University of Cambridge

Post-Doc, Social Anthropology

Research Fellow

Emmanuel College

Thesis Title: Shadows of the State, Subalterns of the State: Police and 'Law and Order' in Postcolonial India

About

    My teaching and research are generally driven by questions about the dynamics of authority, legality and citizenship, with a particular focus on how certain subjects and social practices are legitimated (or not) in light of cultural concepts of order and justice. My manuscript under preparation, "Policing Paradoxes: Disempowered Authorities in Postcolonial India", interrogates assumptions about state punitive power through an ethnographic and historical exploration of the common practices of police officers in Uttar Pradesh, the largest state in the world’s largest democracy. Based on two years of dissertation field work, this book analyzes specific instances of routinized corruption, cronyism, legal manipulation and vigilante violence as “immediate justice” and attempts to express agency, masculinity and the performance of “duty” by subjects who are structurally impotent even while sometimes situationally hyper-empowered. This paradoxical condition demonstrates that what often appears to be nothing more than disorderly, decadent, and even criminalized governance is in fact an intelligible complex of legitimating processes related to security and order production in a postcolonial democracy. It also reveals the dispersed and unstable nature of state authority to deploy coercion and punishment, the continual shifting of forms of social inequality, and the ways in which legitimations of violence configure sociality. The knowledge gained from this research offers new insights into the complexities of power relationships, in contemporary South Asia and arguably beyond.

    In addition to my research on police institutions and personnel in India, I have also conducted an ethnographic and historical analysis of the creation of a civil police organization out of a paramilitary security force in the neighboring country of the Maldives. In a volume that I co-edited, titled Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency (University of Chicago Press 2010), I showed how this “birth of a national police service” constituted a counterintuitive, and arguably punitive, form of counterinsurgency by a dictatorial regime against its own national subjects, who had begun collectively calling for democratic reform and were gaining international support for the movement. My discussion of the punitive suppression inherent to a performative “democratic” act emerged from a broader research program of mine exploring the complex relationship of violence and social order in the era of globalized democracy. I am channelling this research program through a faculty reading group and seminar series that I am now convening at Cambridge entitled "Between Civilisation and Militarisation" (www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/page/1051/b-civilisation--militarisation.htm). This research program also drives several on-going projects. The first is a study of subordinate police uprisings and unionization movements, which is centered largely in postcolonial India, but also has a significant international comparative element, since police have attempted to gain recognition as a uniquely disenfranchised labor/citizen group in a host of other countries including Argentina, Brazil, Nigeria, the Netherlands, South Africa, the UK and the US. The conditions of possibility and complex effects of these types of social movements and historical events are of great concern to any dialogue regarding global security and sustainability, compelling us to ask: what kind of citizens are police (and other security agents) in a democracy, and what does it mean that, for better or worse, their rights tend to be more restricted than those of other types of citizens, and when they act out they are often punished more harshly? A similarly fraught type of citizen-subject is the soldier, and I am exploring this type of subjectivity and its “after-life” in a second research project that I have been conducting for four years now, which examines the memory and recognition work happening at the annual reunions of a group of self-organized former infantrymen in the Vietnam War.

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