1. See Ibrahim 2009.
2. Steffen Jensen (2005), in his study of neighborhood and community policing against drugs in Cape Town, argues that sovereignty should be regarded as a figure rather than as an institution. Sovereign power, in his analysis, is the ability to name someone as a threat to the moral community. Legality is a measure not of state law but of community-sanctioned moral norms. This is the manner in which I deploy the idea of policing.
3. Although Garriott (2011) admits that the exercise of police power is a broad exercise in the maintenance of public order in which the state does not have a monopoly, nevertheless he (2013, 9) holds that there is value in retaining the police force as a privileged site of inquiry. Even though I agree that the police force must be opened up to ethnographic analysis, my argument is that by limiting our gaze to what we deem as “public” order and the public institution of the police, we close off possibilities of policing as they play out across a multiplicity of domains including the “domestic.” This would entail an examination of how the familial order may also become germane to the maintenance of a more general social order.
4. See, for example, Garriott 2011 and Satyogi 2019.
5. Ward Berenschot (2011, 383) discusses the role of “political fixers” as key to the functioning of Indian democracy, wherein “alien and often unresponsive state institutions” are mediated to citizens through middlemen who act as brokers, bringing the ordinary citizen into the orbit of the state. The ethnographic material in this book will, I hope, challenge this view of the state as set apart from the fabric of everyday sociality. Instead, I argue that the lens of policing is able to encompass both the state and citizen—law and the family.
6. My use of scare quotes around “Bengali” indicates that although this is how they are designated locally, they may or may not actually be from Bengal. Chapter 3 takes up the significance of this in more detail.
7. This argument relates to prenatal sex selection favoring male offspring, especially in the northern Indian states of Punjab and Haryana.
8. See Mulla 2014 for an important discussion on how sexual assault intervention is based on forms of “care” and therapy that serve the technocratic processes of the state and law. Mulla argues that they therefore constitute a form of violence in itself, “the violence of care.”
9. In a chilling ethnographic account of rape trials in India, Pratiksha Baxi (2014, 263) argues that custodial violence “straddles the familial and the legal” and is as likely to occur in the police station, remand home, or the familial home. Law, she argues, is the site where the “family articulates its power to discipline and punish” its errant daughters (258). Rape trials are, then, public performances of the “use of criminal law to discipline unmarried daughters [which] points to the dissonance between what is legally constituted as rape and the social uses that rape law is put to” (190). Prem Chowdhry’s (1997, 2004) work on caste panchayats in Haryana discusses the use of violence against young men and women whose marriages defy social codes of honor.
10. See Das et al. 2008 for a sensitive portrayal of the domestic as a “modality” that is always imbricated in the nondomestic. The “home” is, then, constituted by a range of domesticities that simultaneously transcend its boundaries insofar as they are constituted in dialogue with events or institutions that exist outside of it—for example, courts, prisons, clinics, and so on.
11. For Hindu-Muslim mixed marriages, see Mody 2008 and Heitmeyer 2016.
12. See Ghosh 2017 for a sensitive account of how the maintenance of kinship ties across the India-Bangladesh border is marked by risk and the labor of women who must constantly balance familial and nationalist affects, thus rendering a fine line between what may and may not be openly acknowledged.
13. A taluka is an administrative subdivision within a district.
1. This is a revised and expanded version of an article that first appeared in 2019: Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 39 (3): 425–438.
2. See, for example, http://
3. The year before he was elected chief minister following the controversial pogrom against Muslims in 2002.
4. See Ali 2019 for an account of state-citizen relations that are characterized in the intimate and emotional tropes of love, betrayal, and longing. In a trenchant critique of James Scott’s thesis, she argues that “already out-of-the-way subjects are not trying to run away further, but longing to belong” (4).
5. See, for example, Chatterji 2007; Roy 2010; Jayal 2013.
6. Radhika Gupta (2013, 69) argues in the context of borderland residents of Kargil that they cannot be easily categorized either as “manipulated subjects of the state” or as radical resistors. Their stance, she suggests, is “context-dependent as well as different in relation to various guises of the state.”
7. Report of the Inspector General of Police (Delhi and Ajmer-Merwara) on Reorganization of Kutch Police. National Archives of India (NAI)/Ministry of States (MoS)/31(15)—E, 1948.
8. Kutch State was administered by the central government through a chief commissioner during the period 1948–1956, when it was merged into the bilingual Bombay Province. In 1960, it became the largest district in the newly constituted state of Gujarat. Commissioner of Police (CP) H. R. Thakkar to Chief Commissioner (CC), Kutch, dated November 10, 1948, NAI/MoS/31(15)—E, 1948.
9. CP to CC, Kutch, dated December 3, 1948, NAI/MoS/31(15)—E, 1948.
10. Sanad is literally a citation. Here, it indicates a formal order from the state that would serve as a statement of police authority.
11. CP to CC, Kutch, dated December 3, 1948, NAI/MoS/31(15)—E, 1948. See Chandavarkar 1998, 180–233, on colonial policing in the Bombay Presidency and its dependence on social networks in the neighborhood.
12. In his account of vulnerable sovereignty, Sidharthan Maunaguru (2020) argues that the sovereign power of Hindu deities in temples of Sri Lanka not only brought the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam to the limits of its sovereign power, but it also forced it to accommodate within itself the deities’ model of relational sovereignty.
13. Pastoral groups of Banni are far from homogenous; even though they are all Muslim, they are scattered across distinct endogamously organized social groups that are referred to colloquially as jati. Marriage takes place within the atak or agnatic group and between jatis, they maintain the relationship of roti (bread) but not beti (daughter)—that is, they may eat together but not enter into matrimonial alliances.
14. The district collector is the most senior bureaucrat in the district, answerable to the elected government; as such, the figure of the district collector epitomizes “the state.”
15. Veena Das (2004, 234) argues that documentary practices associated with the state acquire a life of their own when they begin to circulate within other forms of regulation such as caste and community groups that “even in resisting the state reproduce it in new modes.”
16. Flight Lieutenant Amit Rastogi in Gulbeg’s visitor’s book, dated July 7, 1975.
17. There were some concerns that Muslim residents on the border were possibly complicit in cross-border activities and knew of the illegal intrusion of Pakistanis into Indian territory. Chief Commissioner, Kutch to Joint Secretary, Ministry of States (GoI), dated December 7, 1952, NAI/MoS/22(157)—PA/52, 1952.
18. In her ethnography of civil-military relations in Ladakh, Mona Bhan (2013, 128) discusses the ways in which security has long been integral to discourses of development. Development proceeds hand in glove with counter-insurgency as well as surveillance in the borderlands of Kashmir, leading to the blurring of the “tenuous boundary between militarism and humanitarianism.”
19. Visitor’s book, entry by Bhomraj Janjani, president of the Gandhidham Chamber of Commerce and Industry, February 29, 1992.
20. She used the word control in English.
21. Chinese goods (chini mal) implies imported goods and commodities, regardless of their actual origin. Although this is probably not untrue for the bulk of contemporary imports, especially electronics and household items such as crockery and so on, the designation of goods as “Chinese” should not be taken literally.
22. See Berenschot 2011 for a good review of some of this literature.
23. Here, mosque attendance (by men) is seen as a marker of good Islamic practice, and saint worship as a sin.
1. The Patidar (or Patels) are traditionally a Hindu peasant caste in central Gujarat who also emigrated in large numbers to the United Kingdom and East Africa (see Pocock 1972). They formed the core supporters of Sahajanand Swami, the founder of the Swaminarayan sect of Hinduism, which then became the protestant ethic that undergirded their rise as an entrepreneurial class in Gujarat (Williams 1984). Despite their materially well-off status—much of it due to remittances from family working overseas—Patidar women are known in Kutch for a lack of disdain for manual labor that may be expected from those with commensurate levels of social status elsewhere. Early on in my fieldwork, weighed down by my own preconceived ideas of class status in India, I was surprised to see Patidar women wearing saris and diamond earrings when receiving me at well-appointed homes in villages adjacent to Bhuj, and then with the same ease they donned shoes and socks, a man’s shirt over their petticoats, a scarf over their head to protect their arms and head from the sun, when they went off to work in the fields.
2. Note the continuities of my discussion of everyday peace under militarization with the following description of the Kashmir valley which has been under Indian military occupation for decades: “military occupation of civilian areas is a prominent and almost permanent feature of the Valley; the military occupies civil buildings, migrant houses, office buildings, hotels, cinemas, industrial areas, college hostels, university guest houses, orchards, agricultural land, private buildings and so on” (Kazi 2009, 97). I draw attention to this to point out that the militarization of the everyday is as much a designator of “peacetime” as of “wartime” or “occupation.”
3. Nosheen Ali (2019, 87) argues that employment in the military produces loyal subjects in Pakistan’s Gilgit-Baltistan. These subjects are deeply enmeshed in the “status, opportunities, and privileges generated by army service,” which in turn constitutes a source of military hegemony in the region.
4. The two shortest overland routes into Sindh would be through the famous black hills of Kutch—the Karo Dungar area of Khawda (from where it is about 15 miles to Chad Bet, which was ceded to Pakistan after the 1971 war)—or through Lakhpat, about 22 miles from Pillar #1175 that marks the boundary.
5. A recent addition to the tourist circuit in Kutch is the “rakshak van,” inaugurated in July 2018. Situated on the main driving route to the section of the Rann of Kutch that is packaged and marketed to tourists as the “White Rann”: the rakshak van makes a double reference to the idea of both ecological (van is a forest) and military (rakshak is protector) protection, for it connotes both the idea of a protected forest (van) and a landscaped garden that is none other than a museum dedicated to the idea of an unequivocal Indian military victory in 1971.
6. In February 2016, police entered the campus of Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi and arrested students on charges of sedition and “antinational” activities. In the months that followed, the government seemed bent on destroying a university that they saw as a bastion of “left” and “liberal” views (Khan 2015; Shankar 2017).
7. The year 1971 is an interesting coincidence for a memorial to the virangana as one cannot help but draw parallels to Bangladesh’s appellation of birangona to Bengali women raped by West Pakistan’s army during the liberation war of 1971 (see Mookherjee 2015).
8. In 2020, the HRD Ministry was renamed the Ministry of Education.
9. Kutch Mitra, Bhuj, August 28, 2015, 1.
10. “IAF Deals Heavy Blow to W. Pak Industry,” The Times of India, December 9, 1971, 9; “Bhuj, Okha Port Bombed,” The Times of India, December 6, 1971, 1.
11. “How 200 ‘Jhansi ki Ranian’ Tamed Chengiz Khan,” The Times of India, December 8, 2012, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=STND&sw=w&u=lom_umichanna&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA311299815&it=r&asid=b9a1749ff4b0a0d00a1179ef03fb90f9.
12. Vijay Karnik, commanding officer of Bhuj Airbase in 1971, quoted in “How 200 ‘Jhansi ki Ranian’ Tamed Chengiz Khan.”
13. Vijay Karnik, commanding officer of Bhuj Airbase in 1971, quoted in “How 200 ‘Jhansi ki Ranian’ Tamed Chengiz Khan.”
14. Vijay Karnik, commanding officer of Bhuj Airbase in 1971, quoted in “How 200 ‘Jhansi ki Ranian’ Tamed Chengiz Khan.”
15. Vijay Karnik, commanding officer of Bhuj Airbase in 1971, quoted in “How 200 ‘Jhansi ki Ranian’ Tamed Chengiz Khan.”
16. “Air Force Honours Brave Kutch Women for 1971 War,” The Times of India, October 9, 2014, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=STND&sw=w&u=lom_umichanna&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA384940586&it=r&asid=8e4c91d032a98aa3f4bcead420495b29.
17. “How 200 ‘Jhansi ki Ranian’ Tamed Chengiz Khan.”
18. This temple is a ritual hub for Patidars that has benefited enormously from its devotees’ overseas remittances.
19. Saraswati is the Hindu goddess of learning.
20. Women’s recruitment into war, militant, and resistance movements is one strand of the argument that there is no “war front” that is separate and sealed off from a “home front” (Lutz 2001; Yuval-Davis 2013). This pertains, on the one hand, to the changing nature of the military that enables more women to participate directly in war as “feeding, clothing, nursing, clerical and communication services, ammunition production and sexual services have all needed, at least to an extent, to establish formal relationships with the military” (Yuval-Davis 2013, 99). In other work, Sandya Hewamanne (2013) examines the classed and gendered aspects of civil-military blurring when women factory workers function as caregivers and nurturers to soldiers in the Sri Lankan civil war. In many of these cases, the domestic, affective, and the familial segues into the public or the domain of war, thereby rendering the two spaces inseparable in any definitive sense. The domestic and the familial domains are also central to women’s mobilization into war and militancy where women’s roles are not restricted only to performing supportive roles to primarily male actors even when they do not necessarily subvert their constitution as gendered, domestic, or maternal subjects. The domestic and the familial domains are also central to women’s mobilization into war and militancy, and women do not only play a supporting role to male actors. Julie Peteet (1991) underscores the centrality of the family in women’s mobilization into the Palestinian resistance movement where brothers and fathers were central figures in either the facilitation or hindrance to their ability to join the movement. However, even as their participation in the resistance required their politicization, she argues that their participation did not necessarily alter the sexual division of labor as “they were called upon to make available to the national struggle their domestic services” (Peteet 1991, 104). Similarly, symbols of motherhood and nurture intertwined with those of struggle and militancy were an important conduit for the politicization and mobilization of women in this movement as well as others, such as the resistance in Northern Ireland (Aretxaga 1997). In the Palestinian intifada, Peteet argues that women were able to reconstitute the meaning of motherhood, even when it provided the contours of political activism for some women. Thus, regardless of the fact that mothering was not constructed as opposed to militancy, the idiom of motherhood as the premise on which women participated in militant activity remained firm even if, as she argues, “reproductive and caring labor have acquired new public and militant meanings” (Peteet 1997, 107). Tarini Bedi (2009) suggests that women are as central to mobilizing other women as their natal or affinal male kin are; her discussion attempts to use the optic of “adjustment” to conjure a female subject whose emancipatory prowess does not necessarily lie in any consistent or overt subversion of the “domestic.” As she points out in her study of Shiv Sena women in Mumbai city, the domains of kinship and politics are mutually intertwined, the one not necessarily in contradiction of the other. Kalyani Menon’s (2012) ethnography of Hindu nationalist women in Delhi, on the other hand, highlights multiple nonfamilial ways in which women are recruited into the movement such as friendship or curiosity, oftentimes quite removed from any firm ideological commitment to the cause (see also Iqtidar 2011, chap. 3). Recruitment into Hindu nationalist organizations, she found, was as often through overt forms of what we would recognize as “indoctrination” as through forms of play, pleasure, and entertainment (Menon 2012, 142–145). Hewamanne (2013) examines the class and gendered dimension of women factory workers who function as caregivers and nurturers to soldiers in the Sri Lankan civil war. In many of these cases, the domestic, affective, and the familial segues into the public or the domain of war, thereby rendering the two spaces inseparable in any definitive sense. In Cabeiri deBergh Robinson’s (2013) ethnography of the production of jihad in Kashmir, conjugality and domesticity are once again not constructed in any mutual opposition to each other. Sexual and familial duties are central to the evaluation of a mujahid’s duties, and his recruitment into jihad is seen as a function of the family rather than the mosque or religious school. Robinson writes of how militant organizations would not admit young men who were known to be only sons precisely because of their deemed duty toward the family. The militant and the family man were not constructed in opposition; women as wives bore witness to the violation of their husbands’ bodies, straddling the revelation of intimate knowledge in the public domain. In contrast to this continuum between the family and the militant organization is the case described by Sharika Thiranagama (2013) in the Sri Lankan civil war where the spaces of home and militancy were seen as distinct. The latter celebrated the power of youth, promising horizontal forms of kinship that promised forms of sociality that could emancipate militant recruits from the older, gerontocratic forms of caste society that were embodied in the family. Thus, “ideas about the household, caste, and marriage, rather than being the preexistent and stable foundation of nonpolitical ‘cultural life,’ were in fact the very subject of potential political transformation” (Thiranagama 2013, 184). In the context of women’s empowerment through militant recruitment, she argues, however, that militant femininity ended up not challenging the domestic code enough, remaining “parasitic on the sexualized kinship of the household, which continued to be reproduced as the appropriate mode for sexual relations” (Thiranagama 2013, 217).
21. “Air Force Honours Brave Kutch Women for 1971 War.”
22. “Hail the Soldier! Hail the Farmer!” was a popular patriotic slogan of the 1960s that gave equal emphasis to the farmer (food security) and the soldier (national security). In Hiru’s outburst, she refers to the fact that the military has been recognized through the slogan but not the women who actually built the runway.
1. Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), a city in the Indian state of West Bengal.
2. I return to this theme in more detail in chapter 4.
3. Even though families may have started out by choosing migrant brides to marry men who were considered “unmarriageable” in the local context—due to advanced age, multiple marriages, mental disability, lack of employment, and so on, as will be seen in Zain’s case discussed in this chapter—over time, the migrant bride has also come to be a preferred choice for reasons that are discussed in chapter 4.
4. See Citizenship Amendment Bill (2016) for a copy of the bill introduced in Parliament.
5. In this respect, I suggest a departure from the South Asian literature on law and the family that argues for a congruence or alliance between the state and the family, the sexual contract as a particular iteration of the social contract (see, e.g., Das 2007).
6. For an ethnography of reconstruction discourse, see Simpson 2013.
7. The relationship between the adivasi and the Muslim in contemporary Gujarat is a fraught one. Although similar to each other in terms of their common distinction from Hindus (represented primarily through their meat eating as against the normative vegetarianism of Hindus in Gujarat), they were also recruited by Hindu right-wing organizations and mobilized against Muslims in the 2002 pogrom.
8. Another reminder of the “less than perfect” habits that foreclosed his identifying as a “true Muslim” in his view.
1. Here, Bano’s statement can be read in line with John Borneman’s (1997) critique of the anthropology of kinship, where he suggests a shift in the object of anthropological research from marriage, kinship, and gender to the more inclusive notion of care. Transnational marriage migration has also been linked to the primary role of women as caregivers, recasting the perceived understanding of women’s migration as wives to be somehow passive (Gardner 2006). Bano’s emphasis on care for an older husband was something I found in a number of narratives from “Bengali” wives.
2. See Charsley 2013 on the rishta as a bridge between emotion and strategy in the arranging of transnational marriages among British Pakistanis.
3. For example, the Meos follow gotra and clan exogamy like Hindu groups and have only taken to matrilateral cross-cousin marriage relatively recently (Chauhan 2003). Matrilineal Muslim communities are negotiating dominant trends toward patriliny in coastal Kerala (Osella 2012), thus rendering it extremely problematic to think of “Muslim” marriage practices in the singular.
4. There are a large number of Muslim communities in Kutch spread across both Shi‘a and Sunni denominations. In my work, I have focused exclusively on Sunni Muslims. Although there are different customs and traditions followed by each endogamous Muslim “caste,” there are certain broad similarities in marriage practices, and it is these that I refer to in this chapter when I refer to Muslims.
5. Anthropologists of marriage have remarked on the fluidity between “love” and “arranged” marriage in practice, especially in middle-class marriage (Fuller and Narasimhan 2008; Mody 2008) even when the two genres are discursively projected as being poles apart (e.g., Donner 2016). The genre of the “self-chosen” marriage may not be desired solely in pursuit of individualism or notions of romantic love but equally to achieve a series of other goals such as the desire for social or economic prosperity (Davin 2005), security, companionship, or other practical considerations as demonstrated below in the example of Sonal arranging for her fiancé to be vetted through her own social networks rather than relying on her parents. On the other hand, a normatively arranged marriage does not preclude aspects of “love” and self-choice, rendering the two types of marriage on a continuum.
6. English words that are italicized indicate that they were used originally by speakers.
7. Spicy snacks that are popular street foods across Kutch.
1. I refer to the district of TharParkar as it was administratively reconstituted in 1990. Historically, it was a part of Rajputana, and Hindus constitute almost 50 percent of the population of the district (Mahmood 2014, 13). Dominant non-Muslim groups in TharParkar are Rajputs, Bheels, Kolis, and Meghwars.
2. See Citizenship Amendment Bill 2016 for the full text of the act.
3. Italicized English words are reproduced as they were originally used.
4. Except in the case of Ram Singh, who has established contact directly with the central government, both other interviewees describe their interactions with the district collector when they make a formal plea for Indian citizenship, which would then have been forwarded to the central government. The Citizenship Amendment Act in 2004 empowered district collectors to directly adjudicate in citizenship matters of Hindus coming from Pakistan especially in Rajasthan and Gujarat (Jayal 2013, 67).
5. Interview with P. H. Bhatti, Bhuj, November 16, 2015.
6. Gluckman (1956) argues that the paradox at the heart of the family lies in the fact that the connection between men and their heirs is dependent on women who are potentially “outsiders” to the group. Variegated bonds of love and loyalty thus cut across the family, rendering it an unstable unit of analysis without reference to a larger social terrain that takes into account relationships at multiple levels.
1. See Sidharthan Maunaguru (2020) for a lucid analysis of “vulnerable sovereignty” where the Tamil militant organization LTTE was forced to accommodate its aspiration for a totalizing sovereign power with Hindu deities in Sri Lanka who engaged their own forms of sovereign power that were by definition relational—to the extent that they existed within a pantheon of several deities.