It was a chilly January afternoon in Sonapar, a predominantly Muslim village southwest of Bhuj. Mohamed Hosain and I had finished with our interviews for the day and were waiting for a bus to return to town. A passer-by informed us that the 4:30 p.m. bus had been discontinued; there were no more buses scheduled for the day. A biting wind had picked up, and the bus shelter began to fill with men lighting up their bidis (hand-rolled cigarettes), as they wrapped their woolen shawls tightly about them, their talk turning to politics and the recently concluded elections to the state assembly. Just as we were about to go off in search of some other means of transport, a young woman approached us, speaking in perfect Hindi. I turned around in surprise. It was unusual to find a Hindi-speaking woman in the area; moreover, one who had the courage to walk into a public space on the street dominated by men, as she had just done, was practically unknown in my experience in the area.
I had just spent the better part of the day interviewing women of all ages in the village, our conversations held in a mix of Gujarati and Kutchi; I would have been happy to have had someone to speak with in a language I considered myself to be more fluent in. She introduced herself as Razia, from Udaipur, in the neighboring state of Rajasthan. She was relatively new to the village, having moved after her marriage four months previously. “Why didn’t you join our meeting?” I asked her, but Razia simply shrugged off the question. Suddenly, a flicker of recognition dawned: I had caught a glimpse of her on a visit the previous week. The women I was meeting with at the time were dismissive of her and told me that she could not have anything relevant to add to our discussion. Although not fully convinced about this explanation at the time, I had let it slide and had more or less forgotten about it. Now, at the bus stop, Razia wanted to know who we were and what brought us to the village. I asked if she was the only person from Rajasthan in the area, thinking that perhaps she could introduce me to others, but she shrugged and said she did not know. The following week, I was back in the village again. This time, I was with the outreach team of a local nongovernmental organization (NGO) that worked with rural women artisans. I asked Sonal, who took classes in health education with them, whether she knew anything about Razia. “Oh, yes!” she exclaimed in the small room packed with women. “The girl from Kalkatta—I have never heard her open her mouth. I have tried and tried to get her to participate in our sessions, but she won’t budge from her house.”1 Looking meaningfully at the other women, she said, “You must encourage her to go out and about and to overcome her shyness. Otherwise, how will she ever settle down into her sasural [affinal home]?” The women looked on in silence, and we began the day’s session as though Sonal had not spoken at all.
On our drive back to Bhuj that day, I asked Sonal why she had referred to her as “the girl from Kalkatta” when I had been told distinctly that she was from Rajasthan by Razia herself when she came up to me at the bus stop. Furthermore, none of the women addressed by Sonal that morning had made any effort to correct her “mistake” in referring to Razia as from Kolkata rather than Rajasthan. And finally, Razia certainly did not seem to be a shy and reclusive person as our encounter at the bus stop had already demonstrated. So what exactly was going on? Sonal turned to me and offered an explanation: Razia was actually one of the many “Bengali brides” who had been “bought” (kharid ke) from Kolkata by her husband who had traveled to Bengal to bring her back. However, the family was afraid of her presence being detected as an “illegal immigrant” by the police, so they tried to cover up her being from the eastern region of Bengal, claiming instead that she was from a western state, Rajasthan. Since she spoke Hindi, a language spoken in Rajasthan, this was a good enough cover for now. Soon, Sonal reflected, she would be able to blend in once she had learned the local language and customs. Her “shyness” was a good excuse for not having to bring her out in company where her lack of facility in the local language would have otherwise given her away to the police as being from “outside,” notably from Bengal. Sonal’s “knowledge” of these practices of dissimulation were quite widely shared among middle-class Hindu society in town, drawn in part from the voluminous media discourse on the subject, as I was to discover.
In contemporary Kutch, there is much media and political interest in women designated as “Bengali” who move to Kutch to marry, or after their marriage to, local men. I first started ethnographic research in Kutch in 2001; often while traveling through isolated villages in Banni, I heard someone or the other mention a “kalkatta bai” or Bangalan (woman from Kolkata or Bengal). It turned out that these were women brought from “Kalkatta” or somewhere farther east to marry locally, much as Sonal had explained. “Kalkatta” was typically a euphemism for the fact that they were from Bengal. None of the women I ended up interviewing were actually from the city; some, although certainly not all, said they were from Bengal. All the women I interviewed identified themselves as Muslim and were married to Muslim men in Kutch. I did hear cases of “Bengali” Muslim women married into Hindu families in Kutch, although I did not find instances of the reverse—that is, Hindu women migrants married to Muslim men. Further, to ask whether they are “actually” Hindu or Muslim, West Bengali or Bangladeshi, Indian or Pakistani is not really the point, as that would be to limit our frame of analysis to terms naturalized by the state (see, e.g., Bourdieu 1994). In addition, it is in fact to replicate the forms of policing that emanate from the state as it attempts to “fix” the identity of those women in Kutch who are deemed to have transgressed some form or other of the social and moral code—that is, they are adult women who have traveled into Kutch from elsewhere, usually unaccompanied by men (such as husbands) from their home regions; they have not migrated in search of “work” but marriage; their marriages violate accepted social codes of religious, caste, and regionally endogamous marriage. Thus, I follow the local use of the category of Bangalan (Bengali woman) as a term that designates a particular sociological category of person rather than a specific designator of place or region. The “Bangalan” is, on the one hand, the subject of policing by the state and border security forces, for she indexes the fear of the “illegal Bangladeshi (i.e., Muslim) migrant”; on the other hand, the designation by ordinary people of a host of migrant women as “Bangalan” points to the difficulty of asserting in any “accurate” way who is the target of censure and by whom.
This chapter unpacks the myriad ways in which migrant Muslim wives in central and northern Kutch are the subjects both of a heightened visibility and a dissimulated presence. It is generally believed by the largely Hindu middle-class, newspaper-reading public in Bhuj such as Sonal that these migrant wives are “hidden” at home, away from public interaction until they can demonstrate a facility in the local language and customs in order to “pass” scrutiny. This acquiring of local cultural capital is also seen to be premised on a “forgetting” of existing practices, such as reading and writing, and their fluency in other languages (Hindi, Bengali) in order to more effectively “blend” into their new environment. Although the “Bangladeshi infiltrator” is made visible through sensational news stories and gossip networks, the chapter argues that “detection” by the police or media is not the only challenge that “Bengali” women migrants are faced with as they choose to manage their visibility to others. Even though the opening vignette suggests that the family is complicit in “protecting” these women through the mechanism of the public secret, for instance, this is not to suggest that the family/community does not engage in its own modes of policing, as will be seen. Further, as many of my interactions with the family that are presented in this chapter were mediated through the NGO’s outreach activities in these villages, it will become apparent how various, often competing demands for visibility (for the police and border patrol, for NGO-led development work, or for the anthropologist) are managed with the need for privacy within the family.
Donor agencies require the process and results of development work to be made transparent. Here, transparency is accountability. This produces practices—not unlike the anthropologists’—that may mimic forms of biometric surveillance associated with the state such as taking photographs or thumb impressions (see, e.g., Garriott 2011, 138). Further, the ubiquitous anthropologist—whether or not she asks tricky questions—observes, takes photographs and notes, and may be drawn into family dynamics that unfold over time. The presence of the anthropologist may court exposure for those who are cast within her reach. This exposure may be welcomed as a source of social capital—in the case, for instance, of Nizam, the maulana who derived some stature among his peers through his attempts to direct my research—but it may also bring unwelcome attention, as we will see in chapter 4 with Bano, a “Bengali” wife who uses her interaction with me to “defend” herself against charges of wrongdoing. The family-NGO-state-anthropologist network pushes people to dissimulate differently, even as they are required to make themselves transparent—albeit in different ways—to each of these institutions and people. How migrant wives and their families manage the terrain between “detection” and “deception,” determining how much to reveal or conceal, from whom and to what end is the subject of this chapter. The ethnography suggests that the law or police are not the only sites that court heightened visibility while the family is a site of interiority or refuge from the law or its agents. The possibility of exposure lurks on the edges of every interaction, inside or outside the family. The idea of the family as a “safe” space or a site of refuge from the state is tested throughout as “Bengali” women move in and out of focus through multiply mediated interactions and encounters. Ideas of insider/outsider and of legality are rearticulated, negotiated, and acted on constantly, both by the police department and the family.
One of the sites where the margin between legality and illegality is produced in the evaluation of women’s mobility is its designation as either marriage or trafficking, as the two possible legal registers for women’s mobility—the one a legal and aspirational social status, the other a dreaded social evil. Surveillance and policing of women’s mobility exists both at what are assumed to be more “cosmopolitan” and “global” sites such as airport immigration counters and visa offices (e.g., Maunaguru 2014) where women are asked to “prove” the nature of their relationship with the men accompanying them on their travels, much as women like Razia may be accosted by police in Kutch on the merest suspicion of too much (or not enough) fluency in a particular spoken language, to determine the legitimacy of their presence in the region. When I decided to systematically track down more “Bengali” women, Mohamed Hosain was uncharacteristically hesitant; he finally asked me outright whether my meeting them would threaten their carefully strategized subvisibility.2 Apart from the fact that I have changed their names, this is another reason why the book is not taken up with the question of origins and my references to “Bengali” women migrants are presented not as a fact of their identity but to index the manner in which they were referred to in the field. My challenge in writing up this ethnography was to try and retain the element of uncertainty and the constant play between “truth” and “falsehood,” “detection” and “deception,” “visibility” and “invisibility” as I encountered it. As in my encounters with Razia, Nizam, and a number of others, my fieldwork was riddled with instances of conversations that did not add up. People said one thing at one time, and they were quite often contradicted another time, often constituting the realm of the public secret. News and information seemed to circulate ahead of me; what I thought of as my sudden and unannounced visits in the remotest of villages were often anticipated. “Oh, so-and-so mentioned that you might show up,” “X mentioned that you had come around, asking questions,” making it more and more apparent to me that I was not the only one piecing together a story. Nizam had become keenly invested in my fieldwork, to the point that I had begun to feel distinctly uncomfortable about what I felt was his way of managing my access to people and information. When contradicted publicly, my interlocutors were not embarrassed to have their “lie” caught out as I initially thought. Instead, everyone was participating in various forms of the “public secret” (Taussig 1999; Robinson 2013; Jusionyte 2015). So when Sonal referred to Razia as “the girl from Kalkatta” in a room full of women who had said otherwise to me, there was none of the embarrassment that I thought would ensue from their being “caught out” in this—what appeared to me to be—blatant “lie”: for had they not just the other day told me that she was from Rajasthan? Yet, this was not the case. We became part of a shared system of knowledge that decreed how much we knew and what we had to agree to not know publicly (Robinson 2013).
These incidents allowed me to recalibrate my encounters with various informants along the scale of honesty versus subterfuge, truth versus lies, or transparency versus deception. Instead, each of these categories was constantly shifting in relation to what was being said when, about whom, and most importantly, to whom. Agents of surveillance were not just to be encountered in the form of the police and the border security forces but also as journalists, development workers, tourists, and the roving anthropologist, as argued in chapter 1. When a woman designated as “Bengali” married into a family, she—and her affinal family—worked to manage her appearance and disappearance across interactions. The following sections explore some of these interactions and highlight some of the tensions that often built up in these carefully choreographed social dramas that nonetheless sometimes veered off script as when Razia broke out of the social role chosen for her (of invisibility) to track me down in a public street and strike up a conversation in full public view. In the sections that follow, I present some of the everyday interactions that took place in Sonapar between Muslim families and the anthropologist, in this case mediated through NGO activity. Each of these actors brought their own desire for information gathering into their encounters and were managed within the overall context of policing the “illegal” migrant as set out by police and media discourses.
Police and media reports regularly report the arrest of “Bangladeshis” from Kutch; in these reports, there is little by way of contextualizing the “illegality” of border crossing or migration. Men apprehended in the border areas of the Rann who cannot provide a good enough reason for their presence are often declared to be “Bangladeshi” citizens. Police rely on intuitive sartorial and linguistic markers to “recognize” them in the absence of documentary evidence of their nationality. For instance, a news report titled “Bangladeshi Held from Kutch” mentions that the man arrested and sent to the Joint Interrogation Centre in Bhuj “has no documents on him. He was wearing a lungi, shirt and skull cap,” the lungi supposedly giving him away, as men in Kutch tend to wear shalwar kameez. It adds, “He is acting as if he is not able to speak.… Policemen say there are many Bangladeshis in this region and when they are caught, they pretend to be dumb” (Yusuf 2011, emphasis added). These media practices are also instructive and pedagogic in nature: they enumerate the practices of deception used by “illegal” border crossers, thus schooling the reading public how to “recognize” or “read” practices designated as “suspicious.” This includes imbuing general personality traits (such as a new bride’s “shyness”) or presumed disability (inability to speak) with suspicious intent, resignifying these as symptoms of illegality within a field of police practice (Garriott 2011). The newspaper-reading public is then complicit with the police in the identification of these traits as suspicious and as markers of illegal cross-border activity. Another report, titled “Exfiltration: The New Threat to Border Security” (Nair 2007), describes how there is a growing trend of Indian and Bangladeshi Muslims crossing the western border illegally to enter Pakistan from where they hope to go to the Middle East in search of employment. It describes some of the strategies they follow to escape detection: “posing as cattle grazers; some pretended to be mentally unstable when the security persons caught them loitering near the Great Rann of Kutch” (Nair 2007). Another reports, “the ‘foreigner’ catching ‘spree’ in the bordering [sic] Kutch district of Gujarat continued with the arrest of a Bangladeshi lady in Kharinadi area of Bhuj town late last evening” (Desh Gujarat 2015a). “Mental instability” is a frequently recurring trope in these stories (e.g., Desh Gujarat 2015b). Police reports emphasize that “mental instability” (usually referred to in scare quotes) and the inability to speak are ruses to get by without detection. It is significant that “mental instability” is thus marked out for evidence of criminal intent. In my travels across Muslim settlements across Banni, I discovered that due to generations of consanguineous marriages, it was not unusual to find occasional cases of mental illness that was likely the consequence of a highly in-bred population. This was more visible among some communities than others. However, this became resignified in police-speak to indicate a deliberate pantomime of mental illness/playing dumb to avoid having to speak and be caught. The news story titled “Bengali-Speaking Girls Being Trafficked to Kutch District of Gujarat” (Bhattacharya 2012) seamlessly moves between “Bengali-speaking” women and “Bangladeshi” women; in effect, this conflates all Bengali speakers as Bangladeshis (therefore “illegal”), regardless of the fact that Indian citizens from the state of West Bengal are also Bengali speakers. The news item is imbued with a strong sense of moral panic: “The coastal district of Kutch in Gujarat is witnessing a sea change in its demographic profile. Hundreds of Bengali-speaking Muslim women are being trafficked from Bengal and Bangladesh to Kutch, where they are sold off as brides.… A large number of these women are even pushed into flesh trade [sic]” (Bhattacharya 2012, emphasis added). Although the women interviewed in the story say they are from West Bengal, the reporter takes recourse to their “Bangladeshi dialect” as evidence of their illegality. The article concludes, “for the authorities, the biggest challenge is in detecting the alleged Bangladeshi women as their nationality is shown as ‘Indian’ on government papers. ‘Even if we suspect them to be Bangladeshis, we can do nothing as they hold valid Indian papers,’ a senior police officer said” (Bhattacharya 2012, emphasis added).
The “suspicion” of being Bangladeshi is thus tied into nondocumentary forms of life: skin color, clothing, and speech (or its absence). Through these rhetorical devices, the “Bangladeshi” migrant is then produced as an object of social and moral disorder through media practices that sensationalize the “trafficking” of women and the “infiltration” of men from Bangladesh into Kutch. The “Bengali” woman in Kutch is designated as cultural “matter out of place” by the police regardless of where she has actually migrated from. Almost every family I knew in Kutch was acquainted with or was related to someone who was married to a “Bangalan.” Some of the women I met with and interacted with over time said they were from Bihar or Jharkhand, other Indian states east of Gujarat, even as our mutual acquaintances—if they were present—shook their heads incredulously: “Oh, you are not from Bengal? We always thought you were!” The “Bangalan” thus indexes (il)legality and visibility more than region of origin. On the one hand, this discursive strategy ends up illegalizing Muslim women migrants in Kutch as “illegal border crossers,” “trafficked women,” or as victims of “forced marriages” from the point of view of various state law enforcement agencies. These varied constructions of illegality coalesce for the most part into the figure of the Bangladeshi migrant in India who is the “iconic illegal migrant” in India, much as the Mexican migrant is in the United States, her illegality inhabited as a perpetual condition of “deportablity” (de Genova 2013). Illegality is not a fact given in law—attested to by the presence or absence of paperwork, for instance—but is actively produced through encounters between various forms of regulation and policing that generate the legal and illegal as relational rather than fixed categories (Poole 2004; Jusionyte 2015). Language, religion, sartorial practices, and skin color became clues to the identity—and thus the presumed legality—of migrants in the region.
On the other hand, the “Bangalan”—the collective designation for a host of women who migrate into Kutch from outside—are also received by the Muslim families that they marry into as desirable outsiders. There are different moral codes in operation as the presence of the “outsider” is evaluated. On the one hand, the “Bengali” Muslim woman is feared as a reproductive being that threatens the nation’s demographic balance away from the ideal Hindu-majority population, desired by right-wing nationalist parties. On the other hand, she is read through a different moral index for Muslims who see her as the bearer of an Islamic civility—although poor (therefore, sent far away in marriage by parents who cannot afford to provide her with dowry), she comes with cultural capital—that is, knowledge of reading and writing and of Islamic values—which she can then disseminate in her new environment. Forms of action or states of being that are marked out as constituting “suspicious activity” by the state may be read quite differently by families who choose migrant brides.3 This does not, however, mean that borderland residents are not discerning about what it means to have “others” in their midst. It is just to point out that the moral axis along which this distinction is made is different from the policing that emanates from the state.
The migrant has been crucial to legal debates on citizenship in India from the very beginning, as seen in the foundational debates on citizenship after Partition. Although migration enabled the acquisition of citizenship during the immediate post-Partition period, when it “provided the condition of passage into citizenship” (Roy 2010, 27), it was precisely the figure of the migrant that became a mark of illegality by the 1980s, the “illegal migrant” from Bangladesh becoming a key site of nationalist insecurity (Roy 2010). Although the Bengali Muslim immigrant from Bangladesh became a particularly charged policy issue only in the 1980s when India’s “citizenship regime” (Jayal 2013) began to move toward a more exclusionary definition of citizenship, it had been biased against Muslims right from its inception following decolonization. In the immediate aftermath of the 1947 partition, Constituent Assembly debates already reveal an inherent bias as they attempted to keep out Muslims, with Hindus regarded as somewhat more “natural” citizens (Jayal 2013, chap. 2). Legal judgments and cases indicate this double-speak by the Indian state on the question of migration into India from Pakistan, reaffirming in the process the “ethno-cultural and gendered bias of citizenship in India” (Roy 2010, 61). Especially in the period between the enactment of the constitution in 1950 and the commencement of the Citizenship Act in 1955, a period characterized as one of indeterminacy and liminality (Roy 2010), there was a notable distinction between policies pertaining to the granting of citizenship to Hindus coming to India from Pakistan and those that concerned themselves with the admission of Pakistani wives as Indian citizens. The latter, as Roy’s (2010, 62) survey of archival documents reveals, was a far more “grudging admission” while there appeared to be an official understanding “that the legal confirmation of Indian citizenship of displaced (Hindu) minorities from Pakistan was to be facilitated and expedited” (74).
Chapter 5 will revisit these concerns ethnographically through an examination of cross-border migration from TharParkar in Sindh and the role of marriage and kinship networks in facilitating the transition into citizenship for those who chose to migrate in and around 1971. Current debates over who has more legitimate claims to citizenship and residence rights in India thus bear the shadow of these early debates. The Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019 legalizes the status of certain religious “minorities” from neighboring countries (to be read as all except Muslims—“Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan”) who, it is proposed, “shall not be treated as illegal migrants for the purposes of this Act.”4 This is the third amendment to the Citizenship Act, with earlier changes incorporated in 1986 and 2003, each of which was formulated as a response to the crisis of potential Muslim migration into India. Muslim migrants from neighboring countries (or, for that matter, even from other states within the country as seen above) are designated as “infiltrators.” Migrants’ status is thus “illegalized” (Jusionyte 2015) through such discursive exercises: the designation of refugee or infiltrator.
In late-colonial India, women’s chastity and appropriately managed conjugality was the idiom for the construction of what was deemed to be an authentically indigenous (and therefore Hindu) nationalist response to colonial modernity (Sarkar 2001). The upper caste Hindu woman was “the metaphor for both the unviolated, chaste, inner space and the possible consequence of its surrender” (Sarkar 2001, 265). Sexual moralities in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were reconstituted within the idiom of an upper caste, bourgeois respectability. Hindi literature was canonized into a properly respectable genre; the depiction of Hindu women consequently shifted “from the sensual to the virtuous.… The woman was gradually transformed from a figure of eroticism, sexuality, excess and playfulness to a classic, calm and perfect figure in most of ‘high’ literature. The assertion of a moral code in a canon of literature became a national virtue” (Gupta 2001, 40–41). The Hindu woman had to be protected from the Muslim male, portrayed in newspapers and popular literature of the time as aggressive and lewd. A spate of “abduction” stories circulated in the popular media in the 1920s enabled the consolidation of the “Muslim” as the chief threat to the emergent Hindu community as they targeted the Muslim man as the lascivious aggressor who set out to “abduct” the virtuous and innocent Hindu woman who must be kept safe from his clutches (Gupta 2001).
With this high value placed on chastity and domesticity in the evaluation of women’s character, migrant women have been marked out for particular censure in the subcontinent, much as in other parts of the world (Andrijasevic 2010). Women’s migration in general—regardless of religion or ethnicity—is often designated as “trafficking” in the domains of law and public policy. This is also the result of a tendency to equate women’s mobility with questionable morality (Kapur 2010). Thus, many distinct types of labor migration undertaken by women are often collapsed under the single framework of “sex work” and all sex work is then equated to trafficking. This problematic set of assumptions not only ignores other instances of exploitation and potential trafficking of women in factories and domestic work but also assumes that sex work is “immoral” and that as such, no woman would willingly choose it as a form of labor (Kempadoo 2005). In the ethnographic sections that follow, it will be seen that although law and policy may criminalize or illegalize women’s migration due to a particular evaluation of “normative” women’s work, the family makes its moral evaluations on a qualitatively different register. While policing the moral boundaries of the family, its interests do not always dovetail with the state and law.5
In Sonapar, women artisans are crowded into the house of the “field representative” of a local NGO that works to preserve and market the region’s traditional handicraft. Hasham is the chief go-between for this village and the NGO. The previous day, he had attended the weekly meeting at the latter’s office where he, along with all the other field representatives from the various villages they worked in, went to deposit finished embroidered products and to collect new raw materials: thread and cloth. Back home, he has lists of items that need to be produced—cushion covers, shawls, skirts, jackets, and spectacle cases. He cuts the cloth for each item and distributes it among his kinswomen, for everyone in this village, as with other Muslim settlements that I have worked in in rural Kutch, is related to everybody else. As with other Muslim communities I met, they practice consanguineous marriage, often making it hard for the anthropologist to keep track of kinship as there were so many doubled-up relations. By the time I arrive at Hasham’s, most have already left with their assignments. It is 1:00 p.m., and he tells me he has been at it since 9:00 a.m.! “What do you want to embroider?” he asks a young woman whose turn has arrived. She says that she would like to do a shawl. “No,” he replies, “you already have a lot of work that you still have not finished; you need to bring that in before you take anything else. If you want something small like a spectacle case, you can have that.” She looks doubtful and is too shy to pursue the matter, perhaps because I am sitting right behind her. Turning to another woman, he tells her to embroider three cushion covers and that he wants them done by Friday. “By Friday!” she exclaims. “But that is only three days away; I couldn’t possibly do that. Why not give me one or two?” “Because,” responds Hasham, “they are a part of a set; they have the same design, so it is better to have one person do them. This is a new design and it will look better if one pair of hands works on all of them.” He hands her the embroidery threads for them. The fabric is orange, and it will have a beige and brown pattern on it. She still looks doubtful and says she cannot take this on; she does not have much time. She settles for spectacle cases instead. Mehreen, who is Hasham’s sister, gets the cushion covers instead. Who decides on the patterns and the colors? I ask Hasham. “I do,” he declares with a grin. He is still trying to persuade the young woman to do the cushion covers: “People in big cities have liked these products,” he tells her. “When a woman from Dilli [New Delhi] came to the [NGO’s] office, she looked around for things to buy and didn’t like anything as much as our products; people like them, they will buy them, you should be happy to do this work,” he adds. Still unsuccessful, he gives up. Why not give her what she wants? I ask. He replies that he knows each and every woman’s embroidery by heart; he can recognize the singularity and uniqueness of each’s work and that he knows who is capable of what, whose work is likely to be better appreciated than others. He keeps a strict watch on the progress of the embroidery even as he is doling out new tasks and chatting with me. Women stop by occasionally to show him their works in progress, and he checks and comments on each one. “A stitch in time saves nine, isn’t that so?” he asks.
Meanwhile, Mehreen, with orange cushion covers in hand, asks me to come with her to her house. “I will sit and work, and we can keep chatting, OK?” We settle down on the porch in front of her house where there are about six women of all ages embroidering away. She introduces me to her daughter-in-law and two of her young daughters who are still too young to embroider professionally but have begun as apprentices to their mother. She begins to measure the orange fabric designated for a cushion cover. Hasham has drawn out a pattern and she will follow it. But when she measures across, she demonstrates that the design is not accurately drawn. “Basically, his markings are just to give me an idea. Now I will measure and find the center point from which to make a symmetrical design.” The embroidery is geometric and relies a great deal on accuracy of the counted spaces between each stitch. “How will you mix and use the colors you have been given?” I ask. “Oh, that is up to me,” she says. And what of the decision as to what stitch to use where? “That, too, is up to me,” she responds.
Hasham prides himself on being able to “read” everybody’s stitches; he has a keen sense of his kinsfolk and indicates that nobody can escape his eagle eye. He knows who is visible and present when the anthropologist and the NGO team visits and who is not. He works hard to manage the public face that the artisans of his village present to the outside world: the quality of their embroidery, their punctuality, and their attention to detail in their work: hath ki safai, which translates as a clear (i.e., skilled) hand, but importantly, it can also indicate a “sleight of hand,” depending on the context. He also took it upon himself to organize the “rebuilding” of the village using donor funds in the aftermath of the Gujarat earthquake of 2001.6 Although the police are focused on aspects of dress, demeanor, and language to determine the boundaries between the insider and outsider, in the determination of “illegality,” they are not the only ones keeping an eye on those activities or persons who are seen as rupturing the smooth flow of everyday life. The family also keeps a keen eye on the management of legitimacy, between those seen as insiders and outsiders. Skills and general good breeding, such as reading and writing, and knowledge of the Koran and a generally “Islamic” way of life are also central to the manner in which boundaries are drawn up between those who are “local” and those who may have come in from the outside and therefore the locus of potential suspicion. Family and kinship networks are once again crucial in the way in which these boundaries are negotiated.
Further, this brief vignette suggests that the family does not denote a space of “interiority” from the gaze of the state, law, or the police. What the law threatens to expose (“illegality” of citizenship status, for instance), the family does not necessarily cover up in the folds of intimacy and kin relations. Exposure is threatened at each level, just as one is being scrutinized even when within the ambit of the “domestic.” In the above examples, embroidery is being distributed through domestic networks, where women’s individual style and skill is known to their kinsfolk. Hasham is the uncle who knows familial secrets, but he is also its conduit to the outside world through his official designation at the NGO. Watchfulness and knowledge of the domestic can segue into surveillance and the deployment of information about the family by others as well.
Hasham’s sister is married to a man of another caste in a different village. She has a physical disability, and it had been difficult to find a match within the village. A marriage was fixed in a village in Banni among a different caste, more socially backward and poor. One of her sisters-in-law—her husband’s brother’s wife—is a “Bengali” woman, Halima. She stands out in her affinal home by virtue of her (very elementary) education; the others are steeped in illiteracy and ill health. Halima knows how to read and write; over the sounds of her rolling out and cooking rotis (bread) on a tiny wood-fired stove in the corner of her single-roomed hut and her children crying occasionally, I catch fragments of sound as voices reciting the alphabet in Urdu float in on the breeze: “aliph, be, pe … sin, shin … toe, zoe … lam, mim, nun,” the children are chanting rhythmically, strong gusts of wind carrying away bits and pieces. Do they go to school? I ask Halima. She teaches them the Urdu alphabet and the Koran. They come to her every morning and study until the afternoon with a break in between. “What is the point of a school?” she says. “What is there to learn in a jungle?”
“You never can tell,” she says, concentrating on the roti she is rolling out, “where your destiny [kismat] will pick you up and leave you.” Her husband is completely unlettered; he did not even know how to be a Muslim, said Halima. “The atmosphere [mahaul] here is completely different from where I grew up.” Her husband was named Moti (pearl), after his grandfather. When he was to get married to Halima, her parents said that this “Hindu name” would not do; he should get a “proper” Muslim name. So he changed it to Mohammed Ali. Halima has brought some “Islami tariqa” (Islamic ways) to the family but was soon disheartened. On my next visit a couple of months later, she said she had stopped teaching the children. Her mother-in-law had died in a road accident in Bhuj, and it was difficult to manage all the work at home. In any case, she felt that the “atmosphere” (mahaul) in a “jungle” was not easy to change. “Look at their names: most of the time, they just name their children after the day [of the week].”
Hasham’s sister wants to bring Halima, who is her sister-in-law, to Sonapar on one of her visits home. “I want to show her a different place,” she says to her brother, Hasham. “We have fields and some kheti [cultivation; agriculture] in Sonapar. Sonal comes once a week, and the women get to meet others when they go to the NGO office now and then.” Hasham told her off in no uncertain terms: “You think I don’t know what is going on under my nose? I will not allow it. In fact, you have had too much freedom. I don’t know what your husband calls himself [a reference to another un-Islamic and, according to him, ‘odd’ name], but it’s time he stopped letting you out and about. I don’t want girls from here and there hiding under my roof.” Later, Hasham explained to me out of his sister’s earshot that he did not want any lafda (problem or scandal) over the presence of women he could not vouch for personally. It occurred to me through the many visits I had with Hasham that he had never mentioned Razia, who had spoken to me at the village’s bus stop. Although he and I met and spoke at length over the course of a couple of years, he never once raised the question of “Bengali” women in his own village, even though he did not have any hesitation in discussing Halima, the “Bengali” sister-in-law of his own sister. Although the women of the village appeared to acknowledge her existence, even if they did not wish to clarify her biographical details—if in fact these details were public knowledge—I was never able to meet Razia again to interview her directly.
What a particular category “looks” like as it is enumerated is typically an anthropological/state concern that does not always mirror the blurriness in practice. Although the overarching theme for the police’s search for “outsiders” in this border was evidence of being Muslim and/or Bengali, Hasham constantly made references to various “others” from whom he chose to distinguish his people. These “others” were typically adivasis—a generic term used for the freelance migrant labor that came into Kutch after the earthquake in search of work in construction. What is also noteworthy is that Hasham’s own self-reflection on what it means to be Muslim also complicates ways of seeing that are naturalized by the police and the state that uses certain markers such as clothing or given names to make an assessment over identity and from there jumps to conclusions about legality, as is done for “Bengalis” on this border.
The theme of given names came up often in conversation, along with what were seen to be forms of behavior that were deemed to index a certain “Islamic” civility. Driving with me to visit his sister in Banni on one occasion, Hasham explains to me the rudiments of their faith: “We are not Muslim [mussalman]! ‘Mussalman’ means those who pray five times a day and who read the Koran; this is what it [the Koran] says; you must have read this there. We don’t read namaz, nor do our children. And after all, if we don’t, then how will they follow our example? Look [pointing outside the car at passing herds of cattle]! Allah has made a cow different from a buffalo, a goat different from a camel. You can spot the difference as soon as you set eyes on any of them; you would never mistake one for the other. But he did not make any difference between human beings, between a Hindu and a Muslim. There is nothing to distinguish us. By keeping a beard, we think we become Muslims! But a true Muslim is only he who prays regularly and reads the Koran. We don’t do that, so we cannot lay true claim to being Muslim.”
Hasham was able to detail for me his ideas of who constituted a “real” Muslim, thus distancing himself from a full claim to the identity. Even though Islamic practice was an aspiration that was worthy of emulation, there was also a very real recognition of human frailty and the difficulties of achieving a perfect congruence with this ideal that was now available in the person of the “Bengali” bride who often displayed a fluency in Koranic education, as Halima had. Similarly, there was also an understanding of what forms of practice they wanted to distance themselves from. Who was allowed entry into the circle of kinship and residence in the village was the outcome of a process of vetting that Hasham declared crucial to maintaining social order. Adivasis were universally reviled by most Muslims as being of a particularly uncivilized form of life. Bengali brides, on the other hand, were poor and came from destitute families (“They are so poor, their parents have no choice but to sell them—bech dete hain—to far-off places”) but had capital in the form of more “properly” Islamic ways that could contribute to the uplift and maintenance of the moral order in families and villages they were married into. This made the Bengali woman a desirable wife and mother.
The reviling of the adivasi was closely linked to the competition for scarce resources in the region and how the incoming adivasi directly threatened Muslims’ access to work.7 In Dolpar, a village of pastoralists in Banni, I never saw any men in the village, whatever the time of day or night. Rumana, a middle-aged woman who kept a feisty hold over her family, said that in all her years she had never seen such hard times as these, referring to the consequences of three consecutive years of drought. “We are traditionally maldharis [pastoralists], and we do still have some mal [animal herds; also wealth] which the men are currently out with in hopes of finding some water and fodder. They used to work in kolsa [coal; making coal illegally by burning wood]. That was good, the going rate was 110 rupees for 40 kilos of coal, but it’s been nine months now and that has been closed down. They promised us that they would restart it after the elections, but we are still waiting. It’s too dangerous to work in coal nowadays. The police roam about every evening,” she says, circling above her head with her finger.
Suddenly struck by an idea, she turns to Sonal. “Why don’t you take the coal that we have and sell it for us?” Sonal laughs and retorts that she does not want to go to jail either! She suggests instead that their menfolk travel up to Bhuj and look for work among the newly commissioned construction work in the post-earthquake building boom in the towns. Sonal adds that there are people like the adivasis who have come from so far to work in Bhuj, people who have come from outside Kutch even; so why should their own menfolk not be more enterprising in their search for work? Rumana virtually explodes. “These adivasis are all over the place! It’s as if when the earth moved and shook at the time of the earthquake, these adivasis came out of the earth and took over this place! Wherever you turn, they are there!” She regains her composure and adds, “Well, most of our men are away in any case, looking for work; there are only two men in the village, looking after all of us women, and we need them to stay here,” she concludes firmly.
Hasham takes me on a walk around his village. The houses are easily identifiable: after the earthquake, the NGO built them 132 houses from their reconstruction grant. Seventeen new houses are being built under a poverty rehabilitation scheme of the government, and fifteen were built under the same scheme before the earthquake. The NGO-sponsored construction stands out—round cement structures with rust-colored curved roofs, whereas the government-sponsored ones are rectangular with sloping tiled roofs. Interspersed with these new houses are old ones, or remnants of old ones, mostly made of mud, with tiled or thatched roofs, repaired after each monsoon. Hasham conducted the post-earthquake village survey himself and decided on the number of new houses required to be built through the NGO. The organization had planned and budgeted to build houses only for those people registered with them as artisans.
This did not suit them, said Hasham, pointing out that at that time, there were only about forty artisans. “How could we say to one brother that you will get a house, but the other one won’t? So I made sure that everybody got a house constructed in their name; I even made sure that the names of my young children were written down. Now, if the organization [sanstha] is giving us a house, we should make sure that the future is taken care of as well, shouldn’t we?” He then made sure that no “outsider” was given the building contract. He convinced the NGO staff that when he had about two-hundred-odd men in the village who needed employment, there was no way he was going to allow outsiders like “adivasis who want alcohol all the time, men as well as women,” to come into the village and ruin the atmosphere (mahaul). “I drink, too,” Hasham says as an aside to Mohamed Hosain, “but in moderation, not like these adivasis.”8 Turning back to me, he says, “I told the sanstha: you may send one person to oversee the construction and give instructions, be a supervisor, but all the labor will be ours. And so it happened [aisa hua]; our own people earned good money building these houses.” For these Muslims, it was the “adivasi” who was the figure of social and moral disorder, a licentiousness and excess that threatened to ruin the mahaul. “Bengali” women, on the other hand, were seen to be poor, but they had “good Islamic values,” and this was held in their favor.
Expectations of transparency come from various institutional sources. In the context of borderland policing and the maintenance of various boundaries, NGO-led development work creates new layers to the management of deception and detection. I am at Sonapar with Sonal; she has come for a follow-up workshop with the women on safe pregnancy. We sit in a newly constructed office building and wait for the women to arrive. It is the middle of the afternoon, four o’clock and blisteringly hot. Prior to parking in front of the office, the jeep did a round of the entire village, sounding the horn loudly, announcing our arrival. About fifteen women show up and they are of all ages, many of them young unmarried girls and some older women among them. Sonal begins by asking them—as she did with the other groups in different villages—how they cleaned the cloth they used during their menstrual cycle, emphasizing how it should be washed, dried, and then stored in a clean place. The women responded that they knew how to do this. They are not like Rabaris (a Hindu pastoral community); they do know better than them! “They consider themselves above the Rabaris,” Sonal feels the need to explain, underscoring to me once again the constant need to distinguish one’s own people from “others” who are considered less “civilized.” When she displays the illustrated book on pregnancy and childbirth as well as the male and female anatomy, they giggle but only sporadically. Mostly, they listen well, and I am impressed at their attention and engagement. Finally, Sonal takes out chart paper and pens and asks them to convey through illustrations what they learned today, while she will take photos to show the workshop sponsors. As soon as they see the paper and pens, they scuttle into a corner; fear grips them.
Sonal says, “You do such beautiful embroidery. Can’t you draw a bit? It’s not to judge you, just to get a sense of what you learned. Since you can’t write, why not draw? Look, all the other villages have drawn something.” And she shows them the drawings; some of the charts have a lot of written words as well. I am intrigued to see the fear of the paper and pen in this village. When the camera came out, Fawzia objected vehemently. She is educated and young; she joined the group late but interjected vehemently. “This is not right,” she announced. To be showing such pictures and talking like this, and then to have them draw and talk about it—it was not acceptable to her, and she stormed off. The NGO’s need for transparency is dictated by the terms of their donors who demand visible proof of the development process as well as the tangible outcomes of activities they have funded: in this case, a workshop on maternal health. These activities may bring in their wake a need to make themselves visible that is not always desired; they may also unintentionally stage or highlight some of the latent tensions within the community in their management of privacy under conditions where transparency is demanded of them.
The NGO has a newly inaugurated office building in the village, where the weekly sessions with the health and education outreach team are to be conducted. The keys cannot be located, so we all congregate in Hasham’s one-roomed house once again. Like the last time, the room fills up with women, not to receive embroidery this time but to work at whatever task their teacher, Harilal, has planned for the day. A mat is spread out on the floor for me; Harilal sits on a quilt spread nearby while all the women squeeze themselves onto the floor space opposite us. Except for my tiny corner of the mat, the rest of it is scrupulously avoided by all the women. Come and sit next to me, I coax them, it is so crowded over there. But they only giggle. Finally, Harilal tells Fawzia and Mehreen to come and sit with me so that others would follow; sure enough, four women came and sat down. Once the children had been shooed away, there were about fifteen women roughly between what I imagined were the ages of about twelve to forty-five. Harilal announces the project for the day. He hands out sheets of paper to the women and tells them that they will draw their family tree on it—like this, he demonstrates, drawing one. He draws lines, each culminating in a circle that represented one person. “If you can write, put down the names of the family members you are representing in each circle; if you cannot write, at least you can draw lines and circles, can’t you?” he asks them. As he demonstrates a family tree, pointing out the base for the grandfather, then branches going upward for each uncle and the father, there are stifled giggles at the prospect of drawing a circle and saying, “This is my uncle.” There are not enough pens to go around, so they have to take turns at this. “Where are your notebooks and pens?” Harilal asks. There is no response except for more stifled giggles.
It takes an age for the women to come up with their charts. The broad contours of the kinship network of the village have been sketched: each chart starts with a grandfather and shows all the male members of a family. I tease Harilal, “What about the women? Why do the charts only show men?” There are more giggles, louder this time. “OK, let’s put in the women, then: start with your dadi [paternal grandmother],” he instructs. Now there is more confusion: many women have the same name, across generations. “But they can’t be the same person,” I argue. More laughter. “No, but we keep the same names across generations,” says an older woman. Fawzia has identified a circle with a very different-sounding name from the usual pool: Shehzadi (princess). “Now, that’s a nice name; who is Shehzadi?” asks Harilal, holding up Fawzia’s chart. There is an uncomfortable silence. The younger women cover their mouths with their dupattas and look intently down at their charts. Fawzia’s mother reprimands her, a short sharp sound that I cannot decipher. Turning to me, she says, “This is why we have banned television in our village. We don’t like people watching films; this is the kind of thing that happens. She is confused between real life and TV life.” Nobody speaks after this; the general bonhomie has broken. Harilal and I gather up the charts and prepare to leave. An unspoken tension leaves a mark on the room, regardless of whether there is actually anything to hide.
Is Shehzadi a fictive character—from a television show, as Fawzia’s mother’s reprimand indicates—or is she someone whose public identity must be fictionalized in order for everyday life to go on? From the ethnographic vignettes recounted above, it is clear that Muslims in villages across Banni are engaged in the everyday policing of boundaries. These are social and moral enumerations that allow them to articulate their terms of belonging to a community, even while Hasham reflects pertinently that it is not always easy to demarcate the objective boundaries of a group. What does it mean to say we are Muslims? he asks—a question that is of more than passing importance to the anthropologist. These boundaries determine who is an acceptable or desirable member of the group—regardless of their language, skin color, or region of birth (thus, women from the east are desired for their “Islamic” values) and who is the “outsider”—for example, Rabaris and adivasis who are endowed with a social and moral bankruptcy. These evaluations of insider and outsider do not map onto the state’s policing of border communities, but they take active cognizance of them. Thus, the fictionalization of Shehzadi is an acknowledgment of the multiple regimes of policing that encounter one another in this complex and multilayered terrain. When these regimes of policing come up against regimes of transparency—the NGO, the anthropologist, or the state—they produce unexpected social outcomes as recounted above.
Demands for transparency were also negotiated at a physical level of presence/absence. I noticed with the NGO outreach programs that they struggled to acquaint Muslim women in border villages with the rudiments of reading and writing. A grassroots worker in an organization dedicated to Banni’s development said, “It’s hard to organize anything in Banni; women will not come to any kind of public meeting.” Sonal tells a group in Dolpar, “Reading makes your life easier. You can read nameplates on buses to know which one to take; you can sign your names and can keep track of your embroidery work and how much money you have earned.” Often, the “Bengali” woman is better educated, albeit in Urdu. This is a fact that must be kept hidden, for it is an avenue to detection, much like reports of men being rendered “speechless” when accosted by the police.
In another village tucked away in Banni, I am introduced to two young women who—it is said to me—are from Kolkata. Over conversation and tea, Rabia tells me that she is from Patna (Bihar), that she has lived in Banni for five years now. She speaks fluent Kutchi, as does Salima who confirms that she is, indeed, from Bengal. Rabia and I had established a friendly rapport before Salima joined us, during which time she told me that Salima was from “Bangladesh” and had six or seven others from her area in nearby villages, unlike she who was all alone here; nobody from Patna had married anywhere in the region, to the best of her knowledge. Salima “corrected” Rabia’s observation when she joined our conversation, stating that she was from (West) “Bengal, near the bone glass factory at Asansol.” “We can’t go to Bangladesh,” she chides Rabia. “You need a passport for that.” Turning to me, she clarified, “Where I come from, there is a border; here, too, is a border.” I asked whether she spoke Bengali, and the others immediately chorused, “She has forgotten her language!” Only Rabia laughed and commented astutely, “How can you forget your own language? You can never give that up, can you?” When I ask her to, she writes her name on a piece of paper, in Hindi and then in Urdu, the two languages she learned in Bihar.
I noticed that she had written down her name as “Roohi” and I looked up, puzzled. “I was Roohi there, wasn’t I? I was given the name Rabia after my nikah [Muslim wedding ceremony],” she clarified. In this narrative, there is a melancholic longing expressed by women that is no different from the leaving of a natal home post-marriage in the South Asian context more broadly but compounded here by the additional demands of being a border area where difference in language and culture mark one out as “different” and with differing moral contours depending on who is doing the work of seeing.
The above ethnographic vignettes dwell on some of the ways in which boundaries are assessed between insiders and outsiders by those who have a stake in the maintenance of social and moral order along this national border. The police make their assessment of the legal and the illegal, not on the basis of paperwork—as is often assumed for a rational, bureaucratic form of governance—but on an “intuitive” sense of the “outsider” that is based on clues such as language (even dialect) spoken, clothes worn, and skin color. Although on the one hand, for police and media discourses, the “Bengali” indexed a fear of Bangladeshi infiltration and triggered a moral panic oriented toward the containment of social and moral disorder thought to ensue in the wake of the Bengali migrant, on the other hand, the family was invested in a very different kind of order based not on “legality” but “legitimacy.” One of the markers of being from the “outside” was any evidence of an educated woman among an almost completely unlettered population. Similarly, marriage to a “Bengali” woman was often the recourse taken by men who were regarded as not particularly attractive partners: they often suffer from a range of social or psychological deficits (they are often unemployed, ill, or old). As a consequence of their marriages, they came to lead more structured, ordered (even Islamic, as Halima felt of her husband) lives. This was often the case in town as well.
Although Zain came from a respected Muslim artisan caste in Kutch with long-established urban connections across the region, he was nevertheless considered to be somewhat “useless” (bekar) by the community. He could not hold down a job; after his parents died, none of his brothers wanted to look after him as they were “fed up” (bezar) with him and his slovenly ways. He lived alone and ate at local eateries (hotel ka khana), a sure marker of undomesticated ways. People tut-tutted and expressed sympathy for him but were not moved to help him out in any way (“his brothers have washed their hands of him; what is it to us, then?”). One of his usual haunts for meals was a restaurant run by a family from his caste. It was well located near the main bus station in town, and he often managed to get meals at a discounted price, catching up on the day’s gossip and news. The restaurant owner realized suddenly that it had been a while that Zain had not shown up. Then others began noticing a distinct improvement in his appearance. Women commented that his clothes looked clean and mended. Something was clearly up. What kind of job had he landed? Rumors began circulating of possible nefarious connections and “illegal” activities (do number ke dhandhe). Was he dabbling in one of the illegal trades in liquor or coal? Was he helping the “military” out? Some could not quite believe this of him; he was too simple. Then what explained this sudden turnover? An acquaintance of one of his sisters-in-law found out that Zain was now married and leading a life of quiet and respectable domesticity. It turned out that his bhabhi’s (brother’s wife) parents had suggested a “Bengali” wife for him. After his marriage, he found a job working as a cloth dyer in someone’s karkhana (workshop) and was doing reasonably well. As they said of him now, “He is poor but always well turned out in clean clothes and fed and looked after by his wife.”
Boundaries between insiders and outsiders, “legal” and “illegal” residents were drawn continually by agents of law enforcement as well as the community. When the police struggled with “illegality” as a stable, documentary attribute, they made up for it using forms of intuitive wisdom drawn from the region: who belonged and who did not was ascribed to the ways in which people looked, spoke, dressed, and behaved. “Look at the features of these people in Banni,” a police officer pointed out to me. “They are tall and fair; many of them have light eyes. Bengalis are short and dark. You can immediately tell them apart. I don’t have to talk to a Bangladeshi to know one; I can see him and tell you immediately.”
Yet, pastoralists in Banni reflected on the irony of such “intuitive” wisdom deployed by a force that was also ambiguously related to the local, evocative of colonial forms of policing that produced distinct social “types” as the objects of policing (Nigam 1990) by a state that was simultaneously disconnected from those they were supposed to police; they said it was strange how the police and military people thought they could read the local landscape. According to Ismail in Sonapar, “These military people are all from outside, mostly from Kerala [again, not to be taken literally; here, the southern Indian state of Kerala signifies the south and non-Hindi-speaking regions]. They cannot even speak Hindi properly; what do they know of our language? They don’t have a clue and then they harass us, suspecting all Muslims of being terrorists.” The community was also constantly engaged in the evaluation of legitimacy and illegitimacy for those whom they decided to incorporate strategically into the family.
Women designated as “Bengali” were conduits to an “Islamic” way of life and they brought domestic order to men who were lacking these attributes, therefore seen as social outcasts, regardless of how they were perceived by the law enforcement authorities. The enumerative practices undertaken by the state, as it attempts to “fix” identities—“citizens” or “infiltrators”—are not always the outcome of rational bureaucratic practices. They are quite dependent on the ways in which particular police officials deploy this information and on how they determine the attributes of those who are deemed to “not belong” to a particular context. As we saw, this is often based on subjectively evaluated criteria of religion, dress, skin color, or language. On the other hand, the family or the community is also engaged in similar enumerative tasks, even asking, what does it mean to be called a Muslim? These ways of reading the landscape and the people within it alert us to be wary of the use of categories, forcing us to ask what is the content of these categories and how are they contextualized within the particular contexts and the agents through whom they are deployed.