Sometime in 2007, I was traveling back with colleagues to Mumbai, where I was teaching at the time. We were on our way back from Kathmandu via New Delhi. As I passed through immigration and passport control—an unremarkable exercise at the best of times—the official looked at his computer screen for what seemed like an inordinate amount of time. He looked up at me a couple of times, then back to his screen. My colleagues were waiting impatiently on the other side; we had very little time to make our connecting flight. I must have asked if everything was okay; I cannot remember the details. I do remember what he said, though. With the hint of a smile, to just take the edge off, he stated rather than asked, “In 2002–2003, you lived in Bhuj.” I nodded, somewhat bewildered at this unexpected conversational turn. He continued, “You lived in Friendship Colony,” correctly identifying the neighborhood where I had rented an apartment in a residential complex for the duration of the fieldwork for my PhD dissertation. By now, I was even more bewildered, and he continued, enjoying my reaction. “You lived on the mezzanine floor of Sunlight Terrace.” At this point, I asked—maintaining the same tone of careful jocularity that he had used to initiate this conversation—“Wah [Wow], does it say all of this on your computer screen?” He responded, “Oh no. You see, I was ‘on deputation’ to the CBI [Central Bureau of Investigation] that year and I was posted in Bhuj. I lived in the same neighborhood. When I saw you just now, I thought you looked familiar; I used to see you walking home now and then, so I thought I would ask if you were the same person.” I recall laughing this off and asking him whether he just had a very good memory or whether his job while “on deputation” was to keep an eye on me, but this marked the end of our exchange; he stamped my passport and waved me through.
This exchange stayed with me and got me thinking about the fieldwork that I had concluded four years previously in Kutch, a district on the border between Pakistan and the western Indian state of Gujarat. Bhuj is the administrative capital of Kutch and the place where I had rented an apartment for my yearlong residence while conducting research for my PhD.1 Even though many people in the field had warned me about the ubiquity of state surveillance and the possibility of my movements and conversations being monitored by the various state intelligence networks who combed the border region, this was my first “direct” encounter with such “official” surveillance that also disconnected from my fieldwork both spatially and temporally. On the other hand, my notes from that year in the field are filled with what I thought were “suspicious” encounters and regular exhortations to myself not to be paranoid or read too much into everyday interactions with acquaintances in the field even as I was somewhat self-congratulatory about having “escaped” surveillance.
On my next visit to Kutch, I related the incident at the airport in New Delhi to one of my acquaintances, a journalist and editor who also ran a small stationery and office supplies store with a printing press in the old city. He confessed that a mere week after I had moved into my apartment in August 2002, he had received a “friendly” visit from an intelligence official. (The apartment rented by the CBI for its field officers was indeed right behind where I lived, he confirmed.) The official asked about me and what the journalist thought I was doing in Kutch. I was surprised and asked him why he had never mentioned this to me. He replied, “Well, if I had told you, then I would not be doing my job, would I?”
I was puzzled at first and not a little disappointed; perhaps I expected that this kind of information would have been shared with me as a matter of course, particularly by someone I met with so regularly and thought of as a confidant. As I was to learn, however, information was like capital; it had the power to generate enormous dividends. It could be bestowed as a gift or withheld from public circulation. Information was leveraged for other kinds of reciprocal exchanges, material and symbolic. Transparency could not be taken for granted in interpersonal relationships. For me to have expected it was surely naive; after all, as an anthropologist in the field, did I also not manage my persona and encounters in a way that enabled me to most effectively gain access to information from others? Why did I assume that I was the only one collecting information from others without being subjected to a similar exercise in return? The fact is that although I was predisposed to thinking that I would be primarily policed by the state, there were many other forms and sources of policing that I was interpellated in, including those that emanated from my own practices as an anthropologist, and that only became clear to me in hindsight. In this book, the state and its documentary practices are not the only ones disposed to surveillance and the management of information—the credibility of the immigration officials’ claims apart, he did not acknowledge his recognition of me on the basis of official records but on an interpersonal exchange at the airport where he claimed familiarity on the basis of living in the same neighborhood.
Although my interaction with the immigration official suggests that individuals in politically sensitive areas are policed by state agencies—the immigration checkpoint is after all the quintessential site for policing the entry of individuals into state space (Luibhéid 2002; Jeganathan 2004; de Genova 2013)—this book looks beyond the obvious sites, sources, and modes of policing that are usually tied to its institutional elaboration within the context of the state. By “policing” I mean the complex web of discourses and practices that are produced by multiple agents in service of maintaining what is basically a contested social and moral order. In this approach, policing is a form of embodied social practice rather than merely a state institution.2 It is in this broader sense that we might refer to “moral policing,” “caste policing,” “community policing,” and so on, each of which provides additional texture to the forms of policing that are deployed by the state.3 Various institutionally organized forms of the police do figure in the chapters that follow, especially in part 1 of the book. However, my intent is to constantly reflect on how modes of practice that are seen as quintessential to institutional forms of policing are also replicated more generally across various social sites that straddle the “public” and the “private,” through not only law but also through the family. Domestic order is linked to public order; modes of policing the family, from within the family, also have repercussions for how public order and citizenship is perceived in this borderland society.
Even as I make this argument, I am also attentive to the fact that within the institution of police, what counts as “police work” has been significantly expanded.4 In this western Indian borderland that separates Kutch, a district in the western Indian state of Gujarat, from Sindh, a southern province in Pakistan—a national border between nation-states that cultivate a mutual hostility at the political level—there are civil and border police, the air wing of the armed forces, and paramilitary forces besides various central intelligence agencies that depute officers to the region. A long-standing anthropological engagement with the region has allowed me to observe how policing—as practice—plays out at multiple levels that exceed these institutional sites of order maintenance and also how these distinct institutional forms of policing are experienced differently by residents of this borderland.
This book reflects on the multiple sources and forms of policing that structure everyday interaction on a microscopic scale such as the family, the religious community, and the individual. Thus, I was able to observe how everyday interactions at home or at work among Muslims who lived in this region were continually engaged in policing—and producing—what it meant to live a secure and well-ordered life. A key impetus behind this argument is to suggest first, that relations between state institutions and a borderland public—where mutual cooperation is of essence to the project of national security—go beyond the framework of patronage.5 I propose the concept of “adjacent sovereignty” to suggest that forms of policing that are elaborated through state institutions in fact derive much of their force through forms of local, even familial, sovereignty that operate in this borderland. Second, through a focus on forms of policing that play out at the level of the family and the religious community, I hope to be able to reclaim some agency for India’s Muslim citizen beyond the abjection of “bare life.” Produced as the “other” of India’s citizenship regime and border management practices, it is clear that the Muslim is more often than not the object of the state’s policing regime. I explain this with reference to early debates on policing and the constitution of the police force after Partition in chapter 1. However, one of the questions that also animates this book is, what would it take to envisage the Muslim as a subject of policing? How is information and movement deployed within this borderland society by those very actors who are also produced as “terrorists” and “infiltrators” by the state, as they determine their own modes of belonging to the family and the religious community?
Key to my argument is the figure of the “Bengali” Muslim woman, who is marked by the state and allied discourses—such as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—as either an “illegal infiltrator” or a trafficked marriage migrant into the region.6 Muslim families in this borderland society are able to creatively use the presence of the “Bengali” woman to fundamentally transform the nature of sociality that underpins the task of kin making. Everyday life in a borderland society—already saturated with forms of suspicion-imbued sociality—does not always sit well with too much transparency vis-à-vis each other. Consanguineous marriage—where cousins marry each other—is a traditionally preferred marriage arrangement among Muslims in this region. However, the relations that this kind of marriage engenders across the terrain of the social become fragile when affines are too closely related. Much of the work of kinship—as the social practice of relating to others (Strathern 2005)—has to do with the transformation of affines (as outsiders) into consanguines (those “of the house”). This is demonstrated for north Indian Hindu society through the practice of gift giving (Vatuk 1975). Giving gifts continuously to affines is one way to smooth over the fundamental fragility of affinal relationships. The work of kinship is thus the continual working through this knotty site of affinity; kin making is a processual task, a constant site of incorporation (Carsten 1997). However, when affines are too closely related by blood, it can rip apart the terrain of the social; the carefully maintained fragility between affines and consanguines threatens to implode across the terrain of the family and the social. How, then, to reintroduce the creative tension of an “outsider” who has to be “incorporated,” thereby reintroducing the very logic of kinship?
Although the “Bengali” remains somewhat of a social outsider (what the state refers to as an “infiltrator”), it is precisely her foreignness to the local social context that allows her to become a catalyst for the resumption of an increasingly strained sociality. Arranging marriages with these “outside” women allows Muslim families in Kutch to restore social and familial capital through affinity, something that had become difficult to maintain within traditional forms of consanguineous marriage, where affinity continually collapsed into consanguinity. Marriage with an “outsider”—who nevertheless brings other forms of capital with her—allows for the stability of Muslim marriage in the region albeit through the fundamental transformation of a traditional form of alliance: the consanguineous marriage. This argument is also offered here as a new way in which we can understand marriage migration within India for it moves beyond the restrictive lens of demographic indicators as an explanation for why women migrate for marriage. The literature on marriage migration in India views it primarily as a consequence of uneven sex ratios that lead to fewer girls born in an area, and bases its arguments primarily on the study of north Indian Hindu society.7 My focus on the Muslim family, in addition to bringing the conceptual lens of policing into the family and marriage, thus also argues that sex ratio or demographic concerns cannot explain all instances of cross-region marriage migration. Kin making and border making—the policing of not only marriage but also of citizenship—is a dialogic process that rests on the work of multiple actors across the domain of the family and the state. Kinship and affinity are fundamentally political values, and this is underscored again in chapter 5 with a discussion on Hindu men from Pakistan who seek to migrate into India through marriage alliances that subvert the traditionally honorable category of marriage among upper caste men. These chapters also allow me to reposit the relationship between the state/law and the family. The family is certainly not a space of interiority, invisibility, or resistance to the state, but neither is it in collusion or alliance with it.
Although South Asian ethnographies on law and kinship are familiar with this relationship, they often fall back into the trope of the manner in which law and the patriarchal family come together to ensure compliance across gender and caste lines. By engaging primarily with the Muslim family, as well as Hindu men who crossed the border from Pakistan in and around 1971, this ethnography argues that policing across the terrain of state, family, and religious community is not always predictable. It is through an ethnographic entanglement with the “imponderabilia of actual life” (Malinowski 2002, 16)—sharing in births, marriages, and deaths, stumbling upon secrets that kept families together but also tore them apart, upholding through my ethnographic practice public secrets that were not spoken of but often shared by the ethnographer and her subjects—that this book arrives at its conclusions about policing practices at a multiscalar level that abound across civil-military and state-society domains, allowing us to rethink these distinctions in the context of anthropologies of policing and security.
The dispersal of policing “as practice” (Ibrahim 2019) outside of the state institution adds to ethnographic accounts of sovereignty as it is actually performed—that is, its functioning as a “de facto” category instead of “an ontological ground of power and order, expressed in law or in enduring ideas of legitimate rule” (Hansen and Stepputat 2006, 297). In this spirit, anthropologists have revisited this foundational category of political thought to pluralize its meanings and to understand what it actually means to wield sovereign power in a variety of political and cultural contexts. Giorgio Agamben extended Carl Schmitt’s notion of sovereign power (as the one who determines the state of exception) to the biopolitical body by formulating the concept of “bare life.” The body enters the realm of the political—and sustains it—through its exclusion: its capacity to be killed. Agamben acknowledged Michel Foucault’s contribution to the conceptualization of a biopolitics but sought a return to the “juridico-institutional models” of sovereignty that the latter eschewed. Agamben’s (1998, 6) project is to examine the “hidden point of intersection between the juridico-institutional and the biopolitical models of power.” In other words, “what is the point at which the voluntary servitude of individuals comes into contact with objective power?” (6). The totalizing nature of sovereign power is manifested for Agamben in the space of the camp, which is for him a paradigm for modernity, a “pure, absolute and impassable biopolitical space” (123). This totalizing vision of sovereign power has been criticized by anthropologists who reflect instead on ways in which it might be possible to “disagree with such gloomy, life-denying judgements” (Singh 2015, 44). Sovereign power in practice emerges in rather different light than its idealized projections of transcendence over “bare life.” In various accounts, the functioning of sovereign power is “informal,” “graduated,” “vulnerable,” “layered,” or “bipolar” (Hansen and Stepputat 2006; Singh 2015; Osuri 2018; Maunaguru 2020) and dependent for its power on the degree to which it is recognized by those whom it has power over (Maunaguru 2020). Even though sovereign power remains bound to the body (whose life and death it exercises power over), the centrality of violence to this relationship is contested. Although some argue that violence is integral to the performance of sovereignty, regardless of whether it is the state that enacts it, thereby constituting an effective challenge to the state’s monopoly over violence (Hansen and Stepputat 2006), others argue that violence is not central to the enactment of sovereign power (Singh 2015; Maunaguru 2020). Further, the definition of “life” is also extended to include more broadly considered forms of life: the dead, unborn, spirits, and deities (Singh 2015).
Since I am suggesting here that policing as practice cannot be regarded as the sole preserve of the institution that goes by the name (the police force), it follows, then, that an ethnographic illustration of policing practices also becomes an instance of the dispersal of sovereignty, and an exploration of how sovereignty is grounded in multiple sites across the state-society or civil-military domain. Since the state is not the only agent with a vested interest in the maintenance of social—and moral—order, policing opens up its meaning and becomes about more than crime control or the maintenance of everyday peace. Furthermore, the expansion of policing beyond the state is not just about the privatization of security under forms of neoliberal governmentality alone but also encompasses the domain of the family and kinship, which is equally complicit in producing—and policing—the sociomoral order.
The structure and institution of the state makes it difficult to step outside it in order to disaggregate it; in Pierre Bourdieu’s (1994) pithy formulation, how does one think the state and resist being thought by it at the same time? It is the same with policing—the practices of policing are overtaken (even in academic writing) by the police as institutional arm of the state, the vanguard of order maintenance. In modern times, we have fetishized both the state and the police as fundamental sources of law and order (Reiner 2010); this often blinds us to the polyphonous sites that engender the social and moral order, not as a singular normative injunction but as fractious and unstable constructions of what constitutes a well-ordered life.
Anthropological accounts of the police and of law have contributed substantially to opening up the concept of the police, but I suggest that they do not go far enough to think the policing beyond the state. They variously attend to policing beyond state-backed weaponized practices of violence (as in the United States, for instance), focusing instead on the underlying conditions that enable violence and cruelty that constitute “everyday invisible violence” (Fassin 2013, 137). Further expanding the sociality around police work, police practices have also been imbued with care. Scripted into policing practices even in a highly securitized environment in Gaza, Ilana Feldman (2015, 2) found that “policing was a space of both constraint and possibility, of control and action.” Pooja Satyogi (2019, 52) finds in her ethnographic work with the women’s cell of the Delhi Police that counseling and mediation allowed for what she terms “restorative practices” of the police. These practices enabled women police officers (who were not required to wear uniform in this unit) to forge forms of sociality with complainants of domestic violence that may have been based more on empathy and care rather than adherence to the letter of the law.8 Srimati Basu (2015, 193) discovered in her fieldwork in the eastern Indian city of Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) that although the existence of a women’s grievance cell indicates “state sensitivity to gendered violence, their tendency to prefer reconciliation and mediation dilutes their mandate of pursuing criminal sanctions.” An overall commitment to a patriarchal “familial ideology” (Kapur and Cossman 1996) meant that women police officers rarely sanctioned the filing of a case that may be disruptive of the normative family setup. In effect, Basu (2015, 196) argues that “the only good S498A [the section of the Indian Penal Code under which domestic violence case can be prosecuted] case was one that did not quite become an S498A case,” implying that the filing of a legal case was resorted to as a last measure, after all forms of reconciliation were exhausted.
Others locate the police function within a variety of historical, cultural, and institutional contexts that question the assumed universality of the police as it functions in Western democracies (Caldeira 2013; Garriott 2013; Martin 2013; Jauregui 2016). With the reconfiguration of authority in the late capitalist period, it is argued that there is a retreat of the state not just from welfare but also the provision of security and policing (Wacquant 2009; Goldstein 2010; Comaroff and Comaroff 2016). This shift in the relationship between state and police—where the police is no longer the principal punitive and disciplinary arm of the state—corresponds with the changing nature of the state under late capitalism. As Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff (2016, 217) argue, “with their increasing corporate capture, states have ceded to the market control over many of their signature functions, most of all their monopoly of force. As a result, vertical structures of authority are giving way to a lateral montage of partial, overlapping sovereignties, making it even more difficult to separate government from business and business from criminality.” Thus, this body of work argues that policing is no longer the preserve of the state as a vertical model of governance but works through lateral interests and connections. In much of this work, the decoupling of policing from the state either follows from the privatization of security or the ways in which everyday life is reimagined in terms of police power (Garriott 2011) rather than thinking of the ways in which policing can also be articulated as a mode of order maintenance that springs from institutions other than the state and the market.
Ethnographic work on the policing of gender, caste, and family in South Asia has for long been mindful of the constitution of policing as a field of intervention in the family and whose interests it serves. For example, Anupama Rao (2010, 239) alerts us to caste sociality as an agent of policing and “the role of caste in regulating female sexuality and sexual access,” which gestures toward the complex relationship between the “state” and the “nonstate” with regard to questions of policing in the broader South Asian context. Pratiksha Baxi’s (2006) work on the deployment of law to restrict marital choices of consenting adults in India enables us to ask who in the community stands to benefit from police action and who is at its mercy. She argues that a politics of honor is folded into state law and deployed by the police at the local level, who become instruments of publics constituted through affect rather than the letter of the law. In effect, she argues that there may be an “alliance between the policing practices of the family and the state” (72), a position that bears upon the longer history of work on the state and sexual governance in India. Uma Chakravarti (1996) discusses the sexual surveillance of women in the eighteenth-century Peshwa State (in present-day Maharashtra) that was grounded in a caste-based patriarchal order. The moral policing of kin and community transposed itself seamlessly onto the moral-juridical order of the state, backed by the latter’s coercive and legal apparatus. Similarly, Veena Das (1995) discusses the intervention of the state into matters of kinship when it legislated the “recovery” of abducted women during the Partition. In each instance, it is assumed that the state made more stringent forms of punishment that existed within the family. I argue here that the family does not necessarily constitute a space of interiority, site of intervention, or collaboration with the state. When the subject is the Muslim family in a borderland context, already saturated with suspicion and surveillance of various kinds, the theme of alliance between the state and the patriarchal family needs to be revisited.
While I build on these important insights that detail the relationship between law and the family in India, I seek to go a step further and invite a reevaluation of the relationship between the state and the family. I consider the family not merely an instrument of the state or an ideological state apparatus; nor is it only a field of intervention for the state: a “privileged instrument for the government of the population” (Foucault 2001, 216). Instead, it is a site that allows for a particular conceptualization of the social order as being also a question of moral regulation. The question of a well-ordered population stretches across the fabric of the social, a fabric that is constituted through both state and family, which do not encounter one another as distinct domains (Donzelot 1979). The family and the state relate to each other through the idea of the well-policed society, their tutelary role vis-à-vis individuals and also through their ways of seeing, sorting, and managing individuals and information. Each of the chapters questions the sequence in which policing practices bind the state and family to each other. Rather than a collusion between the state and the family in practices of sexual governance, the book locates within the “interior” domains of the family forms of policing that are evocative of state-led practices of surveillance and information management. The effects of these practices on members of families and communities within an overall borderland context is to heighten the feeling of suspicion and policing and provides a good site to therefore propose an anthropology of policing that is also fundamentally an anthropology of kinship.
To sum up the argument thus far, this ethnography seeks to push the existing anthropological literature on the police by extending the idea of police well beyond its institutional arm and by situating the above debates in the anthropology of policing within a social and historical context that saw the development of policing along routes that are quite distinct from those that are taken as axiomatic in the existing anthropology of police literature. Critiques of the order-maintenance approach to policing caution against the taken-for-granted nature of what we may call “order” and “disorder” as a stable binary. “Disorder” is often produced by the very practices of policing that are designed to contain it (Harcourt 2009), and even the more “rational” forms of neoliberal policing such as carceral punishment are also means to restore a social order that is produced as predominantly “economic, ethnoracial and moral” (Wacquant 2009, 152). In this ethnography, the contours of social order are elastic: legality and morality as defined by the state is continually tested against other sites such as the family or the religious community. Since there is no singular iteration of the legal, social, or moral order as it plays out among those who live on the border, and yet there are high stakes in the maintenance of order on this political borderland, where the state is unequivocal about the legal, social, and moral order that it perpetuates, the chapters that follow attempt to disaggregate the multiple sites of policing in this everyday borderland context.
With a couple of notable recent exceptions, the police have rarely been a stand-alone subject for South Asian anthropology. I argue that this should not be read as a critical absence in the literature but be a recognition of the fact that law and policing in this region has always been embedded in other forms of regulation and sociality such as gender, caste, and the family (Chowdhry 2004; Chakravarti 1996; Mody 2008; Rao 2010; Baxi 2014). The dangers of constituting the police as an exceptionally powerful and violent body have been noted through history and ethnography (Chandavarkar 1998; Jauregui 2016). However, ethnographic explorations of policing have often looped back into ethnographies of the state and of law (Das 2004; Mody 2008; Baxi 2014). If the move to reclaim police practice from its contemporary iteration as a particular form of government institution concerned with the fighting of crime alone entails an acknowledgment of its more expansive history as a mode of good governance and the production of a well-ordered society (Garriott 2013), then policing in South Asia is a particularly good site to engage the question of what constitutes policing, both its institutional forms and the question of how state and nonstate actors operate in pursuit of constituting the social and moral order without necessarily adopting neoliberal governmentality as the explanatory route to the fragmentation of authority away from the state.
In South Asia, the state has been central to discussions of conflict and order maintenance, of which the dominant trope is ethnic or communal violence and its containment (e.g., Brass 2011). More recent work on sovereignty (reviewed above) disperses authority away from the state and locates it in other sites and relationships. Recent work on policing in India problematizes the idea of police authority as exceptional, highlighting its deep entrenchment in other forms of local power and authority (Jauregui 2016), touching on the moral ambiguity in police work especially with respect to the deployment of violence (Wahl 2017) and the co-constitutive sociality of citizens and the police (Satyogi 2019). Chandavarkar’s (1998) important work on policing in colonial Bombay proposed a focus on everyday police practice rather than institutional or bureaucratic design. “Everyday policing” in nineteenth-century Bombay showed the police forces to be deeply embedded in local power structures and neighborhood processes: they were no monolith; far less did they have a monopoly over violence even in a colonial context. Arnold (1976) discusses the ways in which colonial policing built in significant ways on earlier forms of enforcing order, despite its rhetoric of ushering in the “rule of law” in its colonies. Ethnographies of the state and of the law also indicate that the police do not always constitute themselves outside of social constraints such as caste, gender, or patriarchy (Das 2004; Mody 2008; Baxi 2014; Basu 2015). This ethnographic exploration of policing extends these concerns and provincializes the state by arguing for the ways in which the function of policing may be internal to a range of social and institutional contexts that are nonetheless not necessarily in “collusion” or strategically aligned with the state.
The various ethnographies of policing, law, and kinship referred to here point to an expansion of the field of police work beyond the use of spectacular violence and coercion alone. In South Asia, “coercive violence and police authority are not isomorphic” (Jauregui 2016, 13), and in the South African context, Julia Hornberger (2017) discusses police work in terms of complex forms of reciprocity, exchange, and the management of social obligations with the community. While in India, police functions are known to be exercised by a range of actors inside and outside the formal institution of the police leading to what is perceived as a “delegitimation of police authority” (Jauregui 2013, 646) both within and outside the institution. And yet, there is a deeply ambivalent aspect to the manner in which police authority is recognized especially when it is harnessed by socially marginal or disempowered groups to assert their own legitimacy in society (Hornberger 2017; Khanikar 2018). Those very categories of the urban precariat who are most likely to be at the receiving end of police violence may, in fact, be able to harness the threat of violence to their own advantages. Inviting the police into the home to intervene in a marital dispute in a poor urban neighborhood becomes, in this sense, a form of deterrence to political, kin, or gang rivals. The sheer presence of the police and their potential to unleash violence becomes a source of empowerment for those who are otherwise on the margins (Khanikar 2018).
If police practice is about ways of seeing, the ability to be “equipped with a new field of vision, a new way of perceiving the local landscape” imbued with “suspicion” and “apprehension” (Garriott 2011, 43–44), then a borderland society teaches us that these are attributes that are not necessarily controlled and outsourced by those formally recognized as police, nor restricted to the so-called extrajudicial authority of the strongman, gangster, or political intermediary (Poole 2004; Hansen 2005; Berenschot 2011). Secrecy circulates within the family and community, as “poisonous knowledge” (Das 2007), but the family does not necessarily constitute a space of interiority from the state.
With increasing global concerns around the “policiarization” and “criminalization” of a range of social actions and services such as migration, schooling, immigration, and security, for instance (Fassin 2011; Garriott 2013), we could either say that the boundaries of the police have expanded to encompass the community, training them to think like the police, thereby significantly expanding the scope of what is conventionally understood as police work, or on the other hand, we could acknowledge that the community and the family was always already familiar with forms of surveillance, and produced within its members forms of affect such as insecurity and suspicion that ended up constituting the weft of everyday life as it wove across the domains of its interior life and its public face. Insecurity, suspicion, and surveillance are the very affects and practices that we have also come to regard as constitutive of “police work.” Here, it is worthwhile to recall the injunction to treat the “police” not as a preconstituted object but as “a type of sociality that is constituted through practice” (Karpiak 2013, 79). Transparency (and “recognition”) is a key attribute of how subjects must appear when they are policed—through forms of biometric and social security data in addition to the more personalized forms of recognition that police employ in their identification of “suspicious” actors. And yet, within the heart of the family, transparency is not taken for granted among its members any more than it is in more “public” or “surveilled” spaces.
If sovereignty is defined as the power over life and death, the family is a primary stakeholder in sovereign power. The family is life generating; it is the primary institution that generates bodies as both biological and social beings. In a compelling shift—though not always a challenge—to the state’s sovereign power, the family, certainly in South Asia, has demonstrated that it can also wield spectacular forms of violence against its members and indeed has the power to condemn them to death.9 This ethnography argues that it is time to bring attention back to the family in the context of broader discussions of sovereignty/policing. Although this connection was never ruptured in the context of South Asia, as will be seen in the ensuing section, the politics of the academy and of knowledge production more generally meant that these discussions did not always make their way into the domain of anthropological theory, remaining provincialized as matters of relevance to South Asian studies. If we agree that sovereignty is fragmented across a range of sites and actors beyond the state that are invested in the maintenance of the social order, then one of the key sites for sovereignty and policing is the family.
The question of how social order was maintained was central to early anthropological accounts of order and control in so-called stateless societies (e.g., Evans-Pritchard and Fortes 1950; Gluckman 1956; Durkheim 2013). In these accounts, what was perceived as the lack of a strong, centralized jural order (in the absence of the modern state) was made up for through a strong kinship or moral order. Max Gluckman’s (1956) question for us—where should we look for social order in the absence of the modern state—can be reworked more appropriately for our times to ask—since the concept of the state has itself been historicized and localized—now that state sovereignty has revealed its complex forms of adjustment to other forms of sovereign authority, whether human or divine, what does that do to the problem of social order and who is charged with its maintenance, with or without the use of violence? It is worthwhile again, to recall Gluckman’s argument in his essay “Estrangement in the Family.” In his view, the long-term stability of tribal society lay in the fact that a man was torn between obligations to his agnatic descent group and his need to enter into matrimonial alliance with a range of others not related to him. Agnatic loyalty (a man’s loyalty to his patrilineal kin) conflicted with the need to be able to live amicably with one’s neighbors who are—through the logic of marriage—made up of kin from a number of different lineages. Even though the matrimonial tie makes men friendly to other groups, a man and his wife are pulled in opposite directions when it comes to obligations within their own natal families. What this meant for the problem of social order was that individuals were constantly offsetting one set of enmities with other sets of friendships and alliances. What this meant for the study of kinship is that rather than take the nuclear family as a unit of analysis, it is recognized that the spousal unit is actually constituted through a “dispersal of attachments” (Gluckman 1956, 77) rather than through an overattachment to the notion of the nuclear family as a bounded entity made up of spouses and their children. Gluckman went on to clarify that this is a custom-derived estrangement, one that does not have a bearing on the personal affective relations between particular husbands and wives. In effect, affinity or the nature of affines (relationships through marriage) is shot through with ambivalence (Carsten 1997) even as it is crucial to the project of reproducing the family through the production of children. This suggests, as Gluckman (1956, 78) pointed out, “the need to examine family relations in the light of wider social relationships.”
Closer to our present times is Marilyn Strathern’s assessment of the nature of kinship as a mode of relationality in the context of modern biotechnology. She argues that kinship is certainly about connections between people, but it is equally about their disconnections. Even as the Euro-American family was concerned with individualism both in law and in terms of familial ideology, she argues that it is increasingly impossible to draw a boundary around the nuclear family, rendering it more appropriately the “unclear family,” a term she borrows from Bob Simpson (Strathern 2005, 22). Biotechnology has enabled the dissolution of the family as we once understood it and has enabled the emergence of new types of “recombinant” families. Recombinant genetics offers ways of thinking about social relationships that allows us to engage with forms of disconnection that enable new ways of relating to each other.
The family and the state, private and public, are not insulated from one another; this is already argued from the perspective of feminist ethnographies and cultural theory (Berlant 1997; Carsten 1997; Brenner 1998; Warner 2002). In the postcolonial context, what does this mean for the way in which sovereignty is operationalized and of how law straddles the domain of the state and the family? In her study of Partition violence and the state’s quest to recover “abducted” women and children in the aftermath of the horrific violence that ensued, Veena Das (2007) argues that the social order of the state is instituted in a very particular form of the sexual order. She suggests that the social contract is not between men “in the state of nature” but between men as “heads of households,” thus instituting the nation as a masculine nation. The citizenship of men is predicated on the existence of a “correct” relationship between communities. A woman’s citizenship is predicated on her ability to reproduce within the normative group, to provide the nation with “legitimate” children. Thus, Das argues, “a corollary is that a woman’s citizenship is an offense not only against the family but also against the sovereignty of the state” (36). The “state re-instates the correct matrimonial dialogue of men” (21) in a bid to maintain the social contract (built, in turn, on a particular form of the sexual contract). We are already in the realm of the law and its negotiation with the family. Baxi (2000) extends this argument and suggests that rape legislation provides the site to unpack the relationship between the state and violence against women. Although rape legislation in India operates in the name of protecting women, Baxi argues that it does not in fact seek the bodily autonomy of all women. The law normalizes certain types of violence against women by refusing to name it (rape of lower caste women by upper caste men; marital rape) while it criminalizes only those forms of violence that it deems as pathological (rape of upper caste, married women by “other” men, for instance). The form of retribution sought by the state, “in this case capital punishment, aims at punishing men for having breached the contract between the masculinist state and all men” (Baxi 2000, 1199). The law thus upholds the “familial ideology” of the patriarchal family (Kapur and Cossman 1996).
The political and the domestic are therefore coproduced, even though the nature of the sociality they forge in relation to each other may not always be predeterminable. In her analysis of sexual violence within the family in the United States, Sameena Mulla’s (2015) finely rendered ethnography demonstrates that the law enables the suturing together of familial ties that may have come under strain in the aftermath of sexual violence. Far from a breakdown of sociality, the occurrence of sexual violence—when it reaches out to the law—may in fact lead victims to “renegotiate and realign loyalty, care, and intimacy” (Mulla 2015, 174). Sexual violence in this instance does not lead to alienation; rather, through the mechanism of the law and the visibility that it occasions, it may in fact enable new forms of affiliation and care to emerge. On the other hand, Baxi’s (2014) ethnography of rape trials in India argues that the law may compromise kinship relations and disrupt sociality. The law does not produce visibility here; instead, Baxi argues that rape trials are the “privileged sites of the production, negotiation, and management of public secrets” (xxiv). The law, she argues, is thus “the institutional site that normalizes violence against women” (3, emphasis original). By aligning itself with the patriarchal family, the law delegates the power to name the harm caused by rape to the family or community rather than the individual. Rape is adjudicated not as a crime against the survivor but against the harm caused to society by the act. This is how “the social moves into the legal to birth a public secret—one that severs law from its self-reference” (222).
In this borderland context, the so-called interiority of the family explodes in the face of the policing of citizenship and migration. The regulation of marriage has become a matter of great relevance for border policing as the figure of the “Bengali” bride becomes a site for the determination of potential illegality (as the undocumented “infiltrator” from Bangladesh) even as Hindu men who migrate from Pakistan in search of wives are welcomed as always-already citizens. The juxtaposition of affinity (as a valued social asset that allows for the perpetuation of marriage as an institution among Muslims) with citizenship (for Hindu men who use marriage as a means to political belonging) allows me to explore sociological changes at the level of the family (in terms of new forms of marriage, for instance) in conjunction with broader political contours of belonging to the nation.10
Policing, as I approach it in this ethnography, is a form of practice that concerns itself with a quest for social order. Further, the book reminds readers that the social order is also fundamentally a moral order (e.g., Durkheim 2013), the moral coordinates of which are fundamentally elastic. Who belongs and who does not—to the family, religious community, region, or nation—is debated, performatively enacted, and contested at multiple levels. The questions of belonging and boundaries are particularly charged on a postcolonial borderland between nation-states that are politically hostile but share a considerable degree of social and cultural compatibility. Kinship ties and cultural connections persist across this border even at the risk of being criminalized by border security protocols. Even as the conditions of political belonging are set out unambiguously by the nation-state, it is at the level of the social and the everyday that these conditions fall short of unequivocality. As the family, kinship group, religious community, and nation-state confront each other on this border, it becomes clear that there are multiple stakes in different forms of boundaries. How these are maintained and transactions across them are policed in an everyday context is the subject of this book.
I suggest therefore that this book also be read as a contribution to the anthropological literature on not only forms of policing but also to everyday forms of reckoning kinship and relatedness, especially for the contemporary middle-class Muslim family, a demographic that has received scant attention in ethnographies of marriage and the family in India that have been produced over the past three decades. This remains the case even decades after Imtiaz Ahmad (1972, 172) commented on the “poverty of Indian sociology” in the absence of critical ethnographic work on its Muslims. The only notable contributions to the study of the Muslim family, marriage, and middle-class desires since the 1990s are Osella and Osella (2007) and Osella (2012)—mere drops in the ocean when compared to the richly documented and theorized work on marriage and family among Hindus. Ethnographies on love, aspiration, and middle-class marriage are almost exclusively devoted to Hindus in India (Kalpagam 2005; Fuller and Narasimhan 2008; Abraham 2010; Grover 2011; Clark-Decès 2014; Donner 2016).11 Muslims in India are written about—including in academic writing—from the point of view of either exclusion/marginality or religiosity, ironically reinscribing through their representation the problem of bordering or marginalization from “mainstream” society (e.g., Gayer and Jaffrelot 2012; Chatterjee 2017; Borker 2018).
The focus here is not only on kinship structure and marriage practices but also on how everyday forms of trust and betrayal, suspicion and favor, aspiration and desire work to police the family order from within as much as from the outside. It reconnects the family to forms of policing—to regard it not just as a site of intervention for the state but also as an active agent of policing it itself. Chapter 4 addresses itself to the question, how do forms of knowledge that are internal to the family structure relationships between affines and consanguines, particularly in the case of cousin marriages that are preferred by Muslims in this field site? The chapters on the family highlight the manner in which familial tensions around marriage—both inter- and intragenerational—and the choice of spouse become charged sites for the policing not just of familial boundaries but also become a potent commentary on the management of interregional migration into Kutch. The family, in this ethnography, is not a site of interiority from the state, nor is it a haven of peace or refuge for individuals. The ethnography turns to the interiority of family life to shed light on how tensions play out within the family, of how “poisonous knowledge” (Das 2007; Mookherjee 2015) is managed and how there is a general agreement about the things that may not be spoken about.12 These can relate to the everyday management of grief in the aftermath of a cataclysmic event such as the deathly earthquake of 2001 or the fixing up of marriages with women who are deemed to be nonkin, or “Bengali.” The “interior” is not what is hidden but what erupts “in the performative techniques actors deploy to make the conflict and violence present on public occasions” (Das 2007, 87). A number of these performances will emerge throughout the book; some of them may be precipitated by the presence of the anthropologist, journalist, or development worker, whereas others may unfold according to their own temporality, the anthropologist feeling like a distinct interloper at times like these. These moments dramatize the tensions that structure the forms of life that relate the interior to the external, the private to the public. There is no pure division of public versus private, state versus family; the terrain of the social is constituted across them, and practices of policing make these terrains visible vis-à-vis each other even as they dramatize the desire to keep them distinct.
Located in a borderland context that is saturated by forms of surveillance and policing across the civil-military and state-society terrains, the following chapters do not describe ways in which the state’s technologies of policing are amplified or replicated across society, bringing “nonstate” actors into the domain of policing in some sort of alliance with the state, expanding the state’s policing (Andrejevic 2005; Garriott 2011). Instead, they show that practices of policing extend across the larger canvas (the nation-state) and the smaller stage (the family), not because the latter represents “the privileged instrument for the government of the population” (Foucault 2001, 216), but because practices of policing within the family may end up evoking or mirroring those that we have come to associate naturally with the state. This is also not to speculate on which precedes the other but to point toward a field of governance that is constituted by policing practices that does not add up to a coherent whole. What are the contours of the social and the moral order? This is not the product of a prior consensus that is then policed across domains, co-opting the family and the state into policing within a singular moral universe. Instead, the social and moral order are contested and emergent through varied practices of policing.
A central premise of state formation is its control over secrecy (Nugent 2010) and the deployment of fear, the police becoming “trafficke[rs] in dread” (Verdery 2014, 26). Surveillance, secrecy, and fear are indeed central to the state’s management of security. Following from the earlier discussion, the chapters argue that discourses of securitization are contested and emergent, sites of strategic maneuvers between different agents rather than mere impositions from the state (Jusionyte 2015). They argue that “a critical, comparative ethnography of security can explore the multiple ways in which security is configured and deployed—not only by states and authorized speakers but by communities, groups, and individuals—in their engagements with other local actors and with arms of the state itself” (Goldstein 2010, 492). Policing can also lead to the production of insecurity in society (Ali 2013; Verdery 2014); the transition to a security state may actually produce the insecure subjects that it retroactively seeks to protect. Fear and dread are not the only affects deployed within circuits of policing. Chapters 3 and 4 identify policing practices that are generated within the interior spaces of the family and the community. Interpersonal relations that hinge on mistrust and insecurity may also be enfolded within informational flows that occur across spaces of intimacy, care, and desire that are internal to the family. Rather than a strategic alliance between the state and others (e.g., technology, data, or key informers) to manage a finite body of information, the process of information gathering about each other is a limitless exercise where it is not always possible to detect alliances in any obvious manner. Key stakeholders of information in a region such as the state and its functionaries, police, development experts, tourists, and visiting anthropologists are not necessarily bound together by a central agency that has “offloaded” its task among others. Seen from the state’s perspective, Gulbeg, a central character in chapter 1, is an “informer,” but when he is situated within his own social context, it appears that he serves as a conduit of information from multiple sources; the police are dependent on him for the success with which they police the border. If the maintenance of everyday peace on the border was a result of its policing, this was in turn defined less in terms of police personnel and materials (weapons and uniforms, for instance) or a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence/coercion, but in terms of the control of information, leveraged through various ways of seeing that seeped into networks of sociality within the neighborhood and even the heart of the family: the management of information and the deployment of suspicion was central to the way in which communities constituted themselves.
The work of policing the social order—of determining the terms of belonging, of deploying suspicion so that it stuck as a stain onto some people rather than others—goes well beyond the work of “the police” in this book. It is certainly true that although it is the Muslim who is uniformly the object of suspicion by both the state and society, it was not always so. Chapter 1 discusses how suspicion could be deployed among Muslims to carve out boundaries within a group that the state produced as homogenous. In this case, suspicion came to structure forms of sociality among Muslims based on what was known—and just as often suspected or speculated on—about which religious sect (maslak) they belonged to. An important conclusion of this ethnography is that even though border management practices in India have consistently defined the Muslim as the suspicious “other” from the beginning (Jayal 2013), suspicion also circulates within the Muslim family and community, thus tearing apart the notion of a homogenous group that is bound together in an intimacy produced as a consequence of being policed by the state. Added to this, a key contribution made by the book is that it identifies the Muslim as internal to policing practices and not just as their target. To this extent, it is an attempt to disaggregate the way in which we may understand the relationships forged between the postcolonial state and those who are constituted as specific targets of its policing. India’s borderland regime is structured quite explicitly around the question of policing Muslim migration. Muslims constitute disproportionate numbers of those who are unlawfully detained and harassed and those who are the victims of police violence (Sethi 2014). Even though Muslims may increasingly constitute disproportionately small percentages of the police forces in India, a key contribution of this book is to locate a broader range of practices in which Muslims on this borderland engage in policing within or without the institutional structure of policing.
Although my fieldwork covered a substantial cross section of rural society in north and northwestern Kutch and middle classes in Bhuj, in this ethnography I find myself returning to the people whom I have come to know quite well over the years. Of these, more were Muslims than Hindus. This was a biographical constraint pertaining to how I was read by my interlocutors. Given the suspicion that characterizes intercommunal relations in Gujarat more generally, and especially during the years of my fieldwork, I could not have hoped for—even had I desired it—a more representative demographic cross section. The fieldwork that this ethnography draws from was conducted over periods of varying intensity that ranged from August 2002 to March 2017. My longest research visit was thirteen months, the shortest six days. During these visits, and increasingly over the years as fieldwork time became more and more precious, it was the time spent with a few people whom I returned to over the years that produced the interpersonal relationships that are by definition impossible to achieve with a large demographic sample. These relationships are ones that produced most of the insights presented here. Ethnography is dialogic, and to the extent that “relationability” is dependent on the identities of both the ethnographer and her subjects, only a few spaces make themselves available for research (Navaro-Yashin 2012, xii).
Over these years, the nature of my relationships transformed from fleeting encounters to something more durable and changed the nature of access I had to people. When I moved back to India from the United States after my PhD, I was within easier access of “the field.” As I continued to write about people who no longer saw me as an anthropologist interloper but as a friend or member of the family, it remained harder to see them as “informants” or “research subjects” alone. I increasingly pondered the question, what does it mean to become a part of another’s family (Gold et al. 2014), when the boundary between anthropologist and research assistant (and their family) has broken down? Mohamed Hosain started out as my language teacher in 2001 and then moved to becoming a research assistant in 2002 when I began dissertation fieldwork. He and his wife, Sherbano, took me in as a member of their family, a relationship that deepened after our formal relationship as researcher–research assistant “officially” ended after my PhD. I was present at their children’s weddings and have known all their grandchildren since they were infants. The youngest generation in the family has simply accepted my presence in their lives as a matter of course. To them, I am either phuphi (father’s sister) or masi (mother’s sister). I have known the grandchildren—Saqiba, Zobiya, and Zaid—from the time they were born; they have grown to become my special little friends in the field, surrounding me with the most ardent and heartfelt love and affection. They have brought me joy and hours of entertainment and over the years have become frequent companions on journeys around Kutch.
My status as a daughter of the house, which quickly superseded my precarious status as visiting anthropologist as soon as my PhD was complete, was confirmed to me when one time, my usual gifts for the family were accepted rather more reluctantly than good taste dictates. This time, I was chastised quite severely for bringing gifts of clothing for all the women in the house. Finally, Sherbano articulated what was bothering her: it was not at all the “done” thing to accept gifts from a niyani (a daughter and her marital home, who are affines to her parents). Daughters are only given gifts to; one cannot accept gifts from them in this cultural universe. Once the kinship muddle was sorted out, this was how it was to stay. In future, whenever she traveled to her favorite shopping destinations—for instance, to Karachi or to Mumbai—she would buy pieces of cloth for her daughters, and inevitably on my next visit, no matter how many months later this occurred, she would pull something out for me. “I have three daughters,” she said on one occasion as she gave me her gift: “Nasreen, Farzana [her daughters], … and you.” In her inimitable style, once she pronounced this, there was no arguing with her. I just became a part of the family. When visiting others as part of my various research agendas, she or her daughter-in-law began to accompany me even as her husband, my original “research assistant,” started taking more of a back seat. As far as they saw it, now that my “official” research—that is, for a PhD degree—was over, my subsequent trips were altogether more social. As my visits to others began to be conducted in a more familiar—even familial—mold, the nature of my interactions also altered subtly. This period of research also coincided with greater linguistic facility on my part, and I could more easily take part in conversations in Kutchi with women, something I would have been far less confident of when I first began research in the area. This made me less fiercely dependent on Mohamed Hosain’s presence for interviews. As the contours of my own belonging in the field shifted with time, I was able to become gradually more aware of the dynamics of other forms of belonging: of the shifting scales along which marriage between “insiders” and “outsiders” was evaluated by different agents, and of the transactions made by the “Bengali” wife or the “Pakistani” husband to belong within families along this national border. My location in the field and the forms of sociality that I became imbricated in as time wore on had a direct bearing not only on the forms of familial interaction that I was able to observe and participate in but also on the questions that I was able to ask and indeed the social contexts that produced—and often dramatized—issues relating to secrecy, intimacy, and kinship. This interpersonal context is central to my ability to argue here that the family is a site of policing not only in the external sense of its collusion or alliance with the state (the mainstay of South Asian ethnographies of law and the family) but also in the sense of how it structures its inner workings—how consanguineous marriages begin to give way to cross-region marriages, not as a consequence of demographic compulsions such as a declining sex ratio as is argued by much of the literature on cross-region marriage in India but as a consequence of what it means to maintain the familial and social order.
I conducted fieldwork primarily in two languages, Hindi and Kutchi. Most men and younger, educated women were conversant in Hindi and spoke to me in it. My interactions with officials of all stripes and in institutional contexts of the NGO were all in Hindi. Kutchi is a spoken language that does not have a script of its own. The written language—and of official business in the state—is Gujarati. Although I am conversant in it, its proximity to Hindi meant that most people used Hindi when they spoke to me. Women more generally—including Sherbano and her cohort—and especially rural women in Banni spoke only in Kutchi. The exception were “Bengali” women who, because they were from “outside,” tended to speak more fluent Hindi than local women.
I have identified broad areas (such as taluka subdivisions) within Kutch but used pseudonyms for all village names except Bhuj, Madhapar, and Dhordo and for all the people who feature in this book with the exception of Mohamed Hosain and Sherbano in Bhuj and those who have been written about in the public domain—that is, Gulbeg and his family (Miyan Hussain, Phupli, and Sofiya) in Dhordo, and Virubai and Hirubai in Madhapar, or those who are public figures, such as Ram Singh Sodha.13 This is with their consent.
The book is divided into two sections. Part 1 (chapters 1 and 2) delineates the landscapes of policing on this border. The variegated landscape of peacekeeping on a hostile political border is made up of distinct types of uniformed police and military personnel, in addition to official and unofficial intelligence networks. Part 2 (chapters 3–5) examines contours of policing that evoke more conventionally understood practices of state policing but are forged outside of them. Each of these chapters will depict how policing is about the social order, but there is no shared consensus about its social and moral coordinates. These chapters focus on how the family, the anthropologist, and the NGO may all be part of a universe of policing that often uses similar techniques—the use of surveillance, techniques of tracking information, the deployment of fear and suspicion, the lack of trust—even though they do not work toward a common end. The nature of the social order opens up along a moral spectrum rather than narrows down under the gaze of the state or its security discourse.
Chapter 1 redefines border policing in terms of networks of sociality rather than as a preconstituted institution or arm of state. It opens with debates on police reorganization that took place along this border in the years immediately following decolonization. These debates give us a critical perspective on what the state considered to be the essential attributes of professional policing: the cultivation of social distance, and attributes such as suspicion and the deployment of fear for effective crime fighting. Once these debates set the context for how institutional policing was envisioned, the chapter opens up the question of policing beyond its institutional or professional forms alone. It identifies practices of policing—such as the use of suspicion, fear, and the management of information—as attributes that circulate beyond the formal confines of the police as an arm of the state alone: they can be located within families and communities. The chapter uses the figure of Gulbeg, a charismatic resident on the border, to think more broadly about forms of sovereignty that I term adjacent rather than nested within the state, and of modes of policing during times of peace. Gulbeg had an affective relationship with the military that thrived on a shared masculine ethos of friendship, camaraderie, and adventure. His hunting and shooting expeditions across the desert, accompanied by senior police and army officers, complicate the idea that surveillance and information flows were deployed by the state and reveal instead how they were managed and negotiated across the so-called civil-military terrain with officers of the state dependent on Gulbeg rather than the other way around.
Chapter 2 disaggregates the multiple faces of uniformed peacekeeping/law enforcing that people encounter in an everyday context in Bhuj, examining the ethnographic nuance of the term militarywala (military man) as it is threaded into everyday conversations and encounters within an overall context of an everyday militarization that is nonetheless not evocative of war or occupation but is seen as a basic constituent of peacetime. The chapter emphasizes that the work of policing is not just about ways of seeing and the deployment of information but also a form of labor, often performed under conditions of great physical duress. In this chapter, a shared experience of wartime labor allows for a very particular kind of civil-military intimacy to develop between the armed forces, who are seen as laboring to protect the country’s territorial borders, and Patidar women, who also share an ethic of hard work through laboring on the land. Through the shared experience of laboring under exceptionally trying circumstances that pushed their levels of bodily and emotional endurance to a degree not encountered before, Hindu peasant women who worked on rebuilding a bombed runway during the 1971 war remind us that the work of policing is a physically and emotionally demanding one. Even as they are enshrined into the nation as its core members, valorized as the nation’s mothers, they resist this narrative of belonging. Instead, they insist on the embodied, raw, and physical attributes of the labor they performed and the emotional quality of courage—himmat—that they forged through the tutelage of military men.
Much of the time, police work on this border consists of the detection of the “illegal infiltrator.” Chapter 3 describes how the migrant woman from the east 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 migrant”; on the other hand, the designation by ordinary people of a host of migrant women as “Bengali” points to the difficulty of asserting in any “accurate” way, who is the target of censure and by whom. When a woman designated as “Bengali” marries into a family on the border, she—and her affinal family—work to manage her appearance and disappearance across interactions. The chapter describes the work they have to do to “belong” locally but resists casting the family as a place of refuge from the heightened visibility of the state. It argues instead that the possibility of exposure runs through every interaction, inside or outside the family. The idea of the “safe” space is recalibrated throughout as “Bengali” women move in and out of focus through multiply-mediated interactions and encounters as sometimes competing demands for visibility (for the police and border patrol, for NGO-led development work, or for the anthropologist) are managed. 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.
Chapter 4 continues with forms of policing that may be continuous across the domains of the state and family even though they may operate within different moral universes. Notwithstanding forms of bureaucratic rationality that are believed to structure practices of governmentality of which policing is a key component, the police rely on ways of seeing that often rely on intuitive assessments of who is inside or outside the law. Similarly, in the family, an imbalance in the flow of information, suspicion, and trust may threaten to destabilize the traditional order. Even as the “Bengali” wife is seen as a threatening outsider to the state, she may be a desired wife or daughter-in-law within the family, her lack of familiarity being her biggest appeal. Traditional consanguineous marriages may at times jeopardize the delicate balance of information management: when cousins know too much, how do they maintain the balance of trust within the family? Information can be deployed within the family: here, the key fault lines are not necessarily between kin and nonkin or between “wife givers” and “wife takers,” the key categories through which much of South Asian kinship has been understood, but through the management of generational cohorts and the use of lateral surveillance therein. The availability of the “Bengali” wife who is an “outsider” allows the family to circumvent the crisis of intimate knowledge attendant on marrying within the family while also saving face by not marrying a different (possibly lesser) local Muslim caste.
Chapters 3 and 4 also refute the currently dominant view that such long-distance marriage migrants represent a sociologically new form of marriage that is an instance of socially sanctioned nonendogamous, intercaste marriage among Hindus (Kaur 2012; Mishra 2013). Dealing with contemporary Indian Muslim marriage, family, and kinship—on which there is a huge gap in the existing literature on South Asia—these chapters suggest the need to situate what is regarded as a relatively “new” form of marriage practice within the local “field” of marriage, in this case consanguineous marriages. They examine how practices of policing that are attached to the detection of the “long-distance” bride by the state (which may be replicated by the anthropologist) may also exist within the order of the family. Different types of marriage and the forms of social practice that they engender (trust or its absence, surveillance, threats of detection, exposure) exist on a continuum rather than as opposites of each other.
Chapter 5 turns to migrant Hindu men from the west who—no less than the Bengali women from the east—have to work to belong locally. Although the men in this chapter are no strangers to the state (i.e., they are Hindu rather than Muslim), who welcomes them into the fold of the nation as always-already citizens. The police and local administration abet their border crossings regardless of their formal legality, often granting permission for entry and residence that are at odds with explicit official orders they have received. Even though, as “Hindus,” these Pakistani men are welcomed into citizenship by a state eager to manage its border demographics, they do not always meet with a similarly effusive reception among the family for whom they remain strangers, regardless of being connected as kin through the maternal line. Despite state patronage, within social networks, the stigma of being “from Pakistan” or the corrosion of trust through suspicion of their being “traitors” (desh drohi), informers (sources), or “double agents” makes it much more difficult for these border crossers to be seamlessly accepted within the family or the wider society. Once again, the work of belonging involves a reconfiguration of traditional marriage patterns and the place of “honor” in reckoning political lineage.
To sum up, the book argues that family, marriage, and forms of reckoning kin involve modalities of policing that are not necessarily discontinuous from those that we are used to associating with the state, even though they do not necessarily spring from the same source and may not agree over the shared outcome of the moral and social order. Multiple forms of policing are not categorized as forms of regulation that are “state” or “nonstate”; this distinction is not a primary focus for the ethnography. Thus, I see this book not as an anthropology of the state but of policing practices. Threaded through the chapters are reminders that forms of identification used by the state—that often the social scientist is complicit in using—do not always tell us how political belonging at the level of the nation-state is translated into the microprocesses of everyday life: through negotiation, adjustment, compromise, and adaptation.