence through which the urban poor seek to meet the demands to prove the constancy of work and abode. While Nangla’s population consisted of a wide mixture of religious, regional, and ethnic groups, it wasn’t a concern over these forms of identity that knitted – or fractured – the sense of community; rather, it was the obsession with obtaining an identity card (pehchan patra). Neither Ramu nor Prakash had any form of identity documents such as voters’ cards or the Below Poverty Line (BPL) cards that carry entitlements of cheap food and other goods at state-run shops. It had been impossible for them to obtain any of these since the application procedure invariably required proof of residence, which they did not possess. Ramu: Here [in Delhi] we can do everything in the private sphere, but nothing if it involves government work ... we are completely private people! Anyway, if the government doesn’t bother with us … not giving us any form of identity, why should I bother with it? It is not difficult to get a duplicate I-card made … but why bother? I have absolutely no identity here! My identity is entirely linked with private activities, nothing to do with the government. I can do whatever I want as a private person! I have filed an application for a BPL card, three or four times, but nothing ever happens. I’ve even been to various offices in this regard. … once went to Laxmi Nagar [a locality in East Delhi] to become an agent of the Revolution Forever [pyramid selling scheme] company and they asked for my I-card … and I didn’t have any [other] proof of residence, so they didn’t even allow me to enter their premises.
A significant aspect of Taussig’s (2003) discussion of shamanistic discourse and practice is the focus upon the relationship between ‘the various shadings of gullibility and trickery, faith and skepticism’ (2003: 299). In particular, he explores ‘the continuous anxiety about pretence and the continuous excavation of fraud through revelation of the (failed) secret’ (2003: 289) in the face of ‘native’ scepticism about shamanistic magic. A significant aspect of my discussion is the absence of anxiety regarding pretence and fraud, and this article explores the kinds of relationships between ‘trickery, faith and skepticism’ that weave the trick into strategies of everyday life. Tales of magic that circulate in the bastis – of evil mistresses of disguise such as churails – are only one of many kinds that the people of the bastis encounter. Such stories sit alongside the ruses of the state, and the ‘anxiety’ that ensues relates not to exposing trickery as ‘fraud’ but concerns over whether one might be excluded from the circuits of trickery and hence be harmed by it. This – not being able to secure a much needed document, say – can be a matter of life and death.
Prakash once told me that he had got an I-card made from a private security company that operated at Pragati Maidan. But, he added, ‘I never worked as a guard, it was just to get the I-card made from the Red Star Security firm!’ ‘Genuineness’ is often established through fakeness: a fake proof of residence can ensure a genuine BPL card, and a fake I-card can – at least that is why Prakash got it made – be a passport to something more real, perhaps a voter identity card. In the great chain of documents of proof, the fake and the genuine often change places, and the point at the fake has provided access to the genuine is seldom clear. The state and its documents – couched in bizarre language, written on expensive ‘stamp-paper’ – are, of course, intimidating strangers. But strangers become intimates through the local acts of reproducing their image and the circulation of such reproductions among friends and neighbours. Curiously though, unlike art, such reproductions of an ‘authentic’ presence (Benjamin 1985) do not ‘depreciate’ its authority or aura. The constancy of the state’s presence in the life of the people ensures its undiminished power and its unflagging aura. That is the art of the relationship between the (basti) people and the state.
Copies circulate due to the lack of access to the original, and also because the copy serves the purposes of the original. Technology – colour photocopying in particular – makes it possible to make exact copies of the original, thus doing away with the danger of losing the original if it is a document that needs to be carried upon one’s person; it can be left at home. At Nangla Matchi, public spaces – lanes, mosques and temple precincts, shop-fronts, tree-shades, verandas – were frequent sites of discussion regarding the processes of obtaining, faking, selling, and circulation of originals and their shadows. Shahid Ansari came to Delhi in 1987 from a small town in Uttar Pradesh state. He had earlier spent time in jail for illegal logging. Being literate, he is frequently called upon by his fellow residents with paper-work. He also has extensive knowledge of different kinds of government documents and the calamitous consequences of losing an ‘original’. One day, as Ansari and I sat near Nangla’s main mosque – he was fielding queries about paper-work and I was acting as his unofficial assistant – an acquaintance came by to make small talk. An identity card was visible from his shirt pocket. Ansari laughed and told him that he ought to be more careful should he be pick-pocketed or the card fall out. The man took out his card and showed it to us. He said that he only carried a (laminated) photocopy, leaving the original at home ‘just for this reason’.
Even as its documentary manifestations are endlessly reproduced as fakes, the aura of the state – the belief in its powers notwithstanding its ‘impersonal norms’ (Fuller and Harriss 2000: 14) – remains untarnished. And it leads to the internalization of the most troubling of all its demands: to ‘provide proof!’. In basti interactions, this frequently becomes a challenge similar to ‘prove your manhood!’; scepticism and faith in the state coil around each other. Many young men in Nangla were keen to become members of a pyramid selling scheme promoted by the Revolution Forever company since it appeared to promise quick – and incredibly large – amounts of money in the shortest possible time, and with apparently little effort. The first time Ramu had visited the company’s premises there was a man giving a bhashan (lecture). The man said he used to be a ‘TTE’ (Travelling Ticket Examiner) for the Indian Railways, but that he had given it up to work as an agent for Revolution Forever. Now, he said, he was a very rich person and owned a Honda City car. This is how, the man said, industrialists such as the Ambanis and the Birlas became rich. A young man from Gonda town in Uttar Pradesh was in the audience and, after the lecture, he got up and, according to Ramu, demanded that the speaker ‘show proof’ of all the payments he had received, and also his car. If he was able to do this, the man from Gonda said, he was willing to pay the Rs. 8000 joining fee ‘on the spot’. The speaker was taken aback and said that he could hardly be expected to carry around such ‘proof’. By now, the crowd had joined in, chanting demands for proof. The man from Gonda was invited into a private chamber for a discussion, but he refused, saying ‘everything must be discussed in public’.
Everyone needs proof. But even the most routine acts of obtaining identity proofs can go wrong. It is not unusual for an individual to be registered under different names on different documents: admission card for school examinations, ration cards, identity cards, BPL cards can carry different versions of the same name. ‘You write your name one way on the application form’, 15-year-old Rajesh said to me, ‘and when your final document comes back, it’s written in some other way’. So, he said, his father’s name – Mani Ram – is written down as ‘Monkey Ram’ in a government document. ‘We all know about the problem this creates later on’, Rajesh says. Ramu says that everyone must make sure that they have just one name on all documents: ‘otherwise, you wander around with many names and none of them work!’ But everyone needs proof, so the form-filling must go on. Ramu says that whenever he asks the tea-shop owner Nassim – who has unspecified contacts with a political party – for help in getting a ration-card made, the latter asks for a photocopy of the ‘original’. ‘But I don’t have an original!’, Ramu says. However, they all know about the drunk official of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) and think that he may be able to help.
A fake state of affairs
I first met Raj Kumar, a clerk of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, at the house of Suraj Chandra, an ex-pradhan. I thought he was a local since he seemed very friendly with many of the residents, constantly providing advice about some official matter or another, talking about their problems and generally holding forth about the ‘corrupt officers’ in terms no different than those used by Nangla residents. And, invariably, whenever I ran into him, he seemed slightly drunk. In fact, till our fourth or fifth meeting, I had no idea that he was actually an official of the MCD’s Slum Wing. He could normally be found in the shack owned by Suraj Chandra, located on Nangla’s main road. The shack had no door but a sack cloth curtain that was only occasionally drawn. It contained two wooden beds and a few broken chairs, and on most mornings Raj Kumar could be found reclining on one of the beds, drinking glasses of tea and slurring over his words. As people passed by, some would wave and others would wander in to inquire about some ‘government’ matter or another. Usually, apart from Suraj Chandra, Raj Kumar would also be surrounded by a group of the former’s friends. To a passerby it seemed like a gathering of acquaintances from Nangla, each waving different bits of paper and animatedly discussing how to make one’s way through the bureaucracies where these papers originated. Raj Kumar seemed just one of the participants in the tableau of Chandra’s shack, where the state was open to the street, and at one with it.
Nangla was Raj Kumar’s ‘beat’, and he had been assigned to carry out one of the many surveys that were always in progress. He would sit in Suraj Chandra’s shack, collecting information from whoever happened to come by. The fact that Raj Kumar sat in his shack also garnered a certain amount of prestige for Chandra. Recently defeated in the pradhan’s election by a female competitor, Chandra sat next to the body of the state, soaking in its whisky-drenched aura. This is one manifestation of the quotidian state, within reach and part of the conviviality of locality. This state – through feigning intimacy, simultaneously as it aligns with local ‘big’ men such as Chandra – is part of a process whereby the struggle to interpret laws (Das 2004: 238) gives way to the possibilities of negotiating outcomes as well as identities.
Raj Kumar’s easy accessibility – where the body of the state simulates the life of the people – touches upon a number of contexts. Firstly, it dulls the edges of bureaucratic indifference and hostility through a symbiotic relationship with ‘non-state social networks’ (Corbridge et al. 2005: 89), frequently merging with the latter. Secondly, everyone knew that Kumar would only really get ‘work’ done if he was bribed and that Suraj Chandra got a ‘cut’. In this way, Nangla residents could be sure that Chandra’s identity as a member of the community would ensure that the bribe would produce a result. However, on the other hand, no one was ever sure about the exact nature of his ‘influence’ upon Raj Kumar, and this formed another level of feint between the state and the people. The opaque relationship between Suraj Chandra and Raj Kumar allowed Nangla residents to maintain their sense of distance from the formal state since their representative’s relationship with it remained vague; the ‘people’ – a term whose valence derives from the malevolence attributed to the state – remained distinct from the state. Basti notables such as Suraj Chandra parade their intimacy with various low-level government officials but are also keen to represent themselves as linked to ‘community’ and, as I will also discuss below, the idea of ‘community-life’ emerges out of the complex relationship with the state.
But what about the quotidian state? Simultaneously as Raj Kumar got drunk with the people, his continuing efficacy depended on his ability to maintain a sense of statist sobriety, where the state’s identity could be represented as possessing a rationality beyond the atavistic sensibilities of the crowd. One morning I found Raj Kumar surrounded by a large group of men and women, each pleading that he examine and submit a variety of forms on their behalf. Raj Kumar sipped tea while casually glancing at the scores of forms being thrust at him from different directions. ‘You know’, he said, ‘most people don’t even know why they are filling in a form. I have come today to do verification for the voters’ list. However, they think it’s for a ration card, so they’ve filled in an application form, and this causes more confusion’. Someone from the crowd asked him where his ‘form’ was. ‘It’s lying in a cupboard at a friend’s house’, Raj Kumar responded. Then – with an exasperated look on his face – he glanced at me, as if to interpret my presence as kindred to his state-ness, and turning to the questioner said: ‘I can’t keep carrying it around can I? Do you think a form will travel with me in a bus?’ Unlike basti people, government documents do not travel in buses. For then what would differentiate the state from the people?
The relationship between Raj Kumar and Suraj Chandra (and, through him, the people of Nangla) leads us to a significant way in which the sense of community is constituted at the cultural and economic margins of the city, one that has bearing upon some recent ethnographic explorations of the relationship between the ‘state’ and the ‘people’. My discussion shares common ground with scholarly explorations of the legibility of the state that suggest that ‘at the local level the boundary between the state and society is a blurred one’ (Fuller and Harriss 2000: 12–13). Within this vein, Akhil Gupta describes how the post-colonial state’s developmental agenda is vivified through ‘local politics’ (Gupta 1998: 106), the Osellas speak of the ‘quotidian intimacy of the state’ (Osella and Osella 2000: 157), and Das and Poole describe the state’s ‘penetration into the life of the everyday’ (Das and Poole 2004: 15). Even for those for whom the state exists apart from the ‘people’, whereby ‘tangible institutions of the state may be helpless against the intangible force of historically sedimented cultural understandings of ordinary people’ (Kaviraj 1997: 235), its pervasive presence is not really in question. So Kaviraj concludes that: ‘From an agency which was spectacular, mysterious and distant, the state has become something vast, overextended, extremely familiar at least in its sordid everyday structures’ (1997: 243). We need, however, to insert a caveat between the anthropological observations of blurred boundaries, as outlined by Das and Poole, and the political scientist’s formulation of ‘sordid’ interaction, as suggested by Kaviraj. This is that despite the deep embrace with the state, the quotidian relationship with it is marked by an ambivalence that derives from a suspicion of its form and ‘personality’. Most significantly, even those, such as Suraj Chandra, who know it well (and get drunk with it) like to be able to represent their position as distinct from the state; their public presence is as men of the `community'. For it is the ‘community’ that possesses norms and standards of behaviour, whereas the state is seen to consist of ‘ceremonial moves’ without any serious intent (Kaviraj 1997: 240). However, as I will now discuss, the state is – ironically – fundamental to the making of ‘community’ life for the urban poor.
To fake is to make: Duplicity, intimacy, community
Nietzsche’s take on trickery, Michael Taussig (2003) says, is organized around two separate points: [Firstly is] … his often-repeated assertions about the long-term well-being provided by error and untruth in human and social life, the second being the injunction for us not to labor under the illusion of eliminating trickery on the assumption that there is some other world out there beyond and bereft of trickery, beyond and bereft of what has come to be latterly known as power/knowledge and the artistry associated therewith, but to practice instead our own form of shamanism, if that’s the word, as philosophy and as search for understanding, if that’s the word. And come up with a set of tricks, simulation, deceptions, and art or appearances in a continuous movement of counterfeint and feint strangely contiguous with yet set against those weighing on us. (Taussig 2003: 278; emphasis in the original)
I would like to focus upon specific senses of community, neighbourliness and trust that permeate the acts and narratives of faking and passing. These include ideas of tariqa or etiquette or protocol, the necessity of exploiting one’s own in order to provide care against the arbitrary callousness of outsiders, and assimilating and making intimates of strangers. The discussion incorporates the Nangla view of the state as both powerful and lacking any sense of ‘impersonal norms and values’ (Fuller and Harriss 2000: 14), and hence an entity that must be dealt with through entirely ad hoc means, of which faking is the both the most elaborate and the most frequent.
Tariqa and norms
One day as I sat around with Shahid Ansari outside the local mosque, several people carrying different pieces of paper approached him to ask about their ‘case’. These included ‘cases’ concerning the issue of ration cards, voters identity cards, ‘Below Poverty Line’ (BPL) cards, and several other kinds of documents. One man was accompanied by Raj Kumar. The man wanted Ansari to put his signature on an application form. Raj Kumar also urged Ansari to sign the document. But, Ansari exclaimed, ‘Come later – illegal work can’t be done in broad daylight!’. ‘Illegal’ has an interesting position here: it is publicly mentioned as such, and is allocated a particular time for when it can be carried out, rather than rejected out of hand as beyond the pale. However, more significantly, though it is a regular part of life at Nangla, it is also a potentially dangerous activity: if caught, counterfeiting can incur a wide range of serious penalties. Acts of counterfeiting involve an entire chain of participants – middle-men, procurers, information-gatherers, transferees of ‘originals’, and beneficiaries, for example – and carry risks of disrupting closely established links within neighbourhoods and settlements. Hence, the most admired members of the community are those – such as Ansari – who possess the capacity to do ‘illegal work’ in a proper manner, minimizing or eliminating the risk of damage to community life. But not only this, the ‘proper’ conduct of ‘illegal work’ also ensures the life of the community: it is the grounds upon which everyday life – food, education, health, employment, residence – is based.
Soon after the above episode, Ansari was approached by a young woman who asked about her ‘form’. ‘I’ll take back my Rs. 20’, she said, ‘unless I get the card immediately’. Ansari turned to me and said that he was deeply offended by these comments. Then, addressing the woman, he told her that her ‘work’ would not now be done, since ‘even though we are neighbours, you don’t trust me to do your illegal work properly!’ A friend of Ansari joined the discussion and told me that this was all ‘bachpana’ (childishness): ‘look at all the effort that goes into getting all this work done’, he said, ‘and all these people can talk about is Rs.20–30’. ‘What about all those young men’, he continued, pointing to a group of locals, ‘who are helping to verify and fill up the forms. They are educated, their parents have spent huge amounts in educating them, yet they are giving of their time freely’. Another man now approached our group and asked Ansari to help him fill in the ID application form. ‘Go to that other place’, he was ordered, meaning the house of a local leader of a rival faction. A bystander offered to fill in the form. ‘Let’s see you if you can!’, Ansari shouted out. An elderly man sitting next to us now spoke up: ‘you don’t only need education but also a tariqa (method, etiquette). After all, the engineer makes the plan, but it’s an illiterate mazdoor (labourer) who executes it. You need tariqa!’. Ansari then turned to the supplicant: ‘There are 45 columns to be filled up’, he said, ‘miss a single one and the form is invalidated!’ The man quietly withdrew.
Why does one need tariqa to deal with the counterfeit world? Tariqa and trust make a community in the face of arbitrary rules and regulations that must be engaged with on their own terms. Tariqa and trust ensure that even though the well-being of the community depends on mimicking the arbitrariness and dishonesty of the state, this does not translate into the community becoming like the state. For, the state has no norms. Several months after the above episode, when Nangla had been demolished and the lucky ones had been allotted plots at the resettlement colony of Savda Ghevda, I was talking to Nangla residents Rakesh Kumar and Bhanu Prasad about the ‘P-98’ designation that had denied large numbers of Nangla residents a resettlement plot, and was being contested through the courts. The designation refers to the length of stay in Delhi, which is a basis for entitlement to alternative accommodation when slums are demolished. I asked them about procedures for arriving at the P-98 categorization. Rakesh Kumar: You know that the government has a gupt [secret] system of codes, and in each basti it uses a different system. So, during a survey [leading up to demolition], they may just write 1, 2, or 3 in their paper work, but it [plot entitlement] is really decided in their offices…. There have been three ‘numbering’ episodes at Nangla since 1995. The first in 1995) was to enrol residents on voters’ lists, then, houses were renumbered as part of the 2001 census, and finally, in 2005, houses were numbered again as part of a survey carried out by the Delhi Development Authority and the Pragati Power Company, who claimed ownership of the land on which Nangla was situated … people were always confused and fearful about the most relevant numbers, and often didn’t fill in any on official papers. Rakesh: There is an old woman who comes to Savda Ghevda every week. She was allotted a plot here but works as a domestic servant in South Delhi. She can’t leave her job there as that’s her only source of income. But she also doesn’t want to sell her plot as this is her only asset in her old age. But her allotment was cancelled … as a government ‘survey team’ came to see who had actually occupied their plots, and which ones were lying vacant … hers was vacant, so her allotment was cancelled. She didn’t have enough money to put up a permanent structure, and whatever she had put up was stolen by others. And she didn’t want to sell her plot. But how can she sell in any case? Her allotment has been cancelled, right? But she doesn’t want to sell ... I tried to help her sell it … But she can’t, can she? It is illegal to sell a resettlement plot ... Who knows? A property dealer can go to the relevant MCD official and get it allotted in someone else’s name ... and pay off the official. Who knows? I want to help those genuine allottees whose allotments got cancelled … it is my duty….
The state has no norms, as evidenced by the arbitrariness of its procedures that its subjects encounter: gupt, and hence inscrutable. But even as one counters the state through mimic-procedures, it is important to not become the state, to remain of the people, and that requires tariqa, etiquette. It is here also that particular kinds of neighbourly bonds take shape when neighbours ‘help’ each other, in the manner that Rakesh sought to assist the old lady by selling her property which was not hers to sell; it was his duty. It is preferable to be preyed upon by one’s own rather than be left to the mercies of the depredatory state. In the former case, the bonds of intimacy are strengthened as well as ensuring a result in one’s favour.
Neighbours with the kindest cuts
I met Mohammad Islam in 2008 through Rakesh Kumar. Originally from Bihar state, Islam has lived in Delhi since 1984. He lived at Nangla Matchi before it was demolished and was Rakesh’s neighbour. He had been allotted a plot of land at Savda Ghevda in the wake of the demolition, but did not move there as he did not have the funds to build a house. He told me that about 12 months ago Rakesh had lent him 40,000 rupees for treatment of a serious illness and had told him that he could return it whenever he was able. However, after some months, Islam realized that he would not be able to pay Rakesh back the money, so he offered him his Savda Ghevda plot as payment in kind. Rakesh, Islam says, told him that he would ‘take’ the land, and that whenever Islam had the money, he could return it and take back ‘his’ property. Since he was unable to sign his name, Islam put his thumb impressions on ‘some papers’, handing over the land to Rakesh. The land did not legally belong to Rakesh, and under government regulations it was a criminal offence to sell it. However, given the latter’s experience as a real estate dealer, he drew up a fake ‘agreement’ between Islam and himself stating that the former had borrowed money from him and had offered his land as collateral. Then, sometime later, Rakesh obtained all of Islam’s documents that proved his ownership of the land and altered this information, inserting his own name instead. This was done with Islam’s knowledge: ‘I have complete trust in him’ Islam repeated several times to me. A few months later, Islam told Rakesh that, given the ongoing expenditure on his medication and his general state of penury, he was now certain that he would not be able to pay back the money, and hence Rakesh should consider the Savda land his own.
Rakesh told me that he always tried to convince ex-Nangla residents to not sell their land, even if it meant some hardship in the short term, such as having to commute long distances to their work and disruption in their children’s schooling, and that ‘if they held on for a while, things would get better’. However, if they were going to sell, Rakesh said, ‘they might as well sell to someone like me who they can trust, I will never betray them’. Having ‘sold’ the land to Rakesh, Mohammad Islam’s troubles multiplied. He was forced to live about two hours from his place of work in an ‘unauthorized’ settlement, having to change three buses to and from work. Some time ago he borrowed money to buy a plot of land near where he now lives, but lost it all as it turned out that the real estate agent had actually sold off government land. And yet Islam could hardly stop singing Rakesh’s praises. ‘I can’t tell you how kind Rakesh has been to me’, he told me. ‘He is one of the kindest people I know’.
Islam’s take on his miseries is instructive. Rakesh exploited his neighbour’s extremely vulnerable economic condition to purloin his sole asset, exposing him to further exploitation and ongoing wretchedness. And yet Rakesh’s ‘trustworthy’ operations in the counterfeit real estate market – that appear to have left Islam permanently disadvantaged – struck Islam as a deepening of neighbourly bonds and a fulfillment of community obligations; to be made predictably wretched by one’s ‘own’ is nevertheless deliverance from the arbitrary havoc of outsiders.
Islam’s comfort in the depredation of intimates leads us, once again, to the question of norms. For what lies at the heart of his attitude towards Rakesh is his belief that unlike ‘outsiders’, Rakesh’s exploitative behaviour is based upon certain norms which, in turn, will secure a degraded package of ‘benefits’ that may not otherwise be forthcoming. These are the norms of community life in a hostile and arbitrary urban environment. Indeed, the range of strategies utilized by the urban poor when dealing with the state – pretending to have political and bureaucratic as well as underworld connections, for example – are expressions of their understanding of the arbitrariness of the state. Under such conditions of life it is imperative to rely upon those who would convert the capricious economies of faking and counterfeiting into some minimal advantage through the bedrock of neighbourliness and community feeling. Indeed, the cultures of faking make community possible.
Infusions and foreign bodies: Strangers into intimates
I arrived at Nangla one morning in March 2006 to find a group of people crowded inside Suraj Chandra’s tent. Three men were seated on a wooden bench and a crowd had gathered around them. Women and men were thrusting forward pieces of paper, shouting out names and jostling each other, trying to catch the attention of the men sitting on the bench. Someone told me that a ‘survey’ was being conducted. Copiously sweating supplicants swatted flies and made their case at different decibels. I spied Ansari outside the shed. He explained that the ‘survey’ was being conducted by their ‘own’ men, that is, men belonging to the faction loyal to Suraj Chandra and himself. Some time ago, basti residents had filled in forms for ‘identity cards’. These were then sent to the ‘SDM [Sub Divisional Magistrate] office’ for ‘verification’. Now, the forms had been give ‘serial numbers’ and sent back for final verification before the issue of the cards in question. This meant that Suraj Chandra’s men had to ‘verify’ the information on the forms by calling forward each applicant, and asking ‘Is this your name?’ and ‘Are these details correct?’. Hence, what was happening in Chandra’s shack was of enormous significance in the lives of those Nangla residents who had, in some cases, waited years for the issue of a state document that would entitle them to a variety of ‘privileges’.
However, and just as crucially, the responsibility for verifying a locality – who lives there, how many, for how long, and various other details of everyday life – was being performed not by the state but by those in control of the situation on the ground. The limits to the state’s intervention are determined by bureaucratic elasticity and the uncertainty regarding the best way of surveying the field of dominion; nothing can be further than the notion of panoptic surveillance that smoothes the way for disciplinary mechanisms. At the edge of the city, the state and its people leak into each other’s lives in unavoidable but erratic ways. Here, determination of who is a ‘Bangladeshi’ and who is Indian was largely dependent upon the goodwill of one of the two factions that had been entrusted the task of verification in Nangla. The state does not always know or is able to determine ‘authentic’ identities, leaving these to be verified by the ‘community’ and, at this level, individual negotiations between different participants produce identity. One of the most common causes of disputes between the different factions at Nangla centred over claims and counterclaims over the numbers of Bangladeshis who were passed off as Indians, with each group suggesting that the other had swelled its factional strength through passing off strangers as intimates. Personal relationships – alignment with one faction or another, ability to secure patronage, friendships, etc. – are crucial if ‘foreigners’ are to be passed off as ‘one of us’. Hence, forged identities are simultaneously the forging of community bonds through including strangers within its boundaries, and faking is crucial to the making of community life.
There is another way in which faking infuses new blood into the community. As most newcomers to Nangla have no proof of residence, it is quite common that purchasers of property will receive ‘help’ from sellers who will add the former’s name to their own ration card as a relative. This is the first step to the buyer eventually applying for and (hopefully) obtaining an independent ration card which, in turn would make for access to other kinds of documents. It is also common for landlords to add several of their tenants to their ration cards as relatives. The possession of a ration card is the only guarantee of obtaining a resettlement plot should the basti be demolished. Here too, faking and duplicity serve as the grounds for the making of community and neighbourliness.
Conclusion
This discussion on the different ways in which the urban poor in Delhi engage with the state in the contexts of faking and counterfeiting has sought to highlight both the manner in which the poor understand the state and construct ideas of ‘community’ life within hostile and precarious conditions of urban existence. Through this, the discussion has sought to argue that it is not so much that the ‘state idea [of the modernizing elite] … is not part of ordinary Indians’ understanding’ (Fuller and Harriss 2000: 9) as that ‘ordinary Indians’ understand the state only too well, and that they choose to engage with it through the Nietzschean dictum ‘about the long-term well-being provided by error and untruth in human and social life … [and] the injunction for us not to labor under the illusion of eliminating trickery on the assumption that there is some other world out there beyond and bereft of trickery’ (Nietzsche in Taussig 2003: 278).